The Vinyl Ain't Final - book review

posted on behalf of Kendra Hoerst

One unifying theme underlying the selections from The Vinyl Ain’t Final: Hip Hop and the Globalization of Black Popular Culture is the influence urban planning has had on the development of hip hop worldwide. As we saw in Popular Culture in the Age of White Flight, policy makers’ conscious and deliberate decisions regarding housing and have direct implications for the political and economic milieu of hip hop artists. These similar factors create cohesiveness in hip hop worldwide as a tool for creating a collective identity, whether black or not, through popular media. For example, French hip hop arises within cités and the banlieu (157), just as in the Bay Area’s ghettos (83). In “From Azeem to Zion-I: The Evolution of Global Consciousness in Bay Area Hip Hop,” Arnold links “the grim murder rates of ghetto youth” to the growth of hip hop worldwide. He writes, “One reason for this might be that the freedom of expression inherent in hip hop has been somewhat of a universal language” (83). The lyrics that most of this anthology’s authors emphasize point to hip hop as a unifying reaction to an economic system that creates and maintains these neighborhoods. However, as both Basu and Magubane further detail in the articles I will focus on, the picture of this unification is complicated by the fact that the control over the production and distribution lies outside of these neighborhoods.
Basu’s “Hip Hop: Cultural Clout, Corporate Control, and the ‘Carceral Cast,’” dismantles what he calls the “much celebrated hype of rap moguls and artists livin’ large in baronial splendor” (27) by tracing the careers of two artists, Lil’ Slim and T-Bone. While their music grew out of the same protest movement Daulatzai, Arnold, Heleson, and Magubane all point to, Basu reminds us that white privilege undermines Lil’ Slim and T-Bone’s efforts. The majority of labels are owned by whites, and while the rappers’ backgrounds lend what the industry considers legitimacy to their music, many of the consumers are white. Basu contends that hip hop “is troublingly beholden to commercial interests and professionals whose social perceptions and ethical codes have an ignoble history of representing ‘Blackness’ in the worst possible ways, often with the complicity of Black folks themselves” (40). He traces this perception of blackness, which the industry perpetuates through hip hop, to the incarceration rates of black youth in general, and these rappers in particular. Although hip hop gives these artists the opportunity to express themselves and participate a worldwide community, Basu sees the enterprise as potentially self-defeating. I agree with the majority of Basu’s analysis, but his over-arching glosses leave little room for the complexity I am sure underlies both hip hop production and distribution. I would have appreciated a more detailed look at the role black producers play.
Similarly, Mugabane connects South African hip hop to a worldwide movement motivated by ghetto conditions. He cites another scholar, who argues that hip hop is “an aesthetic response to the urban malaise that accompanied the trans-nationalization of the American economy” (212) Still, Mugabane balances his analysis between connecting South African artists to their African American inspirations and emphasizing the distinct contributions each make. Both African American artists and South Africans have little control over the global distribution of their music, as “White owned and controlled media conglomerates determine which African-American cultural products enter the global arena” (211). Despite the value South African artists and audiences attach to local production, transnational corporations twist their representations globally. Mugabane argues, “It is well known that the majority of rap music (perhaps as much as 70 percent) by the White youth consumer market, which is hungry for caricatured images of Black gangsters and pimps—a postmodern form of minstrelsy” (211). These artists are co-opted as vehicles for advertisements and the development of South African consumerism, rather the maintenance the counter-culture they express. In sum, both Basu and Mugabane locate hip hop as an international form of protest, but they argue that its subversion has been skewed by the force of a white-dominated industry.