Hip_Hop Redux: A Plugin with Extensions

Hip_hop as it has been traditionally modeled over the past few decades is broken in several aspects—namely as a nationalist construction, as a productive underground movement, as a barometer of the real, and certainly as an adequate sign for authentic black identity. Hip_hop’s aesthetic character has in many senses outgrown the performative boundaries of its original elements as well as the limitations of its presumed American singularity, anticipating further revisions of conventional representations of blackness and Americanness in public discourse. For this and other reasons, solely text-based readings of hip_hop fail because of their dependence on narratives that have been disrupted and that will continue to evidence its ruptures. Alternatively, hip_hop itself—hip_hop properly built as a way of reading culture (as a theory or a set of theories) rather than hip_hop defined by its text—still has very useful applications.!