Hip-Hop Revolution: The Culture and Politics of Rap

Field: Arts and Humanities (Social Sciences)

Reviewed by: Hip-Hop Revolution: The Culture and Politics of Rap Julia Goldstein (bio) Ogbar, Jeffrey O. G. Hip-Hop Revolution: The Culture and Politics of Rap. Lawrence: UP of Kansas, 2007. With Hip-Hop Revolution, Jeffrey Ogbar’s second book, the author enters into the hotly contested debate over the cultural politics and effects of the American popular culture phenomenon of hip-hop. Ogbar approaches this “unprecedented global cultural juggernaut” (10) with an historical perspective, often contextualizing elements of hip-hop aesthetic in earlier twentieth-century aspects of African American cultural production and civil-rights issues, while also employing close readings of a vast repertoire of hip-hop lyrics, videos, and personas. Central to every argument in this five-chapter book is the insistence that hip-hop is not monolithic in its artistic manifestations, meanings, intentions, or means of consumption. The book’s controlling question explores the ever-shifting nature of discourses of authenticity, which Ogbar reveals to be at the center of hip-hop aesthetic. Ogbar grounds his work in the large body of writing on hip-hop history, particularly singling out Jeff Chang’s Can’t Stop Won’t Stop: A History of the Hip-Hop Generation, and clarifies his focus on the political and social landscape of musical verse in hip-hop, rather than on a comprehensive study of all components of hip-hop arts (including graffiti, break-dance, Disc Jockeying and MCing). Another qualifying factor submitted by the author is that the book “is not . . . a heavily theoretical cultural studies work” (6). Indeed, the work engages with theoretical political concepts such as hegemony and institutionalized racism without being incomprehensible to a reader unversed in highly academic theoretical jargon. After a concise introduction, chapter one, “Hip-Hop and the Evolution of the Black Image” explores the debate over representations of blackness in the hip-hop industry. Ogbar contextualizes the debate by providing a history of the minstrel figure in American popular culture, relying particularly on the work of W. T. Lhamon and Patricia Hill Collins. He then demonstrates how the earliest manifestations of hip-hop music in the 1970s grew out of the Black Power movement and often included direct rejections of minstrel tropes (such as in KRS-One’s “My Philosophy”). Before embarking on a chronological study of the internal debates among rappers over their relationships with the minstrel trope, Ogbar identifies roots of the debate in early twentieth-century black writers’ (particularly Du Bois) interest in elevating portrayals of African Americans in the arts, versus Harlem Renaissance writers’ rejection of the emphasis on portrayals of middle-class blacks at the expense of depictions of poor and working class blacks. Ogbar locates in this debate the precedents to the late-twentieth century prevalent (in commercial hip hop) conception of [End Page 553] “authentic” blackness as eschewing middle-class values. The remainder of the chapter examines the proliferating echoes of minstrel images in 1990s hip-hop, as evidenced by the defining characteristics of greed, violence, hypersexuality and pathos in gangsta rap (a genre further defined in chapter two). Ogbar balances this landscape with challenges to what he calls neo-minstrelsy from both inside and outside the hip-hop community, including discussions of Spike Lee’s Bamboozled, hip-hop groups such as The Roots and Little Brother, and the activist Stop Coonin Movement, to name a small fraction. Chapter two, entitled “’Real Niggas’: Race, Ethnicity, and the Construction of Authenticity in Hip-Hop,” considers the role of racial identity in defining the integral hip-hop aesthetic of authenticity (sometimes termed “realness”). It also explores how other racial groups have appropriated African American semiotics in order to achieve an aesthetic of hip-hop authenticity, simultaneously engaging in cultural melding and reinforcing the notion of race as a social construct. Ogbar details the crucial split between conscious rap and gangsta rap in hip-hop, epitomized by the contrast between Public Enemy’s Black Nationalist politics and N.W.A.’s violence and braggadocio; this is a split that runs through the rest of the book and demonstrates the shifting qualifications of authentic blackness in hegemonic hip-hop culture. A particularly nuanced section pulls apart the different balances between conformity...