The commodification of hip-hop culture and rap music
Tate Tsang
Within hip-hop culture, rap music is the most popular vehicle of freedom of expression for black African Americans to project their voices; artists such as Kendrick Lamar, Childish Gambino and Jay-Z dominate popular culture as some of the top rap artists, utilising their music to incorporate subliminal messages regarding black oppression as a liberating and politically progressive form of popular culture. However, the issue of rap music as an oppositional phenomenon lies within the relationship between rap artists and patriarchal capitalist structures. Hip-hop may be considered counteractive by utilising rap music to oppose the hegemonic frameworks of white America, yet it is simultaneously dependent on this very framework that it resists in order to reach success.
Rap music has become a primary distributor in capitalist production and consumption. Contemporary discourse on rap recognises rap’s dependence on dominant culture of capitalist production and consumerism. African Americans constitute the majority of hip-hop culture such as rap artists, dancers, producers and DJ’s, and have become dependent on white dominated America as its primary distributor and consumer.
This dependency raises several issues: firstly, dominant groups of hegemonic structures have control of hip-hop’s production and distribution. The corporate control over hip-hop translates to controlling hip-hop’s image and voice through dictating its production, marketing and distribution. The social hierarchy and structure that produced the oppression of black and minorities (the white supremacist capitalist patriarchy) seem to have control over minorities with white dominated mainstream media being its primary market and consumer. It is the white supremacist institutes that are profiting off of rap artists as chief controllers.
Photograph: Jan Střecha
Secondly, there is an issue of commodifying black rage and violence. This has jeopardised and stereotyped the authentic image of hip-hop culture and the black members affiliated with it. It has been embedded with critical discourse and misconceptions that rap artists and their consumers are supporting materialism, gun violence and drug abuse. These assumptions surrounding rap music thinly veils anti-black comments and feeds into the racist lens of portraying black adolescents as threatening and violent. Ironically, the very features of rap music that are criticised such as its profanity, violence and aggression have become one of the key selling market points in today’s popular culture.
What began in the 1970s as a cultural expression created to provide an outlet from the destitute urban inner cities, through the control of corporate America, hip-hop has now become profitable through packaging and distributing the commodification of ‘black rage’ for mainstream consumption and enjoyment. The perpetuation of utilising violence and the ‘gangsta lifestyle’ as a selling point is ultimately the opposite of what the emergence of political rap stood for, as Christopher Smith contends: “Public Enemy made the ghetto visible in order to abolish it. Many of today’s rappers make the ghetto visible in order to sell and be sold.”
hip-hop has now become profitable through packaging and distributing the commodification of ‘black rage’ for mainstream consumption and enjoyment.
It is corporate America that is glorifying and perpetuating the images of profanity and the ghetto lifestyle. As a result of the commodification of the gangsta rap lifestyle, an expectation has arisen that “to be a successful rapper one must be aligned with the corporate industry’s agenda”. Rap artists have been cultivated to have an exaggerated ‘hardcore’ and ‘ghetto lifestyle’ in order to conform to corporate America’s expectations. Rap’s commodification and transition into mainstream America has normalised the expressions of black rage toward its consumers.
A prime issue in today’s culture is the embrace of racial slurs by non-African Americans. While for some, words are simply just ‘words’ and have little consequence outside of its context. For others, racial slurs carry great weight in representing internalised oppression and racism. The use of racial slurs in hip-hop and rap music is progressive in reclaiming a sense of racial identity and resisting its connotations of oppression anti-black vernacular. It is regressive in dismissing its context that is synonymous with hundreds of years rooted in racism. Majority of black artists within the hip-hop scene utilise racial slurs such as the N-word within their music as a positive movement, reclaiming it as their own after centuries of its derogatory use.
Because of the mainstream success of rap music within white dominated areas, the frequent use of racial slurs within hip-hop culture has risked normalising it, so much so it has again, become adopted by non-African Americans. The frequent exposure of racial slurs has been assumed as an invitation to use it freely; casual use of the N-word is demonstrated through youths singing along to rap music. In this prime age where youths are the main demographic for rap and pop music, the message should be even clearer that the word comes from a place of attack, there is disturbance when a non-African American uses it. No matter how ‘normalised’ the N-word becomes amongst non-African Americans, it has been embedded as a pejorative racist insult.
[Rap’s] image of abuse of narcotics, misogyny and profanity has been strategically projected by the mainstream media as a tactic to profit corporate America.
The commodification of hip-hop culture is a fundamental issue as it has led to a paradox of rap attempting to destabilise dominant hegemonic paradigms, while equally being dependent on the hegemonic frameworks of popular culture and capitalist production. To a great extent, this dependency has placed the voice of those rendered mute in U.S society back into the hands of white capitalist structures. The racial infrastructure within the music industry may therefore be predominantly responsible for the stagnancy in the social progression of rap music. There is a vicious cycle of contradiction surrounding hip-hop’s image, subsequently damaging hip-hop culture as a form of liberation: the image of abuse of narcotics, misogyny and profanity has been strategically projected by the mainstream media as a tactic to profit corporate America. These are the very features that gain the most disapproval toward hip-hop as a culture, yet ironically has been enhanced by commercialism and exploits the image of the criminalised black youth to become a commodity of popular culture.
To minimise the effects of commodification, it is therefore up to the listener to take initiative in placing the lyrics in its context and viewing its potential as an oppositional culture rather than leisurely dismissing it for its profanity and harsh tones. Rap music has been used as an opportunity to deconstruct racist images of black youths. The utilisation of lyrics becomes a form of narration against unjust oppression and racial profiling as well as exposing the harsh reality of poverty within the urban centres and the brutality of the criminal justice system.
This dismissive attitude in perceiving rap as monotonous and promoting violence is common in the critical discourse of rap music, particularly among older generations. A reason for hip-hop still belonging and defined by black minorities is because of the unchanged economic circumstances and social oppression they still face. It is important to not assume everything that is fed onto us from mainstream media and to avoid false imagery of a culture that has fallen into the control of capitalist industries. Black oppression and the economic struggles of the black urban youth should not be washed out in the globalisation and mediated imagery of hip-hop culture. Black struggles and personal stories should be heard, not just used as a form of profitable packaging, or reduced to a dance track.