You Better Lose Yourself!

Abstract

Cultural production in hip-hop has become such a multifarious notion from its original live performance, counter-culture orientation in the South Bronx to its early commercialization with Sugar Hill Gang’s “Rapper’s Delight”; to its hypercommodification that produced the ubiquitous use of hip-hop in selling everything from sneakers to hamburgers and also created “hip-hop moguls” like Russell Simmons, Diddy, Jay-Z; to the birth of a generation of so-called underground hiphop artists who are more likely to seek to recapture the early counter-hegemonic impulses than their more commercially successful peers.