‘Give us a million dollars!’ Hip hop’s integration of commercialism and counterculturalism as a break in the structures of cultural consumption Thomas van Gaalen 4303024
[email protected] MA Cultural History of Modern Europe Supervised by dr. Jochen Hung 1 Abstract This thesis addresses a central question posed by the popularity of hip hop. Hip hop, which integrates both explicit counterculturalism and commercialism, does not fit the dominant ‘countercultural idea’ as described by cultural historian Thomas Frank. According to Frank, the ‘countercultural idea’ is the im- plication of a dichotomous distinction between authentic, free countercultures and the grey, commer- cial mainstream. This assumption, argues Frank, has formed the foundation of cultural consumption in the second half of the 20th century. As such, a culturally dominant genre such as hip hop’s rejection of the ‘countercultural idea’ implies a break with the dominant structure of cultural consumption. To un- derstand hip hop’s integration of commercialism and counterculturalism, this thesis explores an alter- native theoretical framework based on a suggested new structure of cultural consumption, the structure of ‘omnivorous’ consumption. This structure is defined by an increasingly individual ap- proach to culture, resulting in the demise of traditional countercultures, as well as a more open, ‘cherry- picking’ approach to cultural consumption. This theoretical framework is applied to source material from the New York hip hop scene around 1980-1990, the period hip hop rose to mainstream popularity in the USA. This leads to several conclusions. Firstly, hip hop combined counterculturalism with com- mercialism early on. Whereas earlier African American genres such as jazz and rock ‘n’ roll also show- cased a similar integration, and as such, a break with the ‘countercultural idea’, hip hop’s business- focused approach functioned well within the increasingly neoliberal cultural market of New York in the early 1980s, thus resulting in a large, black-owned hip hop business.