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

have been blunted and co-opted into reinforcing many of the values that contribute to sustained inequality, the very thing that gave rise to its birth.

Hip hop culture, which was at the fringes of society in the late 1980s, is now in the mainstream. To understand how such images, symbols, and icons are transformed is to explore the intricate relationship among economic, cultural/ideological, and social sectors of the society. Moreover, in exploring the process of transformation, we have to look at values, the marketplace, and how the marketplace and values are linked through the media industry. The contemporary media cultivate, repackage, and market certain cultural products which fulfill the baseline of contemporary capitalism, namely, the making of profits which reinforce entrenched dominant power. This is not a linear process, however, and is sometimes misbegotten and filled with pronounced contrasts. It is also how the various media representations of the Fugees allow middle-class audiences as well as street-wise hip hop fans to enjoy their music, since they are tied to some core dimensions of the American value system. Kathleen Abowitz contends that “the Fugees, like many hip hop artists, are represented in the tradition of the Horatio Alger American myth: African American street kids, against all odds, claw their way out of poverty through work and determination” (1997, 411). Whether we discuss the Fugees, Jay-Z, or Kanye West, the shifting paradigm that raises hegemonic eyebrows is the process by which Horatio Alger meets hip hop. Hip hop's transition from the subcultural to the mainstream is powered by technology and has created new narratives that are now aimed at a global marketplace. In “Sold Out on Soul: The Corporate Annexation of Black Popular Music,” Mark Anthony Neal sees hip hop's commercial viability as facilitated by the cutting-edge technological advancements in the music industry that the art form tacitly critiques (1997, 133).