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Popular Culture Review
Stuart Hall’s theory of articulation illuminates this problem concerning
the fragmenting and resolidifying of rap musicians’ images. According to Hall:
An articulation is...the form of the connection that can make a
unity of two different elements, under certain conditions. It is a
linkage which is not necessary, determined, absolute and
essential for all time. You have to ask, under what circumstances
can a connection be forged or made? So the so-called “unity”
of a discourse is really the articulation of different, distinct
elements which can be rearticulated in different ways because
they have no necessary “belongingness.” (53)
Hall implies that the articulation is the site of contestation for a unified discourse
producing a specifically intended meaning. For rap musicians, social criticism is
impossible without the articulation between their expression of anger and the
recognition of the deprived urban living condition. Indeed, the debate over rap’s
negative effect on society begins when rappers' expression is disarticulated from
racial and class distinctions in society. The visibility that rap musicians have won
in the mainstream media is, therefore, accompanied by the greater risk of isolating
their gangster image, as signified in their stereotypical attitudes, styles, and lyrics,
from the social and material context that caused their emergence. When their
“culturally particular” attitudes are cut out of the texture of their inner-city lives
and subsumed into the hegemonic discursive framework, their image is rearticulated
in terms of its logic connecting the representations of rap exclusively with crime
and thus the need to police.
Rappers’ strategic self-commodification as a contemporary mode of
resistance, therefore, produces various ironic effects, including the fact that their
description of the social reality encompassing inner-city life matches and thus
unwittingly reinforces the connection between social decay and the black
community in the dominant imagination. The tactical nature of that strategy is,
however, obvious in light of the fact that rappers keep using rebellious self
representations, instead of creating an antithetical self-portrait that might modify
the gangster image. Returning to Fab 5 Freddy’s remark on the importance of the
promotion of rap music from a local sub-cultural scene to the mainstream, we can
infer that the media-savvy rap musicians are provoking misinterpretations and
scandals by their self-portrayal. As an act of resistance, rap music certainly involves
a paradox; that is, the actuality o f their perform ance is activated not by
understanding, but by the refusal, misunderstanding, and confusion of the cultural
hegemony. Houston Baker presents an analysis that helps to explain the possible
background of this theory of strategic self-commodification. Baker appreciates