Popular Culture Review Vol. 5, No. 1, February 1994 | Page 61
Rap Music
Resisting Resistancei
Rap music is both one of the most popular and most controversial
forms of music today. Rap songs now regularly make the top of the
popular charts; at the same time the music has become a target in the
battle over censorship. The music is controversial in part because of
its content: it may be sexually explicit, blatantly anti-women,
politically radical or even appear to celebrate violence, but rap is
also controversial because it originates from African-Americans, who
have been historically oppressed in this country and whose continued
liminal status serves to scar any idealized conception of contemporary
American society. Despite receiving little radio airplay, rather than
being successfully repressed, rap music only increases in popularity,
thus indicating a potentially disruptive force in this country.
Intentionally or unintentionally, rap contains multiple meanings
derived from its position within various ideological discourses.^ Its
disruptive potential comes in attempting to articulate particular
elements of the social world as well as the subject position of AfricanAmerican youth into a discourse which opposes elements of a
dominant American discourse.^ In this paper I want to show how rap
music is an articulatory practice which is uniquely African-American
both in its form and in the discursive elements it tries to articulate.
Rap articulates elements which are part of a traditional AfricanAmerican discourse that arose to confront the oppressive conditions
which blacks have historically faced. Rap may be shown to
articulate elements which oppose but also ones which affirm
elements of a dominant American discourse: while opposing the
institutional racism found in our society, rap affirms the ideals of
capitalism. The positive influence rap may have on Afr icanAm erican youth is severely undercut by the pervasive
commodification of the music.
Rap music’s form is deeply embedded in the tradition of
signifying which Henry Louis Gates Jr. describes in his book The
Signifying Monkey. Signifyin(g)^ is the use of language or any
symbolic form to mean something other than what it normally means.
Gates claims that the standard English word "signification" is
overturned; instead of denoting what a word is intend^ to convey, in