Hip-Hop Music - The Cultural Contradictions of 21st Century Capitalism

 

            The early 90’s were characterized by various mass-scale social changes all occurring at once: the Berlin wall fell, the Soviet Union disintegrated, all while personal computers and the internet became more wildly available to the general population. All of these constitute a sharp increase in globalization: not just the globalization of information, but of capital as well. Mark Fisher identified this moment with the moment in which global capitalism officially set itself as the ultimate form of political organization¹, with its supporters largely dismissing all other forms as utopic. Capitalism (as with liberal democracy) does not grow by promoting an ideology that it is a good system, but that it's the least bad option: there is no better alternative.

            Was it, then, a coincidence that hip-hop music started becoming the mainstream genre of music by that exact same time? If we accept the hypothesis that artistic fiction is “more real than reality”, that it symbolizes the unnamable real of our everyday lives in metaphorical form, then it is no surprise that the cultural contradictions of the new globalized, digital capitalism would manifest themselves in music as well. The intent of this article is not to demonize hip-hop music as just a form of ideological propaganda, but instead to show how the contradictions of rap reflect the “real contradictions” of the life caused by the current system of political and economic organization. If we can accuse the majority of mainstream rappers of contradicting themselves or being hypocritical, we can very well interpret this as the modern-day rapper being a sort of apostle of the contradictory superstructure of society in the 21^st century.

            Here is how Simon Reynolds described the culture of what Mark Fisher later described as “capitalist realism” that is present in hip-hop:

 

“In hiphop, ‘real’ has two meanings. First, it means authentic, uncompromised music that refuses to sell out to the music industry and soften its message for crossover. ‘Real’ also signifies that the music reflects a ‘reality’ constituted by late capitalist economic instability, institutionalised racism, and increased surveillance and harassment of youth by the police. ‘Real’ means the death of the social: it means corporations who respond to increased profits not by raising pay or improving benefits but by what the Americans call downsizing (the laying-off the permanent workforce in order to create a floating employment pool of part-time and freelance workers without benefits or job security).”²

 

            A few things should be asked here. First off, what is the position of class in all of this? A naïve attempt might try locating the subculture in one of the multiple social classes, yet hip-hop does not stand for any one particular economic class, it stands for class struggle as such. Rap is neither “poor people music” nor “rich people music”: the summary of a large proportion of its mainstream variants can be summarized as “I am the richest person in the poorest neighborhood”. The contradiction stems from how, on one hand, its lyrics perfectly reflect the everyday reality in the poorest areas: the capitalist realism of ‘survival of the fittest’, make money or die, you are at risk of getting robbed in any moment, life is tough, etc. On the other hand, the rich lifestyle is added on top through the displays of wealth, status, cars, women, and so on. Here we should remember that for Marx, the difference between classes precedes the identities of the classes themselves: it is not that first we have one class, and then another, and finally we can analyze the difference between them, it is quite the opposite – the difference paradoxically comes first³. In order for us to understand each particular class, we must first understand the difference between them, the class struggle itself, with each class representing one partial, failed attempt at resolving or somehow symbolizing this struggle in itself.

            Hence, the contradiction is how behind the seeming “capitalist ideology” of rap music stands a profound Marxist insight: how class struggle is not the struggle between particular classes but a struggle that precedes the existence of each class. Hip-hop does not stand for the struggle between the poor and the rich: quite paradoxically, we must first define the difference between them before understanding them in isolation (just like sexual difference in Lacanian psychoanalysis: there is no neutral or unbiased way of defining the difference between masculinity and femininity, there is the masculine way of understanding the difference between the masculine and the feminine, and the feminine way of understanding the difference between masculine and feminine – so is class difference).

            From this perspective, it only makes sense that hip-hop music became popular in the 90’s, an age in which an extreme increase in globalization happened, as its effects are both an increase in inequality as well as an increase in the interaction between unequal classes. Whereas a culture with low globalization more or less indirectly segregates the spaces of the unequal classes, resulting in a space where moderately unequal classes each more or less “stick to their own"; the massive globalization of capital both increases the inequality as well as their interaction, resulting in a non-segregated space where massively unequal classes all interact in one big marketplace. In simpler words, 21^st century neoliberalism is not the equivalent of a rigidly defined battle between two teams, but the equivalent of what shooter video games call a “free for all” (hence the “I am the richest man in the poorest neighborhood” message of rap). Byung-Chul Han correctly notes how globalization manages to blur all boundaries, including even the boundaries of classes in our new “hustle culture” in which both workers and capitalists exploit themselves to the point of burnout and depression:

 

“The achievement-subject stands free from any external instance of domination forcing it to work, much less exploiting it. It is lord and master of itself. Thus, it is subject to no one—or, as the case may be, only to itself. It differs from the obedience-subject on this score. However, the disappearance of domination does not entail freedom. Instead, it makes freedom and constraint coincide. Thus, the achievement-subject gives itself over to compulsive freedom—that is, to the free constraint of maximizing achievement. Excess work and performance escalate into auto-exploitation. This is more efficient than allo-exploitation, for the feeling of freedom attends it. The exploiter is simultaneously the exploited. Perpetrator and victim can no longer be distinguished. Such self-referentiality produces a paradoxical freedom that abruptly switches over into violence because of the compulsive structures dwelling within it. The psychic indispositions of achievement society are pathological manifestations of such a paradoxical freedom.”⁴

 

            The second contradiction is that of authenticity. The paradox of hip-hop is this: on one hand, rappers always insist on how “real” and authentic their message is, since there is an expectation that your public persona matches your “true, real self” as much as possible, more than in other styles of music like metal or as in classical poetry (which is also one reason why today solo artists replace bands – the culture of “free for all” hyper-individualism destroys all collective solidarity, leading to an atomized society full of alienated individuals each desperately attempting to identify with group identities). On the other hand, hip-hop artists always deny the authenticity of their music whenever the public tries to make them responsible for their message, accusing the public of taking the message of the music too seriously, that “it is nothing but music”. Besides the contradiction of “I’m the richest man in the poorest neighborhood” we can count the dialectic of “I’m both murdering and not murdering people at the same time: when I rap about doing crime, one shall not take it seriously, and yet my music is of prime authenticity”. D12’s “Ain’t Nothing But Music” perfectly reflects this:

 

“What's going on in the world today?

People fighting, feuding, looting, it's okay

Let it go, let it flow, let the good times roll

Tell 'em, Dre! - It ain't nothing but music…”⁵

 

            Shall we naively pass this off as hypocrisy, or an irresponsible failure to account for one’s actions? Not necessarily, since the hyperreal is the default mode of intersubjectivity in the 21^st century: where simulation replaces reality. As Jean Baudrillard put it: “Today abstraction is no longer that of the map, the double, the mirror, or the concept. Simulation is no longer that of a territory, a referential being, or a substance. It is the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal. The territory no longer precedes the map, nor does it survive it. It is nevertheless the map that precedes the territory”⁶. The internet is indeed not real, it is hyperreal: more real than reality itself, since it perfectly captures a mode of social interaction that I previously called “the private-public self”⁷. 18^th century society was still marked by a sharp distinction between the private and the public spaces: in private, with close friends and family, you are transparent and relaxed, without consciously putting an effort to put on a performance, while in public, you put on a mask, do not share intimate details about your life with strangers and respect a code of unwritten rules of politeness and social interaction. The hyperreal “private-public space” of online forums and social media provide a break in this logic by creating a space which is transparent, where you can “open up” about a lot of intimate details about your life (mental health, sex life, personal problems etc.) not in spite of but precisely because other people are strangers. Thus, online, it is the private “authentic” mode of interacting with our close friends and family that is staged as a public performance, a paradoxical public exhibition of privacy itself (think of daily vlogs, Instagram stories, etc). We can make a table summing them up like this:

            So, what does this have to do with rap? The question lingers: “which is the real and which is the fake?” – both hip-hop and the newly-emerged form of social interaction confront us with the same paradoxes of authenticity. Slavoj Zizek gives a surprising solution to this problem⁸: we usually say that online, because of the lack of consequences, we can play any character we want, putting on a mask that hides our “real self”, but what if it’s the other way around? What if in our day-to-day lives we have to repress our true self and only in the “private-public” online space can we truly show our deepest, dark desires precisely because of the lack of consequences?

            There is a third cultural shift that is manifested in hip-hop music, which is a semiotic shift in how we treat connotation, or indirect communication. Lyrics have always played with connotation, but whereas classical poetry, up to rock and metal, used romantic metaphors, hip-hop resumes itself with an obscene, “in your face” attitude, which is only supplemented by “puns”, witticism and clever double-entendres. Most of hip-hop music does not take you on a fictional story, it is not seductive or erotic but pornographic: its connotations do not give one a sense of fantasy but a sense of “Aha, I see what you did there!”. It’s no surprise then that philosophers like Baudrillard and Byung-Chul Han have considered this a general condition of our post-modern age in general (which is obviously a consequence of my previous point, the rise in a transparent ‘private-public’ space):

 

“Seduction requires a scenic, playful distance that leads me away from my personal psychology. Eroticism in the form of seduction is different from the intimacy of love, for in intimacy the playful aspect is lost. Seduction is based on extimacy, on the exteriority of the other, an exteriority that escapes the sphere of the intimate. Constitutive of seduction is a fantasy of the other.

Porn, finally, marks the end of seduction. Here, the other is effaced altogether. Pornographic pleasure is narcissistic. It derives from the immediate consumption of an object that is offered naked. Porn is a phenomenon of transparency. The age of pornography is the age of unambiguousness. Today, we no longer have a sense for phenomena such as secrets or riddles. Ambiguities or ambivalences cause us discomfort. Because of their ambiguity, jokes are also frowned upon. Seduction requires the negativity of the secret.”⁹

 

            Consider, for instance, the semiotic difference between offline and online dating: the overly-used infamous meme that “one does not ask a woman her age, a man his salary” is quite paradoxically reversed on today’s dating apps – there is a hidden compulsion to be transparent, to share from the very first conversation details about your life that would have otherwise taken you a longer time to open up about. This hostility towards secrecy, mystery and ambiguity marks the triumph of the “pornographic” private-public space, in which the only ambiguous language one can use that would require a minimum effort of interpretation are “clever” one-liners and witty jokes. Again, we see how the cultural superstructure of society is correlated with is technological-material base: the difference between classical poetry and “technical/lyrical” rap is analogous to the difference between seduction and Tinder.

 

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NOTES:

1: See: Mark Fisher – “Capitalist Realism: Is There Really No Alternative?”

2: https://www.thewire.co.uk/in-writing/essays/the-wire-300_simon-reynolds-on-the-hardcore-continuum_4_hardstep_jump-up_techstep_1996_

3: See: Slavoj Zizek – The reality of the virtual: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RnTQhIRcrno

4: Byung-Chul Han, “The Burnout Society”, p. 11

5: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IMUZjMbs5C4

6: Jean Baudrillard, “Simulacra and Simulation”, p. 1

7: https://lastreviotheory.blogspot.com/2023/05/the-private-public-self-inside-out.html

8: See: The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WMmBtG5qxsY

9: Byung-Chul Han, “The Disappearance of Rituals”, p. 86