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

hop culture which maintain focus on social critique, social justice, and transformation: hip hop that continues in the tradition of its original founders but remains largely underground.

This book is organized in such a way as to facilitate an analysis of contemporary hip hop culture and its role in capitalist America. Chapter 2 embarks upon a theoretical discussion of how a dominant culture/ideology incorporates some dimension of a subculture into its mainstream. It analyzes how a subculture which in its initial foundation was oriented to confront the dominant culture is expertly caressed or coerced into the service of the dominant hegemonic culture/ideology. Moreover, it forces one to examine the process by which subcultures become part of a confirmed hegemonic culture. This line of inquiry leads one into an interrogation of the relationship between artist and culture and the extent to which artists are creators of culture, reflectors of culture, or both. The relationships between subculture, artist, and the dominant culture are, we contend, dialectical ones, in which the artist reflects some values of the dominant culture and, in many instances, helps to reinforce the dominant value system while at the same time challenging some dimensions of the dominant culture/ideology.

History and the structural location of the artist within the societal hierarchy influence the artist's ability to challenge the mainstream. However, the extent to which the subculture becomes part of the hegemonic culture is dependent upon the extent of the gains (economic and ideological) that the hegemonic classes can make by incorporation, as well as the amount of control that dominant groups in society, who benefit from the hegemonic culture/ideology, have over the instruments of cultural communications. The work of James Brow (1996) is particularly helpful in understanding this process. For Brow, there are structural