Abstract
There is a widespread belief that rap music can be empowering for its listeners. In this chapter, I discuss conventional approaches to empowerment in hip hop studies and suggest how listening to rap affords such empowering experiences. I formulate a theoretical framework for empowerment in music listening, drawing from established theories of perception and cognition in music studies, community psychology work on empowerment, and psychological research on felt power. This model of listener empowerment is then applied to an analysis of Kendrick Lamar’s single “Backseat Freestyle” (2012). In doing so, I argue that even tracks which do not easily comply with dominant perspectives on rap’s emancipatory potential allow for empowering interpretations in the listening process.
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Notes
- 1.
This label indicates an identification between the heard voice and an imaginary younger character. It is based upon the notion that, while one cannot access the experiences that Kendrick Duckworth had while he performed the vocal recording, or those of Hit-Boy while producing the track, or even those of recordist Derek “MixedByAli” Ali, there is a Kendrick afforded in the listening process. This theoretical approach does not mean to distrust the real lives of performing artists, but prioritizes listeners’ understandings of the song in its commercial, multimediated context.
- 2.
Others with whom I have discussed the track identify this timbre with clashing weaponry, such as hitting an anvil or the metal of blades (enacting Kendrick’s combative tone), or with jingling chains (as Kendrick is unable to free himself of the chains of capitalist materialism).
- 3.
- 4.
This claim shares a basis with the mimetic hypothesis put forth by Cox (2016).
- 5.
For listeners who develop broader artist narratives, the track may be conceptualized as the present-day Kendrick Lamar’s memory of a real scenario which he experienced in his adolescence. In this interpretation, our unreliable narrator may idealize the past, remembering the beat to go harder than it did, his bars hotter than they were, and so on.
- 6.
I am grateful to Kai Arne Hansen for this concise phrasing.
- 7.
If we do not excuse Kendrick’s youthful degradation of women in this track, we may think that other songs at least partially redeem the artist (Bonnette 2015, 92–95). Perhaps not, and the track remains yet another disappointing—and potentially disempowering—normalization of the maltreatment of women in rap (Rose 2008, 113–31).
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Gamble, S. (2019). Empowerment in Rap Music Listening ft. Kendrick Lamar’s “Backseat Freestyle”. In: Braae, N., Hansen, K. (eds) On Popular Music and Its Unruly Entanglements. Pop Music, Culture and Identity. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-18099-7_9
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