Transcription
Repetition, repetition, it's all the same to me.
Loaded dice never bang but claim to be.
Chasing their heads like a masochist chained to me.
Artless dodgers of the culture change, you see.
Adorno, so pronto, the clock this.
Art serious, never written for the optics.
Popular sonics, orthodox like Coptic.
32 bar chorus, one octave.
Concentration of the powers increase.
Freedom of choice to what you listen to decreased.
Cut throat decibels abusing lobotomies.
Music becomes a consumer commodity.
Fetishized livestock, you dream the doorstep.
Free adverts for martinis and Porsches.
Colonized raps, Italian sources.
They sell hollow arses, that's Trojan horses.
Mos Def told us who's running this rap sh*t.
Most definitely still running this rap sh*t.
Old white men and corporate forces.
Couple years back, ride white hoods and torches.
[Music]
[1Dime] Big thanks to Artin Salimi for that absolutely wonderful intro. I highly recommend checking out his music when you're done watching this video. The links are in the description. It has always been surprising to me that hip-hop, despite being one of the more politically charged genres, especially in its early stages, is rarely discussed in leftist circles or analyzed from a socio-political point of view. In this video, we'll be talking about the gradual impact of capitalism on the genre of hip-hop.
In the past decade, many old-school hip-hop fans and iconic old-school rappers have been proclaiming the "quote-unquote 'death of hip-hop'," and that it has been taken over by a new form of trashy hip-hop music that people are calling "mumble rap." Discourse on the evolution of hip-hop primarily tends to center around blaming particular rappers for the supposed downfall of hip-hop, but what most music critics and hip-hop journalists tend to miss is the systemic economic incentives and the socio-political ideology that have shaped the genre of hip-hop, and how these factors are not actually new, but have just taken on a new form in the streaming era. In this video, we'll analyze how the evolution of hip-hop is more so a product of the changing incentives of our socioeconomic system and, most importantly, something that philosopher Theodor Adorno calls "the culture industry."
Now, before we get started, I just want to say that I put a lot of time and effort into the making of these videos, and I even take money out of my own paychecks to enhance the quality and resources of this channel. So, in order for it to be sustainable, it'll have to be fan-funded in some way. So, please consider supporting the channel on Patreon. You will get access to a lot of exclusive content where you can learn a lot of interesting stuff. One-time donations are another option that is also available in the description.
Now, before getting into the video, I just want to clarify that this video is by no means an attack on hip-hop or a dismissal of the genre as a whole. My username on Twitter is literally @TheRapNerd7, and while I tend to prefer older-school hip-hop, I also like a lot of contemporary hip-hop. If you would like to know my favorite hip-hop acts, I will reveal them at the end of this video.
Now, before getting into the theory of the culture industry, let's briefly unpack what exactly mumble rap is, and how we got to this state of hip-hop in the first place, because the commercialization of hip-hop is by no means a new thing, and I think it's important to first understand the changing economic incentives of the music industry over time that have shaped the production of hip-hop.
Now, mumble rap broadly refers to the trend of rappers with very simplistic, repetitive, mind-numbing lyrics that are often barely even understandable. In many cases, they literally mumble their lyrics, like they're barely even trying. On top of very simplistic, bassy instrumentals that rely more on 808s and their loudness without any complexity or the creative use of sampling. Popular examples include the Migos, Future, Lil Baby, Gunna, Lil Uzi Vert, Kodak Black, and many, many more. If this cultural trend is completely alien to you, then I would recommend checking out the video titled "The Evolution of Mumble Rap."
[Snoop Dogg] But all them n*ggas sound the same. *mumbles*
[1Dime] And if you want an idea of just how bad so much of the lyrics in mainstream hip-hop are, then I'd recommend checking out The Rap Critic. He is a true hip-hop connoisseur, and his videos making fun of terrible rap lyrics are absolutely hilarious.
Now, the origins of mumble rap are heavily debated. Some people say it started with Future, Young Thug, or the Migos, and others say it went as far back as Lil Wayne. But nowadays, mumble rap more or less has become a vague pejorative label to describe rappers who are just simply bad lyricists and have similar bassy instrumentals and often rely on sensationalist antics to sell music. The label has been used broadly to encapsulate rappers that don't really mumble their lyrics but just have low-quality, repetitive lyrics and very simplistic production. This could include acts such as Tekashi 69, Lil Pump, Blueface, Lil Yachty, G-Eazy, Tyga, NAV, Nicki Minaj, Post Malone, French Montana. F*ck it, it'll even throw Pitbull and Black Eyed Peas in there. Comment other rappers you think fit this category of absolute trash.
Now, jokes aside, for simplicity's sake, when we are talking about mumble rap in this video, we will be talking about lower-quality commercial hip-hop in general, with lazy, generic lyrics, repetitive hooks, and simplistic production. But for those who listened to hip-hop in the early 2000s, it should be known that the decline of quality in mainstream hip-hop did not start in the 2010s. So how did we get here?
Since its inception in the late 1970s and early 1980s, hip-hop started off as a unique Afrocentric genre that was authentic and politically charged. It was a musical expression of the socio-economic conditions which African-American communities were dealing with as a result of neoliberal capitalism and an even longer history of racial oppression. And the fusion of the sampling of older jazz records with simple beat-making technology was a creative way to make great music with very little money. Even songs such as "The Message" by Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five, which was arguably the first hip-hop song to become a hit, was still very politically charged with themes of poverty, racial violence, and depression in African-American communities. This age included rappers such as KRS-One, Rakim, as well as groups like Public Enemy, X-Clan, N.W.A., Native Tongues, and De La Soul.
In the 1990s, a time which critics often call the golden age of hip-hop, rappers became more skilled, advanced, and versatile while maintaining a lot of substance in their lyrical content. While some would argue that hip-hop started to become commercialized as early as the 1990s with rappers such as LL Cool J and Big Daddy Kane, it wasn't really until the late 1990s where hip-hop truly became commercialized and co-opted by capitalism. This was when more and more rappers started getting signed to major record labels, and not small record labels, the major record labels. Nowadays, there are only three major record labels in America.
As more and more rappers in the late '90s and even more so in the early 2000s began to be signed by record labels, they became subject to the incentives of the mass market, as record labels, who ultimately owned the music rights, pushed artists to make music that was more accessible to as many people as possible. In addition to being subject to the incentives of major record labels, hip-hop also started to be platformed on MTV, which increased the importance of an artist's image in their success. This time period that started in the late '90s was known as the shiny suit era, an era dominated by acts such as P. Diddy and Vanilla Ice, and even where lyrically talented rappers such as Jay-Z began to significantly water down their lyricism to sell a lot of records. Rappers signed to major labels began prioritizing hit singles and started to rely on the same standardized formulas employed by a lot of popular music.
Things only got worse in the early to mid-2000s, an epoch often called the bling era, where popular hip-hop music became even more commercialized and watered down, and the subject matter itself became ever more overtly materialistic, as rappers were encouraged to ostentatiously flaunt their money, jewelry, cars, designer clothes, and other materialistic possessions. With major record labels and big corporate brands investing a lot of money into hip-hop trying to profit from and commodify the idea of the gangster image, it is no surprise that this era was heavily dominated by commercial rappers such as 50 Cent, Ludacris, T.I., and Lil Wayne, who all had very simplistic lyrical skills and content, and rapped about more or less materialistic subject matter, and used very poppy production to create catchy hits to fit in with mainstream pop, while still presenting itself as unique by leveraging the gangster aesthetic. That being said, it is worth acknowledging that there were a few exceptions to this mainstream trend, with rappers such as Kanye West and Lupe Fiasco, and also the underground scene at the time flourished, as old-school hip-hop fans became increasingly fed up with mainstream hip-hop. The point here is that the watering down of hip-hop is not something new, and it started to happen ever since it became commercialized by mainstream pop culture.
But, there was a brief rupture in this trajectory with the rise of internet platforms like YouTube and MySpace, where many talented hip-hop artists who probably would have otherwise stayed underground were able to find followings on the internet and didn't need major labels to be heard. With less pressure to sell their souls to record labels, many creative rappers were able to become successful without dumbing down their music in order to be accessible to the radio, which is what most rappers signed to record labels had to do in order to become popular. During this time, we saw the rise of lyrically talented rappers that were unique in their subject matter and in their production styles. Granted, hip-hop was still commercialized at this time and just as many mundane, standardized rappers became mainstream as new creative ones, but the internet still allowed many alternative artists to get famous who normally would have stayed underground. In hindsight, this was a great era for hip-hop, and even though many of these artists are still thriving today, their dominance on the mainstream stage was gradually replaced by a new wave of rappers in the mid to late 2010s who initially emerged on the fringe corners of the internet, but gradually became the face of hip-hop during the streaming era.
As streaming platforms like Apple Music and Spotify started to dominate music consumption, artists were faced with very new incentives as they had to rely on these streaming platforms in order to be heard. On these digital streaming platforms, artists are paid based on how many streams they get, and the first 30 seconds of a song is what counts as a stream. This, by nature, incentivizes quantity over quality and it led to artists abandoning the art of making albums entirely and instead just overly long albums with singles to maximize the amount of streams they get. A perfect example of this is the evolution of Drake's music, who once made full albums—however poppy and standardized they may have been—but as artists gradually began to rely on streaming for income, Drake and other artists started to make much longer albums that were basically just playlists of generic singles. Additionally, because the first 30 seconds of a song are what is counted as a stream, artists are incentivized to start off immediately with repetitive hooks to catch attention as soon as possible rather than building up to them, which can be exemplified by the likes of Migos or Post Malone's music.
However, while the decline in quality in hip-hop music can be partially attributed to the incentives of streaming platforms, that's clearly not all there is to this story. The decline in lyrical quality and uniqueness in hip-hop is symptomatic of a much deeper force which has affected almost all forms of popular music ever since music became an industry of mass consumption under capitalism. This force can be described as the culture industry.
Now, keep in mind that Adorno's theories of the culture industry can be applied to most genres of popular mainstream music and other sectors of mainstream entertainment, but for simplicity's sake, we'll be using mainstream hip-hop as a unique case study example of it. When it comes to the influence of capitalism on music and other sectors of popular culture, the theorists Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer have some of the most compelling insights, particularly Adorno's work on the culture industry and his essays on popular music. I'll give a very quick background for those who don't know. Theodor Adorno was one of the most important philosophers of the Frankfurt School, a group of German academics who escaped the persecution of Adolf Hitler's Germany to the United States. Now, you would think that they would have considered America a much better place than Germany, and it was, but that didn't stop them from giving one of the most ruthless critiques of American capitalist ideology and its mass entertainment industry, which, according to them, led to a disintegration of culture and also indoctrinated the masses with consumerist capitalist ideology. Not only was Adorno a philosopher and a sociologist, he was also a musicologist who had a talent for playing classical music. He had also studied extensively in Freudian psychology, so he had a deep understanding of the human psyche, and we will see how these skills allowed him to provide one of the most useful insights into mass culture.
So then, what exactly is the culture industry? The culture industry is a conglomeration of culture-producing factories which generate cultural commodities for mass consumption. The term "commodity" here is key. Popular music is an instance of what Adorno calls cultural commodities, not simply because they are made by the culture industries like big record labels or film studios, but because they are manufactured, like all commodities, solely to realize their exchange value. On the capitalist market, songs produced in the culture industry are made to make money, to capture the attention of a mass audience, and sell as many records as possible.
Growth and business, business mindset. The principal universal characteristic of all popular music, and most products of the culture entertainment industry in general, is what Adorno calls standardization. Standardized music made for mass consumption comes pre-digested. It robs people of their imagination and does the listeners' listening for them in advance. It delivers music as a pre-packaged commodity so that listeners are only left the task of consuming it. In his theory of standardization, Adorno demonstrated that popular entertainment, and by extension popular music, is standardized by using the same formula to appeal to the masses. Adorno demonstrated that all popular music contained a verse, chorus, bridge, and a 32-bar song form. These elements are interchangeable in most popular songs, and if you listen carefully, these formulas still are used in most popular music today. These formulas manufacture what most people are primed to consider natural music, which consists of these exact common conventions and musical formulas that they are accustomed and conditioned to like. Once you take note of these popular standardized formulas, it becomes pretty evident in most popular music if you just ignore the aesthetics. Hell, don't take it from Adorno or from me. Take it from the book titled "The Song Machine: Inside the Hit Factory" by John Seabrook, or the book titled "The Addiction Formula," which both show how most popular music all use very similar strategic formulas for hooks, musical blurs, melodies, rhythms, and repetition, that are all crafted in a way to instantly grab your ears' attention and get the song stuck in your head. But the absolute irony of these two books is that the authors wrote them from the perspective of two music insiders trying to show other aspiring popular artists how to make hits, and not trying to expose the banal homogeneity of the popular music industry, which just goes to show the hegemonic capitalist realist ideology that people have been imbued with.
As Theodor Adorno put it, "Mainstream films and radio music no longer need to present themselves as art. The truth that they are nothing but business is used as an ideology to justify the trash that they intentionally produce." Wow, spitting facts. In many ways, music doesn't even have to pretend to be artistic. Capitalist ideology is so pervasive that it is already implicitly accepted that everything is and should be a business. That's why most people tend to judge music based on how many records were sold and the monetary success of the artists, rather than qualitatively judging the actual art for what it is. Even in the hip-hop community, where the notion of selling out was once demonized, it is now commonplace to just accept that artists should make basic hits so that they can "get the bag," a saying that perfectly embodies the capitalist realist mindset that has infected hip-hop. For the most part, artists are incentivized to effectively sell out from the very beginning, adapting to the sound of what's popular in order to be accepted, which is why even many unsigned, underground, or indie artists sound just as standardized as major label artists.
However, if all songs in popular music were completely identical, people would soon tire of them and the industry would lose profits. So, in order to be mass-marketed, a hit song must have at least one feature by which it can be distinguished from other hit songs, and yet still possess the complete conventionality and homogeneity of all the other hit songs. For the most part, these slight sonic variations and apparent aesthetic novelties are mostly superficial. Adorno describes these instances as pseudo-individualization. Pseudo-individualization is when different standardized songs are made to look as if they are new by having surface-level distinctive features, such as a catchy hook, different voice effects, a polarizing personality, or an edgy aesthetic. Such surface-level pseudo-individualistic differences fool the listener into thinking that they are consuming a unique musical product, and they forget or never even realize that the music was ever standardized. Even so-called alternative or indie music is heavily co-opted by the culture industry and sold right back to us in standardized form. Don't want to be a basic normie? We've got pre-packaged alternative music for hipsters who don't fit in.
While most standardized music ultimately shares the same set of musical formulas, patterns, and subject matter, the variations in image and aesthetics are by far the most important things that differentiate different standardized acts from each other, by creating an image or consumer identity that fans can identify with. That's why even if different artists may look different on the surface or even sound slightly different, standardized music rarely ever breaks from the standardized structures of popular music. Popular music cultivates conditioned reflexes that prime listeners to regard standardized music as natural and anything that deviates from it as unnatural. That's why music which actually attempts to break from popular conventions and standardized formulas is often difficult to listen to for people who have only been exposed to popular music. Most people will perceive non-standardized music as boring or unlistenable. People react to it like sugar-addicted kids react to broccoli.
Adorno describes this perfectly. Quote: "There is actually a neurotic mechanism of stupidity in listening. The arrogantly ignorant rejection of everything unfamiliar is its sure sign. Listeners behave like children, again and again with stubborn malice, they demand that one dish that they are usually served." Try showing non-standardized music to a friend or someone you know who only listens to popular standardized music, and you will probably get a reaction like this:
[Music] *fart*
[Hank Hill] Mother of God! It's all toilet sounds!
[1Dime] A good example of how average listeners react when popular artists deviate from standardization is when Kendrick Lamar dropped his album "To Pimp a Butterfly," arguably his magnum opus and most artistic album. However, because the album was very unorthodox, with very deep subject matter and the mixing of hip-hop, jazz, and rock and roll, it was perceived as boring by many hip-hop listeners because of the lack of hits, and most importantly, because it hardly subscribed to conventional formulas. In contrast, Kendrick Lamar's album "DAMN.," which was still a good album, sold immensely more than "To Pimp a Butterfly" due to having multiple standardized hits. While one album was far more artistically experimental, the latter sold a lot more due to conforming to standardized norms.
Standardization in the music industry causes what Adorno calls the regression of listening. When people hear music without listening, standardized music hears for the listener. We aren't supposed to listen to the lyrics or even listen closely to differentiate the instrumentals. We are just meant to bob our head. The standards of popular music are set so low that the familiarity of the music is often the only prerequisite for it to be considered good. To recognize it is almost the same thing as to like it. If you ask a person why they like a particular hit song, they usually won't be able to tell you why. Often their response will just amount to saying that the song is catchy. It is often the case that the instrumentals as well as the lyrics of standardized music tend to appeal to listeners' most childish instincts. Standardized songs often incorporate the continuous repetition of an easy-to-follow musical formula comparable to a nursery rhyme-like structure that you would have been conditioned to enjoy as a kid.
[Lord Jamar] That's him, right?
[Interviewer] Yeah.
[Lord Jamar] That's right. That's him, right? That's Lil Yachty? You know what I do with that song, right?
[Interviewer] What do you do with it?
[Lord Jamar] I replace the words. 'Cause listen how... listen to the melody. You know what you can replace the words with? A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I, J, K, L, M, N, O, P, Q, R, S, T, U, V, W, X, Y, and Z.
[1Dime] The regression of listening that standardized music cultivates is one of the reasons why people have low attention spans when it comes to music. This has been further exacerbated by the streaming era, where we have all the music of the culture industry right at our disposal for consumption, whereas previously, aside from listening to songs on the radio, of course, people had to mindfully choose which albums they wanted to buy, because buying albums costs money, and if we are paying money, we better get our money's worth and listen to the album in its entirety. But now, in the streaming era, we can just flick through songs like it's a buffet, or listen to algorithmically crafted playlists of catchy songs that are most effective at getting stuck in our heads. The streaming era has arguably caused a further regression of listening that is far worse than anything that Adorno could have imagined.
As mentioned earlier, the culture industry often produces commodities that appear different to what is mainstream in order for people to not get fed up with the standardized products. Nowadays, so-called mumble rap has become so pervasive to the point that many hip-hop listeners who feel disaffected with the state of the genre are gravitating to pseudo-rap rappers who just rap really fast without any content. While these type of rappers may seem superior in contrast in terms of lyrical skill, they are too also standardized.
I'm a spiritual lyrical individual, spiritual miracle lyrical individual, spiritual miracle individuals skipping... *incomprehensible* REAL HIP HOP!
Anyways, the standardization does more than just ruin the artistic quality of music. For Adorno, the standardization of music and mass entertainment leads to the standardization of the audience who consumes it. It creates one-dimensional subjects. We are what we consume, after all, and when we consume fast-food music on the regular, it has an effect on our mechanical, primal ways of thinking, and severely liquidates our capacity to actually appreciate art. It's kind of like what happens to little kids who eat a lot of candy and fast food. They no longer can appreciate good, nutritious food.
Furthermore, Adorno contrasts popular music to what he calls serious music. Serious music, for Adorno, is a concrete totality whereby every detail derives its musical sense from the concrete totality of its piece. Adorno differentiates arts and commodities produced in the culture industry in this quote: "Art respects the masses by confronting them as that which they could be rather than conforming to them in their degraded state."
Now, there is something to keep in mind. Just because the type of music is standardized does not mean that you are not allowed to like it. Hell, there are plenty of examples of standardized music that I like, such as Travis Scott and Kanye West's hits, and even great rappers such as Biggie Smalls and Tupac have made a few standardized hits. Personal taste in music is mostly subjective, but whether people like something is irrelevant to whether or not it is standardized for mass consumption. Standardized formulas in popular music can be objectively demonstrated, as seen in Adorno's work and the books we mentioned on the hit factory. Even if you are not a musicologist, you can detect standardized formulas and melodies quite easily if you just listen carefully. This is often hard to accept, because we may come to the realization that some of our favorite artists or artists that we identify with on a personal or parasocial level make standardized music. We want to feel as though our music tastes are unique, as though our consumer identity is different from the others.
That being said, while most standardized music contains very surface-level subject matter, a song can have a very standardized structure while still having a deep message, as seen in Childish Gambino's "Feels Like Summer," Kendrick Lamar's "Swimming Pools," Gorillaz' "Feel Good Inc.," or Outkast's "Hey Ya!" But in popular music, this is the exception, not the rule. But feel free to share your favorite artists in the comment section below or artists that you think don't make standardized music.
Nevertheless, it is worth mentioning that the separation that Adorno makes between serious music and popular music can seem a little bit elitist. Adorno typically comes off as an armchair academic snob who hated everything popular, and if you think that music critics like Anthony Fantano were picky, boy, you have not seen anything yet. This man really hated mainstream jazz, granted the 1920s to 1950s type of mainstream white people jazz, not the artistic kind of jazz made by the likes of Miles Davis, which was quite the opposite of standardized. But imagine how Adorno would react to things like mumble rap, EDM, or pop music today in general. But ultimately, I think that most of Adorno's points about popular music still hold true.
But people may still object by saying something like, "But don't people want this stuff? These artists are just giving people what they want, right?" The promoters and producers of commercialized entertainment exonerate themselves by referring to the rationalization that they are giving people what they want. Now, Adorno is careful with his words. He differentiates the term "culture industry" from "mass culture" because he does not want to imply that it is necessarily the fault of the masses for liking these things; rather, the culture industry artificially cultivates these needs to which masses passively accept and become conditioned to enjoy. Most of the time, the first music that an individual hears is standardized popular music. Often, that is the only kind of music they are exposed to. Nobody is just simply born with the taste of what is sold in popular music. Taste is cultivated, and when the only music you are exposed to is popular, standardized, formulaic music, then of course you will develop a taste for it. This creates a consumption cycle where demand is cultivated, and then more standardized music is reproduced for mass consumption to meet this demand, which then creates more demand, and the cycle repeats itself.
While the overarching formulas of hit songs tend to largely stay the same over time, certain stylistic variations can become trends, and then what follows is other artists follow these trends. A new standard is set. And when certain artists pioneer a certain trend, or record labels capitalize on it, other artists and record labels then start to imitate that trend, and start putting out music that sounds exactly like this in order to capitalize on the new standard that has been set. Even most unsigned, upcoming artists tend to follow standardized formulas and ride cultural trends. This does not only apply to mainstream artists. To get a record deal in the first place, or even be heard in the streaming era, artists often have to imitate or conform to the sound of what is already popular in the culture industry. This is one of the reasons why the culture industry breeds imitation over innovation. This, of course, applies to many sectors of capitalist society in general, not just the culture industry. If you are an artist in capitalist society, why put so much time and effort into making good-quality art and prioritizing quality over quantity when you can just get more cash and clout by making catchy songs with extremely simplistic melodies that sound similar to what is already popular? Why risk pouring a lot of money and effort into a brand-new, innovative, creative project when you can just keep releasing the same 100 sequels to the same movie or video game, because you know it will sell? And because the entertainment industry in capitalist societies are largely dominated by a few oligopolies, they are subjected to the rule of endless upward economic growth by nature, incentivizing them to take precautions in order to make the most amount of money possible, thereby discouraging more risky innovations.
For Adorno, another reason why people passively accept the low standards of popular music and the low-effort entertainment in general of the culture industry, no matter how mediocre it is, is because such repetitive, simplistic products coincide with the banal, repetitive lifestyles of work under capitalism. In capitalist society, we are trained to perceive work and leisure as diametrically opposed. At work, we are expected to be as productive as possible, and in our time off, indulge in leisure activities that require absolutely zero thinking in order to escape the misery of work. Drained of all energy after working all day, people are exhausted and don't want art or entertainment that will challenge them. Except for the people who watch this channel, of course. ;) Treacherous, repetitive work schedules under capitalism deny people any novelty, so they seek novelty in their time off, but the strain and boredom associated with the work life and the amount of energy that is drained from them leads to avoidance of any effort in their leisure time. Anything involving the slightest critical thinking is too much work, and learning is perceived as a chore. So, as a substitute, they crave a stimulant. Popular music comes to offer it, along with other stimulants, perhaps. The repetitive nature of popular entertainment conditions people specifically for the repetitive nature of work, even if that's not its direct intention. Robotic working habits and habitual escapist consumption is a perfect recipe for capitalist social control.
Lastly, the culture industry plays a big role in reproducing the dominant capitalist social ideology which rationalizes the practices of the culture industry, and also contaminates the lyrical content of the music itself. It limits subject matter to the confines of what conforms to the capitalist reason of generating profits, reproducing, purchasing commodities, and egoism. And of course, promoting art that challenges capitalism or fosters a critical consciousness is not in the interest of the culture industry, which is primarily owned by rich capitalists, and mainly rewards artists who care the most about money and fame. But in some cases, however, the culture industry can also perform our anti-establishment desires for us. We have pseudo-anarchist rock bands, movies with evil rich villains to hate, and even so-called conscious rappers that remind us of the obvious of how police are killing black people. At best, some popular artists will be politically woke on a few issues, but not beyond a surface level or in a way that escapes the logic of capitalism.
Popular music, and more explicitly mainstream materialistic hip-hop, reinforces what the theorist Antonio Gramsci calls cultural hegemony, whereby we adopt the ideals of the ruling class. This reinforces the dominant ideology which is, by its nature, the ideology of the dominant class. Capitalist ideology in hip-hop can be further understood by what can be called the spectacle, which is an omnipresent social relation of late capitalist society mediated by images where people relate to each other via representation and showing. In the society of the spectacle, having wealth itself is not the main motif, but rather it is showing that one is wealthy which is the most important thing, and how we display our social capital to each other. The shiny suit era, the bling era, and the so-called mumble rap era of today are all, in a way, cultural products of the spectacle. This doesn't need much explaining. Just watch a hip-hop music video, and it's quite obvious. Showing off money, cars, naked girls, and expensive commodities is the basis of much of the subject matter. And the brand image of many of these hip-hop acts, even if none of it is actually real, it is the presentation that counts as reality. This spectacle in hip-hop further cultivates the pseudo needs for egotistical aspirations, materialistic purchases, and most importantly, communicating the message to the world on social media that we are doing these things. It is no coincidence that many rappers and even hip-hop fans who identify with the image wear fake jewelry, grills, Yeezys, and shoot videos with rented cars. For the spectator, these celebrity rapper icons are like gods who have successfully attained this need which was artificially created. But in reality, the rappers and pop stars alike are essentially just commodities sold to us for consumption, while the real capitalist owners of the culture industry, like record labels, streaming platforms, and the brands endorsed by these artists, are the ones who profit the most.
But now, try imagining music and art outside the capitalist society. One not driven by profit. It's not easy, is it? The mind prison of capitalist realism makes it hard to think outside of the capitalist logic that has been entrenched into our minds. If the capitalist mode of production was replaced with a socialist one, where profiting from other people's work is illegal and instead people owned what they produced, and where everyone had access to basic necessities of life like housing, education, food, and healthcare, then we could create a society where artistic expression is more possible, and the collective ownership over a lot of industries could possibly abolish copyright, which is one of the most corrosive aspects of capitalist societies that hinders artistic freedom. A post-capitalist society would also lessen the incentives of selling out, the pressures to succumb to standardization, and to create art not reliant on the profit motive, which would ultimately attract artists who really want to create art for art's sake, and not just to become rich. Such a society can definitely work, but the real question is how to bring about its implementation, and that's a whole other debate. But for now, in order for any solution to be remotely attainable, more people have to understand the problem in the first place.
Now, as promised, here are my favorite hip-hop artists. Most of them are underground, but a lot of them are quite famous. MF DOOM, Tupac Shakur, Nas, Outkast, Earl Sweatshirt, Vince Staples, Ab-Soul, Isaiah Rashad, Billy Woods, Akala, Atmosphere, Dead Prez, Death Grips, Run the Jewels, Aesop Rock, Quelle Chris, Jean Grey, Black Thought, Rapsody, Talib Kweli, Mos Def, Royce da 5'9", Shad, Brother Ali, Noname, Blu, Lupe Fiasco, Mike, Immortal Technique, and my favorite, Ka. Oh, and Artin Salimi, of course. Go subscribe to him, and check out his wonderful music. Links in the description.
Now, what artists do you think escape the conventions of standardization? Feel free to comment your thoughts. I'd love to know who your favorite artists are.
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