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Popular Culture Review
subjugation dichotomy. Rappers and the power of media control contest each other
for representational resources disseminated by the media. In this complex process,
rappers both lose and gain the meanings indispensable for maintaining their socio
political goals. However, due to the intrusion of the force of capitalist social
distinctions, this contestation can in no way be a purely semantic one.
Visibility and the Burden of Representation
The representation o f African-A m erican cultural attitudes in the
mainstream media has engendered various social effects. On an artistic level, one
of the essential techniques of rap, “sampling'’—a method that incorporates portions
of a rhythm or phrase from existing records into a newly programmed sound
context— came to be problematized as a violation of copyright. Rap was free from
this legal issue when sampling was implemented by anonymous DJ’s in less public
contexts, including the street and house parties of the 1970s.^’ Simultaneously, the
intention of social critique that determined the original growth of rap music was
suppressed by the discourse producing the “official truth” of middle-class society.
John Fiske’s theory of the “media event” is useful to explain the construction of
the dominant image of rap; rap’s reified images, audio-visually produced and
reproduced, come to possess their own realities in each mediational framework—
no matter how different the narratives attached to the representations may be.
Furthemiore, the realities are evaluated by the mainstream discourse community,
which supplies the legitimate interpretive codes with the framework functioning
as a Foucauldian regime of truth (Fiske 1-4).
The multifarious effects o f rappers' presentation of their political
intentions, however, prevent us from concluding this analysis with a simple neo
colonial story of the white media’s misrepresentation of one black art fonn. In a
1991 interview with Havelock Nelson and Michael Gonzales, Fab 5 Freddy, who
originated hip hop along with several pioneers and successfully promoted rap music
from Brooklyn parks to clubs in downtown New York and finally to MTV, clarifies
the significance of hip hop’s affiliation with the nation-wide media, in light of the
dominant tendency to exclude black figures from the culture industry in the 1980s:
Around May 1988...Peter Dougherty was telling me there were
a couple of proposals to do a rap show at MTV, where he was a
producer. That was something 1 never thought would happen
because MTV still wasn’t playing Black music except for
Michael Jackson, Prince.... (xiv)
Implied in this depiction is the rappers’ struggle to win not a local but a
general acknowledgment of their music as a legitimate aesthetic fonn. In this regard.