ABSTRACT
Rap has usually been approached as an aesthetic form of AfricanAmerican expression: a resistant, oppositional, counter-cultural style created via the appropriation of technology and existing musical signs and symbols (scratching, sampling, mixing), drawing on a long tradition of diasporic creativity (with varying inflections of both an essentialist and anti-essentialist argument that point both back to and away from the slave routes of the Atlantic). Although the music industry has been referred to and acknowledged by a few writers,1 most of the writing has tended to concentrate on cultural criticism2 and locate the ‘polities’ of rap within the domain of a cultural struggle conducted across the broad terrain of ‘consumption’ that is lived outside the world of the corporate entertainment industry.
