The work of art in the age of hip hop reproduction

In turning his talents to fiction in his 2011 debut novel, Kings of Vice, gangsta rapper Ice-T has faced a particularly intricate challenge in “keeping it real”. At this point in the twenty-first century, the credibility of hip hop’s harder core seems to have been undermined by the distance gangsta rap has travelled from the street realities that gave it birth in the 1980s to the millionaire enterprises that have emerged since. A “rapocracy” of incredibly successful rappers and producers, most of them associated with gangsta rap (such as Diddy, Dr Dre, Jay-Z and Russell Simmons), has taken the gangsta ill-logic of exploiting the street for maximum profit to the extreme. Ice-T’s intervention in this dynamic has been to try to remind us of hip hop’s more “auratic” origins while acknowledging that the past is indeed a different country. The turn to authorship of books and making of documentary films in the context of a post-2008 economic meltdown environment constitutes an imaginative way to revivify the creative possibilities of the gangsta. The very title of Ice-T’s 2012 documentary film, Something Out of Nothing: The Art of Rap, betrays an almost nostalgic yearning for a purer age and the form that erupted out of it. This same retrospective paradigm for thinking a better way forward for gangsta aesthetics is also at the heart of Kings of Vice. Ice-T’s inventive return to origins shows us how even at a moment of its maximum commodification, gangsta culture (precisely because of its contradictory relationship to capitalism) can provide a uniquely critical perspective on a deregulated world

Aesthetics · Art · Art history · Commodification · Epistemology · Literature · Media studies · Nothing · Postmodernism · Sociology · Caribbean history, culture, and politics · History · Music History and Culture · Philosophy · South Asian Cinema and Culture

• ‘Singing acts’ from the deep North

  Juha Ridanpää•Journal for Cultural Research•2016

  Add to list

• Strategic Visuals in Hip-Hop Life Writing

  Nassim W Balestrini, Nassim Balestrini•Popular Music & Society•2015

  Add to list

• The Autobiography of Malcolm X

  Alex Haley, Malcolm X•The Autobiography of Malcolm X•1965

  Add to list

• The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility, and Other Writings on Media

  Walter Benjamin, Michael W Jennings et al.•Work of Art in the Age of Its…•2008

  Add to list