Hip Hop and Inequality: Searching for the "Real" Slim Shady By S ...

Chapter 2

Locating Rhymes IN
Society

Hip hop and rap form an intricate world of extremes with regard to lifestyle, fashion, ethics, language, musical forms, and, more than ever, the creation of a culture. It is a culture that at the center has white and nonwhite business moguls who mainstream a once subcultural art form that emerged to deal with many unfulfilled dreams of the post–civil rights era. Post-soul art forms, which we contextualize within an enterprising hip hop and rap framework, become, as Eithne Quinn observes, “…a metonym for the fragmented, ‘feel-bad’ politics and poetics of recent neo-conservative times, just as soul serves as a symbol for the perceived ethical certainties and positivist politics of the civil rights era” (1999, 188). At the same time, however, as hip hop culture has been mainstreamed and commodified, its oppositional tendencies