Media-Transmitted African-American Attitudes
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hop culture paradigmatically suggests a two-fold politics: 1.) the hegemonic culture
industry’s racializing of gender conflict; and 2) the coincidental suppression of
women practitioners of hip-hop. Since the media attempt to construct a single
image of hip-hop, one that ‘"glamorizes” sex and violence, they exclude all topics
except lyrics that feature those acts from the actual hip-hop practice. Particularly,
figures of women who collaborate with men in fertilizing this art are subjected to
exclusion, because such a reality would fonn a counter-image to the vicious gangster.
In this regard, Nancy Guevara argues that “the elision of women from the hip hop
image” collaborates in reproducing a stereotypical portrayal of male dominance
and female subordination as the black gender relationship (49). According to
Guevara, “[t]he undermining, deletion, or derogatory stereotyping of women’s
creative role in the development of minority cultures is a routine practice” that
determines “the overall distortion of hip hop” (51,50). Jn this view, the conflation
of racial and gender politics effectively misrepresents both genders in the group:
man as sexist and hostile, woman as absent. By utilizing some male rappers’
misogynist lyrics, the media succeed in camouflaging the ideological combination
that sustains the discourse of irrecoverable sexual domination in the black
community. As this situation suggests, an investigation of the power relationship
between the media and rap music provides a useful framework for describing the
complex field of domination in the postmodern sphere of info-media.
It is these situational, conceptual, and discursive dynamics surrounding
the production and consumption of rap music and hip-hop culture in the U.S. that
1would like to consider in the present study.This problem is essentially connected
to the electronically mediated reproduction—mainly through tele-visual and digital
sound recording systems—of urban (originally black) youth culture and the figures
of rap musicians themselves. This essay investigates how the mass mediation of
rap music became the source of momentum for the emergence of a paradoxical
mode of resistance to the dominant culture: strategic self-commodification. In order
to approach this issue, I will first look at the historical context in which rap has
acquired its cultural visibility, in terms of the tension between rappers’ politics of
self-expression and the racial order that conditions the institutional evaluation of
the genre. Next, I will analyze several arguments on the consequence of rap’s
commercial success that conditioned the style of Gangsta Rap. While exploring
Gangsta Rappers insight into the possi bility of manipulating the image of African
Americans in the hyperreal field as the basis of their strategic self-commodification,
finally, 1 will indicate a limitation of Gangsta Rappers’ self-commodification in
relation to the postcolonial requirement for the reconstruction of identity. Rap is a
case demonstrating that the mass media have changed the patterns of those who
benefit from the symbolic resources they proliferate. In the late-capital media
society, control of symbolic resources is not a matter of a simple domination-