Browsing by Subject "Rap (Music) -- Social aspects"

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    A Carnival of One’s Own: Contemporary Rap and the Commercial Appropriation of the Neoliberal Carnivalesque
    (2013) Sacks, Susanna; McCormick, Lisa
    I argue that the performance of deviant black masculinity – as articulated through images of bodily violence, criminal activity and exaggerated sexuality – represents a carnivalesque space, in which neoliberal life goals of individual`, competition and material success, are glorified and, ultimately, reified. By studying patterns of imagery in the lyrics of popular artists during the 1990s and 2000s, we see a clear correlation between rap’s increasing popularity and artists’ emphasis on political respectability, with the latter following closely on the heels of the former. We may understand this shift through an examination of three categories of rapper: the gangsta, who operates antagonistically to conservative social values while adhering to neoliberal ideologies; the entrepreneur, who successfully navigates the change from criminal to capitalism; and the integrationist, the product of rap’s new place in American society. The changing image of deviant masculinity in rap over the last two decades reflects shifts in media and political responses to the genre, so that it may fruitfully speak to rather than against imagined mainstream values: where rap music originally had to be deviant, its assimilation into popular cultural and media forms has led to the articulation of relatively conservative values by contemporary rap artists.
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    Sounding Blackness: Affect and the Sonic Unconscious
    (2011) Elysee, Bertolain; Nadkarni, Maya
    This paper interrogates the relationship between the histories of black musical production in the United States and the evolution of sound recording technology since the late 19th century through its successive mediations. The development of certain devices, such as the phonograph and the tape recorder, facilitated the spread and documentation of different genres of African-American music, while the formal innovations of these genres, particularly hip-hop, have also directly informed and altered the course and use of these technologies. After providing this history, the paper looks to the voice through the lens of what I term the sonic unconscious, hearkening to Walter Benjamin’s concept of “unconscious optics” in his famous artwork essay – different mediations of the voice through sound technologies allow listeners to hear the voice in novel ways. Lastly, this paper will look to emerging rapper Lil B, both his music and the discourse surrounding it, as a case that allows for further understanding of how artists and fans themselves work through the history of technology and musical production in hip-hop, and how the voice acts as referent both to lyrical, linguistic modes of signification and material affectivity. By the end, this work’s emphasis on mediation will allow us to think about how the sociology of art can account for the autonomy and specificity of cultural texts while unpacking the sociohistorical processes that enable their constitution and legibility.