Ghetto echoes: Hip hop's subversive aesthetics

This dissertation encompasses an examination of hip hop culture, and situates the ghetto as a primal scene of this culture. Focus is centered on a hybridized theory of popular culture to explain and analyze the aesthetic value of rap music and the wider hip hop culture. Hip hop is more than rap music. It is a movement of collective conscience. To define or name this movement, infused with a music genre, art, form, fashion and language is not transparent. Envisioning hip hop as a cultural force would be more apt.

Hip hop found its incubus and generative creativity in the complex inter-relations of subversive aesthetic fueled in the South Bronx of New York City among African Americans, Caribbean and Latin American immigrant population and other disenfranchised people during the 1960s and 1970s. It has grown since and, has become susceptible to global and local market forces and values beyond the immediacy of the ghetto as much as it spins between civil rights and civil disobedience. Hip hop sutures the nodal complexities of an assemblage of fetish sexual economics, race, commerce, and commodity reification into capital relations at times threatening to its existence. It has been able to resist, intercept and create in harmony be it on a minor note or line of flight.

Examination in this dissertation centers on the premise that the ghetto is a register of past and present in the national construction and discourse of space and race. Analysis in this study is governed by the following working definition. Aesthetics is the sounding (echo) of polyvocal voices from a primal locale (the ghetto) that, in turn, leads to the shaping of ideology that fuels the imagination to be creative in the face of overarching social constraint; and any attempt to politicize the denial of that imagination is viewed as subversive. Intent in this examination is to hip hop as counter hegemonic.