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Tolerance has been widely accepted as a desirable outcome of negotiating disagreement; it has also underscored implications for a normative understanding of democracy. Specifically, tolerating opposing views is part of valuing every political argument equally; a central tenet of democratic decision-making. However, tolerance also implies a negative attitude toward coexistence instead of the active consideration of conflicting perspectives (Sullivan, Pierson, & Marcus, 1982). On this point, I propose to consider perspective taking as a behavioral intent that reflects attitudes toward political adversaries, given that it more precisely captures the expectations of democratic interaction between disagreeing actors. It implies both a cognitive process that leads to understanding others and a disposition toward actively acknowledging disagreement. Perspective taking has been studied as the product of deliberative experiences in which exposure to disagreement occurs in face-to-face interactions (Gurin et al., 2002; Gurin et al., 2004; Nagda, 2006, Nagda & Zuniga, 2003) and in contexts in which political talk is motivated by exposure to political content. Perspective is taking akin to deliberative principles, such as the expected conscious effort of political adversaries to consider the various arguments on all sides of a public issue in a fair, egalitarian, and open manner (Gastil, 2000; Habermas, 1989; Rawls, 1996). According to Flavell (1975), perspective taking may also promote the desired outcomes of deliberative experiences, for it develops as individuals become more attentive and move from purely egocentric viewpoints to understanding the views of others (as cited in Thompson, 2007). It also implies the development of cognitive constructs that affect a person’s understanding that seeing another’s viewpoint is necessary for sustaining social interaction (Hale & Delia, 1976). Considering perspective taking to be a potential outcome of exposure to political disagreement highlights the importance of intermediaries in providing access and sense-making cues that enlarge the capacity to organize complex information with situational elements and contradictory content. The role of social movement organizations in structuring issue networks is crucial to determining the degree of exposure to disagreement and is thus expected to be related to the demonstrators’ disposition to take the perspectives of their political adversaries. In this sense, questioning the extent to which exposure to political disagreement in protest mobilization is related to perspective taking will provide evidence regarding the potential effects of political disagreement in contexts of salient controversy and active engagement.

Perhaps what has been lost in this movement, then, is the consideration of epistemic justice as a first-order problem of intellectual inquiry into the (post)colonial world. I would even suggest that the subaltern has become part of an academic disposition – postcolonial studies, broadly conceived - that shares much with the narcissistic "gaze" of the imperial world map, famously illustrated by John Charles Ready Colomb in 1886.

The map features an array of peripheral others – subalterns – looking only towards Britannica, the masterful self who occupies the centre. Universal knowledge is dispensed at the point of Britannica’s centred perspective, and from there all are named and defined. Upon closer inspection, none of the peripheral figures (not even white settlers) are making sideways glances; all roads lead to Rome: crop, mineral, goods, bodies, value, narrative, concept, Jesus. Hawaiki and Ethiopia-Zion could never connect. This disposition of "critical thought" that I am describing situates the Western self as the only entity that is critically knowable. The peripheral others, even if considered morally worthy, nevertheless serve only to reflect and refine the Western self.

From the nineties onward, the meanings of the subaltern became increasingly tied to poststructuralism’s growing influence on the School. Here, the subaltern came to serve as the central demarcation for the organizing dyad of a colonizing West and a colonized East. In the words of Gayatri Spivak, the subaltern was “a position without identity” (Spivak, 2005: 476), whose constitution had become the “allegory of the predicament of all thought, all deliberate consciousness” (Spivak, 1988: 12). No longer a heuristic intended to intervene in a historiography largely blind to political and social mobilization from below, the subaltern had now increasingly become a fetishized figure whose primary function seemed to be to illuminate the functions of Western epistemic power. In ways similar to how we saw that the figure of the trans woman in queer scholarship seems to function to recenter cis-ness, the subaltern had under the poststructuralist project of the Subaltern School become, in the words of Robbie Shilliam (2015), “a project that was [singularly obsessed] with the modern (read colonizing European) subject” (p. 6).

These metaphorical constitutions of the Subaltern School project’s deployments of the subaltern are largely carried forth in international studies. Its perhaps best-known adaptation is Mohammed Ayoob’s idea of subaltern realism, a theoretical approach launched as a corrective to the Eurocentrism of neorealism. Ayoob (2002) operationalizes the subaltern to be largely synonymous with non-Western states, marked by their structural weakness in the international state system: “Third World states, rather than subaltern classes, form the quintessential subaltern element within the society of states, given their relative powerlessness and their position as a large majority in the international system” (p. 41). The subaltern, then, is a category seemingly wide enough to encapsulate all states located outside the Global North; indeed the “large majority,” which in Ayoob’s democratic impulse means that it is “their experiences that should count most” (Sharp, 2011: 271). However, it remains unclear what these experiences constitute more specifically, since the subaltern in subaltern realism rests on largely undifferentiated notions of an abstract geopolitical space located outside of the imperial core. Despite the critique of Eurocentrism fueling Ayoob’s intervention, subaltern realism nevertheless reinforces these same impulses through its stated mandate, namely to “provide more comprehensive explanations for the origins of the majority of conflicts in the international system and for the behavior of most states inhabiting it” (Ayoob, 2002: 47). We see that Ayoob’s intervention ends up using subalternity, the ostensible heuristic for the accumulated experiences of the global majority, as theoretical Polyfilla to amend, rather than fundamentally confront, imperial ontological assumptions in IR.

The multifaceted field of Dalit studies is rooted in material histories, political geneoalogies, and social struggles that have become productive of particular epistemological outlooks. This stands in stark contrast to ideas of the subaltern which, according to its anticaste critics, must be understood not so much as a category of the historically downtrodden, but rather as a category for symbolic and material restitution for a privileged substratum of Indian postcolonial society and its global diaspora. Indeed, as we have seen, from its inception in Gramscian Marxism, the subaltern in postcolonial studies gained traction primarily in scholarly discourse, without any clear referent outside of academic debate. We might say that out of the three categories discussed in this article, subaltern remains the designation with the greatest potential for mystification. Indeed, unlike trans and queer which exist as material and affective designations outside critical scholarship’s theoretical extrapolations, the subaltern is in its designations a distinctly academic category of identification. Through its propensity for mystification, the subaltern as a category of critical scholarship ends up obscuring more than it reveals, producing new exclusions in its wake.

Inspired by anticaste critique but moving closer to home in disciplinary terms, we might then ask: What would the field of postcolonial IR look like without a reliance on the subaltern as a centering analytical device? Indeed, Robbie Shilliam poses this exact question in his seminal book The Black Pacific (2015). In the pursuit of epistemic and political justice, Shilliam (2015) inquires what would happen if “the democratic impulse of Subaltern Studies were to be separated from the very term ‘subaltern?’” (p. 7). In this book, as well as in more recent work, Shilliam (2018, 2021) provides us with potent answers to this question, combining a decolonial approach focused on the lifeworlds of seemingly disparate colonized populations such as the Māori, RasTafari, and Ethiopians, with an acute attention to the concrete entanglements between racialized historical imperialism and the emergence of modern capitalist social relations. In a similar register, Joanne Yao’s considerations of the histories of the Rhine, the Danube, and the Congo 20 European Journal of International Relations 00(0) River in The Ideal River (2022) provides an instructive example for the concretization and demystification of historical imperial dynamics. While relying on extensive archival research to chart the relationship between the impulse to tame the river and the emergence of the world’s first international organizations, Yao moves beyond strict empirics to allow eighteenth and nineteenth century poetries and works of fiction to complement her argument. Instructively, however, instead of understanding these merely as extensions of Western imperial imaginaries, the book demonstrates their productive aspects, linking literary work to the material machinations of imperial relations. What we call Yao’s dialectical method consists in the careful moving between an analysis of literary imaginaries and the emergence of the modern international system through the interactions of European state bureaucrats, diplomats, and politicians. In this way, her work applies the method of concretization by inquiring into the social and historical relations that were productive of, and produced by, the abstract imaginaries fetishized within poetry and fiction.

In this review, I develop an outsider's point of view. Conceding that in the spe- cific context of revolt and resistance, the term has made a contribution, I dispute its usefulness in a general history of the 'below'. I propose that the very term 'subaltern', by begging in a research programme bound up with polarity, coercion, and resistance, has been limiting in the study of the underprivileged peoples in south Asia. This critique has two basic points.

(1) First, the term 'subaltern' refers to a fuzzy set of people. If they are the poor, then Subaltern Studies fails in meeting the most basic criterion for an adequate historiography of the poor, possessing a nuanced economic history. If they are the victims of domination, then they are indeterminate, for every victim was in principle also an oppressor. Search for ways out of that problem has almost always led Subaltern Studies to select and privilege some axes of domination over others, and to overlook the ambiguities characterising most relationships, between 'principals' and 'agents', or between the state and the subjects.

Yet, as one of the reviewers of this article pointed out, the term ‘subaltern’ has become in a certain way an abstract academic cul-de-sac, a rather elusive and rarely theorized concept in archaeological literature (see also González-Ruibal 2019b, 104–6). In fact, many analyses of the subaltern—not only in archaeology—have overlooked the heterogeneity of these groups and the existing antagonisms within them. In their homogenizing endeavour, these studies have conflated the peasant proprietor or better-off subaltern with the poor peasant (Brass 2017), or the discrimination of the Western female subject with the double effaced experiences of ‘Third World’ women (hooks et al. 2004; Mohanty 1991; Spivak 1988). In archaeology, scholars have very often conflated the subaltern with colonized and/or indigenous groups, disregarding the heterogeneity encompassed by the term (cf. Cañete Jiménez & Vives-Ferrándiz Sánchez 2011; Cuozzo & Pellegrino 2016; Dietler 2010; Ferris et al. 2014; Gnecco & Ayala 2011; Kistler & Mohr 2016; but see González-Ruibal 2019a; Liebmann & Murphy 2010; Spencer-Wood 2010). They have denied colonial violence by celebrating a peaceful cohabitation of colonist/colonized groups (cf. Antonaccio 2013; Greco & Mermati 2011; Malkin 2002; but see Delgado Hervás 2010; Zuchtriegel 2018); or they have disproportionally represented indigenous people as vanquishers of European colonial powers—see especially the case of colonial Chile (Boccara 2008; Dillehay 2007; Sauer 2015).

However, subalterns are neither (only) colonized people, nor homogeneous, quite the opposite. The subaltern is an invented concept that no-one has ever claimed. It does not refer to the identity of any known social group, nor is it an ideality shaped by political philosophers—peasant, proletariat, worker, citizen, indigenous, refugee, etc.—and asserted by historical beings for political reasons (Banerjee 2015, 39, 42–3). In fact, Gramsci stretched his notion of subalterns to a wide range of oppressed groups (1975, 2286): ‘Often, subaltern groups are originally of a different race (different religion and different culture) than the dominant groups, and they are often a mixture of different races, as it is the case of the slaves’. He also included peasants, religious groups and proletarians into the subaltern category (Gramsci 1975, 2286). In fact, Gramsci considered as subalterns all those subordinated groups whose political activity was ignored, misrepresented, or were on the margins of dominant discourses (Green 2013), similar to the SSG in India (Arnold 1984; Chaturvedi 2000; Guha 1988a, 35).

Freddie DeBoer makes a great point in his piece on what he calls ““: “This all largely descends from a related condition: many in the broad online left have adopted a norm where being an ally means that you never critique people who are presumed to be speaking from your side, and especially if they are seen as speaking from a position of greater oppression. I understand the need for solidarity, I understand the problem of undermining and derailing, and I recognize why people feel strongly that those who have traditionally been silenced should be given a position of privilege in our conversations. But critique drift demonstrates why a healthy, functioning political movement can’t forbid tactical criticism of those with whom you largely agree. Because critical vocabulary and political arguments are common intellectual property which gain or lose power based on their communal use, never criticizing those who misuse them ultimately disarms the left. Refusing to say ‘this is a real thing, but you are not being fair or helpful in making that accusation right now’ alienates potential allies, contributes to the burgeoning backlash against social justice politics, and prevents us from making the most accurate, cogent critique possible.” Look, I am Black. Also, sometimes, I can be wrong. Those two things are not mutually exclusive, and yet we have gotten to a point where any critique of tactics used by oppressed communities can result in being deemed “sexist/racist/insert oppression here-ist” and cast out of the Social Justice Magic Circle. And listen, maybe that is cool . Maybe the revolution that so many of these types speak about will simply consist of everyone spontaneously coming to consciousness and there will be no need for coalitions, give-and-take, or contact with people who do not know every word or phrase that these groups use as some sort of litmus test for the unwashed. But for the rest of us who reside in a reality-based world, where every social interaction is not tailored for your idiosyncratic indignations, we know that casting folks out for the tiniest of offenses will lead to a Left that will forever be marginalized and ineffective. I have stated before that the kind of people who put out these lists and engage in the kind of identitarian caterwauling that has become rote copy on the Internet might actually want that, as a world where left-wing activism is made potent and transformative will be one where they cannot simply take comfort in their cocoon of self-righteousness. But damn them when I can turn on my computer and see one Black person after another being gunned down by police. Damn them when we have a president that can sit there with a straight face and speak the words of freedom and liberation while . And damn them when we can get thousands of words on Patricia Arquette drunk at a party or how it is privileged to not like the same musicians that they do, but we cannot seem to get any thoughts on how the biggest moment for communities of color since the 1960s is being squandered in a hail of intergenerational squabbling. And do not even get me started on .

The Subaltern Studies project soon ran into a series of problems laid out most famously by Gayatri Spivak via an engagement with the figure of the subaltern woman.15 Spivak’s work posed a set of questions. Was it possible to recover the political consciousness of the subalterns as knowledge untainted by the exercise of power? To what extent was the notion of a ‘resisting subject’ itself a category born of European fantasies of their own mastery? And, in this respect, was the very attempt to represent the subaltern not also an act of epistemic domination akin to those undertaken by other elitist historians? In sum, did sympathetic ventriloquism induce the same affect as elitist silencing? Addressing these questions, Spivak carefully argued that Subaltern Studies was a politically necessary but necessarily irresolvable intellectual project.16 6 The Black Pacific Yet she went further than this. Because the subaltern could not appear ‘without the thought of the elite’, Spivak also proclaimed that the subaltern provided ‘the model for a general theory of consciousness’. Specifically, she argued that ‘the historical predicament of the colonial subaltern’ could be considered the ‘allegory of the predicament of all thought, all deliberative consciousness’.17 Philosophically, then, Spivak bade the subaltern to travel from the periphery to the centre, but only to become there the ‘recalcitrant difference’ that structured elite discourse.18 As the project was taken up in Western intellectual spaces, enabled by what I would call an opportunistic utilization of Spivak’s sympathetic critique, Subaltern Studies was made to proffer less an opportunity to decolonize knowledge regimes and more another faculty through which to deconstruct knowledge of the Western self. As such, Subaltern Studies could interface with – even be collapsed into – the post-structuralist project (broadly conceived), a project that was also decidedly post-Sartre in its singular obsession with the modern (read colonizing European) subject.19 With these movements the peripheral figures on the Graphic’s imperial world map, now encoded as subalterns, were once more emptied of epistemic authority so as to become the cipher through which to interpret the proclivities of Britannica – the self and master. Perhaps these incorporations were reflective of the general trajectories of the Western academy after the defeat of the Third World project and the apparent re-incorporation of troublesome populations back into neo-imperial orbits through neo-liberal governance. No doubt, the end of the Second World project (i.e. global communism) did nothing to arrest this movement; nor did the subsequent internationalization of the staff and student constituencies of Western universities through the globalization of elites rather than through the global democratization of life chances and the attendant decolonization of knowledge. Nevertheless, the originating democratic impulse has remained seminal to Subaltern Studies. Dipesh Chakrabarty still hopes for a ‘subaltern historiography that actually tries to learn from the subaltern’,20 although in his own work he marks the subaltern as Introduction 7 only an epistemic limit to historical knowledge.21 Spivak, meanwhile, has always read Subaltern Studies as a political intervention, that is, as ‘a strategic use of positivist essentialism in a scrupulously visible interest’.22 More recently, however, Spivak has focused on pedagogy, a move honed through her practitioner work with marginalized communities. She has given up her ‘apologetic formula’ for Subaltern Studies as the strategic use of essentialism, and has found instead, ‘a different one emerging from my own subaltern study: learning to learn from below’. ‘This one’, Spivak suggests (and here I would recall the fate of Sartre’s intervention in the Western academy), ‘will have had few takers.’23 I want to dwell on these (somewhat slim) openings in Subaltern Studies because to my mind the transmogrification of Subaltern Studies from an engaged democratic project into postcolonial critique has (unintentionally) serviced the colonial ‘fatal impact’ thesis.24 This thesis rests on the assumption that indigenous cultures could not withstand or compete with the sophistication of European civilization: they would have to die or transform into substitute versions of the conquering culture. At the epistemic level I would argue that the category of the subaltern is part of this erasure. In his own way, even Gramsci, the immediate source of the category of the subaltern, is complicit in this erasure. He states that some social strata – especially the peasantry – seem to be incapable of developing their own intellectuals because in the very moment of their formation as intellectuals they cease to be ‘organic’ to that stratum.25 But what if, in the pursuit of ‘epistemic justice’,26 the democratic impulse of Subaltern Studies were to be separated from the very term ‘subaltern’? The seedbed of such a decolonial project would not, then, be found in academic discourse but in the living knowledge traditions of colonized peoples.27 Maligned, ridiculed, attacked and disavowed by colonial forces, these traditions have nevertheless retained a tenacious thread of vitality that provides for the possibility of a retrieval of thought and action that addresses global injustices in ways otherwise to the colonial science of the gaze. Crucially, these projects have refused – and more often than not ignored – the injunctions of the 8 The Black Pacific fatal impact thesis. Their ethos of living other-wise is expressed by Bob Marley in the following verse: ‘we refuse to be what you wanted us to be, we are what we are, that’s the way it’s going to be’.28 In light of these decolonial projects, the category of the subaltern becomes singularly unhelpful, if not meaningless. For the colonized figures on the periphery of the Graphic’s world map have always named and re-named themselves as, for example, ‘sufferers’,29 Black Israelites, Ethiopians, RasTafari, Tūhoe, Ngāti Kuri, Māori, Ham and Shem. And, heretically, these peoples have often determined the meaning of Britannica on her behalf as they cultivate useful understandings of their relationships to power. This is precisely what Reitu Harris, president of the predominantly Māori Black Power gang, does when he states that ‘to me the word “Pākehā” no longer stands for “European” … it stands for a type of person who … when it rains, will rush for shelter themselves and not care about others getting wet’.30

With the opening of the discourse came new problems, the most important being elucidated by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (1942-) who asked a very good question in her groundbreaking 1988 essay, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” The term “subaltern” comes out of the empire itself, for it is a British term for a military designation. A subaltern is a lieutenant, an officer whose rank is one notch higher than the non-commissioned soldiers and below the high ranking officers. The term was carried over from the military to connote the “natives” who were designated as mid-level bureaucrats and factotum figures in the service of the Empire. In order to be effective the subaltern had to learn the language of the colonizer and thus lost authenticity and were slightly removed from their native culture. By speaking the language of the dominator or the ruler, the subaltern validated or “recognized” the Master.

The trap for the colonized was certainly recognized by the early post-colonial writers but it was a problem that has yet to be resolved. When one writes/speaks in what one hopes is an authentic voice, such as Luce Irigaray, then one is not always heard and the impact is limited to one’s own community. When post-colonial critics use the theories of European philosophers thinkers and apply these Eurocentric ideas to the post-colonial condition, these same writers who question the appropriateness of Europeans speaking of and about the same colonial condition are speaking in the language of the master. As the feminist Audre Lorde (1934-1992) gave a talk in 1984 titled, “The Master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.” As a double outsider, a black and lesbian scholar, she asked,

FULTON COUNTY, Ga. - Atlanta rapper Playboi Carti has reportedly been arrested in Georgia after allegedly choking his pregnant girlfriend during an argument about a paternity test. TMZ reports that the arrest affidavit showed the victim told Fulton County police that Carti, whose real name is Jordan Carter, grabbed her throat and held her until she could barely breathe on Dec. 20. The woman reportedly told police that she was 14 weeks pregnant at the time and thought she was going to die. According to TMZ's report, the woman claimed the incident began when she tried to talk to Carter about the baby, which led to an argument over a paternity test that escalated into the alleged physical attack. The woman says she was able to get away thanks to a witness, but she says he tried to pull her out of a car and stop her from using the vehicle's SOS feature to report the attack police. TMZ says police wrote in the incident report that the woman had visible injuries to her neck, chest, and back.

The commodification of hip-hop culture is a fundamental issue as it has led to a paradox of rap attempting to destabilise dominant hegemonic paradigms, while equally being dependent on the hegemonic frameworks of popular culture and capitalist production. To a great extent, this dependency has placed the voice of those rendered mute in U.S society back into the hands of white capitalist structures. The racial infrastructure within the music industry may therefore be predominantly responsible for the stagnancy in the social progression of rap music. There is a vicious cycle of contradiction surrounding hip-hop’s image, subsequently damaging hip-hop culture as a form of liberation: the image of abuse of narcotics, misogyny and profanity has been strategically projected by the mainstream media as a tactic to profit corporate America. These are the very features that gain the most disapproval toward hip-hop as a culture, yet ironically has been enhanced by commercialism and exploits the image of the criminalised black youth to become a commodity of popular culture.

The critical school’s writing about advanced capitalism and the domination of the culture industries provide the theoretical base that explains hip hop’s operation within the culture industry. Marcuse (1964) presents the culture industry, as termed by Adorno and Horkheimer (1972), as an oppressive and entrenched societal machine. Marcuse (1964) views popular culture entities as creating false needs such as the need to “relax, to have fun, to behave and consume in accordance with the advertisements” (p. 5). He also suggests these needs or values become internalized but ultimately are still the product of the dominant society and its views. For rappers that view themselves as raging against the system, Marcuse would feel they have internalized capitalistic views and the structure of their industry is such that it is a willing arm, a popular culture clone of capitalism. 39 Marcuse theorizes that dominant society and culture accomplishes its goal by preconditioning members of all classes of society to have essentially similar needs, wants and purchasing goals. He supposes that this system is so effective that dissent is reduced to proposing oppositional ideas within the existing system, as opposed to truly challenging the system itself. This is what is occurring with rap music. Even artists attempting to propose somewhat oppositional ideas within the popular culture are functioning in a subsystem whose framework is deeply capitalistic, augmenting and even propelling the larger system of capitalism many of the artists decry. A great many rappers have accepted the values handed down by the elite and espouse fervent consumerism, cutthroat business savvy and traditional patriarchy, but the other rappers are still essentially helping to perpetuate those beliefs. Marcuse’s evaluation of society characterizes the typical citizen as one inundated with the ideals created and perpetuated by society, so that even a person’s impulses are an attempt to seek the path that the culture industry has set out for the person long in advance. Marcuse (1964) quotes fellow critical school theorist Theodor Adorno in providing the observation that “advanced industrial culture is more ideological than its predecessor, inasmuch as today the ideology is in the process of production itself” (p. 11). Marcuse says that “the productive apparatus and the goods and services which it produces “sell” or impose the social system as a whole” (1964:11). The framework of each element of the hip hop subculture, most notably the rap element, is distinctly capitalistic structurally. Marcuse’s argument suggests that rappers operating within the structure of the hip hop subculture function as salespersons for dominant society and the mainstream social system, whether they attempt to present themselves as oppositional to mainstream culture and values or not.

The way rap culture is organized and practiced, it is structurally similar to capitalism. In a late capitalistic society like America, this synchronicity allowed hip hop to go from a localized practice to a central element of American culture. The adaptation of hip hop into the mainstream was facilitated by its capitalistic characteristics. While the hip hop culture arguably envisions itself as opposed to and outside of the ideals and views of dominant culture and society, because of its structure it is actually an integral part of the culture industry and thus enhances dominant culture. The element of rap that best exhibits hip hop’s capitalistic characteristics is also what it is primarily known for: Emceeing. In capitalism, individuals or collectives start up businesses and compete directly against other businesses. Rap artists closely match capitalistic trends because they directly challenge and compete against one another. Businesses market their products by 32 promoting them whenever an appropriate opportunity emerges, and sometimes even when it seems inappropriate. While the image of early hip hop is painted as that of a localized phenomenon whose practitioners sought artistic pleasure while eschewing material gain, Rose (1994) writes that hip hop artists were simply unaware that they could get paid for their activities: The problem was not that they were uniformly uninterested in profit; rather many of the earliest practitioners were unaware that they could profit from their pleasure. Once this link was made, hip hop artists began marketing themselves wholeheartedly. (p. 40) Rappers have been battling one another since hip hop began. In hip hop rappers directly battle other rappers. In capitalism, businesses and corporations are known to promote their product as being better than the leading competitor. Similarly, it is embedded in the standard rhetoric of a rapper to deem themselves and their work better than other rappers, whether on record or off. Even during a collaborative recording effort with other rappers they are affiliated with or friends with, they still proclaim their superiority over all other rappers. On the 2006 song “Speed Racin’” rapper Chaundon appears, proudly exclaiming how he is better than all other rappers. This includes the three other emcees who recorded it with him. This is standard practice in rap. Rappers spare no expense to promote their emceeing brand furtively much like businesses relentlessly advertise their products and services.

This consumption of rap music as an apolitical or non-racial platform allows for the purchasing power of the White majority to dictate what is or is not popular within the genre. As hip-hop transitioned throughout the 2000s and 2010s, rap’s biggest financial backers, outside of 9 Black people, were White consumers (Montford, 2014). Other scholarly work showed how Gangsta rap music changed after reaching the mainstream audiences and became influenced by the purchasing power of the White manufactures. Bakari Kitwana (1995; 2005) explores the question of how White ownership and investment into rap music overall has changed the cultural product throughout time. As time progressed, marketers and investors in the genre decided to figure out what particular components of the music was most enjoyed and maximized production around what audiences liked the most (Kitwana, 1995). It was determined that songs that were dedicated to drug usage, fantastically violent misadventures, surreal ‘hood life and the promises of potential unchecked riches - were what the audiences craved the most when enjoying Gangsta’ rap, especially when combined with a seductive beat (Kitwana, 1995). Some of the historical origins of Gangsta rap as a platform for underrepresented poor Black life and urban living were washed out for a more hyper-violent depiction of this reality that borders on glamorizing gangrelated violence and the anti-social tendencies central to gangsterism (Kitwana, 1995). This commercialization of Gangsta’ rap transformed as a playground for Whites to participate in an “exotic” and potentially romanticized environment from the safety of their suburban homes. As a result of this commercialization and influence of the production of Gangsta’ rap, rappers themselves began to see the genre as a lucrative avenue to project themselves into as a potential way out of the permanent “underclass” and into a life of financial stability.

Within hip-hop culture, rap music is the most popular vehicle of freedom of expression for black African Americans to project their voices; artists such as Kendrick Lamar, Childish Gambino and Jay-Z dominate popular culture as some of the top rap artists, utilising their music to incorporate subliminal messages regarding black oppression as a liberating and politically progressive form of popular culture. However, the issue of rap music as an oppositional phenomenon lies within the relationship between rap artists and patriarchal capitalist structures. Hip-hop may be considered counteractive by utilising rap music to oppose the hegemonic frameworks of white America, yet it is simultaneously dependent on this very framework that it resists in order to reach success.

Rap music has become a primary distributor in capitalist production and consumption. Contemporary discourse on rap recognizes rap’s dependence on dominant culture of capitalist production and consumerism. African Americans constitute the majority of hip-hop culture such as rap artists, dancers, producers and DJ’s, and have become dependent on white dominated America as its primary distributor and consumer. This dependency raises several issues: firstly, dominate groups of hegemonic structures have control of hip-hop’s production and distribution. The corporate control over hip-hop translates to controlling hip-hop’s image and voice through dictating its production, marketing and distribution. The social hierarchy and structure that produced the oppression of black and minorities (the white supremacist capitalist patriarchy) seem to have control over minorities with white dominated mainstream media being its primary market and consumer. It is the white supremacist institutes that are profiting off of rap artists as chief controllers.

First, although the dominant conceptualization of hip-hop authenticity does not seem to recognize non-U.S. cultural members, these global hip-hop members are still a real part of the hip-hop community. The concept of “keeping it real” is so prevalent among artists that claim hip hop authenticity, and as O’Hanlon (2006) found, Australian hip-hop artists maintain this American hip-hop cultural norm by also staying true to their own cultural identity, as they ”keep it real” with their Australian heritage. With the Australian hip-hop artists studied by O’Hanlon, the desire to promote identification with a local audience overrides any allegiance to an American pronunciation, which is typically defined as African-American English (AAE). The Australian English accent is performed by Australian hip-hop artists to aid identification with their target audience, which mostly consists of the working class youth of the urban areas of Australia, to maintain a local authenticity in Australia, which is also validated with the hip-hop philosophy of authenticity.

Sexuality also impacts how one can be seen as authentic in hip-hop culture. For example, a homosexual artist expressing their truth about being a part of a culture that discriminates against them would not be seen as authentic to many hip-hop cultural members because they are homosexual, and homosexuality has most often been trivialized and discussed in a negative manner in hip-hop culture.

I’d say that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. With capitalism comes power and capitalism has corrupted hip hop. That’s my answer to that question. It’s unfortunate to see what it’s become. It’s been hard to watch how it’s veered from education to purely entertainment. I’m sort of like a purist really and I’m just not pleased with the direction that his gone. I think there’s still an outlier of people trying to bring it back, you know some of the people from New York, like we spoke about earlier Kendrick Lamar, and the J Cole’s of this world. Even I’d argue that Drake has something very few people have. He’s invented a lot with his time signatures and structure and narrative in ways that a lot of the mumble rappers can’t do, and really just don’t care actually. That’s the most important thing you know? They seem to just want to make money and think that it just doesn’t matter. They’re disengaged. To me that speaks to the sort of disenchanted way lots of millennial view the world. They don’t think about the real ramifications of their actions, they think nothing really matters and just think the world will sort itself and for me that’s tied in with politics. Hundreds of thousands of people voted against the war in Iraq and nothing happened. Young people just think there’s no point in anything because when people raise their voices and just nothing happens. That whole attitude carries right through to artists to the point where we have art that doesn’t want to say anything, that’s disinterested, that’s disconnected and you ultimately end up with mumble rap. You end up with people who are making music with no respect or awareness of repercussions to what they’re doing.

Hip-hop made it comfortable for me to express my narrative about being a dark-skinned Black girl growing up in the heated social arena of the South, and the U.S. abroad. I would not be as willing as I am to express the sentiments I have on the current state of hip hop, as I do with this thesis on the assimilation of hip-hop culture in advertising, and hip-hop authenticity. To situate myself in this project, Rose (2008) claims that “the worst of what we find in the [hip-hop] music and imagery is commercially promoted, encouraged, produced, and distributed by major 2 corporations” (p. 77). The authenticity and the pseudo-purity of hip-hop culture has already become tainted due to the business of selling records, and the promotion of an image that record companies and A&R representatives want their artists to portray. Yet, there are also advertising marketers that take certain foundational and popular elements of hip-hop culture and attach claims of hip-hop culture to sell their products, with imagery, hip-hip vernacular, and even a hip hop artist in their advertisements. Though one can understand how many of these hip-hop artists have to pursue other ventures outside of hip-hop entertainment, due to the constraints and control performed by their music executives’ objectives of their record company, I argue that the practice of selling a culture in advertisements is inherently problematic. I do not agree with the current depictions of hip-hop as a culture in the media, specifically television, because the youth of our culture is at risk of a media-generated cultural assimilation, in which they may internalize these falsified representations of an authentic hip-hop culture based on the commodification of hip-hop culture in the media.

In this introduction to his late 2020 offering, Whole Lotta Red, mumble rapper Playboi Carti seems to respond to surplus outlined earlier in the work of Fred Moten with his constant, repeated refrain of “Never too much” over a rumbling, distorted beat. We as an audience are left to speculate, “what is never too much?” Perhaps this refers to bling, the unending desire for material gains that has become synonymous with hip hop. In the music of Carti and his peers, there is never too much material value, but there is also never too much affective value. To quote another of his peers, Lil Uzi Vert, “money got longer, speaker got louder, car got faster,” in this world they’re crafting, there is never too much money, there is never too much volume, never too much speed, never too much sexual arousal, never too much intoxication. Shoota begins with a lone muted synthetic keyboard, slightly touched in reverb. The texture is familar but foreign, more resembling a dinky Casio patch than an immaculate recorded Steinway. The descending piano figure repeats twice before Philly’s Lil Uzi Vert enters the stage, warming up his voice like a supercar revving its engine. The performance requires preparation. As Uzi croons “Nooow is my time,” pizzicato strings dance forwards and backwards, creating a Bacon-eqse portrait of a deranged mechanical orchestra of digital automatons playing in tandem. The sound reminds me of confetti or an explosion of fireworks; prismatic and celebratory, a flurry of vivid color. The texture disappears as soon as it comes, leaving us back with the sole keyboard texture, filling an imaginary stadium or auditorium. Uzi’s voice enters again, in the form of an overdubbed Maaly Raw’s producer tag, the pitched up and playful “That-that-that-that-that-that be Maaly Raw '' that bounces around from left to right the speaker. A producer tag is like the opening credits to their film. The most successful trap producers are known by their tags alone, their tags are greeted with roars of excitement at festivals and in clubs. They become a part of the song’s lyrics. Another key role of the producer tag is to signal where the drop of a trap production is. Often, trap songs begin with a drumless sample or composition, until the producer tag appears often in the first few seconds of the beat with the arrival of an 808 bass and digitally sequenced hi-hats, snares, cymbal, and additional synth textures. This moment where the 808 comes in and fills out the rumbling low-end of a song is called the drop. The distortion of an 808 is overbearing, raw noise, a low pervasive rumble that becomes the defining feature of a space. High volumes and large speakers are essential for these invocations into sonic space, this ritual sonic intoxication that envelops one’s body. The rumbles are inescapable in a club, a car, a studio, or a pair of headphones. Trap music creates and claims space, its potent low frequencies are expansive. They push through thin apartment walls, bound through the doors of busy nightclubs, and pour out of Ubers parked at red lights. My encounters with these 808s fill me with deep pleasure, both affective and historical. The rich resonances vibrate my body like a massage: they rattle the seats of my car and close up my throat. The 808 is heard as it is felt, it shakes the body.

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