Black music has been co-opted by neoliberal capitalism. The aff is reliant on people hearing music circulating the markets which forces de-radicalization, re-entrenching misogyny and homophobia.

As a global youth movement, rap music is a powerful tool for social/political engagement. Since its emergence, rap and its discourses (counter-hegemonic or otherwise) reference a panoply of identity politics: race, gender, sexuality, class, religion, etc. Inevitably, the dissemination of rap music as a commodity necessitates that artists negotiate the ideological hegemony of the marketplace: neoliberal capitalism. Hip hop artists who create subversive art must negotiate between two extremities of inaudibility: either de-radicalize in order to successfully circulate within the markets (dialogue is silenced within the commodity), or radicalize and forgo market exposure (dialogue is silenced within the markets). In this way, the marketplace resists radical change. In order to assess the activist potential of rap, one of the strongest forms of musical protest, it is necessary to confront the sanitizing effects of capitalist ideologies on rap and its potential as musical protest.

In this paper, I will explore how hip hop artists negotiate their selves (bodies, identities) within the regime of values of neoliberal capitalism (Appadurai 1988). I take a specific counter-movement within a globalized, translocal hip hop movement, focusing on the queer rap activist community of South Africa and its relationship to American rap activism. South Africa is one of a few African nations which features both the protection and strong social acceptance of queer citizens (Pichon 2019), fostering a strong queer rap community. Queer hip hop, both in the USA and South Africa, reveals how issues of race, gender, sexuality, and class are concurrent and mutually interdependent. Through a consideration of queer rappers in South Africa, I consider how emotions and meanings elicited within specific rap performances negotiate both the ideological hegemonies of neoliberal capitalism and the revolutionary goals of the queer community. My goal is to understand how South African rap activists repurpose a globalized, capitalist hip hop movement to promote local dialogue. “One common theme throughout Africa has been the question of how to adapt hip-hop so that it represents local and national issues without incurring violence.“ (Morgan & Bennett 2011, 189) South African (queer) hip hop intersects heavily with American (queer) rap. For this reason, I begin by summarizing the historical contexts of both nations. I describe a brief history queer hip hop in the United States, and its relationship to globalized gangsta rap. Next, I trace the same history within South Africa, its relationship to the United States, and the recent wave of queer rap activism in South Africa. Through a musical case-study, I consider three songs from the South African rapper, Dope Saint Jude, and the relationship between activist rhetoric and commercial success. Finally, I reflect on strategies for artist activism at large.

[Hip Hop in the United States]

The integration of black American culture within capitalism necessitated the adoption of the white capitalist value regime — a struggle between black revolutionary discourses and white hegemonic values. In the first half of the 20th century, the civil rights movement sought equal access to financial capital for black Americans. White capitalists excluded black America from economic activity, citing “unheteronormative” behaviors (matriarchical structures and the historical oversexualization of black men): “the state continued to deny African Americans equal status … by holding black women responsible for black men’s economic devastation.“(Xinling 2018, 19). Mid-20th century, the civil rights movement adopted a strategy to heteronormatize black men “focused on desexualizing the black male body and preserving the sexual purity of black women” (ibid., 21). To achieve the White puritan masculine ideal, weak/effeminate behaviors would be suppressed (producing homophobia) and male dominance should be asserted (producing misogyny). It is thus that homophobia and misogyny were born simultaneously with the new black masculinity.