In his few short years of superstardom, Biggie left a crater-sized impact on the music industry and a cloudy legacy behind him. Last week March 9th, marked the 20th anniversary of the death of Notorious B.I.G. The discussion is meant to be exemplary, although certainly not exhaustive of the wide-ranging-and still developing-historiography of queer or queer/LGBT hip hop artists.0 Shares Share on Facebook Share on Twitter The Intercoastal Hip-Hop Championship Belt This chapter is meant to index and codify the ways that queer and lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) hip hop artists have negotiated their artistic work lives alongside a changing landscape related to queerness, Blackness, and hip hop. These mappings give a broad view of how queer hip hop artists emerged, submerged, and reemerged in mainstream hip hop cultural productions-sometimes as quirky outcasts or human interest stories, at other times as actors poised to take over the mainstream stage, and at still other times, as performers whose queerness is identified through musical genealogies and social media musings. The second mapping picks up in the 2000s by turning to new iterations of sonic, identificatory, and affective queerness in the work of millennial hip hop artists. The first mapping starts in the late 1970s, wherein I look to articulations of Black heteromasculinity vis-à-vis an imagined queer foil and then I turn to the first recorded queer hip hop group, Age of Consent, founded in 1981. This chapter maps two contemporary moments related to queer performers inside hip hop culture. The discussion details the notable queer artists, some known and some forgotten, who have made possible the seeming ease with which queer and queer-friendly artists emerging in the 2000s and afterward have captured audiences in multiple mainstream areas. Starting in the late 1970s and ending in the current moment, this historiography argues that queer and/or lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) artists in hip hop music have chartered and navigated perilous landscapes-in the music industry, in hip hop culture, and in the broader US pop terrain. A special thanks goes to professor Patricia Irwin (Swarthmore) for their insight on language stigmatization models and her course LING 41 Dialects of American English, as well professor Jane Chandlee (Haverford), Clare Hanlon (Swarthmore), and Jackson Ramsey (Swarthmore) for their outstanding feedback over the course of this thesis S completion.Īnd Keywords This chapter explores the relatively long history of the queer presence inside of hip hop cultural production. Ultimately, the unfair stigmatization of these artists will be made clear. Additionally, I will question the importance of intelligibility in hip-hop music by offering different means of extracting semantic value from an utterance. By using language stigmatization models, explanations for the misguided usage of the term and the criticisms of naysayers will be offered. I will show that Mumble Rap is not used to describe any sort of linguistic property and that this perception of so-called mumbling is simply a phonetic phenomenon that is fairly common throughout any given language. In doing so, I will attempt to refute the unfair criticisms of those that do not care for this new wave of hip-hop. By the end of the decade, hip hop manifested itself as both a multibillion dollar industry, and as the nation’s number one selling musical genre, highlighting an important shift toward a new era in hip hop’s ongoing development.ġ In this thesis I will argue that the term "Mumble Rap" fails to function as an accurate descriptor ofa new generation of mainstream American hip-hop artists, instead being used to mainly disparage its artists, sounds, and ideologies. Thus, during 1995-1998, because of the crystallization of hip hop culture in corporate and mainstream American society, the hip hop nation struggled to maintain its realness and trueness to its traditional identities and foundational values in the face of cooptation and assimilation from mainstream and corporate America. Furthermore, hip hop experienced rampant mainstream commoditization, and widespread cooptation by corporate interests. During this time, hip hop also developed distinctive regional sounds, styles, and identities, namely in the West Coast and the South, which challenged New York’s hegemony, trend setting, and dominance over the culture and its music. From 1995-1998 hip hop music and culture rose from the periphery of society to mainstream and worldwide commercialization as it rode the wave of increasing globalization, incredible American economic growth, and the explosion of internet and computer technologies, to national and international prominence in mainstream society.
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