Media-Transmitted African-American Attitudes
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the success of hip-hop culture on MTV cannot be contained within the ultimate
business success of the white-owned culture industries in utilizing particular AfricanAmerican cultural attitudes. In other words, rappers have promoted a wide
recognition oP'black culture” despite the mainstream media’s middle-class-oriented
negative interpretation of the genre.
Emphasizing this liberating role of the market, James Lull observes the
“success of black popular culture” through electronic mass mediation:
The technical nature of electronic media resonates sensuously
with the oral qualities of black culture.... The market certainly
doesn’t eradicate racism—some critics claim it only exploits
minority races in many ways even more—but it undeniably
provides unprecedented access to black cultural space. (83)
Taken together, Fiske and Lull indicate the dual function of the mainstream mass
media concerning the representation of rap music. While Fiske’s point clarifies the
distortion of rap’s image in accordance with white knowledge of black culture.
Lull provides a positive evaluation of the public recognition of rap’s presence as a
result of mass mediation. Lull’s perspective foregrounds the tactical skill of rap
musicians, who have succeeded in exercising cultural power from a relatively
marginal position. Nonetheless, his analysis does not clarify the role of the market
in the present discussion.
Even though the market itself “undeniably provides unprecedented access
to black cultural space,” cultural objects and commodities circulating in the market
are evaluated by various institutions, such as corporations, politicians, the media,
and the majority group of consumers. The reasons for their preferences, selections,
rejections, and redistribution of specific items may, accordingly, stem from the
hegemonic notion of acceptability. In other words, those who have the power to
manipulate the market place also have the power to judge the moral value of an
object, not simply its commodity value. That the major media have denounced rap
as distributing messages dangerous to American society at large is explicable by
this logic. Rap musicians’ strategic self-commodification has been informed by
this tension circumscribing the effect of their expressional styles in the mainstream
media as well as the cultur e industries. The mass mediation of hip-hop culture
creates almost unpredictable opportunities for technological reproduction of the
practitioners’ images, which then become fragmented from the context of their
resistance to the dominant culture. Representations of sheer anger in the media
might, therefore, be intentional self-expression. But they are certainly moments of
commodification, in which only particular images are recreated as cultural icons—
signifying the actuality of their lives—and invested with a standard of value
judgment.