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

to rap music was perceived as a subversive and deviant act. It placed them in a category that was easily outside the norm and thereby immediately conferred on them a “cool” status. They defined what was “normal” by the white-collar, clean-cut, suburban standards that were familiar to them. What rap and hip hop gave to them was an alternative way of looking at a world in which they had no substantive part. It fulfilled a subtle desire to momentarily assume an artificial persona and world adorned with flash, celebrity, and immediacy. Rap and hip hop enabled them to be someone other than themselves. That is, by listening to rap music and adopting hip hop culture, white youth could be (or imagine themselves to be) something that they were too afraid to be in real life.

How is this possible? Can just listening to rap music and absorbing its content through lyrics, images, and icons shape one's identity and influence one's perceived position in the social nexus? For our students, rap music does indeed help them to challenge authority, such as parents and parental figures. Frank discussion of sex and drugs is fairly commonplace in rap music, but not in the students’ homes. The rap and hip hop artists that they listened to and liked, Mary J. Blige, Jay-Z, the Streets, Outkast, DMX, Eminem, A Tribe Called Quest, and Lil’ Kim, for example, freely talked about problems that white people—the students’ parents, specifically—do not want to discuss or admit to having. Many of these problems relate to sex, drugs, and violence. Commenting on the overwhelmingly graphic images of sex, one junior-class female insisted that she felt empowered as a woman with each viewing. The visuals that she had were rooted in lyrics and music videos and, by the sheer volume of encounters with its form, gave her keen insights into the possibilities of her own sexuality and (perhaps hoped-for) sexual charisma. She said, “That kind of image shows me that there is an allure in being