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1 Chapter 1 The African Americanization of Hip-hop Even during its humble beginnings hip-hop was never strictly a black thing. It has always been multiracial, multicultural, and multilingual. Those qualities formed a movement that has defied all attempts to impose the strict racial definitions and caricatures that endeavor to limit its potential reach and influence. By insisting on borrowing from various cultural, musical, aesthetic, and political traditions, hip-hop became an incredibly rich fountainhead of youth creativity and expression. While black youth play a central role in hip-hop, white Latino, and Asian youths continue to make their mark on the movement, too. —S. Craig Watkins, Hip-hop Matters: Politics, Pop Culture, and the Struggle for the Soul of the Movement IN RECENT YEARS, scholarly and popular discourse addressing hip-hop and its various articulations has grown exponentially to the point where there is now a fairly substantial body of work that can be categorized under the rubric of “hip-hop studies.” The growth of this literature, however, has not proven to be seamless. Instead, it has come to be characterized by contentious debates and discussions revolving around a particular set of issues, what I consider fault lines within the literature. As hip-hop has emerged as a cultural force on a global scale, it has come under critical scrutiny not just among those at the periphery of the culture but also among those who consider themselves core members. There has been a good deal of debate and discussion, for example, regarding the commercialization of hip-hop on a global scale and its impact on the culture’s dynamism, politics, and integrity, prompting declarations of hip-hop’s demise.1 There has also been a good deal of debate and discussion regarding the gender and sexual politics of hip-hop, and in particular, the pervasiveness of sexism, misogyny, and homophobia in the culture.2 No single issue, however, has generated more heated debate and discussion than the issue of cultural origins, entitlement, and authenticity, particularly as it revolves around hip-hop’s apparent “blackness.” As Anthony Kwame Harrison puts it, “hip-hop, more so than any other musical style, has been mired in deliberations over authenticity.”3 Inez H. Templeton characterizes the debate thisway: “The question of whether or not race is (or should be) a factor in hip-hop practices, as well as the consideration of the authentic within the context of hip-hop’s global consumption, have generated polarizing debates among hip-hop fans as well as scholars, making it difficult to uncover balanced analyses of these issues.”4 Hip-hop’s apparent blackness, in other words, has come under a great deal of critical scrutiny and generated highly divergent perspectives. The epigraph that opens this chapter signifies the “multiracial, multicultural , and multilingual” turn in hip-hop historiography,5 the notion that from the outset, hip-hop constituted an expressive form subject to multiple influences and traditions obscured by its construction as an African American form of expression. But as evidenced by the following quote from Bakari Kitwana, this kind of claim has not gone uncontested even as cultural critics like Kitwana acknowledge the multiple origins and influences of hip-hop: “Yes, it’sbecome envogue to imaginehip-hop asbelonging to everyone. Sure, there have been other cultural influences. But influences are just that, influences . Black American cultural attitudes, style, verbal and body language, as well as insider Black cultural perspective, not only were prevalent at hiphop ’s origin but remain at its core today.”6 The two quotes are symptomatic of the kinds of exchanges that have occurred and the terms by which they have taken place. The debate hinges on whether or not hip-hop constitutes an African American expressive form but also the extent to which hip-hop signifies blackness even as it has evolved into a global expressive form. While at one point hip-hop was seen as unquestionably an African American expressive form, that is nolonger the case. Instead, the emphasis in much contemporary literature has been on hip-hop’s complex genealogies and trajectories that exceed the bounds of blackness. An emergent theme is that it can no longer be assumed that hip-hop is an exclusively African American terrain, although it remains strongly marked as the domain of African Americans . No longer are African American youth considered the sole or primary innovators of the culture. Thus, the kind of “insider...

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