Hip-hop has been commodified and sapped of its radical potential and instead highlighted the ghetto as a place of biopolitical surveillance

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 recognises 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, dominant 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.

Secondly, there is an issue of commodifying black rage and violence. This has jeopardised and stereotyped the authentic image of hip-hop culture and the black members affiliated with it. It has been embedded with critical discourse and misconceptions that rap artists and their consumers are supporting materialism, gun violence and drug abuse. These assumptions surrounding rap music thinly veils anti-black comments and feeds into the racist lens of portraying black adolescents as threatening and violent. Ironically, the very features of rap music that are criticised such as its profanity, violence and aggression have become one of the key selling market points in today’s popular culture.

What began in the 1970s as a cultural expression created to provide an outlet from the destitute urban inner cities, through the control of corporate America, hip-hop has now become profitable through packaging and distributing the commodification of ‘black rage’ for mainstream consumption and enjoyment. The perpetuation of utilising violence and the ‘gangsta lifestyle’ as a selling point is ultimately the opposite of what the emergence of political rap stood for, as Christopher Smith contends: “Public Enemy made the ghetto visible in order to abolish it. Many of today’s rappers make the ghetto visible in order to sell and be sold.”