Hip-hop has been corrupted by capitalism

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.