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This chapter discusses how participation in hip hop culture could lead to recognition from non-Muslim peers. “Hip hopper” was for the Legendz a widely recognized and desirable identity that could momentarily precede and eclipse that of “religious Muslim” in an interaction with non-Muslim peers. In making meaningful social connections with other urban youth based on a shared engagement with hip hop culture, the Legendz were following a pattern observed by sociologists among other second-generation immigrants whose participation in hip hop music and style allowed them to gain acceptance and make social inroads among young people from outside their immediate ethnic community. In addition to employing hip hop as a way to gain acceptance and make connections with a broader urban American community of non-Muslims, the Legendz also actively adapted the genre's music and culture in creative ways to develop their own in-group Muslim American identity and style. The resulting identity performance—referred to as cool piety—tapped into broader African American urban cool while still exhibiting a close association with local standards of Islamic behavior to produce a nuanced and multifaceted presentation of Muslim American self.

This chapter examines three white hip-hop artists whose youth was spent consuming and producing hip-hop in interracial neighborhoods or friendship groups: Eminem, Danny Hoch, and Adam Mansbach. Their cultural immersion facilitated and strengthened social ties to black people. Here, the chapter uncovers long-term manifestations of racial sincerity, but it also registers moments of failure, when one or another succumbs to the privileges of whiteness or opts for the easier postures of authenticity rather than the ongoing work of struggle against racial injustice. Treating these three artists as consumers and producers of hip-hop culture, the chapter analyzes the racial politics and sincerity of their rap lyrics, theater performances, film, fiction, essays, interviews, and social activism. Without reducing the artistic complexity of their imaginative work, it considers their creative products as reception documents that reflect their understanding of the meanings and significance of hip-hop culture.

This chapter investigates how Latinos' racial and ethnic identities yield either similar or dissimilar educational outcomes to African American youth. It analyzes interethnic differences between African Americans and Latinos in behaviors and attitudes about “acting white” and suggests that gender has the strongest influence. It discussed findings that Latinos are more likely than Latinas to share cultural styles, such as those of hip-hop culture, with African American youths.

This chapter discusses the aesthetic and political dimensions of the Muslim International through hip-hop culture during a period when the “Black criminal” and the “Muslim terrorist” were viewed as fundamental threats to U.S. national identity. Through the resurgence of Malcolm X and the embrace of Black Islam, hip-hop culture in the 1980s and 1990s tapped into Black internationalism to challenge racial domination, militarism, and mass incarceration, imagining Black freedom beyond the United States and into Africa and the Muslim Third World. The hip-hop culture—like jazz and the Black Arts Movement—became a space where Black radicalism, Islam, and Muslim Third World politics would have a strong influence, interpreted through lyrics that have been expressed by various artists such as Rakim, Public Enemy, Mos Def, Ice Cube, and many others.

This chapter interrogates the common view that hip-hop culture is largely constituted in misogyny, rampant consumerism, and male violence. West Indian girls pursue a symbolic “dual citizenship” as they construct their subjectivities and negotiate dialectic notions of authenticity within hip-hop culture. The girls voice strong preferences for female hip-hop artists and television personalities whom they define as “real.” Their conceptualizations of authenticity are explored in the ways in which cheerleaders at the Flatbush YMCA and youth at BCM interpret American hip-hop and West Indian dancehall music. Although the mainstream versions of both genres rely on sexually explicit lyrical content and debasing portrayals of women, West Indian girls and their mothers apply a double standard, seeing hip-hop as corruptive and dancehall as “positive.” These contradictions perhaps speak to the ways in which Black consumer culture has been demonized in American society.

This chapter looks at the ways in which the body, aesthetic features of hip-hop music, and the material culture that surrounds it are deployed to construct affect and help delineate between what is meant by hard and hardcore, both as music and as masculine performance. In hip-hop culture, uniqueness and the expression of individual identity are prioritized through behavior, modes of dress, language, and other ways. Those who adopt these styles of behavior in mannerism, dress, speech, or attitude become part of a community of practice that is able to persist because the expressive codes associated with the culture have the power to invoke it through any number of performative texts. The chapter also traces the historical evolution of hip-hop culture from a largely benign music to something more malevolent.

This chapter examines the role of music in creating, communicating, and sustaining identities based on particular sub-cultures. It argues that music can be seen as a powerful medium for communicating intellectual and emotional messages. It draws specifically on 1960s protest music, notably that of Bob Dylan, and on hip-hop culture to illustrate these issues.

Chapter 6 turns to sampling as it is usually understood: integral to Hip-Hop culture. The track in point is “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised” by Gil Scott-Heron, a track that others have sampled, or alluded to, countless times since its release in 1970. The chapter analyses this well-known track for its other, equally formative sonic dimensions. Lyrics do matter here for they are part of African and African American practices of “signifyin’.” Through her “sampling back,” namely, a form of answer rap, Sarah Jones inverts this iconic track thirty years later to launch a blistering critique of sexism in not only the Rap/Hip-Hop business but also the music business in general. The chapter considers the ways in which Jones’s signifyin’ on “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised,” literally and sonically, illustrates how musico-cultural borrowing and or as sampling are part of a broader repertoire of African American signifyin’ practices, as these are, in turn, understood as Black culture and, thereby, Black American politics.

This chapter discusses whiteness, masculine desire, and the animating absent black presence now inverted since its inception in minstrelsy. It shows how the triumph of hardcore rap makes it clear that the transgressive black body, primitivism, and cross-racial desire continue to find value in the marketplace of global popular culture well into the new millennium. The chapter also looks at a number of successful white performers of black music styles, including Elvis Presley, Vanilla Ice, Eminem, and Brother Ali; and addresses whether there are more or less ethical ways in which white and other youth may engage hip-hop culture and appropriations of black male subjectivity.

This chapter focuses on comparisons between minstrelsy and constructions of black masculinity in hip-hop music and culture, particularly the context of hard and hardcore styles of rap performance. Since minstrelsy, blackness has been one of America's primary cultural exports. Furthermore, hip-hop music and culture have been integral in the construction of a new cultural complex of racial perceptions about black masculinity and the black male body. In addition, the chapter shows how black masculinity can be relocated and transposed not simply to other geographical locations, but onto other kinds of bodies in representations that reproduce and perpetuate pejorative understandings of black subjectivities.

This concluding chapter examines how, in the post-MTV world of video culture and the post-hardcore rap world of commodity thugs, mediated images of the black male body remain a fantasy of masculine desire that encapsulates extreme alternatives of heroism and villainy for white and other youth who often have few other references for black American culture. It reiterates on the conclusions drawn from the previous chapters; and furthermore examines the implications of Barack Obama's 2008 electoral victory, his engagement and association with hip-hop culture, his triumph over American power expressed through whiteness, and his overall role as what the author here terms as “the first hip-hop president.”

This chapter explains the significance of live performance in hip-hop culture, describing historical shifts from collective, community-based cultural practices to passive, technology-centric activities that take place in private spaces. As hip-hop culture became more popular in the 1980s, rap thrived under corporate rule but became a more self-contained pursuit that is created in recording studios and increasingly consumed in automobiles or through headphones. In rap microscenes, gaining experience as a live performer is a critical stepping-stone in the career trajectory from rookie to professional. The chapter concludes with a discussion of how social class shapes the performative context.