ABSTRACT
From the standpoint of the twenty-fi rst century, hip hop is no stranger to academia. The booming market of rap scholarship spans a number of different approaches encompassing inter alia Afrocentricism, commercialism postmodernism, post-colonialism and pedagogy in hip hop culture. This chapter takes a different tack and explores how hip hop culture, often regarded as an authentic and resistant form of expression for marginalized young people, has broadened in scope from its original remit and is now utilized in numerous ways in public policy contexts spanning education and the youth services. It draws on fi eldwork conducted in Strasbourg (France) and Manchester (England) where hip hop has been deployed by local authorities in projects aimed at channelling youthful exuberance in urban neighbourhoods known for youth crime with the aim of keeping youth on the ‘straight and narrow’. The chapter investigates the ways in which these initiatives have been received and how young people have responded to the attempts to co-opt ‘street’ culture into social policy to argue that our usual associations with the terms resistance and incorporation have tended to limit themselves to looking at commercial co-optation
RESISTANCE VS. INCORPORATION: A RUNNING DEBATE
The notion of a binary divide positing youth cultural resistance in opposition to incorporation by external forces, has been a long-running subplot in the history of post-war youth culture. Hitherto considerations of incorporation have featured most often in the academic literature in commercial terms. The academic literature on this subject dates back some years. While Mark Abrams (1959) fi rst identifi ed the emergence of the ‘teenage consumer’ as a distinct sector of the purchasing public, anxieties about commercialisation and an attendant loss of authenticity in popular music date further back to Adorno (1941) and the inter-war era Frankfurt school. There has long been almost a resignation that market forces inevitably deliver a commercialized and subculturally neutered version of youth culture as evidenced in Rutherford’s assertion that ‘the global market place
has transformed youth cultures and their signs of revolt and rebellion into commodities, and an aesthetic of “youth”’ (1997: 114). This can be seen in successive waves of pop history and hip hop is littered with examples of once-underground artists who have risen to prominence on major record labels. However, as Andy Brown has pointed out in the previous chapter, it may be a mistake to assume that such movements are necessarily devoid of commercialism to begin with.
