After Hip-Hop Culture: Scandinavian Youth and the Self-Aesthetic Relation

• In Event: Reimagining Youth, Identity, and the Social World: Global Hip-Hop Intellectuals as a Site of Resistance and Transformation

Abstract

After Hip-Hop Culture: Scandinavian Youth and the Self-Aesthetic Relation

Purpose
In this paper I argue that one important idea the globalization of hip-hop suggests is that hip-hop qua culture is over as it was and is being conceived in much of the literature about youth and hip-hop. This argument is the result of my ethnographic work in both the U.S. and Scandinavian countries in which the intersection of youth identity and aesthetic engagement was explored. Instead of conceiving hip-hop as a culture that has been “exported” or “imported” or as something that gets “adopted” by youth outside the U.S., I maintain that hip-hop can no longer be thought of as a bounded set of cultural practices. Rather, it is a phenomenon that sits at the very location of the self-aesthetic relation, not limited to any particular set of political or social impetuses, or stylistic sensibilities.
Perspective
The theoretical underpinning of my work regarding U.S. and Scandinavian youth, identity, and aesthetics includes Cornel West’s prophetic pragmatism that infuses the neopragmatism of Richard Rorty with a sense of the prophetic, 19th Century Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard’s notion of repetition contrasted with the ancient Greek idea of recollection, and Richard Shusterman’s pragmatist aesthetics, which leans heavily on John Dewey’s aesthetic theory.
Methods
This paper is both theoretical and empirical. I have referred to my work of so-called underground hip-hop artists as “ethnographic philosophy” and more specifically “critical ethnographic philosophy.” I am suggesting here a kind of doing philosophy through the use of critical ethnographic methods. Both the philosophical ideas mentioned above and Carspecken’s particular ideas about critical ethnography are brought to bear on youth, hip-hop, and identity.
Data Sources
For the empirical portion of the study, critical ethnography was done on young people in the U.S. and in Denmark and Sweden.
Warrants for Arguments
I have previously argued that most scholarship of hip-hop is primarily concerned with its products and not its process. While the songs, lyrics, and biographies of hip-hop artists are continuously examined, there is little inquiry into the relationship between the construction and maintenance of the self and the hip-hop aesthetic process. I contend that the latter is all that remains “global” about hip-hop after its globalization. There is also evidence that mainstream social processes (specifically education) are welcoming to hip-hop. Here I am thinking about the “Hip-hop Schools” I visited in Aarhus, Denmark.
Significance
This all seems to suggest that making inquiry into young people and hip-hop – where hip-hop is conceived of as a particular culture – may be at an end and what is left may be a virtually limitless range of iterations of young people and the self-aesthetic relation, where the aesthetics are categorized as hip-hop. This shift has far-reaching implications first of all, for theories of youth and identity as it relates to aesthetics. It is also of importance for those who are exploring the role of hip-hop in young people’s lives around the world and how educational institutions are implicated.

Author

• Kip Kline, Lewis University