Хип-хоп: культура молодежной контрреволюции

Логос. 2016. Т. 26. № 4. С. 7–27.

Khestanov R.

This article focuses on hip-hop as a movement of popular culture. e arti- cle has two main aims. First, observa- tion and discourse analysis, which will identify the principal tropes and com- monalities through which researchers and critics of popular culture construct the unity of their analytical narration and subjects of research. It is argued that the achieved discursive unity (the unity of concepts, subjects or themes) does not allow researchers to capture hip-hop as movement in popular cul- ture in all its diversity and heterogeneity. It is argued that academic researchers and critics of hip-hop culture are trapped in representations of the fun- damental di erences between “mainstream” and “underground.” e article shows that research on this topic is dominated by a kind of narrative sce- nario shaped in the post-war decades that depicts subculture as growing into a cultural movement with potential for progressive liberation.

The second task of the article is pragmatic: to show why hip-hop is interesting in the current political cir- cumstances. is questioning allows the author to formulate the following theses: 1) the eclecticism of values and style in mainstream and under- ground music renders the di erence between them irrelevant; 2) the culture of hip-hop, with its aura of the local or the regional, is one of the manifesta- tions of the antimodernization momen- tum; 3) the masculinity of hip-hop, its racial identity pathos and romanticizing gangsterism are manifestations of young peoples’ conservative reaction to rapid transformations of their social milieu; 4) the protest culture of hip-hop di ers radically from youth protests against capitalism and bureaucracy of the 1960– 1970s, with its pathos of gender and race equality, preaching of love and non-vio- lence. 

 

Keywords: андеграунд, mainstream, underground, хип-хоп культура, protest, протест, hip-hop, мэйнстрим