| Chapter 1: | Introduction |
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It also emerged in a period where changes in pre-Internet technology and the media allowed for capitalist enterprise to make significant profits while at the same time reinforcing certain types of inequality, a central tenet for capitalist accumulation. To make our case, we intend to use the words of popular white rapper Eminem as our guide: “Will the real Slim Shady please stand up, please stand up.”
Our aim is to apply sociological interrogation to understanding one dimension of popular culture. This book is not intended to be a book on musicology or the intricacies of rhymes and beats. Rather, it is an attempt to look at hip hop culture as part of an integrated social structure with an ideological membrane. This membrane holds the structure in place and allows power to be organized around and exercised along the lines of race, class, and gender. The major goal is to use some significant sociological concepts to understand the rise, popularity, and power of hip hop culture as well as its role in the ideology of contemporary capitalist America. The intent is to analyze hip hop culture not just as a black-white struggle, but rather to locate it in the broader context of a capitalist society that is based on accumulation and exploitation.
Historically, capitalist society depends on inequality to perpetuate itself, and it is always based on some combination of race, class, and gender variables. This book explores how hip hop culture and its ubiquitous representations in the capitalist marketplace inspire a substantive ideology that maintains and perpetuates positions of power and privilege in the emerging