ABSTRACT
Hip-hop culture operates as a form of global youth culture via its mass transmission on MTV, BET, movies, and advertisements. Does hip-hop teach the youth around the world how to be “a real nigga” (read “black buck”) or “a good trick” (read “Jezebel”)? This chapter examines the historical roots of hip-hop culture from the context of antebellum slavery. It considers how hip-hop artists embody the rhetoric, posture, and survival strategies of enslaved people in the southern plantation, which would become the basis for the social types evolved in Atlantic minstrelsy. These evolved social types would then become the template for the popular representation of women of African descent as “mammy” or “Jezebel” or “tragic mulatto.” There is a similar process with regard to men of African ancestry, represented as “bucks” or “sambos” or “coons.” I explore the extent to which it is useful to think about hip-hop performance as a contemporary form of “coon” show. In this reading of hip-hop as minstrelsy, Lauryn Hill features as “mammy,” 50 Cent as “buck,” Puffy/Puff Daddy/P. Diddy/Diddy as “coon,” and Lil’ Kim as “Jezebel.” I focus my examination on the semiotic inheritance of Atlantic slavery through Lauryn Hill’s lyrics, interviews, hair styles, body image, and marketing strategies.
