"Keeping It Real": Authenticity, Mediation, and the Dynamics of the Hiphop Game

Abstract

This dissertation is an exploration of the slogan “Keep[ing] it Real” within the context of Hiphop culture and rap music. The slogan relates to social and cultural conceptions of authenticity, mediation, vitality, and their dynamic interconnectedness in discourse, interaction, and artistry. While committed to a semiotic anthropological analysis, I stretch the perspective to integrate, ideas, and frameworks drawn from several academic disciplines across the humanities, social, and natural sciences to argue for the centrality of games and play to elucidate the meanings of “keep[ing],” “it,” and “real.” The approach is meant to track, but also to speculate on the future of Hiphop cultural form, health, decline and death more broadly. My evidence comes, primarily, but not exclusively, from Hiphop and African American culture in the United States from the 1980’s to the present day. The 3 general chapters follow an introductory argument for the relevance of Hiphop, and they precede a synthetic conclusion organized around my three key terms. Chapter 1 attends to the “real” and considers the intellectual history of authenticity and media(ti(zati)on) to propose a new theorization of Hiphop studies, and to recast cultural life in terms of finite and infinite games. Chapter 2 focuses on the “it” to give concrete examples of cultural games. At stake are interpretations of historical episodes and enduring epics of (ant)agonistic competition and critique (“beef”) between rappers and their crews. Of particular interest are the attributes and values that make up existential concerns for Hiphop cultural agents on the foreground of postmodernity. Chapter 3 asks what “keep[ing]” means by ethnographically interrogating the case of female Hiphop artists who have strived for their own immortality by way of battling for respect and power through their artistry.