Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: The ability to have a distinct voice discernible above the din and the drone of mass produced culture is difficult. In a world in which independent and empowered action and speech are threatened by the homogenizing forces of capitalist production, an individual’s ability to birth a new way of seeing the world and a new articulation of their own conception is increasingly threatened. But threatened does not mean impossible. The power and scope of mass culture does not equate with an overall disappearance in individual artistic agency or meaning.

This paper will attempt a dialectical and discursive presentation of contemporary culture through the metronome of a specific manifestation of the musical form of hip-hop, seeing within that form a potential as a space of distinction and dissent. Through this articulation, I will strive to avoid the “ineluctability of difference” (Aronowitz, p.296) inherent in a negative dialectical approach.

I will first present an understanding of two meta-interpretations of the concept of “culture”, using Adorno’s critical theory of the culture industry and of mass culture and Arendt’s alternative view. With a theoretical critique of modern mass culture thus established, I will present hip-hop as an alternate and Other site of culture for non-North American youth, using a specific subset of hybridized middle Eastern/European youth as a conceptual frame of reference. My intent, then, is to show that they have the potential to move outside of the culture industry and achieve an active agency that Adorno seems to suggest is otherwise lacking.