Rappin' on the Tyne: White Hip Hop Culture in Northeast England – an Ethnographic Study

This article offers an ethnographic account of the significance of rap music and hip hop culture for white youth in the city of Newcastle upon Tyne in north-east England. Although white appropriations of black music in Britain have been well documented in sociological work, there is currently very little research on white responses to rap and hip hop. During the course of this article I identify two distinct responses on the part of white Newcastle youth to rap and hip hop. I then go on to argue that, despite their differing nature, each of these responses can be seen as bound up with issues of locality and local experience.     

Exploring the use of hip hop music in participatory research studies that involve youth

This article explores the use of hip hop in participatory research studies. The article was informed by a research process that explored the identity construction process of female late adolescents who identified strongly with hip hop music. Hip hop music constituted an integral component of the research process, as it was used to stimulate participation. It was also used to prompt reflection and engagement with the Self. Participatory research methods, namely drawings and lyric inquiry, were used in conjunction with hip hop music to elicit narrative data. The findings illustrate that the use of hip hop music was beneficial as it prompted profound engagement with the Self. Hip hop music provided the participants with spaces within which they could reflect on and articulate the continual, interactional and situational dimensions of their lives. These reflections ultimately initiated agency, as it prompted them to contemplate empowerment and liberation. As such, we argue that hip hop music can serve as transformative data-generation stimulus in participatory research projects involving adolescents who identify with this genre.     

Racial Formation Theory and Systemic Racism in Hip‐Hop Fans’ Perceptions

This work contributes empirical research to racial formation theory (RFT) and systemic racism (SR), demonstrating how these theories complement each other. There are few practical applications of these theories. This research examines RFT and SR from the perspective of hip‐hop fans. I qualitatively examine how 23 nonblack women articulate the relationships of race, class, and gender through discussion of hip‐hop music and videos that accompany it. Findings suggest that hip‐hop is a site of racial formation. Participants spoke from a color‐blind perspective and white racial frame so that they perpetuated ideals of systemic racism theory.     

"Are You an African?" The Politics of Self-Construction in Status-Based Social Movements

Current debates over identity politics hinge on the question of whether status-based social movements encourage parochialism and self-interest or create possibilities for mutual recognition across lines of difference. Our article explores this question through comparative, ethnographic study of two racially progressive social movements, "pro-black" abolitionism and "conscious" hip hop. We argue that status-based social movements not only enable collective identity, but also the personal identities or selves of their participants. Beliefs about the self create openings and obstacles to mutual recognition and progressive social action. Our analysis centers on the challenges that an influx of progressive, anti-racist whites posed to each movement. We examine first how each movement configured movement participation and racial identity and then how whites crafted strategic narratives of the self to account for their participation in a status-based movement they were not directly implicated in. We conclude with an analysis of the implications of these narratives for a critical politics of recognition. Keywords: identity politics, social movements, race, self, hip hop.     

Claiming Queer Territory in the Study of Subcultures and Popular Music

For both the heterosexual and queer subject, subcultural participation and stylistic modes of cultural production and consumption, including popular music, are critical mechanisms aiding in the construction and expression of identity. Yet, in spite of abundant empirical examples of queer music cultures, subcultural studies scholars have paid minimal attention to queer sexualities and their concomitant stylistic modalities. In this article, I claim the importance of queer subterranean music cultures by synthesising significant literatures from various fields of inquiry including cultural sociology, popular musicology and queer studies. To begin, I will briefly clarify to whom and about what queer (theory) speaks. I then go on to offer an overview of subcultural and popular music research paying particular attention to the subaltern queer subject and surveying queer criticism within each field. Accordingly, I discuss various sites of popular music production and subcultural style such as punk and hip‐hop, to show how non‐heterosexual subjects carve space for resistant queer sexualities and merge queer sensibilities with pre‐existing cultural forms. This article consolidates interdisciplinary approaches that will benefit scholars invested in the study of queer subcultures and popular music.     

Freedom within bars: maximum security prisoners’ negotiations of identity through rap

This paper examines the construction of prisoners’ identity through rap in England’s high security prisons. While hip hop studies has often addressed rap’s connection to the social practices of criminalized youths, prison rap cultures have received scant attention. This paper draws on a series of rap workshops and interviews with prisoners to investigate the experiences of black prisoners in high security prisons and how identities are produced and negotiated through rap. Rap is associated with the production of a range of identities and identifications, enabling prisoners to accommodate themselves to the conditions of their incarceration and to challenge aspects of the criminal justice system that they experience as unfair or illegitimate.     

Racial Authenticity and Familial Acceptance Among Transracial Adoptees: A Bothersome Bargain of Belonging

Transracial adoption in the United States has increased significantly in recent years. Crossing the color line within the intimate familial sphere has important implications for how institutions such as the family enable and constrain individuals' identity work. We explore how transracial family members utilize racial stereotypes and racialist understandings in everyday life, employing 30 in‐depth, life‐story interviews with both transracial adoptees and their white siblings. In attempts to accomplish a sense of belonging and authenticity, we argue that both transracial adoptees of color and their white siblings experience divergent and paradoxical expectations of familial and racial authenticity. We find that although they often utilized “color capital” in a quest for racial authenticity, in certain spaces and environments, they were expected to eschew their nonwhite identity and embrace “acting white” as purported by white family members and their “white debt” approach to racial socialization. This study adds nuance to the question of how families navigate the enduring power of the color line in relation to the reproduction of both material inequalities and racial discrimination.     

Perceptions of Misogyny in Hip Hop and Rap: What Do the Youths Think?

This article presents the results of an exploratory study conducted at a community forum sponsored by a prominent African American church and a historically Black university. These institutions are concerned with negative messages given to African American females about their appearance and their morals. The data presented describe the population of female (68.6%) and male (31.4%) participants ages 18 to 24 and inform us about their perceptions about hip hop and rap music, especially as they relate to misogyny. This study found that listening habits and age were significant in understanding youths' views about misogyny.     

Seeking Liberation,Facing Marginalization: Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders' Conditional Acceptance in Hip‐Hop Culture

Using interview data with Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) hip‐hop participants, we analyze how respondents construct hip‐hop as a liberating space where they can circumvent limiting racial and ethnic stereotypes. However, an intersectional lens reveals the constraints that hip‐hop's hypermasculinity places on AAPI men as well as the ethnosexualized expectations that AAPI women must negotiate. The experience of AAPI men and women in hip‐hop due to their unique position in racial and gender hierarchies interacts with stereotypical notions of AAPI people in wider society to relegate these participants to the margin rather than center of hip‐hop culture. Thus, we find respondents' constructions of hip‐hop less an indicator of hip‐hop culture's openness than a statement of how constricting the mainstream U.S. culture is for AAPI Americans, rendering hip‐hop's conditional acceptance preferable by comparison.     

Appalachia and the Construction of Whiteness in the United States

The field of critical whiteness studies has made significant progress in the deconstruction of ideologies of white supremacy. In part, this has been accomplished by analyzing whiteness as a racial identity. Another step in this deconstruction has been a focus on groups of marginalized whites, 'white trash' or 'hillbillies'. Since the mid-19th Century, Appalachia has been considered the paradigmatic place for these marginalized whites in the United States. Hillbillies are simultaneously stigmatized and idealized in the national culture. Accounting for both the negative and positive representations makes visible how marginalized white identity is a space where white hegemony is both challenged and reaffirmed.     

GLOBAL BLACK SELF-FASHIONINGS: HIP HOP AS DIASPORIC SPACE

This essay examines how the “black” racial significance of hip hop culture is received, interpreted, and redeployed within the Afro-Atlantic world. Beyond questions of cultural consumption and reproduction, it is argued that hip hop's expanding global reach has facilitated the contemporary making and moving of black diasporic subjects themselves. Here, African descendant youth in an array of locales use the performative contours of hip hop to mobilize notions of black-self in ways that are at one time both contestive and transcendent of nationally bound racial framings. Hip hop in this way can be seen as enabling a current global (re)mapping of black political imaginaries via social dynamics of diaspora. In pursuing this argument, this essay looks toward hip hop movements in Brazil, Cuba, and South Africa as compelling, yet varying examples of how transnationally attuned identities of blackness are marshaled in the fashioning of diasporic subjects through hip hop.     

‘First things first,I'm the realest’: Linguistic appropriation,white privilege,and the hip‐hop persona of Iggy Azalea

The ‘hip‐hop nation’ is a multiethnic, transnational community that originates from and privileges urban African American experiences. Scholars have explored ways that non‐African Americans worldwide use linguistic features of African American English (AAE) as a way of constructing hip‐hop affiliated identities. The current paper ties these strands together in a study of the linguistic patterns of white Australian rapper Iggy Azalea, who makes use of AAE in her music, but not in other public speech. Our study presents a variationist analysis of copula absence in her lyrics. Findings show that her rates of this hallmark feature of AAE are extremely high, when compared to similar analyses of other rappers. We argue that her overzealous application of AAE features in her music, in order to create a specific linguistic style, enables a success that rests ultimately on the appropriation of African American language and culture, and the privilege that whiteness affords.     

From White to Western: "Racial Decline" and the Idea of the West in Britain, 1890–1930

Abstract Drawing on British works of imperial and social commentary, this article shows how a literature of white crisis emerged between 1890–1930. It was a literature that, whilst claiming to defend and affirm white identity, in fact exposed the limits of whiteness as a form of social solidarity. It is shown how these studies drew together a variety of challenges deemed to be facing the white race and, more specifically, how they exhibited a contradictory desire to defend white racial community whilst attacking "the masses". The idea of the West, developing alongside, within and in the wake of this crisis literature, provided a less racially reductive but not necessarily less socially exclusive identity.     

Songwriting and Activism: A Young Singer's Efforts to Write Himself into the Traditions of an Activist Group

This article examines how music functions as a vehicle by which people may place themselves in social movements. Centering questions of culture, the article describes how an environmentalist group based in the northeastern USA used music to: (1) assert a collective identity; (2) project a past, present and future; and (3) forge relationships among group members and between group members and the general public. Against this background, the article considers how a young activist used music to take on and adapt a movement identity and position himself within the movement's traditions and social relations. In a discourse analysis of a song this young activist composed and performed at the group's summer music festival, the article shows how he adapted a range of cultural resources to reimagine and place himself within the group's relations of time and social space.     

Rap Music and the Empowerment of Today’s Youth: Evidence in Everyday Music Listening, Music Therapy, and Commercial Rap Music

Pioneers of various elements of Hip-Hop culture have been empowered through the ability to voice their reality and find a meaningful identity alongside others who found purpose and function in embracing Hip-Hop culture (Chang, Can’t stop won’t stop: A history of the hip-hop generation, 2005). This empowerment persists in various reinventions of the culture within the United States and worldwide. The present study examines whether evidence exists in research to support the value of esteem, resilience, growth, community and change as empowering dimensions outlined in the individual and community empowerment framework. Research questions ask: (1) Does youth self-expression in rap music created within music therapy sessions reflect framework dimensions? (2) Does content in commercially recognizable rap music reflect framework dimensions? (3) How well does the framework align with a model of empowerment-based positive youth development? First, data collected to examine the validity of the framework were reviewed. Next, two peer-reviewed research studies published after articulation of the original framework, were examined to investigate commonality between themes and framework dimensions. One study was in a music therapy context and another explored themes in commercial Hip-Hop recordings. Original framework data supports theorizing that rap music content actually comprises developmental narratives (Travis and Deepak, 2011; Travis and Bowman, 2012). Data in the present study further suggest that these developmental narratives are relevant for Hip-Hop in every day music engagement, in therapeutic self-expression, and within commercially available musical content. Framework dimensions also aligned with a conceptual model of positive youth development that allows specification of intervention pathways and empirically testable outcomes for Hip-Hop integrated change strategies. Results suggest that rap music is a discourse in lifespan development. Rap music’s developmental narratives may be used by practitioners, parents and researchers. The narratives exist within a framework and model that (a) provides a template for better understanding these narratives and (b) positions this understanding for use as a tool to promote and research positive change strategies for individuals and the communities that they value.     

Invisible no more: White racialization and the localness of racial identity

What does it mean to be white? How do whites see themselves and other white people, racially? These are empirical questions, questions that sociologists have spent decades trying to answer. Among numerous findings, none have been as pronounced as white racelessness; the theory that whites possess invisible, or raceless, identities. Despite its influence on our understanding of race, the construction of whiteness as an invisible identity has been called into question, as a number of scholars, past and present, focus more on the local dynamics of white racialization. For a growing cross-section of whites, modern cultural and demographic change has shattered the illusion of white normality, causing them to confront their own racial identities in intimate and explicit ways. How do these and other whites respond to being seen as white? Though adept at detailing the way whites conceptualize white racial identity, generally, sociologists have been far less successful in examining how whites conceptualize white racial identity, locally. In this article, after reviewing both general and local constructions of white racial identity, I argue that going forward, researchers need to dispense with contextual overgeneralizations and focus more the localness of white identity formation.     

Rap music,race, and perceptions of crime

Scholars who study rap music have long expressed concerns that criticism of the genre is inextricably linked to stereotypes of young Black men in the United States. Yet minimal research has empirically examined how rap music is linked to race in ways that legitimize and maintain anti‐Black attitudes, particularly attitudes related to crime. This article reviews how scholars have typically challenged seemingly racialized concerns about rap music before surveying the handful of studies that empirically examine attitudes related to rap music, race, and crime. In so doing, this essay highlights a growing need for broader conceptualizations of race/ethnicity and social control.     

Signifyin' Cinema: Rudy Ray Moore and the Quality of Badness

This article engages the limits of both film and race studies in their approach to heterogeneous and “low” forms of African American cultural production through an analysis of the films of Rudy Ray Moore. While Moore’s films have been almost entirely overlooked in both film studies and black studies, they were extremely popular among black youth of the 1970s and have exerted a powerful influence on today’s hardcore hip hop artists (and their understanding of how to turn black market entrepreneurship into global enterprise). The theory of “signifying”, advanced most rigorously by black literary theorist Henry Louis Gates Jr, helps explain how and why Moore has slipped through various critical nets — and grounds a claim for why we should take “bad” black film seriously. Close film and context analysis illustrates how Moore’s low‐budget films “signify” on Hollywood and the system of expectancies that go with putatively “good” filmmaking and reveals the extent to which they constitute a hybrid cultural and multimedia practice. As vehicles designed to elaborate on the badman of black folklore, Moore’s films contribute to the long history and rich language of “toasting” in African American oral culture and music. As such, far from being emblematic of black filmmaking’s impoverished relationship to mainstream cinema (as a cinema manqué), these films constitute vital precursors to the hip hop music video.     

The Janus‐Face of Whiteness: Toward a Cultural Sociology of White Nationalism and White Antiracism

While the sociological study of white identity has traversed many stages, its most recent turn emphasizes the contextual heterogeneity of whiteness. Because of this increased attention to context and locality, the study of whiteness has never been more amenable to cultural analysis than it is today. Hence, an emphasis on different white racial formations that span a political spectrum from conservative to liberal and racist to antiracist is now dominant. In this vein, white nationalists and white antiracists represent the distinct polarities of contemporary inquisitions into white identity formation. Motivated by this academic milieu, this article first reviews the common perception that whiteness is in ‘crisis’ and polarizing into antagonistic political projects. Second, the article scans the literature on white nationalist and white antiracist groups, making explicit the relation to cultural theory. Third, the article questions why these two groups are consistently juxtaposed against one another and how such a conceptualization hinders, rather than advances, cultural analysis. Fourth and last, the article advanced a cultural sociological framework for understanding white racial identity formation that neither collapses white identities into a monolithic collective nor reifies white formations as a static typology. Such an approach considers the general processes and contexts which produce ‘whiteness’ and give it meaning, as well as illuminates the social relationships and practices in which white racial identity formations become embedded.