Hip_Hop Now: An Introduction

Most people were sleeping. The others of us were cocky youngsters who had snuck out back doors and cracked windows while our parents dozed off to the syndicated flicker; undeclared majors who had concocted excuses to wriggle free of the caffeinated, claustrophobic dorm room cram sessions; clockwatching nine-to-fivers who had napped for half a measly hour since having abandoned our ill-fitting cubicles, only to return streetside, streetwise with rolled-up sleeves and stained white collars; and seasoned slang and head-nod junkies, copiously crunk(ed) and baggily clad in the uniform of the region, who had all been casually killing time toward this explicit purpose. From the hinterlands of Monday night came an eclectic grouping of devoted souls to converge upon the good site hallowed and habitual. Record sellers, who began the sale of Tuesday releases at the stroke of midnight, saw us congregate about the scrappy storefront with the dingy interior and queue up between rows of dilapidated bins that had held vinyl then cassettes and now CDs. Giving dap, squabbling, and eavesdropping on the latest news–cum–conjecture, heads assembled for the weekly ritual, to procure a choice item from that limited and anxiously anticipated stock (sometimes at a slight discount). You move, you lose.

We were brought together in an amalgamation of aggregate desire and consumerist inclination, marking a line of distinction between those who could wait until later in the day and those who had to have it right then. There were familiar faces and some new ones as well—another meeting of the minds whose effort was to be ahead of the game, a virtual cross-section of American cultural consciousness, all hungry for the new release, all eager to advance the dialogue and to contribute our own critique. Romantic, I know, but it is also a scene that has become more rare in the past several years as quicker, more efficient routes of acquisition have become quite commonplace. Recently, many of the physical lines have dwindled, replaced by an increased accessibility of bootleg copies and of tracks downloadable as mp3 files. New sound is now just as likely heard first through the earbuds of an iPod as through a rattling car trunk or a home entertainment system. And the listener has less direct interaction with his or her community of counterparts who are as likely to encounter one another in an online chatroom as in the aisles between the racks, altering the ways that hip_hop culture is being processed and conceived.

Embedded in the discourse around hip_hop as an intellectual project is an ongoing argument about exactly how we should be arguing about hip_hop and about how we should interpret its prominence as a topic in critical circles. The current discussion engages hip_hop at the line of transition, in a moment of crisis in public culture and cultural studies. The turn of the millennium witnesses hip_hop being mediated by big industry and marketed globally to an unprecedented extreme. A new core group of entities and individuals is deciding for us what hip_hop is and what hip_hop means. To the extent that hip_hop is referenced synonymously with black culture, we also see particular conceptions of blackness being mediated and marketed as well. (That hip_hop remains, in many respects, a sign for blackness is in part why its cultural products are marketable in the first place.) We are challenged to remark upon the ways in which what have been until now relatively privately constructed subjectivities are being regulated in nontraditional spaces. There is a new level of public access to the agency of identity. This circumstance is nuanced, however, by hip_hop's situation as a major American (not exclusively African American) export to the rest of the world. The narrative arc of mainline hip_hop (especially rap music) production and distribution demonstrates the constant efforts of entities and individuals who are well-devoted to the disassociation of hip_hop from any particularizing blackness with regard to claims about authentic artifacts and cultural property, but who remain heavily invested in trafficking in the commercially alluring conventions of black suffering and black mortality, while facing little...