Hip Hop Versus Rap ─ The Politics of Droppin' Knowledge

This book is an ethnographic study of the cultural and racial politics of an activist UK hip hop culture that uses hip hop "off-street" in the civic spheres of education, spoken word poetry and theatre as a force for social betterment and for the purposes of artistic experimentation. Focusing on how the cultural activism of the "post hip hop" movement that first emerged in the US in the early 1990s is framed around a discursive opposition between what is authentic and ethical in hip hop culture and what is counterfeit and corrupt, it shows that for many of these activists, the conscious path, ordained by hip hop’s functionally communicative nucleus as a black diaspora culture, has been blocked off by the global success of more generic and nihilistic forms of rap music over the last twenty five years or so. The book demonstrates how these nostalgia-tinged ontological concerns generate three key cultural political questions for UK post hip hop activists: "what is the real hip hop?" "To whom does hip hop belong?" and "For what constructive purposes can hip hop be put to use?"