The Subculture of Hip-Hop
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In his critique of the evolving subculture of hip-hop, Kitwana sounds a cautionary note on what he acknowledges has been an influential contributor to the character of American black youth culture. As part of a larger and more complex multiethnic society that has increasingly become the norm in the United States, hip-hop music has cut across cultural and class lines in its appeal. Equally, blacks appear to have recognized that an ethnocentric approach to addressing various political and social problems that touch on their group carries as many risks as it does rewards. In that connection, Kitwana deplores "the damage we do to ourselves" (xii) by way of cultural referents that can be found in some hip-hop art and in various patterns of social organization among African Americans. For example, he criticizes what he sees as the phony "rivalry" between East Coast and West Coast hip-hop adherents and artists as destructive. Further, he makes the point that the project of redressing problems and grievances can resonate from hip-hop and can support the more complex project of building social and political coalitions between African Americans and other demographic groups. Hip-hop, in Kitwana's formulation, has the potential to be a vehicle for meaningful social and political transformation benefiting African Americans as a community rather than merely an aesthetic artifact benefiting artists and their immediate circle or remaining anchored in pop-culture trivialities.
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does not sufficiently answer. The problem is that the contradictions also do not, in Kitwana's view, sufficiently enable hip-hop to address issues that are in the background of its subjects of discourse--poverty, relationship chaos, and inequitable distribution of other social goods.
It must be remembered that hip-hop emerged in a context of historical patterns of poverty, aggravated by the withdrawal, outsourcing, or other manner of disappearance of working-class employment in the African American demographic--and all of that in a context of economic globalization. Social and economic cleavages that already operated in U.S. society were amplified by such changes and by the persistent influence of drug culture and the decline in quality and national commitment to universal public education. The whole picture was further complicated by the evil-twin dynamics of such notions as "diversity" and "multiculturalism," as against mounting evidence that poverty and social dislocation was disproportionately experienced by people of color. In particular, Kitwana cites the "atmosphere in which ciminalization was the unequivocal public policy solution to any major social prolem disproportionately involving Black youth" (122).
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Approximate Word count = 1406
Approximate Pages = 6 (250 words per page)
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