"I Don't Like to Dream about Getting Paid": Representations of Social Mobility and the Emergence of the Hip-Hop Mogul

During the Clinton 1990s—a time not so long ago when the social consensus rendered "the ballot box and the box office [as] one" ¹ —the ensemble of aspirations and practices that constitute hip-hop culture became accepted as common-sense elements of the American experience. In this article, I describe this process of incorporation by paying attention to a figure who proved catalytic to this cultural movement, the "hip-hop mogul." On the one hand, the hip-hop mogul bears the stamp of American tradition, since the figure is typically male, entrepreneurial, and prestigious both in cultural influence and personal wealth. The hip-hop mogul is an icon, therefore, of mainstream power and consequently occupies a position of inclusion within many of the nation's elite social networks and cosmopolitan cultural formations. On the other hand, the hip-hop mogul symbolizes something new about traditional American corporate culture since he is also typically young (under the age of 50), typically African American, and typically tethered either literally or symbolically to America's disenfranchised inner cities. He is, therefore, worthy of further critical scrutiny because he crystallizes and makes visible a variety of social tensions that are otherwise so widely scattered across disparate social knowledge formations as to go either unnoticed or unmentioned. Young black and Latino entertainers and entrepreneurs like Sean "P-Diddy" Combs, Russell Simmons, Percy "Master P" Miller, Jennifer Lopez, and Damon Dash thus bring together, at a point of prominent visibility and maximum volatility, an expansive constellation of discursive formations and the requisite ideological tensions that inhere within them, whether they concern social identity politics or issues of equal opportunity and social mobility.

Politically, the hip-hop mogul becomes a charged figure precisely because of his ability to appeal to the varied sensibilities of apparently disassociated public spheres. In this respect, the emergence of the hip-hop mogul in contemporary American culture over roughly the past decade, and his ascension to the uppermost layers of the nation's celebrity classes during that span, also raises the issue of "representation" both in a semiotic sense—as may regard the codes and symbols through which these figures generate social recognition—and in terms of an ethical responsibility to serve as stewards for the thoughtful composition of these codes as [Begin Page 71] they may "stand in for" the desires and values of those individuals who are not eligible to occupy similar positions of mass mediation and discursive credibility.

The axis around which this representational dilemma revolves is the mogul's glamorous lifestyle, which serves as a symbolic proxy for the more mundane strivings of those with whom the mogul shares an apparent racial or ethnic affiliation. The hip-hop mogul is not intelligible without credible accounts of the lavish manner in which he leads his life, nor is he intelligible unless his largesse connotes not only his personal agency but also a structural condition that squelches the potential agency of so many others. What makes the hip-hop mogul significant is the degree to which his celebrity alleviates the tension within this symbolic relationship by appealing to the power of socially competitive consumption as a viable mode of civic participation and personal fulfillment. Indeed, I will argue that the hip-hop mogul's rise to social and cultural prominence is symptomatic of a new paradigm in the nation's long-standing consumptive ethos, ² one in which average people engage in a push for what commentators have dubbed the distinction of "mass prestige," a phenomenon whereby "America's middle-market consumers ... [trade] up to higher levels of quality and taste ... while feeding their aspirations for a better life." ³ In short, the mogul inspires his more downtrodden constituents to "buy in" to the emerging paradigm of accessible luxury and social status...