Hip-Hop Authenticity and the London Scene

Living Out Authenticity in Popular Music

Laura Speers

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781317338925
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

This book explores the highly-valued, and often highly-charged, ideal of authenticity in hip-hop — what it is, why it is important, and how it affects the day-to-day life of rap artists. By analyzing the practices, identities, and struggles that shape the lives of rappers in the London scene, the study exposes the strategies and tactics that hip-hop practitioners engage in to negotiate authenticity on an everyday basis. In-depth interviews and fieldwork provide insight into the nature of authenticity in global hip-hop, and the dynamics of cultural appropriation, globalization, marketization, and digitization through a combined set of ethnographic, theoretical, and cultural analysis.

Despite growing attention to authenticity in popular music, this book is the first to offer a comprehensive theoretical model explaining the reflexive approaches hip-hop artists adopt to 'live out' authenticity in everyday life. This model will act as a blueprint for new studies in global hip-hop and be generative in other authenticity research, and for other music genres such as punk, rock and roll, country, and blues that share similar issues surrounding contested artist authenticity.

1 Keepin’ It Real

Authenticity Debates and Global Hip Hop

The process that is hip-hop is not proprietary to the Bronx, New York City, the East Coast, or the United States and the Caribbean for that matter, which is why in every place in the world where hip-hop is relevant there’s an accompanying narrative about authentic beginnings in that part of the world. The point is that hip-hop has never been as “real” as we’ve been led to believe.

Mark Anthony Neal (2012: 69)

Authenticity is implicitly a polemical concept.

Lionel Trilling (1972: 94)

The documentary The Great Hip Hop Hoax (2013) follows a rap duo from Dundee in Scotland who fabricate an elaborate story to secure a record deal. Following a humiliating audition in London where the pair are laughed at by a panel of judges for being Scottish rappers, they become more determined to make their dream come true. Billy Boyd and Gavin Bain reinvent themselves as brash and outlandish Silibil N’ Brains, who hail from California. As soon as the rappers fake American accents their fortunes turn. Booking agents, promoters and even music executives are soon duped by the pretence. Quickly touted as the ‘next big thing’, they land a record deal with Sony, but the audacious masquerade and constant fear of being exposed as frauds takes its toll on the rappers. The film documents the true story of the duo’s rise to fame, their downfall and the personal cost of the deception.

At the heart of the real-life story is the contentious issue of authenticity. To be taken seriously, the rappers feel the need to pretend they are from where the culture originates, the USA. It seems, at least in the case of the British mainstream music industry, that rap is only authentic if it is American and based on conventional, almost stereotypical, tropes of hip-hop. As Gavin states in the film, “It has nothing to do with how good you are. If you want to get on a label, you have to be marketable.” Here we can see many of the tensions at play in global hip-hop regarding appropriation, race, place and commercialization.

For a music that holds “being true to oneself” (Harkness, 2012) as a fundamental tenet of ‘keepin’ it real’, rappers who fabricate personas and live a lie portraying themselves as American, might immediately seem inauthentic. However, the documentary conveys the complex and often paradoxical nature of authenticity. If these two Scottish rappers wanted nothing more than to be hip-hop stars, then perhaps we can understand them as ‘being true’ to that ideal. The contested and messy way in which authenticity can be interpreted and practiced is what makes it such a highly charged issue in hip-hop. This book examines how authenticity in hip-hop is ‘lived out’ and negotiated by artists in a context where the music did not originate.

Hip-hop is a diasporic culture so in many regards does not have a specific starting point because of the complex nature of its formation. However, many typically pinpoint the Bronx ghetto of New York City in the 1970s as its birthplace. Hip-hop has subsequently progressed to become a popular cultural form, proliferating around the globe and is now a multi-billion pound industry. Originally a predominantly African-American art form, the music and its adjoining four cultural elements (DJing, MCing, Graffiti and Break-dancing), have been appropriated and developed in countries all over the world, ranging from France and Australia to Senegal and Japan (Mitchell, 2001). Capitalistic processes typical of late modernity and the postmodern era including neoliberal economics, globalization, and immigration, have been instrumental in aiding the exportation and adoption of hip-hop as a medium of youth affiliation around the world. Young people in the UK embraced hip-hop culture in the late 1970s, most notably in London where, according to Gidley (2007), diasporic youth found the malleable cultural resources of hip-hop a meaningful form of identity exploration and expression in a predominantly white society. The expansion and spread of hip-hop from a city neighborhood to global phenomenon with its attendant commodification has been paralleled with debates concerned with its authenticity and legitimacy in its now more globalized form.

Hip-hop has shifted from an underground culture that gave a voice to marginalized and disenfranchised youth to become a substantial global commercial industry. The music and culture is still often marketed with an empowering and emancipatory image, despite being co-opted by cultural and creative industries keen to capitalize on the associated style, music, technology and fashion, causing the authenticity of hip-hop to come under intense scrutiny. In the early 1980s, movies such as Beat Street and Wild Style exported the creative elements of hip-hop to elsewhere in America and abroad. Major music labels started to take an interest and wanted to sign up-and-coming artists. By the mid-1980s the cable music channel MTV was cashing in on hip-hop and airing music videos. The fun and accessible party hip-hop of the (notably white) Beastie Boys catapulted them to stardom and mainstream success (Chang, 2005). Not only was hip-hop transitioning from an underground to popular music but it also was no longer the sole preserve of African-Americans. Furthermore, gangsta rap and highly sexualized rap, such as that of 2 Live Crew’s controversial album As Nasty As They Want To Be (1989),¹ expanded hip-hop’s appeal to a primarily male adolescent audience.

White rapper Vanilla Ice was the first hip-hop artist to top the Billboard charts with his song ‘Ice Ice Baby’ in 1990. However, he swiftly became subject to ridicule in the hip-hop community as it emerged his record label had fabricated a poverty-stricken biography in which Vanilla Ice belonged to a street gang, when in reality he came from the suburbs of Dallas in Texas (Perry, 2004). This greatly tarnished his credibility and also had significant repercussions for white rappers struggling to gain acceptance in hip-hop communities all over the US (Hess, 2005). The contrived authenticity Vanilla Ice’s record label had constructed incited debates between stakeholders in hip-hop about race, oppression, class and commercialization, which are issues still fraught with tension today.

Rappers and Authenticity

Rapping, DJing, graffiti and break-dancing (and an unofficial fifth element, that of knowledge or consciousness) comprise the multi-faceted culture of hip-hop (Darby & Shelby, 2005). This book focuses on rap music, not the other elements of hip-hop culture, although they are interlinked and influenced by each other. Therefore, in this book when I refer to ‘hip-hop’, I am talking about hip-hop music and not the other elements unless explicitly stated. I use the terms rap music and hip-hop synonymously and interchangeably, although I acknowledge that some scholars prefer to differentiate between them.² Though the term ‘scene’ is contested in certain literature,³ I am basing my usage on the definition provided by Stahl (2004: 54) as denoting the “formal and informal arrangement of industries, institutions, audiences and infrastructures” that underpin music-making. Furthermore, following Harkness’s (2013) ‘microscenes’ perspective, I acknowledge that London is home to multiple, interrelated and overlapping hip-hop scenes rather than one big, cohesive scene.

Rappers and their relationship to hip-hop as a cultural form are the primary focus of this study. I have centered on rappers because they are pivotal to the whole scene – they are the most visible and identifiable agents of the music and it is their voice that gets heard. However, I do of course take into account DJs, fans and other participants involved in the musical element of hip-hop as they all influence each other and understanding their inter-relationships is integral to hip-hop authenticity. This book, then, explores how specifically rappers grapple with what it means to be authentic in cosmopolitan London, and reviews the conflicting social, cultural and economic tensions they manage to ‘keep it real’.

Rapping can be understood as “a form of rhymed storytelling” (Rose, 1994: 2) that is “verbal art as performance” (Sköld & Rehn, 2007: 54). This performed rhymed storytelling is manifested through the oral skills of the master of ceremonies, the ‘MC’ or ‘rapper’.⁴ The music that accompanies rapping in hip-hop is referred to as ‘beats’. Beats are electronically composed, usually made through the manipulation of pre-existing material, for instance borrowing instrumental excerpts from other records (known as the ‘breakbeat’) or looping passages of music from different records to make a new track. Technology today allows ‘producers’, who usually start out as DJs before progressing to ‘produce’ their own tracks (Schloss, 2004), to create beats through samplers, drum machines, synthesizers and various computer software programs.⁵ In the London hip-hop scene, there are a few rappers who also produce their own beats, but generally rappers focus solely on the lyrics, which include delivery, flow, wordplay and rhyme schemes. As my focus is authenticity, I concentrate on the everyday cultural and social lives of rappers. Although this of course encompasses music, I will not be taking on the wide-ranging literature on music (aesthetics, emotion, composition and so forth) nor analyzing music and songs in and of themselves. It is through rappers’ stage personas, song lyrics, behaviors, interactions with others and online presence that one can see their explicit, as well as implicit, practices regarding authenticity. Furthermore, rappers are producing and performing hip-hop culture (as opposed to merely consuming it), and so are central to reinforcing, subverting and/or transforming this cultural form through their (in)authentic practices.

The archetypal authentic rapper is defined by Harkness (2012: 288) as black, male, urban, underground, skilled and true to himself, indicating authenticity is rather ‘rule bound’. The list suggests authenticity is fixed and static, but also raises the question of where these normative ideas come from; are they inherited, socially agreed upon, or different from place to place and person to person? The idea of following ‘rules’ seems antithetical to the notion of authenticity and creative expression itself, so how do rappers negotiate the tension of being creative and authentic? Further problematic tensions particular to practitioners of hip-hop include: Should rappers make music that reflects their own diverse musical interests, or instead that which closely aligns with the roots of hip-hop? If rappers want to be famous and make money from their art, are they going against hip-hop’s values regarding not ‘selling out’? Considering hip-hop’s origins in the Bronx ghetto of New York, do rappers have to be African-American and working-class to make rap music? There are additional less obvious questions such as can you continue rapping and making hip-hop when you are in your 30s and beyond, or is it the preserve of the young? These issues relating to hip-hop’s history, culture, and values are intimately entwined with the authenticity of the rapper. The tension between what can be understood as hip-hop authenticity and rapper authenticity is at the crux of debates on authenticity in rap music and its localized scenes.

What I term ‘rapper authenticity’ and ‘hip-hop authenticity’, although closely interlinked, refers to the tension between what can be understood as the self versus the community, in that rappers want to assert individuality and demonstrate belonging to a group. Hip-hop authenticity refers to how practitioners have to follow certain tropes, practices and rules based on the culture’s history to gain acceptance by the collective, and yet, on the other hand, be highly individual and original, which can be understood as rapper authenticity. These debates will be further highlighted and explained throughout this book.

Authenticity Debates

Authenticity is a contentious and highly contested issue. There is little agreement over what it is or, indeed, whether it even exists. How authenticity has been conceptualized, though, varies between different schools of thought. Cultural theory scholarship on authenticity can roughly be divided into two camps. The first hold there is an “essential(ized), real, actual, essence” (Taylor, 1997: 21) whereby people can speak the truth of their situation, culture and experience. The other camp argue authenticity is not inherent in a person, object, event or performance but a socially agreed upon construct (Peterson, 1997; Grazian, 2004). In the words of Moore (2002: 210), “It is ascribed, not inscribed.” In contrast to these theories, I position myself with Frith (1996) who suggests values in music such as authenticity are not socially agreed upon constructs but produced through cultural activity, i.e. through ‘living them out’.

In Howard Becker’s research on art worlds, he explains the way artists and their art are valued in conjunction with one another: “Artists’ reputations are a sum of the values we assign to the works they have produced … the reputation of the artist and the work reinforce one another: we value more a work done by an artist we respect, just as we respect more an artist whose work we have admired” (1982: 23). Becker illustrates the extent to which ostensibly objective aesthetic judgments are subjective, socially constructed, and based on connections between the artist and consumer. An individual consciously and unconsciously engages in complex cultural practices when interpreting a cultural text. In music, as well as visual art, how one feels about the artist impacts the interpretation of the cultural product and vice versa. In hip-hop, rarely is an individual rapper or their musical work considered in isolation, they are interpreted together. Thus for a rapper, lived out authenticity is of vital importance because one’s lyrics and music needs to reflect one’s life.

The definition of authenticity in a living art form can have a number of meanings, Peterson avers, but what is important centers on being believable and at the same time original (1997: 220 italics in original). Therefore the claim of authenticity made by or for a person, thing or performance has to be either accepted or rejected by relevant others. This is called the process of authentication. It calls attention to the importance of not just the intention of those wanting to be authentic, but how others receive and perceive them, which is a highly subjective affair. Moore (2002) holds that whether or not a performance or person is regarded as authentic, depends on who ‘we’ are. The listener or viewer interprets the cultural text, be it music, art or literature based on their individual cultural background, life experiences and taste. Bourdieu argues in Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste (1979/1984) that taste or consumer preferences are not innate, intellectual choices but rather socially conditioned. The object of consumer choice reflects a symbolic hierarchy that is determined and maintained by upper classes to enforce distance or distinction from lower groups in society, thus act as forms of social positioning. Peterson (2005) found in his research on country music quite often the ‘experts’ and fans had quite different judgments of authenticity. Other factors have an influence on authentication, such as the passage of time, because of a simplification and reimagining of the past based on memories. Furthermore, there are various gatekeepers of visible history, ranging from critics, historians and teachers to documentary makers and music specialists, who all have a voice in authentication (Peterson, 2005).

Authenticity in Popular Music Studies

Peterson’s book Creating Country Music: Fabricating Authenticity (1997), is one of the most extensive studies of authenticity in popular music. Based on archival research and the production of culture perspective, Peterson focuses on the process of institutionalization to demonstrate the ways in which authenticity is fabricated in country music. Peterson argues that authenticity is socially constructed as the continual quest for a ‘creative voice’ has the effect of destabilizing the image of the authentic, so that the idea of authenticity continually evolves. As such, what is taken to be authentic is not static but continually generated over the years (1997: 220). In the case of hip-hop, we can apply this argument to suggest authenticity is an emergent capacity, which changes according to different actors and context. Thus the different c...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Copyright Permissions
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1. Keepin’ It Real: Authenticity Debates and Global Hip Hop
• 2. Setting the Scene: The Changing Context of the London Hip-Hop Scene
• 3. Negotiating Struggle in Everyday Life
• 4. Strategies and Tactics: Living Out Authenticity
• 5. Towards a New Conceptualization of Authenticity
• Hip-Hop Timeline
• Glossary
• Index