Abstract
In the years leading up to the 2008 financial crisis, hip-hop appeared to celebrate financial success and material wealth. When the financial crisis arrived, however, public opinion on materialism changed drastically. This chapter investigates whether hip-hop became less materialistic following the crisis. Rap lyrics from before and after the crisis’s onset were qualitatively and quantitatively analyzed to assess their degree of materialism. Moreover, members of New York’s hip-hop community were interviewed to gauge their feelings toward materialism. It was found that rappers, reflecting the hip-hop community’s sentiments, became more critical of society’s materialism as well as their own.
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Notes
- 1.
Milli is a slang expression meaning ‘one million dollars’.
- 2.
‘Reagonomics’ refers to Ronald Reagan’s trickle-down economics, which “affected the poor, among whom [African-Americans] are disproportionately represented, more negatively than the rich” (St. Pierre, 1991).
- 3.
Crack, a cheaper, more addictive free base form of cocaine became widespread in impoverished African American communities so fast that its rapid increase in consumption and accessibility would later be referred to as the “crack epidemic” (Reinarman & Levine, 1997).
- 4.
Jag stands for the expensive Jaguar car brand.
- 5.
Sallie Mae is the nickname of the SLM Corporation (originally: Student Loan Marketing Association)—the organization that distributes student loans in the United States.
- 6.
The slang expression to pop (some) tags means ‘to buy something’ (i.e. take the price tag off a product). The expression is usually reserved for expensive purchases (cf. Jay Z’s 2002 song “Poppin’ Tags”), so by using it in a context of thrift shopping, Macklemore humorously plays with its usual connotations.
- 7.
Paper is slang for ‘money’.
- 8.
Yeezy is one of Kanye West’s aliases.
- 9.
The lyrics from Jay Z and Kanye West’s joint 2011 collaborative project Watch the Throne and Rick Ross’s 2011 collaborative project with other artists signed to his record label Maybach Music Group were also included in the corpus.
- 10.
Specific slang alternatives for certain words (e.g. mill(i) for million) and alternate spellings (e.g. dolla(h) instead of dollar) were taken into account in the frequency analyses performed.
- 11.
In hip-hop slang, piece can have many meanings (e.g. ‘gun’), but in the present context, it refers to a necklace in Jesus Christ’s image, a so-called Jesus piece.
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Acknowledgments
The study presented in this chapter was in part facilitated and financed by the University of Groningen Honours College under the supervision of Boudewijn de Bruin. An earlier version of the present study, which only discussed the interviews with New York City’s hip-hop community and the results of a less extensive qualitative analysis of rap lyrics’ materialism, was previously published in the Dutch popular science book Generatie Crisis: Verder kijken dan Occupy (‘Generation Crisis: Looking beyond Occupy Wall Street’; Hermans et al., 2012).
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Gilbers, S. (2018). How the Financial Crisis Changed Hip-hop. In: Ross, A., Rivers, D. (eds) The Sociolinguistics of Hip-hop as Critical Conscience. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-59244-2_7
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