That's Hip-Hop To

“That’s Hip-Hop to Me!”: Race, Space, and Temporal Logics of Authenticity in Independent Cultural Production Michael Gibson University of Arizona ABSTRACT In producer-saturated fields such as popular music scenes, claims to and judgments of authenticity are ever salient in contention for limited resources and prestige. By mobilizing meanings attributed to sounds, objects, individuals, and ideas associated with the past, present, or future of a genre, cultural producer groups are distinguished from each other and unified within themselves. Observing the dynamics of these distinctions allows us to ascertain how artistic professionals think of themselves and others, as well as begin to unpack the role that authenticity work may play in the practice and warrants of cultural production. Drawing on fieldwork and interviews from an independent rap scene in the Midwest, I demonstrate how artists draw on collective memory, modern convention, and projected futures to form competing, temporally-rooted logics of authenticity by which to advance their positions. KEYWORDS: Authenticity; Cultural production; Temporality; Hip-Hop “That’s Hip-Hop to Me!”: Race, Space, and Temporal Logics of Authenticity in Independent Cultural Production 1. Introduction In an upper middle class suburb 20 minutes outside of a mid-sized Midwestern city, bass heavy hip-hop instrumentals drown out the sound of Victor’s children playing in his back yard. Posters of 1990s rappers line the walls around him. Like most of his neighbors, Victor is a white, mid-to-late 30s father and husband. Unlike those neighbors, he is a rapper and hip-hop producer with his own record label, Institute Recordings. Today, he prepares his setlist to perform at an upcoming local festival. Wade, the PR Director for Institute, will arrive soon to help. Ten miles away, Lex, a prominent member of a hip-hop collective called The Syndicate, sits with his publicist in a city coffee shop. They discuss plans for promoting Lex’s new album, as well as the prospect of an appearance on the BET television network. Lex took two buses here this morning from his inner city home. Unlike Victor, he lives in a poverty-stricken neighborhood near childhood friends. Like many of them, he is a single, black man in his late 20s, residing near where he grew up. Some are rappers as well, but he is considered the most successful. Downtown, eight miles from the coffee shop, Logan locks up his recording studio, clutching his sketchbook and laptop. The late-20s, black rapper, music producer, and designer is leaving for a gentrified strip farther south to meet Hank, a white rapper of the same age, who lives in that area. Logan spends much of his time there, experiencing its transition from impoverished neighborhood to prominent art and music scene. The pair will discuss a concert celebrating the one-year anniversary of their record label, Sword and Shield Records. 2 Much like these rappers occupy distinct geographic spaces and demographic categories, they approach cultural production in markedly different ways. In a major city, it is not surprising that independent artists – i.e., those peripheral to the mainstream music industry (Oware 2014) – would segregate along different criteria. Frequently, artists distinguish and affiliate via conceptions of authenticity. Although past work suggests that rappers foreground racial and spatial logics (Forman 2000), this study advances the concept of temporal logics of authenticity. Race and space remain integral, yet temporality often mitigates or circumvents demographic distinctions in competitions for limited resources and prestige in the local field of production. As the rappers described above plan their upcoming performances, promotions, and recording, these logics guide their career strategies, as well as the company they keep. It has been suggested that when claims to authenticity are salient, artists collectively construct agreed upon ideals (Grazian 2003; Peterson 1997); however, I argue that artists mobilize competing conceptions of authenticity strategically and ideologically to frame themselves and their music in relation to the history, conventions, or prospects of their field. They do so not to legitimize the genre as a whole (Elafros 2013; McLeod 1999), but to vindicate and distinguish their own work within it. Just as entire genres compete for exposure (Mark 1998), artists within them compete for local and national industry resources. The present research turns towards hip-hop artists (alternately, rappers or MCs) in the Midwestern US. For rappers, the possibility of fame and fortune, as well as the dissemination of cheaper, more efficient technologies, has resulted in persistent competition. In such an environment, claims to authenticity – or “aesthetic legitimacy” (Elafros 2013) – are quite marketable (Grazian 2003). Popular portrayals of rappers suggest that they seek “street credibility” by evoking particular images of struggle founded on black identity and urban experience (Kelley 1996; 3 Ogbar 2007). Though this was true for many popular rappers in the 1990s resisting the genre’s assimilation into the mainstream (McLeod 1999), many of today’s rappers emphasize forms of authenticity rooted in different characteristics of the music itself. The racial, ethnic, and class- based imageries for which the genre has been recognized still hold power, but the existence and importance of temporal distinctions of authenticity is absent in prevailing theory. This paper presents a typology of temporal logics of authenticity derived from the conceptions of three groups of cultural producers. The following section will examine current sociological understandings of authenticity useful in understanding these temporal distinctions. Then, following a discussion of methods, I will detail how different groups of artists mobilize temporality in social processes of authentication, or “authenticity work” (Peterson 2005). Some collectively construct “old-school” authenticity – emphasizing aesthetic styles of 90s and early 2000s hip-hop while shunning current conventions. Others adhere to current trends, legitimizing modern genre conventions which grant them accessibility and greater promotional and distributional outlets (Becker 1982). Finally, aspirations or “imagined futures” (Frye 2012) influence others to eschew current conventions while creating what they envision will be conventional in the future. The ways that these three groups distance themselves (or not) from conventional or traditional aesthetics guide their divergent conceptions of authenticity. 2. Theorizing Authenticity 2.1. Defining the Authentic Authenticity has no objective standard, nor is it inherent in any object or actor. Instead, it is socially constructed, taking different shapes in different fields (Harrison 2008; Peterson 1997). Authenticity, then, may be thought of as a field-specific measure of legitimacy, created and 4 manipulated through social processes, mobilized discursively and practically – a measure of “credibility or sincerity,” which, when properly performed, appears “natural and effortless” (Grazian 2003: 11). Cultural producers, consumers, artistic works, and styles of production may all be deemed authentic (or not) based on the standards of particular art worlds or scenes. Commonly, this involves some combination of “sincerity, originality, honesty, or creativity” (Salaam 1995: 303). By meeting locally relevant standards, individuals position themselves “in a particular status hierarchy among their peers” (Clay 2003: 1349), constructing symbolic boundaries – i.e., social barriers separating groups (Cerulo 1997). Actors’ social positions are thus determined not only by individual tastes (Bourdieu 1984), but by how they signal their association with the legitimate tastes of the local scene or field. Much research emphasizes the ways in which actors signal legitimacy through consumption to shape identities and social positions (Clay 2003; Erickson 1994; Lamla 2009; Mullaney 2012; Outka 2009; Zukin 2008). An emerging body of work explores cultural producers’ conceptions of authenticity, especially amongst musical artists. As new technologies provide more control over artistic output, the influence of record labels in shaping the authentic – an area in which they historically held ample control (Peterson 1997) – has waned. As such, the relevance of authenticity for independent cultural producers has increased. This is especially true amongst rappers, for whom authenticity has only increased in saliency (Forman 2000; Harrison 2008; Hess 2005; McLeod 1999). Generally, claiming authenticity requires that artists accurately represent their own life – what Turino (2008) terms “dicent authenticity.” Lyrics and self-presentation must be “truthful” to lived experiences (Harkness 2011; Maxwell 2003). This truthfulness, or sincerity (Jackson 5 2005), should represent characteristics deemed legitimate in an artists’ field. For rappers, these characteristics are most often tied to space and race (Forman 2000). “Spatiality” is a central organizing principle in the construction, presentation, and interpretation “of value, meaning, and practice within hip-hop culture,” including rap music (Forman 2000: 66). Accurate accounting of one’s past – especially regarding one’s neighborhood or city – is often integral to being an authentic rapper (Smith 1997). Local communities – evoked colloquially as one’s “hood” or “block” – are prominent sites of listening to and performing hip- hop music, as well as frequent

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