Digital, Underground: Black Aesthetics, Hip-Hop Digitalities, and Youth Creativity in the Global South
Hip hop’s big takeover, four decades deep, has gone hand-in-hand with the age of digital globalization. Charts and numbers, playlists and soundscan tallies cannot fully measure the influence and mobility of hip hop’s emerging digitalities, which move swiftly across the global media landscape and bring global fans and practitioners into their collaborative folds. After decades of concern with the elusive question of what hip hop is across its historical trajectory, critical media studies is turning to the question of what hip hop does for its practitioners in the context of digital globalization. As this study shows, the long-standing field of Black aesthetic studies can nourish new approaches to understanding a transnational digital landscape in which popular music has become a premium site for emergent digital creativity, even as many of these communities fall across the digital divide that makes professional production hard to reach.
by Ali Maaxa, Ph.D. 2017: From the Oxford Handbook of Hip-Hop Music
When Tupelo rap duo Rae Sremmurd released "Black Beatles," a song dedicated to their own explosive global fame, they also took on a digital experiment.
They released the single for conventional radio and video distribution in August 2016 and quickly followed up with a viral video meme they called #MannequinChallenge. Patterning the meme on the YouTube experiments of high-school amateurs, Rae Sremmurd posed like statues in a diorama-like scene: a shot of the stars onstage pans from the artists to an equally-still crowd while the song kicks up in the background. The short snippet of video-a variety new media scholars call micromedia-was de- signed for easy, low-bandwidth streaming over social networking sites (SNS) Facebook, YouTube, Instagram and Twitter.
And then the project took digital flight: entire high schools filmed their lunchrooms in a collective pose with the song playing off-camera; wedding parties froze over cake and garters; The New York Giants and Hillary Clinton's campaign team pitched in; Paul McCartney even nodded to the group with a #MannequinChallenge of his own (Bergado). Not only did the meme propel the song to the top of the charts, it marked the group's global initiation: #MannequinChallenge was taken up by innumerable teams of young people worldwide, from a group of friends on the beach of Mauritania using an expertly-piloted drone to film their long robes whipping in the Atlantic breeze, to the (temporary) mass immobilization of hundreds of teenage girls on the crosswalks of downtown Tokyo.
Hip-hop’s big takeover, four decades deep, has gone hand-in-hand with the age of digital globalization. Charts and numbers, playlists and soundscan tallies cannot fully measure the influence and mobility of hip-hop’s emerging digitalities, which move swiftly across the global media landscape and bring global fans and practitioners into their collaborative folds. After decades of concern with the elusive question of what hip-hop is across its historical trajectory, critical media studies is turning to the question of what hip-hop does for its practitioners in the context of digital globalization. As this study shows, the longstanding field of Black aesthetic studies can nourish new approaches to understanding a transnational digital landscape in which popular music has become a premium site for emergent digital creativity, even as many of these community fall across the digital divide that makes professional production software, hardware and training difficult to access. Today, hip-hop is as much a global field of digital design as it is a body of musi- cal production.
Mixtapes, samples and reversions, studio choreographies, and vivid videoscapes line a field of multimedia practices that are the product of distinct hip-hop scenes, overlapping influences and innovations. Hip-hop digitalities flourish on emergent platforms: cell-phone videos, third-party wiki pages, and meme generators, as much as they articulate to conventional modes of digital communication. Often, as has been the case with Myspace and Vine, the digital industries simply do not know how to account for the work Black creativity does to their platforms: it oversaturates them, repurposes them, and occasionally trolls them to stretch them far beyond their commercial purpose.
In other cases, as with Black Twitter or hip-hop dance videos on YouTube, platforms accommodate, monetize, or appropriate Black creativity. While some aspects of this creative body erupt in the form of new commercial genres—Chance the Rapper’s groundbreaking "Coloring Book" mixtape, for instance, which reoriented industry attention to genre-blurring hip-hop outsiders in 2017–others spill over the edges of the standalone pop single or album formats, move unconventionally through amateur media platforms, or contribute to emerging forms and formations that work through and against the commercial media industries.
Here, I am concerned with modes of “Black vernacular technological creativity,” following Rayvon Fouché, that allow marginalized young people to write themselves into the global digital landscape (Fouché 2006). These are the digital undergrounds that concern this study: global sites of critical mediamaking by hip-hop communities for whom Black aesthetics, cast in the digital register, offer a route to self-authorship, community-building, and cross-cultural solidarities. Through the channels of an emerging global digital infrastructure, hip-hop has become the lingua franca for young people throughout the Global South: a cartography that joins minori- tized communities throughout the US South, the postindustrial/urban “Upsouth,” global post- colonial and indigenous communities, and in the transnational flows between them (Prashad 2012, 235).
While youth in these communities, historically marginalized by global capital, are deeply affected by the digital divide, they have also leveraged SNS, streaming platforms, and other kinds of emerging media to build a digital infrastructure that works for them. In amplifying global hip-hop digitalities through the concepts of transmedia, small media, and off-label media, I hope to lay critical groundwork for routing further recognition and resources to minoritized media makers whose work transgresses the global digital divide, and to contribute to discourses on what media engagements based in hip-hop aesthetics, transposed to the digital register, can do to empower young people whose creativity is ofter overlooked.
Hip-Hop’s Black Mediascapes
Conventional hip-hop historiographies trace the genre in terms of its developmental arc.
In this schema, hip-hop was born in the outer boroughs of the 1970s, matured in the age of Tu- pac and the Wu-Tang Clan, and entered a sort of spiritual decline under the pressures of global diffusion, stylistic transformation and “selling out” (Frere-Jones 2009). This focus on hip-hop’s development over time can serve to marginalize the thickness of the media practices that collect- ed in its folds: from the development of the graffiti arts, emcee-ing, DJing, and b-boying/b- girling as well as the emergence of flyer art and street fashion, it is clear that New-York based rap recordings were only one aspect of a world of Black creativity that, according to Greg Tate, was located “at society’s margins: its origins are shrouded in myth, enigma, and obfuscation” (Tate 2016). Although hip-hop the commercial music genre is attributed to the specificities of postindustrial Black life in the outer New York boroughs, it crystallized from a series of globally-grounded media practices: what Appadurai would call a mediascape that was flourishing in the outer boroughs of New York at the time of hip-hop’s emergence (Appadurai 1990).1
I want to suspend the germinal New York moment in hip-hop history to sound the thick, globally-grounded media complex that set the stage for hip-hop’s contemporary digital creativity. In doing so, I emphasize the work of hip-hop artists, scenes, and media forms that fall outside the constraints of conventional historiography. While Appadurai’s mediascape references the global mass-media infrastructure, other technologies of the body (voice, movement, speech, fashion) are also media unto themselves, contributing to the mediascape without requiring electronic or mass technologies (ibid.).2
Of the four multimedia hip-hop elements fostered by the germinal Zulu Nation collective–rap, graffiti, DJing, and B-boying, rapping (particularly in the classic 16- bar formation) persists as the primary authenticity marker by which the media industries identify hip-hop. Beyond established hip-hop recording formats, Kyra Gaunt (following Cornel West) finds that rap is a medium that comes in many forms: a kind of “kinetic orality” that moves un- conventionally from one format to another, from the double dutch chants of girls on the playground, to popular rhymes recited by kids on schoolbusses nationwide, to the freestyle rap cyphers of young people on the street corners (Gaunt 2006, 92).3
In addition to the vocal samples that reach into the Black digital archive to anchor contemporary hip-hop production, kinetic orality persists online in the form of viral GIFs (very short, silent videos, based on an accompanying quote or lyric, that can be used to replace profile and text-embedded photos); memes (static photos with a quote or lyrics printed on its margins), and cell-phone ringtones containing a hip-hop sample (Schloss 2015: 5). In continuity with the Black media practices of New York’s germinal hip-hop moment, hip-hop digitalities have proliferated in the past decade; to understand their role in the contemporary mediascape is to recognize and resource the work of young people who are rarely seen as artists or innovators.
An example of how New York's hip-hop mediascape has transposed itself to suit the MTV and, later, web 2.0 terrains, is its kinetic visual culture. The groundbreaking works of Jean-Michel Basquiat, Keith Haring and Zephyr, among others, brought street graffiti to the downtown fine-arts gallery. Soon after, the hip-hop mediascape thickened with the roll-out of the MTV generation in 1980, when the visual, dance, and fashion elements of hip-hop quickly merged with the global expansion of the American media empire. At the confluence of the gallery and the music video, digital installations like Kanye West’s multimedia site “Watch the Throne” and Jay-Z’s “Picasso Baby,” involving twelve hours of freestyle performance in a down- town Manhattan gallery, have become an emerging, industry-resourced mode of hip-hop production. Here, Web 2.0 functions as a kind of unlimited gallery space: an immersive field of hip-hop publicity, which underground practitioners use to manipulate modes of sensation, embodiment and affect not conventionally associated with song-based musical formats (Porcello, et. al., 2010).
In the early oughts, Black teens exploited the plasticity of the Myspace social networking platform to develop an aesthetically-saturated digital language. Pages were “blinged out” with animated diamonds and gold plating, rigged to blast bass-driven crunk music upon loading, and “tagged” with brightly-colored wallpaper and posts that recall the conventions of graffiti. Some youth, for whom access to coding classes and up-to-date operating systems is unattainable, learned a bit of programming language as they augmented their Myspace pages as uploaded photos of street style and independent CD promotion flourished. What Myspace could not do, how- ever, was provide an enduring archive of outsider digital design: as Myspace became populated by inner-city teens, it was abandoned by investors–a kind of digital white flight–and its immense influence as a medium for hip-hop’s global publicity has been largely forgotten.
An example of a hip-hop mediascape that formed in the age of web 2.0 is that of the hyphy scene that ruled Bay Area creativity for a full decade. Hyphy, already an assemblage of interethnic creativity across the Asian, Latinx, and Black communities of the Bay Area, proliferated through an inventive series of hip-hop digitalities that have made an indelible mark on global popular culture. The scene integrated street “lingo,” car culture, club dance and drug cultures, and inimitable Bay Area production styles into its digital folds. While its primary artists (E-40, Keak da Sneak and Mac Dre amongst them) had been recognized names in the classic early-90s West Coast “gangsta” scene that took root decades earlier, the hyphy ecosystem represented a radical aesthetic and political recentering of West Coast hip-hop under the rubric of mass socioeconomic and upheaval under heavy gentrification and policing in the East Bay in the early oughts.
Over the course of a decade, the scene proliferated through its engagement with digital media, from cell-phone videos of hybrid automobile-human street dance in the form of “ghostriding” to the digital routes of rap recordings made by Mac Dre during a stint in prison. Hyphy’s influence had a major impact on the sounds and styles of hip-hop at large, and inhabits a special corner of what Mark Anthony Neal would call the Black digital archive today: its rhythm tracks can be heard consistently in commercial hip-hop production a decade from its inception, and its accompanying street dance videos—which were amongst the earliest street dance videos to go viral on YouTube–set the standard for new movements in dance and in hip-hop videogra- phy (Neal, “Ali” 2016). At the same time, this groundshaking body of aesthetic innovation merited only a passing notice by the industries and remains largely undocumented in the world of hip-hop historiography.
Hip-Hop Digitalities and Marginalized Practitioners
In the age of digital globalization–and in the proliferation of media applications, technologies, and practices that have accompanied this new and uneven infrastructure–we witness an unprecedented transformation of a media ecology in which musical undergrounds rapidly take on new technologies of transmission and new modes of circulation, new forms that sometimes do not seem to be musical at all. These require new empirical and theoretical approaches on the part of media studies, which must sound the thick contexts of global media (Abu-Lughod 1997). Two contemporary approaches to media studies are particularly useful in sounding this field of hip- hop digitalities. The first, transmedia, draws from Henry Jenkins’ work on the convergence of old and new media cultures to describe the ways in which storytelling unfolds across digital platforms:
[It is] the art of world making. To fully experience any fictional world, consumers must assume the role of hunters and gatherers, chasing down bits of the story across media channels, comparing notes with each other via on line discussion groups, and collaborating to ensure that everyone who invests time and effort will come away with a richer entertainment experience (Jenkins 2006, 21).
Hip-hop’s digital archive, like Jenkin’s description of contemporary commercial media, requires participatory immersion, careful curation, and discursive processes that unfold according to multiple spatial and temporal processes. Hip-hop, which has always integrated the musical, visual, and performing arts, is especially poised to engage Web 2.0’s plasticity, as artists’ works bleed over the edges of established pop formats to encompass an assemblage of media projects and platforms. The contingencies and possibilities of hip-hop transmedia help to account for hip- hop’s ability to shape-shift to suit emerging modes of digital globalization.
Social media giant YouTube revolutionized the distribution of hip-hop transmedia, making many previously difficult-to-access hip-hop recordings freely and globally available; allow- ing track remixes, parodies, and reversions to flourish; and providing a digital platform for un- signed global artists and to collect pay in the form of sponsors and ads (Salvato 2009). YouTube is crisscrossed by transmedia chutes and ladders: “lyrics” videos scroll lyrics across a series of static group photos; producers record the “making of” hit tracks in their studios; artists contextu-alize their songs with trailers and mini-documentaries: as the platform accommodates seemingly unlimited innovations in hip-hop framing and format, its also spins new forms of hip-hop value that enfranchise members of the hip-hop community who are less likely to hold a rapper’s mic. YouTube has been instrumental in resourcing dance: Lafayette artist Cupid’s 2007 “Cupid Shuffle” and Atlanta teen Silentó’s phenomenal 2015 “Watch Me (Whip/Nae Nae) merge instructional dance video and hit song into a unique commodity form that saturates the resources YouTube bring to bear, gathering massive web traffic revenue to unknown artists who generate relatively few album or song sales.9
The medium has also opened up space for amateur hip-hop “remixes” that are set to audio from the original commercial release, but which feature a revolving cast of dancers and choreographers. These third parties often become hip-hop industry players unto themselves, particularly women and girls marginalized by the industry but invested in new modes of choreography and videography who have transposed the global hip-hop economy to suit their creative work.
The second critical amplifier I engage is drawn from groundbreaking work within the emerging field of media anthropology: the notion of small media, as described by Faye D. Ginsburg.
Research on video culture and other forms of decentralized “small media” suggests the emergence of a “new media era” that is more fragmented and diverse in its economic and social organization (Larkin 2000), more characteristic of the expan- sion of informal markets under neoliberalism and the fluidity of late capitalism than the older forms of mass media (Ginsburg 2002, 3).
The concept of small media can help to explain the ways in which the resources associated with hip-hop collect around highly visual platforms like Vine, where value is measured in “loops,” or the amount of times users have watched a content producer’s six-second-or-less video. A surfeit of loops yields paid “viner” appearances, merchandise sales, and product sponsorships for vine artists. Hip-hop songwriter DeStorm Power boasts 4.1 million followers for his clips, which mix observational humor with hip-hop music and dance. The Vine format—which was discontinued as a discrete service when Twitter turned it into an add-on app for its own website—was also well suited to hip-hop, as the videos played in continuous loops, creating a rhythm that mimics– or features–hip-hop sampling. The careers of hip-hop artists including OG Maco, O.T. Genais, and RiFF RAFF rely on the popularity of snippets of their work with Vine users; they saturate their work with short sound bytes accordingly.
To the concepts of transmedia and small media, I offer a third amplifier for the work of hip-hop’s hidden digital producers: the concept of off-label media engagements. Where the glob-al digital infrastructure takes uneven root, and particularly in spaces that have been underdevel- oped by the digital divide, hip-hop communities enact media practices and forms in their pur- poseful “misuse” of conventional media technologies. I use the term off-label to account for the unconventional digital media practices by which marginalized hip-hop practitioners draw from Black aesthetics to make excursions into the global media networks, gathering critical resources (digital clicks, sponsorships, record deals) along the way. An excellent case of such digital (mis)use is the case of the excessive use of autotune, initially adapted from studio producers who used it in small measure to digitally correct flat singing.
In the hands of hip-hop’s most inventive producers, certain overblown settings of the program came to mark the robotic, gargly, marled strains of Southern and Third World hip-hop, and eventually to rule mainstream pop production at large. While Jay’Z’s iconic 2009 “Death of the Autotune” single made hay of critical attacks claiming that the autotune indicated a lack of artistic mastery, Jay knew what his autotuned peers from the Global South were up to: off-label use of the autotune to create at least two new modes of hip-hop value. First, autotune thickened the textures of vocal production at a moment in which the genre was ready for a stylistic move away from the sample-based work that had ruled the charts for some time. Secondly, following Lil Wayne’s 2008 The Carter III, autotune became the calling card for the global rise of “Dirty South” hip-hop, to which the industry has turned for new sounds and styles for over a decade, thereby resourcing the creativity of postindustrial, under- class, and Third World youth: the Black digital archive.
Hip-Hop: A Digital Cartography
A series of groundbreaking hip-hop studies turn toward community-based practices as the foundation for hip-hop creativity, from Filipino soundsystems to experimental Cuban genres (Bradley 2016, Harrison 2009, Morgan 2000, Neal 2002, Perry 2016, Robinson 2014, Wang 2016). In tandem, the field of ethnomusicology (and confluent work in popular music ethnography) has generated nuanced studies of global hip-hop communities (Appert 2015, Salois 2015, Schloss 2014). In my longstanding anthropological work with hip-hop practitioners in Clarksdale, Mississippi and Dakar, Senegal alike—communities that are marginal to the US urban centers of the pop music industry–digital music is circulated in unconventional ways: through swapped and copied cellphone sim cards, bootlegged CDs, and unauthorized “ripped,” downloaded and remixed YouTube video files (Neff 2015).
The problem for practitioners in my field- sites in the rural US South and urban West Africa, and across the Global South at large, is a vast lack of recognition and resources for work that remains in community-based, noncommercial form; only a privileged few are able to access the kinds of professional equipment, connections, and mobilities they need to tie into the culture industries (Neff 2015). In the case studies to follow–Mississippi, Senegal, and the emerging hip-hop mecca of Chicago–I outline the contours of hip-hop digitalities as they arise from various local sites of media-making.
Mississippi Delta Hip-Hop and Promotional Small Media
In the midst of my collaborative fieldwork with the Mississippi Delta hip-hop community (2004-9), Southern hip-hop was just beginning to prove its enduring power on the international stage. While the sheer number of talented, practicing hip-hop artists in the Delta community re- flects the immense musical creativity of the region–populated as it is with gospel singers, blues artists and radio and club MCs–the scene remains unrecognized amidst the global hip-hop land- scape. In addition to the devastating effects of socieconomic disenfranchisement in the Delta, the digital divide has starved it–and the Global South at large–of hardware, software and programming know-how. Not only are Delta hip-hop artists unlikely to record their work professionally, as regional recording studios are priced well out of their range, those who do manage to build makeshift home studios would have to handle failing hard drives and lack of access to mastering or official CD production. The Mississippi Delta hip-hop economy is not only based in the small media practices I outline here; its archives are ephemeral. Without attention from the fields of critical media studies and hip-hop studies, its contributions to the Black digital archive remain largely hidden.
The small media that coalesce into an archive of Delta hip-hop creativity are crafted on highly accessible, free and mobile platforms, and their objective is rarely directly commercial. Rather than draw listeners into immersive sites of music discovery or participation toward selling product or pushing advertised sponsors, Delta hip-hop artists use small media as a means of promotion: to loop social media users back into the local cultural economy, which has been, since the heyday of the Delta blues, based on nightclub admission charges. Mississippi Delta hip- hop culture is heavily club-oriented, and a multitude of (often unlicensed and ad-hoc) nightlife spaces for young people use social media to compete for patrons. Delta promoters (themselves hip-hop artists) design flyers from cell-phone photos of local personalities and use their phone’s photo editing apps to add text detailing the theme of the night (often a community member’s birthday or a visit form a Memphis rapper or comedian/MC). These are then posted on one of a number of Facebook forums and personal pages.
In terms of the production of music itself, Delta artists who do not have access to custom- made beats—a point of scarcity for many global artists who do not have access and training to highly specialized and expensive proprietary software, plugins, and hardware—can download free beats from a number of online platforms, which they then distort using pirated apps that can run on outdated PC platforms, such as FruityLoops. Artists who do not have access to professional microphones record directly into their cell phones, giving them a distorted feel that mimics the sound of a phone call. Rather than appeal to a broad hip-hop audience with their raps, Delta artists use this quick-recording platform to promote club nights, answer to a neighborhood controversy, or to shout out a sponsoring barbershop, club or restaurant.
They distribute these through virtually unknown online platforms like datpiff.com, a mixtape upload website that allows artists to sample from popular songs without copyright clearance. The point is less to compose the kind of professional recording that will gain notice of the global media industries—the digital divide (and the socioeconomic divide it articulates) has made that virtually impossible for these artists–than it is to speak to the Delta’s hip-hop present: a thriving local creative economy that digital media serve to enrich, not transform. The world of Delta hip-hop, where nearly all young people are skilled and schooled in traditions of eloquence through the power of church life and community musical practice, has managed to survive and thrive despite its emplacement across the digital divide: a local club performance circuit that supports emerging artists, a heavy stylistic influence over their cousins’ rap in Chicago, Memphis and West Coast, a thriving car soundsystem culture, the genesis of the gospel-rap subgenre.
Senegalese Hip-Hop as Off-Label Digital Practice
My current collaborative research with hip-hop artists of the outer suburbs of Dakar, Senegal, shows that the thriving world of indigenous-language hip-hop production is rendered largely invisible and inaudible to the global popular music industry. Hip-hop offers Senegalese youth a platform by which they can write themselves, to echo Achille Mbembe’s work on African modes of self-writing, into the global digital landscape (Mbembe and Rendall 2002).
Following the development of a powerful national film-TV-music industry in the age of the Pan-Africanist movement, Senegalese youth have used digital hip-hop production, imbued with samples of traditional praise singers and appeals to the local Sufi saints, to mark new grassroots political movements (including the 1990s Boul Falé and 2010s Y’en a Marre movements), to nourish a local arts economy as hip-hop artists gain visas to foreign countries and the resources that accompany international performance, and to articulate an Senegalese cosmopolitanism by which young people represent themselves as economically present and viable in a globalized digital economy that would otherwise cast them as tragically and passively underdeveloped. While these contexts are largely illegible to westerners, the fruits of this hybrid aesthetic collectivity are tangible to the Senegalese themselves.
Senegalese youth access global discourses and resources through what I call off-label engagements with media, a strategy outlined by media anthropologists whose work on African media has been critical to new discourses in media studies. In his germinal work Signal and Noise, Brian Larkin describes the ways in which young people in Hausaland, Nigeria bend dominant postcolonial media infrastructures to allow a host of independent, amateur, and small media to flourish. These include rerouting the electric grid and film projection, radio networks and pop music cassettes, which are used by locals in unconventional and mispurposeful ways to nourish emerging discourses on Nigerianness and Pan-Africanness, to make a bootlegged buck, or to communicate Islamic teachings (Larkin 2008). Jesse Weaver Shipley’s germinal study of the Ghanaian hiplife scene in Accra—a national take on global hip-hop styles—describes the value of digital production as it circulates through the urban political economy. Here, the currency of the local media industries are based primarily in social capital above revenue itself.
As aspiring artists recognize that their success hinges upon fashioning an image of celebrity—and that financial support for music comes primarily from corporate sponsorship and market recognition— they increasingly create personal brands, striving to be made into corporate icons for mobile service providers, drinks, and household goods. In the context of the free market, the freedom of personal ex- pression itself becomes a disciplinary practice that organizes power and value (Shipley 2012, 5).