Introduction

This introduction presents an overview of the key concept discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book provides an overview of how hip-hop has proliferated around the world, originating as an African-American art form to being appropriated and developed in various continents from Europe to Africa and Asia. It maps out the changing context of the London hip-hop scene, and the ongoing effects of the macro-processes of migration, globalization, capitalism and digitalization. The book outlines the struggles facing rappers in an unstable and changing environment. Issues around money and business, social identity, media and music-making itself, mean being a rapper in the twenty-first century is a complicated and testing vocation. The books presents a theoretical model framed around strategic approaches that explain how artists go about negotiating tensions whilst striving to 'keep it real'. It argues for a new conceptualization of authenticity.