Gettin' Skooled: How Hip-Hop Culture Shapes the Identities of Urban Youth
Jacqueline Celemencki Department of Integrated Studies in Education McGill University, Montreal; August, 2007
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This thesis examines the ways in which a group of male youths from Montreal interpret the world and construct their identities through the lens of hip-hop. The theoretical framework draws mainly from discussions of youth subcultural theory as articulated by the Center for Cultural Studies in Birmingham, as weil as current research on hip-hop culture and youth identities. Using narrative inquiry as a methodological framework, this study highlights how the participants' perceive their neighbourhoods through gangster rap culture, and construct their identities according to these perceptions. This study also reveals how the participants' create original rap lyrics as a self-reflexive tool, and how listening to rap music shapes their linguistic expression.
Cette thèse examine les manières dont un groupe de jeunes hommes Montréalais interprète le monde et construit son identité via le prisme du hip-hop. Le cadre théorique vient principalement des discussions sur la théorie de la « sous-culture jeunes » qui se sont tenues au Centre des Etudes Culturelles à Birmingham, ainsi que des récentes recherches sur l'identité des jeunes au sein de la culture hip-hop. En utilisant l'enquête narrative comme cadre méthodologique, cette étude met l'accent sur la facon dont les participants perçoivent leurs quartiers au travers de la culture gangster rap, et construisent leurs identités selon ces perceptions. Cette étude indique également comment les participants faconne leur « rap » comme un outil de reflexion, et comment l'écoute du rap influence leur expression linguistique. Acknowledgements
First and foremost, 1 would like to give a big up to the participants in this study for living their hip-hop, and for sharing their lives with me. Without you this study would not have been possible. To my incredibly patient and supportive supervisor, Dr. Bronwen Low, for providing excellent feedback as 1 wrote my many drafts, and for believing in my work. Shirley Steinberg, for your help during the initial stages of my research. To Catherine Hughes, for saving me from many deadline catastrophes. Ma famille: Mom, Dad, Nathalie and Michelle, for your unconditionallove and support, especially while 1 was hunched over my computer at various family gatherings. To John Pascarella, thanks for your feedback and critical questions. Le voisin, Greg D. for help with the translation and for being my thesis respite during the summer that 1 wrote this.To Seth Sugar, thank you for your loyal friendship and encyclopedie knowledge. To Brian M. Peters, for your mentorship and freestyle-rap phone messages. To Iris Glaser, for your amazing friendship over time and space. And lastly, a big SHOUT OUT! to the former and current generation ofhip-hop heads around the world still keepin' it real. My wish is that this work does not collect dust on a library shelf: jcelem@ .. Table of Contents
Abstract
Acknowledgments
Chapter 1:Gettin' Skooled through Hip-Hop Culture 1 Corning of Age in the New Dawn of Aquarius- A Brief Auto-Ethnography 1
Chapter 2: A Brief Hip-Hop Historiography 7 The Cross-Bronx Highway Project 8 Reaching Back in Time- The Roots of Hip-Hop 9 The Original Hip-Hop Party 11 Looking Back, Looking Forward 15 Chapter Surnmaries 16
Chapter 3: Theorizing Y outh ldentities and Popular Culture 18 The Frankfurt School 19 Chicago School of Urban Sociology 20 Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies in Birmingham (CCCS) 21 Subculture 22 Concluding Thoughts 24
Chapter 4: Varions Approaches to Hip-Hop and Youth Culture Research 28 Hip-Hop as an International Language of Resistance and Negotiation 29 Hip-Hop as Social Activism 31 Hip-Hop and Racial Identities 32 Gangster Rap and Black You th Identity 36 Concluding Thoughts 39
Chapter 5: Mapping out a Methodology- Narrative lnquiry 41 Gathering Stories-Gathéring Data 43 Analyzing the Data 44 Keepin'it Real 45 Procedures 47
Chapter 6:Hip-Hop is Who We-A Collection of Reflections and Observations 51 Growing up Brown-ish, Kosher-ish, and becoming Hip-Hop-ish 51 The Players 53 The Meeting 55 Holla if ya Hear Me!- Rap Music as a Vehicle for Self-Expression 56 Neighbourhood and Identity 59 ldentity and Gangster Rap 61 The Inner City vs. the Suburbs 65 Rap and Role Models 68 Rappin' it Up 69
Chapter 7: Conclusion- Let Me Break it Down For You One Last Time 71
Works Cited: 75
Appendix A: 80 Discussion Prompts
Appendix B: 81 Questions for Further Research
Appendix C: 82 Participants' Original Rap Lyrics
Certificate of Ethical Acceptability of Research Involving Humans: 84 Chapter l:Gettin' Skooled through Hip-Hop Culture
Hip-hop culture is one of the most visible and vibrant youth cultures today. lts global spread can attest toits popularity, which is such that youth researchers today are examining the ways in which youth are drawing on hip-hop culture to shape their identities and teachers are increasingly using hip-hop in the classroom as a pedagogical aid (Bennett, 1999; Clay, 2005; Morrell, 2004; Pough,
2004).
This thesis, entitled "Gettin' Skooled: How Hip-Hop Culture Shapes the
Identities of Urban Y ou th", examines the role that hip-hop culture plays in shaping the identities and perceptions of young, urban men attending an inner city
Montreal high school. The research examines how hip-hop culture functions as a lens through which the participants' cons tru ct reality and perform the ir identities.
In accordance with the narrative inquiry methodological framework I used for conducting my research, this thesis begins with an introduction of my persona! struggles in constructing and articulating my identity as a youth. In order to contextualize hip-hop's current popularity marginalized youth, this persona! introduction is followed by a brief history of hip-hop in North America.
Coming of Age in the (New) Dawn of Aquarius- A Brief Auto-Ethnography
Coming of age as a teen in the early 1990s, I had an ongoing love affair with popular culture, and in particular, hippie subculture. My days of aquarius were highlighted with many rock concerts, barefoot picnics in the park, and the occasional protest. Hippie subculture provided an impetus for me to orchestrate my one-woman revolution against the mainstream, neo-conservative/traditional
1 values 1 was raised with. On weekends, my friends and 1 would scour local thrift stores looking for the longest and most colourful dresses, crocheted hats, and beaded necklaces-anything that would contribute to the penultimate 'flower child' look, a throwback to my parents' generation. 1 attended the infamous
Sunday tarn-tarn jams on Mount Royal in Montreal with a fervor and devotion typically reserved for the deeply religious. These Sunday excursions were the highlight of my week, so intent was 1 to worship at the temple of what 1 revered at the time to be my hippie mecca. 1 even had special outfits that 1 reserved for these occasions, replete with belis around my ankles and decorative sparkles dotting the circumference of my eyes, ali in efforts to become part of the visuallandscape 1 so desperately wished to become part of.
During my little counter-cultural revolution, much to my parents' horror,
1 unceremoniously and effortlessly ditched my on-again/off-again love affair with organized religion to full y immerse myself in the temporal reality of my new adopted subculture. From the ages of roughly 14-18, hippie was my religion. No longer concemed with trying to explore different ways of reaching God through religious prayer, 1 focused my energy on fitting in with my hippie peer groups, forging friendships based on our mutuallove of music, environmental activism, and vegetarianism (not to mention the occasional shared joint). Not only did hippie subculture provide me with a means for reifying my newly constructed identity, it was a place where 1 felt 1 belonged, something 1 was seeking desperately on my teen joumey of self-discovery. Much like the counter-cultural revolutionaries who gave birth to the first generation of hippies in the earl y 1960s,
2 and who were recognizable by their appearances as much as their politics, 1 prided myself on expressing my new identity through fashion. 1 exercised considerable efforts concerning the way 1 dressed and the events 1 attended. 1 wanted my hippie style to help others make assumptions about me, about things such as my musical preferences and perhaps even my politicalleanings. Most importantly, being part of hippie subculture prompted a reconfiguration of my (previous, non subculturally affiliated) identity, to fit in with other members of my tribe. Taking eues from hippie subculture, 1 donned the same uniform as my peers, most prominently a colourful wardrobe and long haïr with a center part. At a time when
1 was incredibly impressionable, curious, and desperate to create an identity that was distinct and opposite from my parents, hippie subculture provided an outlet within which to bury my generalized angst, questioning, and teenaged insecurity, and give birth to a new colourful, albeit slightly insecure, me.
While hippie subculture was a popular choice for youth in my mostly white, middle class Montreal neighborhood, 1 knew that a little further east, and a little further south, other white kids, and even more black kids were wearing buge jeans, baseball caps, getting high-top fade hair-dos, and listening to people like
Tribe Called Quest, Run DMC, and other black rap groups from the US. So while my friends and 1 were kicking up a dust storm in our bare feet while dancing to the sounds of the Grateful Dead, kids a little further east and a little further on the other side of town were bopping their heads to the sounds of American rap music, keeping hip-hop culture alive and kicking. Besides dancing to the sounds of
Young MC's breakthrough rap/dance crossover bit "Busta Move" in 1989, the
3 only other contact 1 had with hip-hop culture in my youth was thanks to a couple of kids in my mostly white, urban alternative high school, who everyone referred to as "wiggers" (a pejorative term for white hip-hop identified youth deriving from the equally derogatory term 'nigger').
lt was not until moving to Japan in 2000 at the age of 24, where American hip-hop culture had recently exploded in popularity, that 1 began to listen to rap music and leam about hip-hop culture, mostly out of curiosity. The weekly adventures out of my tiny town (which was adjacent to a rice paddy and miles from any form of urban culture whatsoever), had me checking out the local hip hop scene in the nearest city, a two hour train commute. Long detached from my hippie identity and the corresponding soundtrack of my teenaged years, 1 welcomed the hard-hitting beats and equally terse lyrics that American and
Japanese rap music quickly seduced me with. On my bi-monthly jaunts to the city
1 became fascinated with the droves of youth in hip-hop style clothing, and the clusters of breakdancers th at would gather in sorne of Fukuoka' s concrete parks.
1 was also exposed to a fair bit of hi p-h op culture through my students, while teaching English at severa! junior high schools. Over time, 1 became increasingly interested in exploring the ways in which my students, and youth ali over the globe born in the generation following mine, were drawing on hip-hop culture to shape and define their identities. 1 even wove hip-hop into my classroom !essons, using specifie rap songs such as Lauryn Hill's "Every Ghetto,
Every City" and the Beastie Boys' "Paul Revere" to teach the students about idiom, rhyme, and cadence.
4 1 retumed to Canada in 2003, and, still interested in working with youth,
began teaching yoga and meditation at several Montreal high schools designed to
serve the needs of marginalized youth from a variety of racial and ethnie
backgrounds. It was during my two-year tenure in this position that 1 witnessed
the enormous popularity of hip-hop culture amongst the mostly culturally diverse,
non-white students, who largely hailed from African, Jamaican, and Haitian
· origins. lt was while teaching the students yoga that 1 received an immersion in
the various aspects of hip-hop culture: rap music, hip-hop style, and hip
hop!English vemacular. 1 quickly realized that my own love of rap music and
growing knowledge of the culture served me well with my students, as it provided
a way to connect with them on a personallevel.
The majority of the students at all of the schools came from
disenfranchised socio-economic families. Their participation in hip-hop culture
through various means (listening to the music, making graffiti art, and attending
community organized hip-hop parties and talent shows), provided the students
with a much needed creative repository, not to mention a break from their
challenging lives. Working with these youth enabled me to understand how hip
hop culture shaped their identities; much like hippie subculture shaped mine as a
youth. Inspired by my work experiences with hip-hop affiliated youth in both
Canada and Japan, for my thesis 1 decided to explore the ways in which hip-hop
culture shapes the perceptions and identities of a group of urban male youth from
Montreal. In the next section, 1 offer another historical context, discussing the
emergence of hip-hop culture in the South Bronx of the early 1970s, and the
5 factors that lead to hip-hop's popularity, particularly amongst marginalized urban youth from the inner city.
6 Chapter 2: A Brief Hip-Hop Historiography
An historical recounting of the climate in which hip-hop emerged in
North America reads something like an old story recalled by your great aunt Ida; it is long winded, sometimes sad, peppered with random characters, and seldom predictable. And unlike those stories that have been frozen in time with the help of a few dusty Polaroid's and sorne 8-track soundtracks to accompany them, hip hop has not remained untouched in a hermetically sealed cultural vacuum. Hip hop emerged during a period in history that birthed severa! other youth-driven global subcultures, namely punk and hippie.
Punk perhaps had the most in common with hip-hop in that it rose in popularity amongst British youth as a form of cultural production that was a direct response to what youth felt were unjust social and economie divisions between the classes in England during the late 1960s and early 70s. Although punk and hip-hop have little in common musically, their roots reflect similar anti establishment sentiments that comment on social, political and economie injustices with an unwillingness to take any of it sitting down (Savage, 1991).
While their peers in England succeeded at manifesting a politically driven anarchistic subculture with edgy music as its mouthpiece, in the Bronx neighborhood of New York City in the early 1970s, African-American and Puerto
Rican youth were coming of age in a climate rife with debilitating poverty and racial tensions. As British youth rebelled against class inequalities and embraced a style of music that reflected the artists' proletariat positionalities, South Bronx youth were sowing the seeds of a subcultural movement that combined music,
7 poetry, visual art and dance. The birth of hip-hop mobilized a generation of youth f"'..
with few opportunities to work towards transcending their difficult life
circumstances (Pough, 2001 ). Hip-hop culture combines four elements: DJ, rap
music, graffiti art, and breakdancing. The combined efforts of the beats produced
by the DJ and the overlapping lyrics of the MC comprise what is known simply as
rap music. Rap music is sometimes referred to as hip-hop, which can encompass
rhythms and singing from other genres such as R&B, and Soul.
Over thirty years after its birth in the South Bronx, hip-hop culture
continues to thrive as one of the most popular global youth subcultures (Mitchell,
2001). Moreover, when used as a platform for researching youth, hip-hop culture
vividly highlights the multiple correlations that exist between hip-hop and youth
learning, youth identities, and youths linguistic expression (Dimitriadis, 2001;
Morrell, 2004). And while punk still rears its angry head in the hallways of North
America's high schools along with other youth subcultures such as emo and goth,
hip-hop remains a hugely popular youth subculture, especially among black and
other urban youth, to the extent that its devout fans are referred to as the "hip-hop
nation" (Farley, 1999; Kitwana, 2002).
The Cross Bronx Highway Project
In 1948, urban architectural monarch Robert Moses masterminded the idea
to build a six-lane highway running straight through the Bronx. The final
construction of the Cross-Bronx Highway reached completion in 1963, leaving
thousands of people displaced and a neighborhood forever ruptured (Caro, 1975).
The aggressive demolition of a once thriving neighborhood created divisiveness
8 between people who bad previously co-existed side by side despite varying racial, ethnie, and economie differences. During the construction of the highway, th ose who could afford it, namely middle class whites, moved to the suburbs of New
York and neighboring New Jersey, while those who stayed witnessed the creation of sorne of the first urban ghettos resembling large concrete cages with windows and doors. As Chang (2006) discusses "there were monotonous slabs of housing rising out of isolating, desolate, soon-to-be crime ridden parks" (p.12).
By the mid-1960s, South Bronx residents' morale continued to plummet, largely in response to the crumbling socio-economic infrastructure instigated by the construction of the highway project. Local businesses were shutting down, employment opportunities were at an all time low, and random acts of violence occurred in the streets (Chang, 2006). With few job opportunities available for youth, many were lured into local gangs with the promise of earning good money quickly. Exacerbating the sense of alienation and hopelessness amongst youth was the fact that discos and community centers were shutting down, leaving virtually no social gathering places for them to congregate and stay out of the streets (Chang, 2006; George, 1993 ). The young Bronx residents of the late 1960s witnessed one of the worst periods of poverty and crime in New York' s his tory up until that point, and the climate was desperately needing the injection of something new.
Reaching Back inTime- The Roots of Hip-Hop
Most current hip-hop heads of the under-20 set attribute rap music's current popularity to the corporate media empires that are responsible for its wide
9 distribution. While popularizing what was once a counter-cultural form of expression, current hip-hop music executives such as Russell Simmons of Def
Jam records, are often criticized by music joumalists, scholars, and hip-hop heads for tuming hip-hop culture into a consumer enterprise, and for cashing in on the popularization of black urban culture as a marketable identity. However, to reduce the genre to its hegemonie stereotypes completely negates its rich historical roots, which pre-date the current commodification of black urban expression as a consumable identity. Hip-hop's roots are deeply embedded in the soil of African history, back before New York was ever considered cool. Current rap music reflects influencing elements from artists such as Cab Calloway, be-bop singers, and more recently, political siren Gil Scott-Heron (Hebdige, 1987, p. 231).
The linguistic elements of rap music, words spoken in a rhythmic incantation, oft interspersed with singing or chanting, are reminiscent of the West
African griot, who was a wandering poet and storyteller dating as far back as the
18th century. The griot used an oral cocktail of staccato rhymes and rhythms interspersed with poetry and singing to perform stories in public venues
(McBride, 2007). The griot's performances both captured and articulated the heartache and hardship of the collective sorrow of African slaves, echoing similar sentiments to others of the African Diaspora affected by forced slavery and colonialization; as Perkins notes, "Black people have always articulated their oppression in sorne form ofrhythmic expression" (2005, p.199). The griot honed his skills through practice and repetition, much like today's hip-hop MC whose rapping skills are sharpened through practice and participation in improvisational
10 ciphers. Ciphers are important and common and are large circles formed with either break:dancers or rappers tak:ing tums performing in the center. And much like the West African griots, the rapper hones his skills through practice and performance, as opposed to formalized training.
The Original Hip-Hop Party
Come Monday moming, when ali the cool kids are talking in the schoolyard about the big party that happened last Saturday night, everyone wants to be able to say that they were there. The first hip-hop gathering is one such party, with sorne naysayers still debating asto who deserves the title of the original hip-hop DJ. Anyone who knows anything about hip-hop agrees that it was born in the South Bronx in the early 1970s, and much like reggae music production in Jamaica, hip-hop music originated from the voices and experiences of mostly lower class black people living in city slums (Hebdige,1979).
Key to any re-telling ofhip-hop's history, are the people who were integral to the birth of hip-hop but who were left out of the current and past recorded discourse. While current stories acknowledge the presence of non-black participants in the movement, including a heavy Puerto Rican presence, hip-hop's originators cites its origins as beginning with the widely known triumvirate of
DJ' s Kool Herc, Afrikaa Bambaataa, and Grandmaster Flash. Important to note therefore, is the fact that hip-hop's history is contested, and not only were Puerto
Ricans and other non-African American contributors regularly written out of its histories, but women have also been often excluded from the official hip-hop canon. For instance, while not much is known of women's contributions to the
11 origins of the hip-hop movement in the 1970s, female rapper Ms. Melodie notes
"It wasn't that the male started rap. The male was just the first to be put on wax''
(Rose, 1994, p.154). While current female black rap artists such as Foxy Brown and Lil' Kim are often on the receiving end of harsh criticism for their overtly sexualized lyrics and videos, Queen Latifah and MC Lyte, two hugely successful female rap artists of the 1980s, continue to represent powerful female role models for the hip-hop generations past and present (Pough,2004). Despite such omissions, what is widely accepted as the official birth of hip-hop occurred as a house party in the South Bronx in 1973, with young Jamaican ex-pat DJ Kool
Herc at the helm (Chang, 2006). Herc and his sister organized and hosted a dance party in the recreation room of their South Bronx apartment building one summer evening. Herc work tirelessly at pumping up the young, mostly black and Latino crowd with well-known dance tracks, while injecting his DJ set with a previously unheard technique of playing records. He would spin two records simultaneously on two tumtables, often altering the speed and direction at which the records were played. While spinning records, Herc simultaneously toasted the crowd with taunts and jeers in Jamaican style "rhythmic patois" (Bennett, 1999). This combined record scratching and lyrics layered over the top is what we now refer to as rap music.
While Herc was busy plan ting the seeds of the hip-hop movement in the
South Bronx, in other parts of the Bronx, DJs Afrikaa Bambaataa and
Grandmaster Flash were simultaneously carving out their own niches in the scene
(George, 1993, p.50). While DJ Kool Herc crafted his "eut and mix style"
12 (Hebdige, 1983, p.226), Afrikaa Bambaataa organized youth under the banner of the 'Zulu Nation', appealing to those who were involved in street gangs. Hebdige
(1983) discusses how Bambaataa set out to replace gang fights and drug consumption and trafficking with involvement in hip-hop culture because he wanted to turn the gang structure into a positive force in the ghetto (p.225).
Bambaataa's mobilizing of youth to participate in hip-hop events merged political, cultural and pedagogical interests and established a framework for using hip-hop as linguistic expression, for articulating social justice issues, and to express artistic freedom. Moreover, while much of current mainstream North
American rap music no longer reflects the driving messages behind Bambaataa's
Zulu Nation movement (with important exceptions such as KRS One), it is
indeed the soundtrack for a large majority youth today, especially black and other racial minority youth (Morre11,2004 ).
Herc, Flash, and Bambaataa came from the same debilitating socio
economic conditions as their teenaged fans and endeavored to transform their hopelessness into a creative force, disseminating their artistic efforts through
dance, art and music. By erecting creative, community-based artistic events with
and for local youth, Herc et al also acted as much-needed successful, black male
role models. Much like today' s rap artists whom youth fans look up to, the
founding DJs demonstrated the value of hard and honest work, and the possibility
of being successful and black. Additionally, in gathering groups of poor and
neglected youth together in efforts to dissuade them from embracing crime and
violence as viable ways to earn a living, Bambaataa, Herc and Flash effectively
13 created spaces of engaged pedagogy (hooks, 1994). While tapping into the passion and energy of their youth fans, the pioneering hip-hop DJs cultivated the hi p-h op movement into a space of leaming by transforming the hopelessness of local youth into an artistic community that produced graffiti, breakdancing, and rapping. Moreover, while each of the three fathers of the hip-hop movement had his own distinct style, they ali hosted free outdoor parties that were attended by mostly black and Latino youth who desired something more than the poverty and crime of their surroundings. Pough (2004) asserts that while south Bronx youth participated in the free outdoor parties hosted by Herc et al, they were as responsible for the birth of hip-hop as were the founding DJs. "They worked with the scraps they were given and developed a rich and vibrant youth culture and youth movement" (p.7). The beginning of the hip-hop movement in the early
1970s was a time of creativity and social activism which enabled youth to develop artistic skills while establishing roots for what would become one of the most influential and important youth subcultures of the 20th and earl y 21 st centuries.
Rap music in particular, provided numerous and desperately needed
'coming-out' opportunities for black youth while broadcasting a public service message to the rest of America about what was happening in their own back yards. As Dyson (1993) suggests, rap music "projects a style of self into the world that generates forms of cultural resistance and transforms the ugly terrain of ghetto existence into a searing portrait of life as it must be lived by millions of voiceless people" (p.6). Earl y rap music therefore functioned as a powerful
14 linguistic resistive vemacular, with punchy verbal metaphors reflecting the hardships of racialized poverty.
Looking Back, Looking Forward
Hip-hop has become a global commodity in the past decade, used to sell everything from Macdonald's hamburgers to children's toys, and therefore it is important for any scholarly writing on the topic to acknowledge its origins, as
Tricia Rose suggests as a "black cultural expression that prioritized black voices from the margins of America" (1994,p.2).
Early Puerto Rican and African American MCs used hip-hop as a way of discussing what they felt was systemic race and class oppression in the United
States, while, as Hebdige (1987) suggests, sorne of the earliest recordings of hip hop articulated the dreariness of life in the Bronx: "the beat becomes a metaphor for being locked up. It's as if you're having to live for as long as the record lasts in a space as cramped as a South Bronx tenement" (p.230).
While hip-hop culture has skyrocketed into mainstream success in North
America, particularly in the last decade, it has also amassed fans all over the globe. A testament to hip-hop's global takeover was in a feature article in
National Geographie magazine, highlighting hip-hop culture's spread from Dakar to Detroit (McBride, 2007). Outside of North America, hip-hop continues to disturb and provoke the public's ears and minds by highlighting issues of social justice, and by articulating political opposition to govemment dictatorship (Nilan and Feixa, 2006; Trondman,2004). While youth around the globe gravitate towards hip-hop culture to help them define and configure their shifting tastes and
15 identities, hip-hop has also grabbed the attention of academies across the disciplines, who are interested in using the culture as a platform for looking at youth learning, youth identities and the impact of globalization on black cultural production. The birth of hip-hop culture and particularly the successes of its pioneering DJ' s Herc, Bambaataa and Flash, signified an important period in black history by bringing successful black male role models into the public sphere, from which they had often previously been absent (Bynoe, 2004). Further,
Herc et al. represented powerful and positive black male role models for a generation of black youth who desperately needed them as examples to emulate.
While coexisting in the same poor ghettos as their young fans, Herc et al managed to achieve financial success while sowing the seeds of a culture that responded to poverty with a vibrant cultural movement (Kelley, 2006). Therefore, current research which analyses hip-hop culture's influence on youth identities must look at hip-hop's history as a means for contextualizing its current popularity, in particular with today' s marginalized youth. Educators interested in mobilizing hip-hop's potential as a space of self-expression, creativity, and social critique should also draw upon hip-hop's history, about which many youth know little.
Chapter Summaries
Following this next section is a brief overview of this thesis. Chapter 2 introduces the reader to youth subcultural theories, and draws specifically from
Dick Hebdige's discussion of youth subcultures and the Birmingham School's research on youth subcultures and youth identities. Chapter 3 focuses on current literature discussing hip-hop culture and youth identities. A traditional research
16 methodology stipulates the formulation of a singular research question with a testable hypothesis, while a narrative inquiry methodology provides a means for analyzing participants' lives as told through their stories. Chapter 4 provides an overview of the narrative inquiry methodology, while discussing its relevance and application for this study.
Chapter 5 both highlights and analyses the participants' discussions of hip hop culture. By providing extensive verbatim quotes, this chapter highlights, among many things, the participants thoughts regarding rap music as a tool for self-expression and the connection between their neighbourhood and their identities. Chapter 6 provides a brief discussion and conclusion of the study, and highlights sorne questions that emerged during the researching and writing process.
In conclusion, this thesis has two overall aims. First, to analyze the ways in which the participant' s identities are informed and shaped by their hip-hop associations. And second, to discuss the participants' use of rap music as a self reflexive tool for linguistic and oral expression.
17 Chapter 3: Theorizing Y outh ldentities and Popular Culture
The passage from childhood into young adulthood is marked by various
significant physiological, emotional, and intellectual transitions. These transitions
often produce sorne confusion and conflict in the period following puberty. Boys
and girls who could once frolic in the absence of generalized anxiety regarding
concems of being perceived as "cool" are suddenly faced with pressure to
conform to peer groups with distinctly delineated codes of acceptable speech,
dress, and musical preferences.
Popular culture asserts a powerful influence during young adolescence.
As youth attempt to assert themselves into the world as young adults under the
influence of popular culture media, the shifting peer groups and varying musical
tastes and styles becomes an iterative process whereby symbols from popular
culture are intemalized and authenticated through the performance of newly
constructed identities. Identification with subcultural groups therefore represents
an important phase in the lives of young adolescents, as it offers a respite from the
banality of everyday life and provides a sometimes oppositional stance to the
mainstream values expressed by the dominant culture (Huq, 2006).
The trajectory from youth to adolescence is also a time for reshaping one's
values as they come to reflect the exploration of one's relationship to the world
(Brake, 1980). Moreover, as sorne youth construct new identities as part of their
coming-of-age process, they perceive themselves as "projects to be worked on
and perfected through self-realization and development" (Bennett, 2005, p.56).
The literature discussing youth identities is vast, and provides a platform for
.~.
18 discussing the myriad and multidimensionallived experiences of youth as they
attempt to construct, retain, dismantle and reconfigure their social, ethnie, and racial identities.
Central to much of the discussions of youth identities is the notion of
'youth' as a concept rather than life-stage, reflecting what Huq (2004) discusses
as "a highly mediated social construct of constantly shifting relations and definitions" (p.4). An examination of youth identities therefore provides researchers with a doser look at how popular mass media culture acts as a frame for youth whereby they construct and develop their identities (Brake, 1980). For
post-pubescent youth who are struggling to find meaning in everyday life,
subcultural affiliations can create an affirmation of self that, according to Vilet
(2007), is gained through creativity and" innovation brought out from the
margins of society, into the open" (p.62).
Chapter 2 examines sorne of the various schools of research and theory
that have worked to understand how youth identities are shaped and constructed,
with particular attention to the CCCS subcultural studies, while chapter 3 explores
the literature on hip-hop and youth identities more specifically.
The Frankfurt School
Sorne of the most influential writing about identity and culture in the 20th
has been the work of the Frankfurt lnstitute for Social Re se arch in German y. The
Frankfurt School's collective works in part inaugurated what we now refer to as
critical studies in popular culture, or more commonly, cultural studies.
19 In his discussions of the culture industry, Theodor W. Adorno, one of the most referenced Frankfurt School scholars, examined capitalism' s impact on culture ( 1991 ), and demonstrated, as Huq (2006) suggests, how "under capitalism, culture was ultimately reduced to the commodity form with the sole function of being traded for profit" (p.45). Perhaps the most pertinent argument to my study to be extrapolated from the Frankfurt theorists is how one's individual identity is influenced by 'mass culture'. As Durham and Kellner (2006) suggest, under the influence of the Frankfurt theorists, "culture and identity were thus regarded as constructed" (p.25).
The Frankfurt school' s discussions of culture and capitalism pro vide us with an understanding of how culture is embedded within the larger structure of everyday life. Further, the Frankfurt schoolliterature is relevant to this study's inquiry into how the marginalized male participants construct their identities under the influence of hip-hop culture because it looks at the ways in which persona! tas te is shaped by capitalist culture, and by one' s socio-economic class.
Chicago School of Urban Sociology
During the 1950s, the Chicago School of Urban Sociology, which was comprised of scholars from the University of Chicago's prestigious sociology department, was the first collective group of academies to conduct youth-specific research. Chicago school scholars such as Frederick M. Thrasher and E.Franklin
Frazier grounded their research in a United States behavioral social science approach and conducted ethnographie research couched in sociological theory, which discussed human beings' interactions with the ir urban environments
20 (Bulmer, 1984; Huq, 2006). The Chicago School's work was also shaped by the ('·.
Frankfurt School' s discussions of mass society in addition to French structuralist
political theory (Huq, 2006). The Chicago School theorists' major contribution to
youth research was their work on gangs and gang culture in Chicago, which
looked at social class as a means for analyzing what they believed were deviant
behaviors amongst youth.
Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies in Birmingham (CCCS)
An influential tum in youth research emerged in the 1970s with the
Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies in Birmingham, whose writings on
post-war youth subculture in Britain opened the door for many subsequent youth
researchers. The writings of the Birmingham theorists drew from the theoretical
tenets of Marxism, the philosophical works of Kant and Hegel, and French
structuralist philosophy. Sorne early CCCS theorists were also heavily informed
by Gramsci's discussions ofhegemony, which argued, according to Durham and
Kellner (2006), that "social orders are founded and reproduced with sorne
institutions and groups violently exerting power and domination to maintain
social boundaries and rules" (p.7). By integrating sorne tenets of Marxism, for
example, which discusses the importance of everyday life and working class
culture as a me ans for understanding mass culture, the Birmingham theorists'
work focused on the influence of social class on public identity, and how popular
culture influenced individual and group youth identities. In 1976 renowned CCCS
theorists Stuart Hall and Tony Jefferson published the seminal edited work,
Resistance through Rituals, which discussed how youth subcultures and youth
21 identities represented a collective resistance to the forces of the dominant, hegemonie structures of rnainstrearn society. This work is perhaps one of the most oft-cited texts to emerge from the Birmingham school, despite its critics.
The CCCS carne under heavy critique for a nurnber of reasons. First, it omitted severa! rnarginalized groups (such as wornen and black youth) in its discussions of youth culture and youth identities. Second, while Birmingham school theorists suggested youth were active participants in rneaning rnaking, drawing on cultural eues and syrnbols to construct their anti-establishrnent identities, they also clairned that youth were in fact without significant agency, subject to intellectual and ernotional constraints beyond their control (Huq, 2006).
CCCS theorists carne under attack for flaws and biases such as the limited arnount of ernpirical research depicted in the writings, not to mention their sarnple, which was cornposed alrnost entirely of white youth. That said, by highlighting the
"boring powerlessness of the daily routine" (Huq, 2006, p.17) as lived by post war British youth, the CCCS theorists effectively captured many of the ways in which youth engage in subcultures as a rneans for diverting their attention from everyday banalities. Moreover, within its collective body of authors and published works, from Angela McRobbie to Rupa Huq, the CCCS, and CCCS-influenced theorists still represent perhaps the longest standing engagement with youth culture research of the 20th century.
Subculture
lt was Dick Hebdige's 1979 seminal work entitled Subculture-The
Meaning of Style that properly defined and then canonized the term subculture.
22 This oft-cited sociological text, which highlights UK youths post-war, music fueled subcultures and their socio-economic and political influences, is considered by current youth researchers such as Andy Bennett (2001) and Rupa Huq (2006), to be of the most important texts on youth subcultures to emerge from 20th century youth research literature. In his discussions, Hebdige ( 1979) refers to subcultural groups as cloisters of marginalized and subordinate youth who draw on ordinary symbols from everyday life, affix meaning to them, and then use these symbols as codes for constructing an everyday framework and foundation for living. Integral to Hebdige's discussion of subcultural groups is that they attract primarily marginalized youth, and therefore represent inherently resistive and anti-establishment positionalities as a whole (1979). Within this understanding, Teddy Boy and punk subcultures, for example, emerged in post war Britain as a set of embodied resistive practices played by youth on the margins, and were expressed through language, music and style (Bennett, 2000;
Brake, 1980). While Hebdige's discussion of subcultures is quite detailed and uses specifie examples such as the previously mentioned subcultural groups, he also suggests that the meaning of subculture is not etched in stone and is therefore open to contestation and reconfiguration from its opponents and supporters alike.
Hebdige's text is still considered by many to provide an important backdrop to any research that seeks to examine the correlations between youth identity and popular culture.
The current research on youth identities has evolved considerably since the 1970s and early 1980s, to the extent that the term subculture is now
23 considered somewhat dated by sorne. However, this study occasionally refers to
subculture in order to demarcate smaller groups such as hip-hop and punk as
distinct from the more general popular culture, and looks at how involvement with hip-hop culture shapes the participants identities.
Concluding Thoughts
From the Frankfurt school theorists 1 take the importance of examining
and critiquing the many ways in which culture shapes an individual's consumption of popular culture. Therefore when examining the reasons for youth's interests in hip-hop culture, researchers must contextualize their choices within a broader understanding of capitalist culture and its impact on the media.
While acknowledging the important contributions made by the Frankfurt theorists, there are sorne instances in which 1 contest their daims. In particular, suggesting that youth are "cultural dupes" implies to sorne extent that youth in fact have no
agency, and therefore the process of identity construction is nothing but the result of the media's brainwashing.
Popular culture and the media play a large role in youth's lives. That said,
1 suggest that as they intemalize the messages and visuals parlayed through popular culture, youth have the capacity to be critical in choosing what and whom they listen to, read, and wear, as reflecting a part of their persona! identities.
Though this study makes certain general conclusions regarding how and why the participants' are influenced by hip-hop culture, it also examines them individually to understand how identity construction is an iterative, and more importantly, a self-reflexive process that reflects both their engagement and critique of popular
24 culture and media. This study also draws on sorne ofthe CCCS's many valuable contributions to the field of youth research, namely the ways in which youth identities and behaviors can be interpreted through the lens of popular culture. In addition, integral to the work of CCCS theorists was the assertion that an individual's social dass is to be taken into account when analyzing hislher relationship with popular (sub) cultures.
While assuming a CCCS-influenced positionality, this study examines the reasons for hip-hop' s popularity with the participants', ali of who rn (except for one), are marginalized, racial minority youths. However, as the CCCS research reflects the habits of almost exdusively white British youth, their general daims about youth identity remain somewhat biased and outdated, and therefore as a reference for current research on minority youth identities, their daims are not generally applicable. While acknowledging the contributions of the Frankfurt and
Birmingham school theorists, this study draws considerable inspiration from contemporary youth researchers such as Andy Bennett, who articulates a departure from CCCS theory in suggesting one needs to look beyond the subcultural affiliations as a blatant representation of social dass. Instead, he implores youth researchers to look at local contexts in order to understand how youth construct their identities based on their interpretations of popular culture and suggests that "the local becomes a point of reference for the individual, a stock of knowledges and sensibilities which individuals draw upon selectively in constructing lifestyles" (2005, p.64). Moreover, while discussing youth engagement with popular culture as a function of everyday life, Andy Bennett
25 (2005) suggests that youth are not in fact 'dupes', but active participants' in the process of choosing and rejecting elements of popular culture.
Similarly committed to the local, Adreana Clay (2003) employs community youth centers as sites for conducting her research, relying explicitly on her participants' feedback to fuel her research questions and analytical framework. Greg Dimitriadis (2001, 2004) also conducts ethnographie research with youth in their local contexts, and like Clay (2003) emphasizes how 'locality' shapes the experiences and perceptions of his subjects. Finally, Ernest Morrell
(2002, 2004) is another example of a eurre nt youth researcher who, through his interests in examining the way hip-hop culture shapes the linguistic practices of youth has conducted extensive ethnographie research in schools, working directly with the students and teachers.
While reviewing the seminalliterature on youth subculture and subcultures research, this chapter locates this study within and existent body of scholarly writing that examines the way youth reconfigure and reconstruct their racial, ethnie, and socio-economic identities under the influence of popular culture. This discussion brings us to chapter 3, which examines the influence of hip-hop culture more specifically on youth. While acknowledging the groundwork laid by the Chicago, Frankfurt, and CCCS theorists, this study highlights various former and contemporary tenets from past and current youth researchers, in order to contextualize chapter five's discussion of how the participants' identities are constructed under the influence of hip-hop culture, and how their social class, and
26 racial and ethnie identities inform the ways they interpret with, and interact with hip-hop culture.
27 Chapter 3:Various Approaches to Hip-Hop and Youth Culture Research
As hip-hop culture continues to attract youth from varying backgrounds regardless of race or ethnie affiliation, it has been gamering the attention of academies in disciplines such as education, cultural studies, anthropology, and sociology. Much of this research has focused on the implications of hip-hop for better understanding and engaging youth, analyzing the various ways youth draw from hip-hop culture to construct their identities, including its influence on their musical preferences, dialects, attitude, linguistic expression, mannerisms, and fashion (Dyson, 2001; Kitwana, 2002). As Dimitriadis (2001) suggests, hip-hop culture provides much more than style eues and musical choices for its youth followers and is, "providing the narratives that young people are drawing on to deal with the issues and the concems that are most pressing in their lives" (p.120).
Hip-hop culture is therefore not merely a passing trend; as Pough (2004) suggests, the culture is "the soundtrack for today's youth" (p.25).
A majority of hip-hop research has focused predominant! y on interpreting and analyzing rap lyrics, and youth's responses to the messages expressed in these lyrics (Sullivan, 2003). While this type of research provides a good reference point for discussing issues such as racial and ethnie identities, crime, and the exploitation of women, for example, it limits hip-hop research to a relatively narrow scope (Kubrin, 2005, p.367). Research which highlights the reasons for inner city black youth' s attraction to hip-hop culture reveals th at with little opportunities to escape the grim reality of urban ghettoized living, sorne of these youth are constructing their identities under the influence of hip-hop, and are also
28 using rap music as a means of self-expression (Clay 2003, 2006; Dimitriadis,
2001; Kelley, 2007; Mitchell, 2001; Sullivan, 2003). In addition, sorne scholars are also assessing the use of hip-hop culture as a pedagogical aid in the classroom
(Duncan-Andrade, 2002; Kelly Quintero, 2002; Weaver 2001). In the following pages, this review discusses hip-hop research and its implications for understanding youth culture, youth leaming, and youth identities.
Hip-Hop as an International Language of Resistance and Negotiation
While conducting research with Turkish expatriate youth through an ethnographie study aimed at assessing the ways in which they articulate their ethnie identities, Andy Bennett (1999) determined that the local hip-hop culture of
Frankfurt am Main, Germany, provided an invaluable resource for understanding and interpreting local youth culture more generally. Bennett's research also probes the nature of Turkish youth's collective experiences of immigration and attempted integration into a foreign culture, and establishes how these youth engage in this complex process by drawing on foreign cultural eues (1999). Bennett found that
Turkish youth used rap music to express what they felt was systemic racism 1evied towards them by their German peers. Further, while discussing the ways that
Turkish youth use rap music as a language of resistance, Bennett ( 1999), described how they performed rap songs in their native tangues in front of German audiences, expressing their frustrations at not being accepted by their German peers.
Bennett (1999) suggests that in rap music, Turkish youth find a common voice of resistance and self-expression by appropriating what he feels are "the
29 cultural resources developed to articulate issues which shape the lives of African
Americans" (p.80). Moreover, Bennett (1999) suggests that Turkish youths' use of rap music as a form of resistance is representative of the way that other marginalized populations articulate their frustrations through the genre in what he describes as "a series of strategies which are worked out and staged in response to particular issues encountered in local situations" (p.81). This daim from Bennett
(1999) opens up the following questions: What is it about rap music that predisposes youth, and particularly youth from marginalized populations, to gravitate towards it as a medium for self-expression? Is rap music inherently self reflexive?
This use of hip-hop to express resistance to local norms and values also shapes sorne of the work of Quebec rappers, as discussed by Sarkar et al (2007), who daim that participation in this racially and ethnically mixed community suggests actively "taking on and negotiating hybrid identities" (p.359), which resist the dominant models of belonging in Quebec society. According to the 17-
18 year old members of the Montreal-based amateur hip-hop group Red Pill, identifying as Quebecois is what they feel distinguishes Quebec rap from
American-English rap (Sarkar et. al, 2007, p.363).
Such complex negotiations and distinctions also help explain the popularity of hip-hop culture amongst Hindu youth in North America. Sunaina
Maira (2006) daims that these youth are creating hybridized identities as distinct from their parents, for example, by sampling Hindi and Punjabi songs into their
English rap music. This "new identity" as reflected in 'hindi-hop', parlays the
30 strong influences of these youth's cultural heritages, while demonstrating, as she daims, "overt strains of cultural nostalgia for an imaginary homeland in frozen time" (p.242). Hindu youth therefore use rap music as a means for bridging their inherited culture, with their chosen cultural affiliations.
Hip-Hop as Social Activism
Sorne youth researchers discuss hip-hop's potential for engaging youth in political and social activism. In an ethnographie study conducted with mostly black youth at local community centers in Oakland, Califomia, Adreana Clay
(2006) demonstrates how youth perform rap music embedded with particular messages as a means for engaging social activism. Clay (2006) also discusses how these youth use rap music lyrics and performance to combat racial stereotypes, and observes how the data suggests that "youth of color are aware of the importance of hip-hop culture at the persona! and politicallevels, through organizing and connecting with other youth and thinking about social change in their own lives" (p.117).
Clay' s research demonstrates the ways in which youth draw from their own
"cultural capital" (Bourdieu, 1990) to initiate awareness in their communities, and cites severa! examples of rap-based social activism initiatives (2006)._For example, she highlights the work of 'You th Speaks', a San Francisco based non profit organization which trains youth how to use rap music and siam poetry to foster critical thinking and leadership skills to implement in their daily lives. Clay also discusses Oakland-based group 'Teen Justice', a youth organization that also
31 uses rap music and siam poetry to discuss politics, racial identities and police brutality with local youth.
Throughout the duration of her two-year ethnographie study, Clay describes severa! other community-based organizations that use rap music as a tool for engaging youth to become social activists and political advocates for their chosen causes. In his book entitled: "The Hip Hop Generation: Young Black and the Crisis in African American Culture", Bakari Kitwana also discusses the potential of rap music to be used as a tool for engaging social and political activism amongst youth (2002).
Hip-Hop and Racial Identities
This section will examine how youth from visible rninorities use hip-hop culture to shape their identities, and will discuss sorne of the reasons for hip-hop's enormous popularity with white North American youth.
Though much bas changed in the world during the last 30 years since hip hop first emerged, the song, sadly, remains the same. Black urban youth in
America's cities are still often the target of racial profiling, living in climates of disparate socio-economic conditions, and also frequently deal with increased accounts of depression, domestic violence, and alcohol abuse (Beachum et al,
2004). In addition to highlighting the challenges that face black urban youth in
America, Beachum et al (2004) discuss how they are influenced by both television and hip-hop culture. Moreover, the authors suggest that school culture has a direct impact on youths perceptions of themselves and the ways in which they articulate their identities in efforts to either fit in with or reject the identities
32 of the dominant school culture (such as jock culture, academie culture,
gang/violent culture, etc).
While conducting surveys with youth in an urban Califomia shopping
mali, Sullivan (2003) asked ber participants questions regarding their racial
identities, and whether or not they were connected in any way to hip-hop culture.
Sullivan's study, while highlighting the comments of an assortment of youth from
various racial and ethnie backgrounds regarding their thoughts on hip-hop culture, found that overwhelmingly, African Americans are more likely to say that they
listened to rap music because it reflects the reality oftheir lives (2003,p.615).
Sullivan's study also determined that overall, many of the participants' felt they
could personally relate to the messages being expressed in rap music, with one
participant asserting, "It bits home, it is something 1 can relate to" (2003, p.613).
Further, Sullivan (2003) espouses the benefits of using hip-hop culture as a
platform for conducting further research with youth, and suggests that a careful
study of hip-hop culture would enable researchers to further examine "identity
development and maintenance" (2003, p.616).
While discussing the importance of talking about hip-hop culture with
urban youth from mixed ethnie and racial backgrounds, Sullivan (2003) is critical
of the participants who suggest, as did one young woman, that rap music reflects
black people's overall reality: "it tells me the truth about how us black people live
being raised in the ghetto" (p.614). Sullivan (2003) agrees that hip-hop culture in
general provides a much-needed space for black cultural production, but contests
33 the supposed universality ofrap music's message, claiming that overwhelmingly,
the genre reflects the experiences and voices of young, urban, black men.
In a study conducted in 2003, Adreana Clay (2003) distributed a series of
surveys to youth from various racial and ethnie backgrounds, endeavoring to
analyze the correlations between youth identities and hip-hop culture. From the
data gathered, Clay (2003) surmised that ber participants used hip-hop culture as a
basis for constructing their identities, and claimed that "hip-hop acts as the
signifier by which youth identify themselves and then express their identities through the ways in which they dress, etc (p.1352). She further highlights the concems and challenges that (in particular) black youth face, and the important role that hip-hop culture asserts in their lives. Through analyzing ber surveys
distributed to various black youth ofboth genders, Clay (2003) observed that they
believed authentic black identity was directly related to the performance of a hip hop identity (p.1352). Further, Clay (2003) asserts that ber participants felt a constant pressure to perform a hip-hop identity by wearing (as they claimed) the right clothes, listening to the right music, and speaking the right language.
Further, she daims that the black youth who did not conform to a hip-hop identity were ridiculed and deemed uncool by their peers. None of this helps explain the popularity of hip-hop among white youth, who, according to sorne scholars,
account for the majority of rap music consumers today (Kelley, 2006; Kitwana,
2002; Pough, 2004).
Charles Aaron's article "What the White Boy Means When He Says Yo!"
( 1998), addresses sorne important points re garding white youths attraction to hip-
34 hop culture. Aaron (1998) describes hip-hop culture as a collection of symbols that youth draw from to articulate and express, among other things, their racial and ethnie identities. Aaron (1998) claims, as does Dimitriadis (2001), that the act of negotiating the terms of their identities in accordance with popular culture simply reflects youth's natural process of 'growing up' (p.220). Unlike Sullivan
(2003), however, whose discussion of hip-hop and identity construction focuses on black youth, Aaron (1998) discusses the proliference of white, suburban, youth hip-hop fans, and suggests that they are being restyled and reoriented by rap music and hip-hop culture, because of its enormous presence in the media. Across
North America today, youth of every colour and creed are increasingly replicating the fashion, musical tastes, and in sorne cases, the vernacular English of what used to be considered the exclusive domain of black, hip-hop influenced youth.
Aaron ( 1998) also suggests that one of the main reasons white kids are flocking towards hip-hop culture to define their identities is because it displays, as he claims, "a multitude of fresh personas and sounds, a multitude that does not exist in rock" (p.213). Aaron's perspective can be built upon by the research of Bakari
Kitwana (2002,2005) and Robert D.G. Kelley (1997), both of whom suggest that part of wh y white kids from the suburbs are drawn to hip-hop is because they have 'ghetto fantasies', instigated by the boredom they feel in their safe suburban lives.
Kitwana (2002) suggests that these ghetto fantasies are perhaps expressions of a real sense of disaffection and marginality that white youth feel as they attempt to construct identities that represent something other than their
35 "whiteness". In an interview with a white, suburban, hip-hop identified male,
Aaron (1998), reveals how this young man adopted a hip-hop identity as a means for distinguishing himself from the xenophobie, mostly-white, racist community he was raised in. For this young man, hip-hop provided an opportunity to distance himself from the racist intolerance of most of the white men in his community.
He also claimed that looking hip-hop in his small, rural America farming town prompted his white peers to reject what they felt was his black identity, while young black men in his community rejected his desire to be part of their peer group, simply because he was white (Aaron, 1998).
While many white youth continue to be attracted to hip-hop culture because they like the music and the style, others, like the one interviewed by
Aaron (1998), inculcate a hip-hop identity as a means for representing their opposition to white, hegemonie, racial stereotypes about black youth. As they reconfigure and perform new identities that are heavily shaped by the influence of hip-hop culture, today's white and non-white youth are demonstrating hip-hop's enormous reach as a symbol of culture, language, ideology and style.
By drawing on various aspects of hip-hop culture to construct and define their
identities, youth from various ethnie and linguistic backgrounds are giving new meaning to the old hip-hop adage of 'keepin' it real'.
Gangster Rap and Black Y ou th Identity
Gangster rap is distinct from other forms of rap music in that it is characterized by its constant references to violence, gangs, and crime, in addition
toits hyper-misogynistic portrayal of women. Because of its often morally
36 tenuous content (glorification of violence and harmful degradation of women in particular), gangster rap music and culture represents perhaps the most controversial elements of hip-hop culture. At its worst, gangster rap music personifies the most grossly exaggerated stereotypes of black, American, male identity today, such as the black man as hyper-sexualized, uneducated gang member and street thug. Rap artists such as 50 cent and G-Unit for exarnple, today's faces of commercial gangster rap, are portrayed in music videos, lauding diarnonds, fancy cars, and a plethora of scantily clad women, while simultaneously flaunting their guns.
Baldwin (1999) suggests that analyzing gangster rap and culture is complicated because on the one hand, the artists represent the possibilities for black people to obtain wealth and success, and on the other hand, rap portrays the black male as the object of both racialized desire and fear. Moreover, while black male identity as personified through gangster rap often portrays degrading and morally damaging racial stereotypes, perhaps worse is gangster rap's portrayal of women as hypersexualized submissive pawns groomed for male consumption
(Morgan, 2000; Perry, 2004). As gangster rap's popularity is continually on the rise, what is being discussed by youth researchers is how listening to gangster rap and interpreting its messages as reality affects youth listeners. For example, gangster rap influences youth's perceptions of, in particular, racial identity, and gender roles for both sexes (Pough, 2004 ).
While scholarly articles that discuss gangster rap music and black youth identity are not numerous, they do raise sorne interesting issues, such as the ways
37 in which the music is currently being interpreted as a code for reality by its youth listeners (Baldwin, 1999; Kubrin, 2005). Perhaps most detrimental of ali to its youth listeners, are the messages of crime and violence that are articulated through the lyrics which represent, according to Kubrin (2005),"the more subtle and discursive processes through which rap helps to organize and construct violent social identity and account for violent behavior" (p.360). In this article appropriately titled "Gangstas, Thugs, and Hustlas- Identity and the Code of the
Street in Rap Music", Kubrin (2005), discusses the bleak: conditions that affect many black urban youth in the United States today. He suggests that in response to deteriorating neighbourhood infrastructure and adequate financial resources for social programming, many black youth in America' s urban ghettos are creating their own sets of codes and rules of governance, as imbibed through their interpretation of gangster rap music. Though gangster rap is certainly not the only form of cultural production that is influencing black youth perceptions of race and gender normativity, it is certainly one of the most visible and vocal forms of black popular culture today (Kelley, 2006; Bynoe, 2004).
In his theoretical discussion of gangster rap music and culture, Kubrin's research reveals how sorne young black males dictate and follow a prescribed set of street codes which incorporate themes of violence, materialism, and retribution, all of which he suggests are drawn direct! y drawn from and influenced by gangster rap (2005). Kubrin (2005) signais the importance of conducting further research in gangster rap culture and youth identities, suggesting lyrical analysis of
38 gangster rap music as means for disceming the effects it can have on its youth
listeners (2005).
Concluding Thoughts
As Dimitriadis (2004) suggests, for the current and next generation "hip
hop music and culture has emerged as the defining cultural statement" (p.291 ).
Hip-hop culture therefore provides youth researchers with a vibrant platform for
conducting research on youth identities and youth leaming. Further, analyzing
the current research on hip-hop culture and youth identities reveals sorne
interesting th ernes and implications for further research. For example, Bennett' s
discussion of Turkish expatriate youth in Germany reveals how they use rap
music to resist and defy racial stereotyping from their German peers, while Clay' s
study highlights black youth's use of rap music as a tool for articulating social justice issues (2006). In both examples, the use of rap music as a tool for self
expression and as a language of resistance and negotiation is highlighted. Further
research can examine the ways in which youth around the globe are using rap
music as a tool for political and social action, and how their local govemments are
responding. Further research on the uses of rap music as a tool for social activism
can examine the following: What happens when youth mobilize under the banner
of hip-hop? What messages (if any), get interpreted through mainstream media
outlets? What are youth saying in their lyrics? Is rap music a useful tool for
affecting change?
Kubrin's research highlights the ways in which black youth interpret
reality through a gangster rap lens (2005), where as Aaron (1998), discusses white
39 youth's attraction to hip-hop culture as a means for reconfiguring their (white) identities. Further, Aaron ( 1998) demonstrates how, through the lens of hip-hop, white youth reconfigure their identities to distinguish themselves from hegemonie stereotypes associated with white suburban dwellers (1998). Kubrin's article highlights the ways in which codes for reality and authenticity are interpreted through a gangster rap lens, which is then reconfigured as part of a larger hip-hop identity for mostly black youth (2005). In both cases, the authors demonstrate how youth reconfigure their racial identities through a hip-hop culture lens.
There are sorne further questions that this research could address: Besides messages about violence and street crime, what other messages are youth interpreting and reiterating from gangster rap culture? How does gangster rap culture inform youth's perceptions of gender roles? When white youth assume a hip-hop identity to distance themselves from the racism of their ancestors, how are they interpreted by their non-white, hip-hop identified peers?
This chapter highlights current approaches to research on hip-hop and youth identities, which inspired the design of my entire study. Through a narrative inquiry methodological framework, this study examines the ways in which the urban, youth participants' construct the ir identities un der the influence of hip-hop culture.
40 Chapter 5: Mapping out a Methodology- Narrative lnquiry
When endeavoring to interpret the nuanced behaviors of hu man beings by observing them in their natural setting, traditional approaches to qualitative research typically suggest that the researcher assume an objective and detached stance from the subjects (Denzin and Lincoln, 1994). The narrative inquiry method reflects a distinct departure from more positivistic approaches to qualitative research by employing a decidedly humanistic approach to conducting research with human subjects in which the researcher' s insights and persona! narratives are equally embedded into the fabric of the research. For example, while qualitative methods such as ethnography or case studies establish clear binaries between researcher and subject, a narrative inquiry methodology suggests that the researcher personally engage and even "fall in love" with the participants
(Clandenin and Connelly, 2000). While developing a persona! relationship with the participants, the researcher implicates herself as both participant and observer.
A relationship therefore ensues whereby a "life history methodology" is co constructed by both parties (Andrews in Clandenin, 2007, p.493). Moreover, a narrative inquiry methodological approach to research begins in the participants' experience as lived and told stories (Pinnegar and Daynes in Clandenin, 2007).
Perhaps a key element in distinguishing a narrative inquiry method from more traditional approaches to qualitative research is that the former does not aim to answer one specifie question or test a hypothesis. Moreover, the method does not suggest that researchers pit one set of data against another in an attempt to construct generalizable daims.
41 In fact, what encapsulates the essence of the narrative inquiry method is a move away from generalizable daims, with a focus on storytelling and everyday occurrences as relevant data. Additionally, the positionality of the researcher is an integral element to the narrative inquiry method, and admitted biases, misjudgment, and even insecurities and miscalculations on the researcher's behalf can be woven into her narrative as part of the data.
While a narrative inquiry approach does not rely on the use of an extensive theoretical framework, it does drawn considerable influence from John
Dewey's 'theory of experience', in particular, his ideas regarding situation, continuity, and interaction in human relations (Clandenin and Connelly, 2000).
Drawing on Dewey's theory, a narrative inquiry approach attempts to locate the inquiry within a 'three dimensional space' which includes reflections and interpretations of, according to Clandenin and Connelly (2000), "the persona! and the social (interaction), past, present and future (continuity); combined with the notion of place" (p.50). Therefore, while the researcher amasses data for the study, she is constantly navigating between these three dimensions while remaining in the present moment with the participants. As participants are encouraged to convey their insights and experiences in this non-linear paradigm, the researcher also embarks on a self-reflexive process, drawing on past and present experiences, which have predicated her research interests. The research process is therefore characterized bath by the participants' and researchers' navigation and examination of past, present, and future versions of themselves and their stories (Clandenin and Connelly, 2000).
42 Gathering Stories-Gathering Data
The narrative inquiry method encourages the development of a reciprocal relationship between the researcher and the participants and, further, recommends that both parties aim to ultimately understand, rather than attempt to control and predict human behaviors (Pinnegar and Daynes in Clandenin, 2007). Further, by engaging with the researcher in this constructivist approach to research design, the participants are encouraged to help make decisions about how the research is performed, and are afforded opportunities to shift the focus of the conversations at
any point (Hollingsworth and Dybdahl in Clandenin, 2007).
The narrative inquiry method more traditionally uses storytelling as a
means for exposing participant narratives. However, the data can be generated
and gathered in a number of ways, including letters, journal en tries,
conversations, photographs and research interviews. Further, integral to the
narrative inquiry method is that the researcher herself emerges in the data as a
lived story (Clandenin and Connelly, 2000, p.63). The participants also enter the
field as lived stories, as their lives do not begin when the researcher arrives, nor
do they end when the researcher leaves (Clandenin and Connelly, 2000).
When a researcher begins the work of collecting data, from any number
of the methods previously mentioned, it is the participants' who decide where the
'story' begins. The researcher must therefore be flexible and open to the changes
that emerge in the participants lives throughout the duration of the research
process, and if necessary, re-negotiate and shift relationship dynamics. Once the
43 data is collected, the central goal of the narrative researcher is to somehow, according to Clandenin and Connelly (2000) "make sense of life lived" (p.79).
Analyzing the Data
Given the opportunities for gathering an abundance of rich and diverse data from a narrative inquiry study, analyzing the accumulated data can often be as layered and nuanced as the research process itself. In order to organize and codify the various forms of data, narrative researchers must read and re-read field texts severa! times in order to initially sort them. Clandenin and Connelly (2002) suggest organizing the data according to various themes, categories, and specifie topics. Once the datais organized in such a way, the researcher again re-reads the field texts in order to construct a chronicled account of the various emergent themes highlighting the characters, plots, and various tensions articulated in the participant accounts. Important to note, however, is that the organizing of field texts is not meant to be a reflective activity. lt is important that the coding and organization of the data be descriptive and succinct, so asto depict particular themes and narratives clearly and precisely.
As texts are subsequently re-read for thematic content, various similarities, differences and daims can be noted based on patterns observed. In addition, the repetitive mentioning of specifie elements such as a particular emotion, location, or feeling is noted and later interpreted when the datais analyzed. The ultimate challenge for the narrative researcher, is realizing that each timea text is read, it assumes a life of its own, and as such, the analysis process can be quite lengthy.
Moreover, while traditional approaches to qualitative research aim to make
44 conclusions based on generalizable daims interpreted from the data, narrative
inquirers attempt to capture the candidness of human experience by highlighting individual interpretations as expressed through intimate and persona! narratives.
Keepin' it Real - The Setting
Having worked closely with youth for severa! years prior to my thesis research, 1 have first-hand experience in observing the various ways in which they
express themselves through their subcultural affiliations. For example, while
teaching yoga at a local arts-based alternative high schoollocated in the Plateau
district of Montreal a few years ago, one of my favorite activities was walking
through the halls during the lunch hour to observe the various fashions boldly put
on display by the students. While strolling down the single, 25-metre hallway, 1
saw everything from silk bustiers to ripped jeans and bare feet, long hippie
dresses, and multi-coloured Mohawks. The students expressed themselves
through their clothing, which for many, represented the subculture they were
affiliated with and the music they listened to. In addition, while sorne of the
mostly Caucasian students looked hip-hop, the majority were not.
Hip-hop's current popularity with today's youth is especially prevalent at
inner city schools with distinctly non-white demographies, and in particular, it
tends to attract a high percentage of black male youths. This demographie echoes
currents of hip-hop's past. As we saw in the hip-hop historiography chapter, at its
inception, hip-hop was a grass roots cultural movement that emerged from groups
of poor, marginalized youth wishing to overcome the destitution of poverty and
crime by being part of a culture that honoured their socio-economic and racial
45 identities. That large portions of current hip-hop aficionados come from similar backgrounds to the peers of three decades ago, is no small coïncidence.
Clandenin (2007) suggests that in its essence, the narrative inquiry method involves "the reconstruction of a person's experience in relationship to a
[ ... ] social milieu" (p.5). Therefore when deciding on the location for this study, 1 chose a local high schoollocated in an inner city neighbourhood in Montreal, endeavoring to capture participants' reactions and responses to their peers in a setting that would enable them to be comfortable
A couple of months before 1 began my study, 1 went to the high school where 1 would do my study to speak with the principal regarding my research interests. 1 arrived at the beginning of the lunch hour when students were spilling out of the front door, jamming cigarettes into their mouths and earphones into their ears. Most of them had the tell tale signs of the hip-hop nation, with their wide legged pants, huge t-shirts, and 'too cool for school' attitudes. As 1 made my way up the flight of stairs to the single floor of the school, 1 could hear sorne rap music in the distance emanating from the student lounge. It tumed out that sorne of the students were rehearsing for a local talent competition, taking place that week (which unfortunately 1 could not attend).
Once the principal agreed tolet me conduct my study, 1 asked her to select a handful of hip-hop identified youth who she felt would be good candidates. While acknowledging the problems in having the principal find participants, and the potential selection biases used, given my time constraints and the fact that 1 did not know the majority of the student body, soliciting her
46 help seemed the most rational way to recruit participants. The criteria 1 had expressed for the participants' were that they be currently involved in the production of one or more of the four elements of hip-hop culture (graffiti, breakdancing, rapping, or DJ-ing). 1 did not stipulate a gender preference, yet the group ended up entirely composed of male students.
Hollingsworth and Dybdahl (in Clandenin, 2007) suggest that when conducting research, the relationship between researcher and participants, in addition to the researcher's knowledge of the participants work and family lives, greatly influences the design and execution of the study. Having previously worked at the school where 1 conducted my study, 1 knew that a majority of the students at that particular school were from difficult socio-economic circumstances. When sharing my research goals and interests with the participants, 1 gave them the option of withdrawing from the study at any time, and encouraged them to bring any music, writing, or visual that they felt was relevant to the discussions. Further, while the initial group was composed of four participants, during subsequent conversations, two others asked to join the group, and the group remained a total of six participants for ali three conversations.
Procedures
There were three discussions in total, lasting approximately 45 minutes each. Given the sometimes-tenuous nature of working with youth and imagining the shy and tentative responses of the participants, 1 organized the discussions around specifie themes, with questions pertaining to each theme used as a launching point for the meetings (see Appendix 1). While this preemptive
47 approach is somewhat unorthodox in a narrative inquiry study, 1 wanted to avoid long patches of silence and dead airtime in the data. The conversations occurred during the participants' lunch hours while at school and were audio recorded.
After each meeting, 1 transcribed the conversations verbatim, and returned to the group with subsequent questions regarding specifie things they had said.
Part of the impetus for returning to the participants' previous comments was to engage them in a dual process of narrative and inquiry, encouraging them to be both critical and self-reflexive of their contributions. In addition, the narrative inquiry method encourages the collaborative building of a relationship between the researcher and the participants (Hollingsworth and Dybdahl in
Clandenin, 2007). While 1 was initially apprehensive about sharing my own experiences with the participants, 1 think that expressing my persona! insights facilitated a comfortable and genuine atmosphere of mutual sharing on everyone's part. Moreover, because it emphasizes the importance of including the participants' ideas regarding the data gathering process, a narrative inquiry methodological framework almost guarantees transcriptions replete with rich reflections and insights. For example, through our discussions 1 was afforded opportunities to witness the participants' struggle in coming to terms with certain challenging aspects of their lives as they see them articulated in hip-hop culture, for example racialized poverty and broken families.
The narrative inquiry method was particularly effective for this study because it afforded a level of intimacy with the participants that traditional approaches to qualitative research do not normally allow. Moreover, Andrews (in
48 Clandenin, 2007) suggests that researchers' can be deeply affected by their participants' disclosure, and this was certainly true in my case. As 1 discuss in the results chapter, it was challenging for me to listen to the participants' portrayals of their neighborhoods as crime and gang addled, because 1 don't live or experience the world in that way. 1 aired my skepticism with the participants' and they were not averse to my persistent questioning and need for clarification at times.
What emerged while transcribing the discussions was the necessity of addressing my own biases and gaps in knowledge, and perhaps the importance of trusting that the participants' narratives were in significant ways genuine reflections of their lives, or failing that, that what they shared were important elements in the construction and performance of their individual hip-hop identities. Further, while certain parts of their stories seemed to contain clear embellishments (for instance, at sorne points they were laughing at one another's contributions), important to note is that any embellishments they may have employed were integral to their understanding and portrayal of their hip-hop identities.
Perhaps one of the most important insights 1 garnered while assuming a
narrative inquiry positionality was that the authenticity of the participants'
contributions were not contingent upon how real the accounts of their
neighborhoods were, for example. By employing a narrative inquiry approach to
conducting research and therefore enabling the process to be guided chiefly by the
participants' interests, 1 assumed that what they chose to share as being
representative of their hip-hop identities was of greater importance for the study
49 than ascertaining the objective truth or authenticity of their representations. It should be borne in mind that the narrative inquiry method can perhaps be criticized for its lack of objectivity. For instance, where the validity of quantitative and traditional approaches to qualitative research is contingent upon the objective stance of the researcher, the narrative inquiry method's efficacy is explicitly contingent upon the relationship built between the researcher and the subject. Therefore, the narrative inquiry method's strength is in its ability to bring the reader into the intimate realms of experience as lived and expressed candidly by the participants and the researcher.
50 Chapter 6:Hip-Hop is Who We Are- A Collection ofReflections and Observations
1 live down the street from a large high school with approximately four hundred students from ages 13-17, and almost every moming 1 observe them walking towards the school courtyard, laughing and taunting each other. Although draped in ill-fitting polyester school uniforms, many of the students have the telltale signs of the hip-hop generation: fashionable running shoes, slick-backed haïr with large hoop earrings for the girls, and stylish, sideways facing baseball caps for the boys. As they shuffle past me in large groups, cracking their gum and laughing, nearly all of the students sport a conspicuous and skinny white wire connecting earphone inserts the size of small cashews to a portable music- listening deviee in their pockets. From these impossibly small deviees echoes sorne thundering baselines, accompanied by the boom-bap percussion typical of rap music. As these youth come of age during their high school years, like most youth around the globe, they gravitate towards subcultures such as hip-hop as an expression of personal tas te, and as a means for projecting a recognizable identity into the world.
Growing up Brown-ish, Kosher-ish, and becoming Hip-Hop-ish
My mini-love affair with hip-hip culture has not been entirely random, and did not emerge exclusive! y because of my affection for the music that seduced me while living in Japan in my mid-twenties. Hip-hop represents a place where 1 finally feel at home in my light-brown-caucasion-by-birth skin. 1 come from a
Jewish family with Polish ancestors on both my mother and father's sides. And yet despite my eastern European heritage (or perhaps because of it) 1 have skin
51 that tums a deep shape of cocoa in the summer, combined with a head of unruly
locks that unless hamessed with hair product, becomes a wild afro.
Growing up in an almost entirely Caucasian neighbourhood in Montreal
with other white Jewish kids, 1 always stuck out like a sore thumb amongst my
peers of straight hair and mostly blue eyes. When 1 began attending hip-hop
shows in Montreal severa! years ago, the combination of in-your-face music and
the mixed ethnie and mostly black demographies appealed tome, because finally,
1 was no longer distinguishable as the girl with the huge hair, and the dark-ish
skin. While attending local hip-hop shows, 1 felt more at ease with people of
mixed race and full-blooded Haitian, West-Indian, and African heritage than 1
ever did at any Jewish functions while growing up. No longer considered exotic in
hip-hip circles, it was not simply visually fitting in to hip-hop spaces that
provided a source of comfort for me. The music provided a refreshing change
from the hippie rhapsodizing 1 had become so familiar with in my youth. What 1
appreciated initially about rap artists, and especially female vocalists like Queen
Latifah and Missy Elliot, is that that their lyrics and personas were powerful and
in your face. 1 found in female rap artists a strength and edginess missing from the
folk-rock set 1 had once been so enamored with.
1 shared stories of my persona! hip-hop trajectory with the youth
participants in my study as an icebreaker during our first discussion group. By
personalizing the discussion and making myself vulnerable to their critiques, 1
was confident that they would be willing to share their persona! insights. From my
descriptions of the experience of watching Somalian rap artist K'naan perform in
(~
52 a torrential downpour last summer and the thrill 1 felt while dancing on stage with
Arrested Development and Grandmaster Flash a few years ago in Montreal, the
students came to know me through my vividly illustrated hip-hop associations.
Sharing my persona! experiences of hip-hop prompted the participants' to discuss their own experiences in a similarly candid fashion.
The Players
While each participant cornes from a different part of the city, what they share in common is a deep connection to hip-hop culture, and in particular, rap music. 1 have assigned them pseudonyms to protect their anonymity. John is 16 years old
and lives in Little Burgundy with his family in a small apartment. His parents are from Sri Lanka, while he was born and raised in Montreal. Like most of the group
members, he listens to gangster rap artists such as Tupac and Papoose, but also likes artists such as Snoop Dog and Dr. Dre. He was one of the quieter members
of the group, yet spoke considerably about his use of rap music as a vehicle for
self-expression.
Mark is a mixed race (half African-American, half Canadian) 15 year old
from NDG, who describes his neighbourhood as the 'ghetto', and refers toit
simply as DG. He lives with his mother in an apartment in what he describes as the poor part of the neighbourhood. He also listens to a fair bit of gangster rap
music, but did not specify whom.
Brian is 17 years old, of African American descent, and lives on the lower
plateau (he did not mention if he lives with one or both parents). As one of the
older members of the group, he had a mature and somewhat reserved disposition.
53 His musical interests ranged from gangster rap to conscious rap (rap music which has poli ti cal and social justice themes ), and a little bit of rock music. He expressed a desire to be a rap music producer, and wants to study business at
CEGEP to help facilitate that dream.
Alexis 15 years old and cornes from half-Haitian and half African
American descent. Unlike the rest of the participants who are native Montrealers,
Alex grew up in the southeastem United States, and only recently retumed to
Montreal to complete high school. He now lives in Montreal North with his brother, who is his legal guardian. Alex has a strong affiliation with gangster rap music, and he feels that it portrays the reality of his childhood neighbourhoods.
He listens to gangster rap artists such as Papoose and Three 6 Mafia.
Stuart is 15 years old and is the only Caucasian member of the group, with family roots in Ireland. Like Mark, Stuart is from NDG, and strongly identifies with what he feels is the poor working class Irish population in Montreal. He listens to gangster rap artists such as Three 6 Mafia and Biggie Smalls.
Michael is 17 years old and is a graffiti artist. He is half-Caribbean, half
Salvadorian, and lives in Snowdon. Unlike the other participants', though Michael looks hip-hop, he also listens to rock, pop, and punk music in addition to rap.
During a discussion between the two of us which occurred during the last interview, he openly mocked sorne of the other participants for claiming that they were from the ghetto; he asserted that there are no ghettos in Montreal.
54 The Meeting
Having worked with youth in various capacities as a teacher in both Japan and Canada over the past several years, 1 know firsthand that the best way to understand the lives of youths is to speak to them directly. It is for this reason that
1 decided to speak specifically with hip-hop identified youth, wishing to understand, via their personal stories, the ways in which hip-hop culture influences their lives. Given the time and space constraints, in addition to the relatively small scope of a Master's thesis, group discussions seemed the most logical and practical format for soliciting personal narratives from the participants' in a timely fashion.
The participants' initial skepticism towards me was palpable during our first meeting when 1 introduced my research interests. There were even sorne jokes made regarding the disdain with which most adults, including their teachers, regard hip-hop culture. This skepticism eventually subsided when the participants understood that my study was motivated by my personal interests in hip-hop, combined with a desire to contribute to a growing body of research that seeks to understand the reasons for hip-hop's popularity among today's youth. Using my interview protocol (see Appendix A) as a loose structure for the discussions, 1 prompted the participants with sorne open questions, and then let the conversations take their natural course. They were initially shy and somewhat inhibited, and the ir contributions remained brief but poignant throughout. Over the course of our three discussions spread out over a period of 4 months, what
55 emerged overwhelmingly was how the participants employ hip-hop as a lens and filter through which they interpret and live in the world.
Seeing the world through this lens of hip-hop means that ali incoming images, and outgoing messages including speech, clothing, and opinions originating from the individual, are shaped and constructed according to a (broad) hip-hop ontology. Such an ontology reveals that the participants' gendered, ethnie, and linguistic identities are shaped by the images and lyrics gleaned from the hip-hop culture that they consume on a daily basis. Referring to this hip-hop lens more specifically as an ontology suggests that in sorne cases, hip-hop replaces the role that, in more traditional cultures, religion naturally assumes. Of the many themes that emerged from the discussions, rap music as a vehicle for self-expression, neighborhood, and identity were the most prominent.
In order to preserve the candidness of the participants contributions, 1 have used verbatim quotes to illustrate their various opinions and stories. These quotes serve as a basis for analyzing and discussing the ways in which involvement in hip-hop culture shapes the construction of their identities.
Holla If Y a Hear Me!- Rap Music as a Vehicle for Self-Expression
"Me 1 come on a more metaphorical tip. Like I'll come on with a rhyme, and 1 try to make it as truthful as possible, and then it all cames together[ .... ]And so 1 come home at the end of the day, write some lyrics, but 1 can 't go home, and write about school stuff [ ... ]So 1 write itfor myself and then 1 look over it afterwards. Then 1 kind offix it up, and perfect it. 1 used to write about four or five rhymes a day"- John, 16 years old
"With my lyrics, the re's words to it, the re's feelings, it 's poetry, ya. But 1 mean, okay say 20 years aga, 30 years a go we asked for things that maybe you know, whites didn 't want, whatever. And then you keep as king, and keep asking, sometimes yo, asking is not gonna do, you have to tell them.
56 Y ou have to tell em' what's straight ... lt's you. The best thing you can dois get to pen and paper. Y ou can be fe elin' anything, angry at one time, and just write, write write ... " -Alex, 15 years old
"Rap is pretty muchjust expressing yourself. That's what isis, expressing yourselfthrough poetry [. .. ] It's you, expressing yourself on paper, it's poetry" -Mark, 15 years old
"Rap music is poetry, it's music of the mind, that 's what it is" -Brian, 17 years old
"Tome the warin Iraq is like a malicious attack Where old guns shoot women in the back Make the oldfolks have a heart attack A relapse in time Way before Diddy ever wrote his first rhyme Way before the white man introduced the nine When the best things to drink was whisky and wine J'm ta/kin' bout world war one When everyone either had a gun or had to run The world has changed and you should tao You're acting like the man who hated on the Jews lnfiltrate the soi! cuz they got a lot of ail That's pathetic man you ain't dawn with it'' -Mark, 15 years old
Writing their own rap lyrics provides an outlet for self-reflexive writing which at its core is a therapeutic outlet for the participants. In addition, while honing their storytelling skills through the writing and performance of these crafted rhymes, the participants develop the confidence to articulate their thoughts and feelings in a way that their classroom writing assignments do not provide an outlet for. For example, in selected quotes above, Alex describes how he conveys his feelings through writing rap lyrics and daims, "you can be feelin' anything, angry at one time, and just write, write, write". Therefore, for Alex, rap is a place that he goes to in order to make sense of the world and his reaction to it. In the sample of Mark's lyrics above, a critique and commentary about the warin Iraq is
57 conveyed through a smart and catchy rap song that, according to him, was written out of anger and frustration at not being able to do anything about what he felt was an unjust war. Therefore, not only does rap music enable Mark to practice his writing skills, but it provides him with a much needed forum and repository for expression and creativity.
Interesting to note is that ali of these boys have expressed dissent towards, and difficulty with the govemment stipulated curriculum, and yet they were extremely alert and focused while speaking with me about rap music and hip-hop culture. When presented with opportunities to draw from their own "cultural capital" (Bourdieu, 1990), the participants' were enthusiastic, articulate and opinionated. In one of the above quotes, John describes his lack of enthusiasm regarding schoolwork, "1 can't go home and write about school stuff'. However, when discussing the creation of his own rap lyrics, John displays both excitement and initiative about writing as a craft. John even claims that he used to write severa! rap songs per day, using metaphors to convey his reflections.
In creating his own rap music, John uses the genre as botha means for expressing himself, and as a tool for practicing his writing. Moreover, in creating their own rap lyrics, the participants develop their writing skills while using rhyme, idiom, and metaphor. Both Alex and Stuart discuss their use of rap music as a means for discussing every day life:
"When I write rap I am thinkin' about flow. Flow is basically being able to portray what you 're trying to say, so that people can understand you, so like, you look at pop culture, you re alize that most of the rap, people are making references to everyday life ... Like look at Papoosei, he's like, speaking metaphorically, and if you can do that, you can say things in a way that others will understand, like that 's flow" - Stuart, 15 years old
58 "Rappers, we think differently, we're not going togo and do something stupid. We 're g on na put it. If y ou don 't like the way we talk, we have freedom of speech ... When people actually go to a school and shoot be cause they are angry, I mean, that has no purpose, at least we have a purpose" -Alex, 15 years old
While discussing rap music, Alex suggests that it can be used as a vehicle for freedom of speech and his lyrics speak of defending his territory, presumably his neighborhood, while uttering threats of violence. As Alex's everyday reality involves encountering violence, his rap lyrics provide a space for him to both express and reflect his responses toit. Stuart's quote reflects his approach to crafting rap lyrics, using the concept of 'flow' to convey his insights. Stuart draws inspiration from artists such as Papoose who employs the use of metaphor in his lyrics as a means for reflecting on everyday life, while channeling his messages into a format that his listeners will easil y digest. Stuart' s interpretation of rap music reflects keen insights regarding rap's potential as a means for communication, as weil as dissemination of insights.
Neighbourhood and Identity
"People from outside NDG they like "yo how can you call DG the hoodl" You got a place where they got nice rich houses, l'm like yah, that's what everybody wants you to see. Go up a little further into DG, see the apartment buildings, see the crackheads in the park, see the people walking around jonesing for drugs, see people doing that" - Mark 15 years old
In many urban hip-hop communities, one of the factors that determines an individual's authentic 'hip-hop identity' is the reputation oftheir neighborhood.
When the participants discussed their neighborhoods, Alex explained that amongst his circle of friends, it is believed that the tougher your area, the more
59 respect you deserve for having survived it. He spoke about his childhood growing up in the southeastem United States, living in an urban tenement housing project where drive-by shootings were a regular occurrence.
When the boys began talking about their Montreal neighborhoods in colorful detail, however, areas that as a native Montrealer 1 am familiar with, 1 felt as though they were depicting a city that 1 had never visited, let alone lived in for most of my life. Like most Montrealers, 1 am aware that there are street gangs, and gang-related shootings here, but 1 always assumed that gang presence was relatively minoras compared to sorne cities across the border, where civilian gun ownership is much more common. Therefore, the constant references to drive-by shootings and gang-fights portrayed Montreal in an unfamiliar light.
The most recent Statistics Canada report daims that in 2005, overall crime rates in Canada decreased by 5 percent, while youth crime rates dropped by 6 percent. In fact Quebec was reported as only second to Ontario in having the second lowest overall crime rate in Canada in that same year (Gannon,2005).
While Montreal and other Canadian cities remain somewhat safer overall than their American counterparts, the participants' described their neighbourhoods in such a way that evoked images of inner city New York, and Detroit. While sorne of the participants' discussed the challenges of living in crime riddled and poverty-affected areas, 1 interpreted their persona! identification with hip-hop culture, in part, as a means for embracing their socio-economic statuses, without hanging their heads in shame. Being a young, visible minority who looks hip-hop can perhaps mean unfair profiling for youth in Montreal. For example, on severa!
60 occasions when transiting through Vendome and Villa Maria Metro stations, both
located in Montreal's NDG borough, 1 have seen dozens of black and mixed race
youth in hip-hop clothing, with equal numbers of police patrolling their every
move. Similarly, while watching French rapper Luce performed his conscious
political rap at the Francofolies festival in Montreal this past summer, 1 noticed a conspicuous abundance of police presence around the stage, while they were
virtually absent from the other venues 1 visited. The crowd at the hip-hop stage
was significantly younger looking than the average festivalgoer, but like the
thousands of other people at the festival, was there to enjoy the free outdoor
music. In both instances, 1 have wondered about the pre-emptive presence of so
much police. What is it about hip-hop identified youth that signais danger for local authorities? Do the participants internalize sorne of society's assumptions
about minority youth in hip-hop clothing? As the participants internalize the
violence witnessed in their neighbourhoods and incorporate these perceptions into
their overall hip-hop identities, are their self-perceptions in part informed by the
way th at they are treated by adults and authority figures?
ldentity and Gangster Rap
"The fact that he came out of the gutter, that he came out of Baltimore, and as you guys know, Baltimore is one of the highest crime rate, and he managed to live and go on with his life, making an impact on hip-hop "-Alex, 15 years old, ta/king about famed gangster rap artist Tupac Shakur (now deceased)
Alex' s commentaries more than the others, con vey a familiarity with living in the ghetto, much like his idols in the gangster rap world. Alex reveres the life of Tupac, for example, because he feels that he understands firsthand the
61 challenges of growing up in poverty and crime. Moreover, Alex regards Tupac as
a role model because as Tupac transcended poverty and crime to become a rich
and famous rap artist, he believes he can perhaps do the same.
Like Tupac, Alex employs violent metaphors in his lyrics:
Any niggers try to interfere me, your bodies will be goin' flyin' Don 't tell me your pain cause l'li just tell you the facts Don 't get involved in a situation, ready for retaliation Thought 1 won 't mention this, l'rn trill in this l'rn Jake/fa te Dressin' up an imitatin' l'll tell you what it take Don 't germate, never Jake, if y ou violate, mo-fucker you 'll be another victim in the nearest lake 1 don 't think they see me coming the venomous slick snake, that boy anonymous splittin' niggers like earthquake
My every move calculated to money making 1 got these niggers shakin' Cuz they runnin ', duckin , and never lookin' back at the nigs -Lyrics by Alex, 15 years old
Similar sentiments were reflected in Stuart's raps:
Y our rhymes are repetitious, l'rn kickin' it fresh Spit the wrong words and l'rn rippin' your flesh Fuck all the haters cuz 1 just detest, The pigs who walk around with a badge on their vest Appreciate your street, communications will heat Complications demonstratin' trauma from the beef- Lyrics by Stuart, 15 years old
Like Alex, Stuart's comments reflect a disdain for people who misuse
their words, to the extent of suggesting violent retribution "spit the wrong words
and l'rn rippin' your flesh". What I gleaned from talking with Alex and Stuart, is
that their lyrics reflect the extent to which their hip-hop identity functions as a
form of persona! armor. While articulating their opinions through their lyrics,
Alex and Stuart draw on their hip-hop associations as a source of power and
.~· pride .
62 "Every time that the re' s a, let' s say the re' s a rapper of sorne sort, and then they say that they came straight out ofthe gutter... well basically what they are trying to get it like, freedom of speech you know, they 're trying to make a point and tell you what's going on in the world. Like through poverty there is so much that can happen ... that's just the way it is and that is the way rapper's portray it nowadays is how it is" - Brian, 18 years old
"Watch your back you know?[. ... ]I mean the music is not telling you to got out and kill somebody, it's just saying, look out for yourself, the world is full of diseases, people are just crazy in the head, you never know you never know, you gotta watch" -Alex, 15 years old
As Alex formulates his opinions and critiques of gangster music and
culture, he is careful not to interpret the violence portrayed in gangster rap as a justification for violence in the real world. By listening to rap lyrics while
thoughtfully reflecting on their meaning and purpose, Alex's interpretation of rap
music reflects his thoughtful interpretation of the power of the genre.
1 was initially skeptical about interpreting Alex and Stuart's descriptions
of violence in their neighborhoods as reality. 1 perhaps wrongfully assumed that
under the influence of gangster rap music in particular, the boys had constructed
'unrealities' that were shaped by the images and messages gleaned from rap
music and iconography. Perhaps this bias reflects how little 1 know and
understand about the reality of growing up in the 'ghetto' as a young black male.
After much deliberation, 1 have come to the conclusion that the
participant's descriptions of their neighborhoods likely reflect equal measures of
reality, and the influence of gangster rap culture in their lives. Growing up young,
poor and black in Montreal is difficult for these young men, and while in hip-hop
they may find a place to validate and affirm their marginalized statuses, gangster
63 rap culture does not necessarily provide the best platform for constructing reality either, as it seems to glorify their understanding of violence.
During our discussions regarding the authenticity of gangster rap music,
Alex said that he believes the artists are indeed reflecting their realities, and wonders, "How can you talk about something that's not real, something that didn't happen to you?" Alex interprets gangster rap as reality because it speaks to him on a personallevel. Further, he speaks with a clarity and confidence markedly different from the others, perhaps a street sense borne from having grown up in difficult circumstances. He does not flaunt the dangers of his
Montreal North neighbourhood, and nor does he does appear to be living in a fantasy world based on gangster rap stereotypes. Alex's contributions reflect his interpretation of gangster rap music as reality:
This is DG, the se ain 't no regular streets, brothers le ave y ou de ad for the way that you speak This ain 'ta jake, sa don 't provoke, the brothers who will choke you by the throat Y ou brokeback snitch, you should walk with a clip Cuz at any given moment nigger you could get hit While you drivin' your four door, you should be strapped with a 4-4 Kickin' in the front door Niggers you want more? Nah you don 't, just hope 1 won 't miss -Mark, 15 years old
Mark spoke at length about his native NDG (or DG as he and other refers to it), to the extent that 1 had to eut him off at points because he was not leaving room for the other participants to speak. While describing the daily shootings that occur in his neighborhood, he admitted that his mother does not let him go out at night, and that his rap lyrics portray what he imagines to be happening in his neighborhood, according to the stories he hears. While Mark's lyrics reflect his
64 perceptions of his neighbourhood, they also act as a means for parlaying to his
audience the dangers of 'DG'. And while it may be that Mark is interpreting sorne
of his peers' second and third-hand accounts through his lyrics in an embellished
way, a significant part of his hip-hop identity is connected to the understanding
and interpretation of his neighborhood as the 'hood'. Like Alex and Stuart, Mark
wears his hip-hop identity as a badge of pride, and through this identity cornes to
terms with poverty and other challenging issues that he faces.
The Inner City versus the Suburbs
In her 2005 novel, On Beauty, Zadie Smith depicts Levi, a half African-
American, half white-British teenager desperately trying to authenticate his hip-
hop identity to his Haitian friends by claiming, like them, to be from a poor part
of town. Much to the horror of his university professor father, Levi goes so far as
to feign the dialect of his inner city Haitian-Bostonians peers while trying to cover
up his suburban Massachusetts accent. Like many hip-hop affiliated suburban
youth, Levi assumes a 'street' persona to imagine his identity as different from
privileged surroundings (Aaron, 2004; Kelley, 1997; Smith, 2005).
When discussing their neighborhoods, the participants' spoke passionately
about the importance of being honest about who you are, and where you come
from, in your lyrics.
"Me personally, 1 don 't exactly spit things that I've done, but things that have happened in my area[ ... ]Like if someone gets shot[. ... ]Me 1 rap about my area, about what's around me, that's what 1 put in my lyrics. If 1 lived in the suburbs it'd be different"- Mark, 15 years old
I asked the participants' simply "what is real for you?", and here is a brief excerpt of that conversation) :----··
65 Alex: 1 'm not gonna say 1'm from anywhere else. 1 don 't expect y ou to say y ou' re from anywhere else except where y ou come from. 1 don 't expect to he ar from y our rap that you did this, or you 're doing that, and you know, id shit cornes down to defend, don 't say you 're drivin hard when you ain 't got no car!"
John: Y ah but if y ou lyrical talent ands y ou 're from the suburbs, (gets eut off)
Alex: But ifyou'refrom the suburbs, yo keep it in the suburbs, don't bring that shit to the streets.
I asked, "Do you associate the suburbs with rich people?"
Mark: There are black folk who made it rich, and they totally forgot about the hood. Look when a black guy makes it big and moves out to the suburbs and doesn 't want to look back at the hood. He was poor and he doesn 't want the streets to remind him of that. So he moves to the suburbs and then forgets about it.
John: We're not talking about the gutter, we're talking about, you know, Westmount, like you know, the rich. We can 't, you know, get rich off our parents. If we want to rap, we have topay for studio time. Of the se kids want to rap, they probably have studios in their houses.
During our last discussion, from where the above quotes were drawn, the participants' made many disdainful references to the ir peers in Westmount, an affluent and mostly anglophone Montreal neighborhood on the island, in addition to hip-hop youth from the suburbs. They assume a binary positionality to their peers from the suburbs and from rich urban enclaves, believing that economie privilege eradicates the possibilities for struggle of any sort. For example, both
John and Alex believe that rappers from Westmount should never speak about hardship because it is not a part of their lived reality, nor is living in, or coming from what they refer to as the 'ghetto'. The fact that the participants come from marginalized backgrounds and attend a school that caters to students with academie and behavioral problems in their eyes provides the fodder for articulating a more authentic hip-hop identity, because their lives are
66 characterized by the strife that cornes from living in the inner city. They believe .~·
that youth growing up in rich areas live idyllic and trouble-free lives.
This juxtaposition of perception between life in the suburbs and life in the
inner city raises sorne interesting points. The participants cannot relate to the
struggles that youth in the suburbs may face, because for them financial stability
is directly related to overall stability. Having worked with youth from various
socio-economic backgrounds, I know that while a stable financial status provides
a certain amount of security for sorne youth, it by no means prevents behavioral,
nor drug and alcohol, problems for example.
In addition, while inner city youth experience hardships that suburban
youth cannot comprehend, the reality is that adolescence is a challenging time for
most young people, as it represents a time when they are attempting to establish
their identities as distinct from their parents. Interesting to note however, is that
while the participants were quick to criticize their suburban peers, none of them
mentioned having friends from these areas. 1 therefore assumed that these
stereotypes were imbibed from their parents, peers, and perhaps certain media
outlets.
As previously mentioned, the participants believe that an authentic hip
hop identity is integrally linked to one's socio-economic status and how
dan gero us one' s neighbourhood is. This perception is in part influenced by the
messages interpreted from hip-hop culture, and more precisely, reflects their
immediate circumstances. With the exception of one participant, all of the young
67 men hail from low in come, single (or no) parent farnilies with absent fathers, where socio-econornic struggle was virtually a birthright.
During the conversations, the participants seerned to take pride in proclairning their struggling economie statuses. Poverty is not a trait that most people are proud of, as with it corne many detrirnental stereotypes and associations. Y et the participants do not hi de the fact that they corne from econornically challenged circurnstances because hip-hop does not tell them that they need to. Therefore, not only does hip-hop culture provide a platforrn for constructing one's understanding of and identity in the world, it also enables the participants to transcend the sharne they may feel in corning from irnpoverished backgrounds, and rather than hide their socio-econornic status, they wear it like a badge of pride. Moreover, while reflecting a sense of entitlernent and near possessiveness regarding their unspoken rnernbership in hip-hop culture, the participants see thernselves as suffering the sarne kind of hardships they hear their rap role rnodels ex pressing in their music. Like the South Bronx youth of the first wave of hip-hop in the 1970' s, the participants gravi tate towards the culture because it reflects, in part, who they are, and where they corne from. Moreover, by associating with youth from sirnilar socio-econornic backgrounds, the participants' identities are validated through a shared hip-hop ontology.
Rap and Role Models
"Come follow me. What's the definition of a real MC? ls it loo kin' hard on MTV, or freestylin' in the back street ailey?" - excerpted from Neutroniks, K-OS
68 Hip-hop's immense popularity, particularly amongst black youth in North
America, makes me wonder why these youth are not gravitating towards public figures other than rap artists as role models. Contemporary African-American
Scholars Yvonne Bynoe (2004) and bell books (2004) have argued that in the last
15 years black male youth in particular have had very few prominent black male public figures to look up to, the hip-hop world being the exception. This was corroborated by my participants, who expressed their respect for artists such as
Snoop Dogg and Puff Diddy for giving back to the poor neighborhoods they originated from, but didn't mention any other public figures such as athletes or political figures as points of reference.
Furthermore, ali of their teachers are white, and this was the case in the other schools 1 worked at, which had largely black and mixed race student demographies. Given the relative! y small numbers of black public figures (as compared to their white counterparts ), and the demise of black community centers and churches which were once at the nucleus of black family life (until the
1960's), is it any wonder that particularly black and mixed race youth are gravitating towards male hip-hop artists for inspiration and direction? (Bynoe,
2004).
Rappin' it Up
Hip-hop culture provides a reference point for the participants, whereby eues on how to act, speak, dress, and think, are interpreted, reconfigured, and performed as part of a hip-hop identity. Furthermore, friendships developed through a shared involvement in hip-hop culture also provide a social network in
69 which the participants identities are maintained and validated through shared peer associations. The participants collective memberships in the "hip-hop nation"
(Farley, 1999) suggest that they have entry into a world that as a youth researcher
I will never have complete access to. Therefore, as an outsider attempting to deconstruct codes of dress, linguistic expression, and socio-political ideologies, I felt somewhat intrusive in attempting to understand what is, for sorne, a private right of passage into young adulthood by means of subcultural and peer affiliations. A place where adults, let alone graduate students, researchers, do not necessarily belong. I have thus relied on the participants to afford me entry into their persona! experiences and belief systems, of which hip-hop is at the center. If
I bad met with the participants more frequently over a longer period, I would have asked them to write individual auto-ethnographies, detailing their musical preferences, family relationships and peer groups, ali in an attempt to more clearly understand how their understanding of hip-hop culture, to a large extent, shapes their interpretation of the world, and their role in it.
As youth researchers attempt to understand what shapes youth identities, we must look towards popular culture production such as hip-hop to understand what is influencing them outside of educational and familial settings. Moreover, when employed as a research platform, hip-hop culture is a rich canvas from which to discuss issues such as racial and ethnie identities and socio-economic class, in addition to the pedagogical benefits of using rap music to engage and develop youth's writing skills.
70 Chapter 7: Let Me Break it Down For Y ou One Last Time r-·· The period of life between ages 13-17 is often characterized by a desire to
construct and perform new versions of oneself that are distinct from familial
associations and childhood identities. Popular culture plays an important role in
youth's lives during this particular period. Peer groups are often formed based on
shared musical preferences, and from the se preferences an individu al' s persona!
style, patterns of speech, and politics are often influenced by subculturally
affiliated peer groups such as punk, emo, and hip-hop.
It was not that long ago that I was navigating the tumultuous waters of my
own teenage years, dealing with various insecurities, while struggling to fit in
with my peers. What characterized this period in my life was a desire to socialize
with other youth who shared common interests and musical tastes, teamed with a
longing to experiment with different social identities that I had acquired under the
tutelage of my middle class and mostly white upbringing. Therefore, the
friendships that I formed based on common popular culture interests, provided an
instant peer group, and a place within which to construct a new, subculturally
affiliated identity. Given youth's tendencies to shift ideological costumes and
experiment with their identities as often as they change hair colours and peer
groups, it seems natural that they wish to create a subculturally affiliated identity
as part of shedding their childhood associations.
Theories of youth subculture from the CCCS (see Chapter 2), as weil as
current research on hip-hop and youth identities, provides the context for both
analyzing and discussing the way the participant's identities are shaped by hip-
71 hop culture. This study is similar to those conducted by youth researchers such as ~ 1 Andy Bennett (1999), Adreana Clay (2003, 2005) and Rachel Sullivan (2003),
whose work articulates how marginalized youths in particular draw from hip-hop
culture to construct and navigate their ethnie and racial identities, and how they
use rap music as a tool for advocating social justice issues.
Using the narrative inquiry method to solicit the participants persona!
stories enabled me to understand the ways in which hip-hop culture shapes their
perceptions of their own racial and ethnie identities, and how these perceptions
affect their linguistic expression, as articulated in their rap lyrics. However while
oscillating between the transcripts and my persona! reflections; 1 realized the
limitations and challenges of my methodological framework. My research design
stipulated the use of the participants stories as the bulk of the data, with minimal
questioning from me. However, while endeavoring to use discussion prompts
(Appendix A) as a loose outline for the meetings, 1 ended up relying on it as a
means for keeping the conversations running smoothly since the participants were
hesitant and required prompting to share their contributions. Perhaps the
participants would have been more willing to share their stories if we had met one
on one, but being in a group setting provided different perspectives and
interpretations of issues raised by the participants, such as neighbourhoods and
authenticity.
In retrospect, 1 could have asked the participants to write down their
stories in advance, and then share them with the group. However, 1 think the
narrative inquiry method provided sorne helpful guidelines for this study and that
72 it would be more sui table for a study of longer duration, therefore giving participants' sorne time to formulate their storied narratives prior to the meetings with me.
Discussions with the participants revealed that hip-hop culture is a place where ideas about an individual's socio-economic class and ethnicity are debated, and then solidified through the construction of a hip-hop identity. Hip-hop is also a place where the participants feel they can embrace their socio-economic statuses and racial minority identities as a source of pride, rather than a cause for shame.
Further, the data revealed that through their interpretation of rap artists such as
Tupac Shakur (who grew up in around poverty and crime and went on to become one of rap music's most successful artists before his untimely death in 1996), the participants feel that they too can transcend their challenging socio-economic circumstances, and attain success through hard work and determination.
Another important conclusion drawn from the data was on the participants' use of rap music as a vehicle for self-expression. In sharing and simultaneously deconstructing their lyrics during our discussions, the participants revealed how they use rap as a self-reflexive medium to address issues such as poverty, violence, and politics, in a way that their schoolwork does not provide an outlet for. Furthermore, writing and performing rap lyrics enables the participants to work on their writing skills and oral expression, which suggests rap music's great potential as a pedagogical aid in the classroom, as a means for engaging otherwise disinterested youths in writing (Morrell, 2002, 2004; Paul, 2000;
Pough, 2004). And finally, by contextualizing the data within a larger framework
73 of research on youth identities and popular culture, this study dernonstrated the efficacy of using hip-hop culture as a platform for conducting research on, in particular, rnarginalized youth identities.
As a platform for conducting research on youth identities and youth learning, hip-hop culture provides a rich lens through which linguistic and oral practices can be observed, as weil as how notions of gender, race, and ethnicity are interpreted within the culture, and reconfigured into the construction and performance of a hip-hop identity. In many ways, hip-hop provides a rnuch needed cornpass for the participants, a place where they go to validate their rnarginalized identities, obtaining a strong rneasure of self-worth from and through their hip-hop identities. Sornetirnes this validation requires irnagining their lives in terms of narratives, which do not quite fit their circurnstances. As an outsider entering in to this intirnate space of negotiating one's identity, it was a challenging endeavor to solicit a group of slightly awkward and insecure 15-17 year old boys to talk about who they are and what they believe. At their ages, ali they want to do during their lunch hours is srnoke cigarettes and listen to their
Ipods, let alone talk to a university researcher about hip-hop. For these young men atternpting to assert thernselves in the world despite the challenges they face at horne, school, and in the streets, hip-hop is not sornething they do, hip-hop is who they are.
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79 Appendix A- Discussion Prompts
How does your original hip-hop music/graffiti reflect your personality? What artists do you listen to and wh y? How does your rap music, or graffiti art function as a form of self-expression? What is it that attracts you to hip-hop more than any other genre? What are the most important messages being conveyed in the hip-hop you listen to? Are you concemed about the lyrics you listen to and the images that you see in hip-hop videos, or are you simply attracted to the music for its beats?
Do you consider any of your favorite artists to be your role models? What messages does a 'hip-hop style' convey to people outside of the culture? How "real" are the messages portrayed in gangster rap?
80 Appendix B : Questions for Further Research
Questions for further research could perhaps examine the following:
How are the racial and ethnie identities of youth interpreted and performed through a hip-hop lens?
What ideas about gender roles do youth interpret through hip-hop culture?
How do female hip-hop identified youth construct their identities through a hip hop lens?
Do the participants' lyrics depict reality, or do they reflect a fantasy narrative influenced by gangster rap music?
Do the participants gravitate towards hip-hop culture to provide a structure in their lives that religious groups or community groups would traditionally provide?
How can hip-hop culture be incorporated into the classroom curriculum as a means for discussing gender roles, politics, and race relations throughout history?
81 Appendix C - Participants' Original Rap Lyrics
(Stuart) 1t's DG where the thugs are always be acting vicious Snitches be wearin' wires, everyone is suspicious Y our rhymes are repetitious, l'rn kickin' it fresh Spit the wrong words and 1'rn rippin' y our flesh Fuck all the haters cuz 1 just detest, The pigs who walk around with a badge on their vest Appreciate your street, communications will heat Complications demonstratin' trauma from the beef 1 patiently creep, around the town of Montreal Rap it up, yah, Montreal, 1 make a 1-2 cali Cats who front gonna fall, don 't get it twisted motherfucker Cause we came to brawl
(Mark) 1 ain 't never se en you in the block, so don 't come with that scarf, thinkin' that you're hot This is DG, these ain 't no regular streets, brothers le ave you de ad for the way that you speak This ain 'ta joke, so don 't provoke, the brothers who will choke you by the throat Y ou brokeback snitch, you should walk with a clip Cuz at any given moment nigger you could get hit While you drivin' your four door, you should be strapped with a 4-4 Kickin' in the front door Niggers you want more? Nah you don 't, just hope 1 won 't miss
(Alex) Y ou see me pressin' the se bitches, don 't think your not in included This is for the motherfuckers the se bitches and greedy suckers Money, Money's on my mind, Gotta grip my halls and 1 grind Any niggers try to interfere me, your bodies will be goin' flyin' Don't tell me your pain cause l'Il just tell you thefacts Don 't get involved in a situation, ready for retaliation Thought 1 won 't mention this, l'rn trill in this l'rn fake/fate Dressin' up an imitatin' l' ll tell you what it take Don 't germate, never Jake, if you violate, mo-fucker you 'll be another victim in the nearest lake 1 don 't think they see me coming the venomous slick snake, that boy anonymous splittin' niggers like earthquake My every move calculated to money making 1 got these niggers shakin' Cuz they runnin ', duckin , and never lookin' back at the nigs
82 (Mark) Tome the warin Iraq is like a malicious attack Where old guns shoot women in the back Make the oldfolks have a heart attack A relapse in time Way before Diddy ever wrote his first rhyme Way before the white man introduced the 9 When the best things to drink was whisky and wine I'm ta/kin' bout world war one When everyone either had a gun or had to run The world has changed and you should tao You're acting like the man who hated on the Jews /nfiltrate the sail cuz they got a lot of ail That's pathetic man you ain 't dawn with it
(Alex) Don 't get me wrong if 1 come up strong So many mother fuckers wanna plot and do me wrong Got me suspicious and not trusting bitches AU about my riches ,my finger itches Quickly to dig ditchesfor niggers withfucken glitches But 1 keep my composure /'mfrom theM right across the border 17 I'm getting older Go tta watch for what approaches And any other nigger try to creep by my shoulder
83