The Big Payback II: Consumption, Style, and the Critical Afterlives of Kultural Signifiers

Day and time: Friday (March 20) · 11:15–12:45
Location: Job Lounge
Format: Talk

Banal Hip Hop: Kultural Signifiers in Everyday Commodification

Presented by: Jaspal Singh & Elloit Cardozo

"What gets lost and what can be gained when Hip Hop Kultural signifiers – like graffiti aesthetics, b-boy embodiments, naming practices, music technology or even the word ‘Hip Hop’ itself – become embedded in the branding of mainstream commodities like fire crackers, beverages or nose strips? Previous critical Hip Hop scholarship has pointed to the racist histories and the depoliticizing effects of such capitalist appropriation of our Kultural signifiers (Judy 2012; Forman 2014, Alim 2023). We align with this critique. Yet, we also note that such mainstream commodification can, in some cases, open up a simulacrum of the real (Baudrillard 1994) that Hip Hop affiliated youth, especially those living on the peripheries of brand capitalism, may use to enter the Hip Hop cosmos. We draw on examples from our linguistic ethnographic research in South Asia and Europe to trace how such banal commodification can engender significant – even life-changing – moments of rupture that allow youth to access globalized spaces and imagine themselves as part of a global community of Hip Hop Heads. We argue that, with increased mediatization and the expansion of commodity capitalism into the global south since the 1990s, such banal Hip Hop deserves our renewed critical attention.

Beyond Protest: the Critical Surplus of Mainstream Rap espousing Consumerist Values

Presented by: Floris Bosscher

Much has been written on Hip Hop’s protest character, and for good reason. Yet, with Hip Hop’s ascent to one of the most popular genres, one could apply an Adornian critique in which consumer capitalism has weakened the genre's critical character by incorporating it into billboards, major venues, and supermarket speakers. Moreover, as Margaret Hunter argues, much of mainstream Hip Hop seemingly celebrates consumerist values rather than protest tropes. Indeed, popular artists like Future, Headie One, Gazo, and Kevin appear to reflect primarily on a luxurious and hedonistic lifestyle. This can, on one level, be read as a celebration of ‘making it’, following a ‘rags to riches’ narrative that Deleuze and Guattari would denote as a linear form of ‘tree thinking’. However, for the close listener, this music also contains a surplus value that can be explored by following the rhizomatic ‘traces’ in the lyrics that destabilise and uproot the neoliberal capitalist narrative. Following this, I aim to show how such lyrics deconstruct the capitalist promise of ‘linear’ redemption by revealing what Berlant has called late capitalism’s ‘cruel optimism’. By doing so, my submission deconstructs the distinction between political and non-political rap and explores the critical, if not political, character of the latter.

Fashioning Hip Hop

Presented by: Tanveer Ahmed

Fashion in Hip Hop has received limited attention from fashion theorists, historians and educators (Turman 2023), despite Hip Hop’s position as a global phenomenon and its celebration in several fashion exhibitions (see Fresh, Fly, and Fabulous: 50 Years of Hip Hop Style at The Museum at FIT (2023). Responding to how ‘Hip Hop offers the Hip Hoppa a space free from colonial logics.’ (Ortiz, 2021, p.1), this presentation reflects on a decolonial fashion course taught at undergraduate level at Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London, UK in which students created zines that explored an issue in fashion using Hip Hop approaches. Using Hip Hop pedagogies, the course taught Hip Hop’s political and radical dress codes, especially anti anti-Blackness, feminist and queer dress. Hip hop’s global expansion from baggy jeans and oversized T-shirts has resulted in both problematic appropriation and collaboration with luxury fashion including US brands Ralph Lauren and Tommy Hilfiger and European fashion houses of Dior, Louis Vuitton, and Gucci. For fashion education, there is a pressing need to show the value of marginalised Black, global majority and working class fashion histories and further the project to decolonise and de-link fashion from racial capitalism; Hip Hop provides the tools to creatively do this.