Black Urban Expression, 'Street Cred' & The Commercial Hip-Pop Empire

“A lot of hip-hop’s characteristics are distinctly urban.  A lot of it is coming from people who are disenfranchised in their communities, or don’t have any other medium to express themselves. And a lot of that is Black America.  A lot of Black America is poorer than White America, so that’s how that lines up.”

-NuSonRize (Interview, 2005)

In the small but growing body of research on rap music, academics frequently reference the unprecedented mainstream consumption of inner city, Black music by middle-class whites (George, 1998:42, Gilroy, 1993:99, Kitwana, 2002:211, Neate, 2003:4, Potter, 1995:9, Rose, 1994:4, Tate, 2003:3). This massive ‘outsider consumption,’ which has occurred with numerous Black musical forms in U.S. history (Tate, 2), has yielded the conclusion in some minds that authentic rap is necessarily produced by inner city blacks and, thus, can only be observed or imitated by whites (Tate, 5).  However, my research suggests that rap can, in fact, be authentically produced by people of all colors and walks of life. 

Additionally, it suggests that reductive conceptions of Hip-Hop authenticity can have far-reaching and negative social, political, and historical implications.  In order to dissect this issue further, we must examine (a) the social origins of Hip-Hop, (b) how those origins have informed popular conceptions of Hip-Hop authenticity and (c) most importantly, how this particular idea of authenticity has been manipulated by mass media outlets to fuel the most profitable purchasing, repackaging and selling of Blackness since slavery.

I wish to argue in this section that although the assumption that authentic hip-hop must be urban and Black or Latino may help us to remember the music’s origins, other assumptions about the specific characteristics that make up Hip-Hop’s stereotypical image of authenticity have had destructive ramifications.  Furthermore, I will argue that simply because someone raps and fits the popular conception of Hip-Hop authenticity, does not necessarily make them an authentic emcee.

As a side note, it is unfortunate that—due to the polarized nature of race discourse in this country, which is reflected both in the body of literature on Hip-Hop as well as in my interviews—this essay will often address issues related to White participation in a Black cultural form.  Perhaps to counter this focus on the polarized race debate, later sections feature in-depth discussion of participation in Hip-Hop by people of all  colors and walks of life.  I hope that future studies will also break the cycle of Black-White focus and explore the increasingly diverse culture that is Hip-Hop in the United States.