Chicago Loves You: Chitown Hip Hop Music’s Alternative Spatializing Narratives to Trump’s Hateful Campaign Rhetoric About Chicago

• In Event: ICA Interactive Paper/Poster Session II
  In Interactive Poster Session: Popular Communication Interactive Poster Session

Abstract

Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign rhetoric about Chicago’s violence spatialized a narrative that branded the city as the poster-child of urban disarray. His rhetoric lacked any contextual understanding of Chicago’s violence and offered no productive pathways for collective solutions. Alternatively, I argue in this paper that an emerging crop of Chicago hip hop artists were producing musical discourses in 2016 that not only challenged Trump’s negative rhetoric, but also spatialized a multilayered narrative of the intersections between hip hop and activism in the city. Through textual analysis of three tracks from three breakout artists in 2016, my goal is to show how hip hop musical discourse allows audiences to spatially imagine Chicago’s 1) structural resistance to violence in the city’s communities of color, 2) a sense of place and community belonging amongst the city’s youth, and 3) a loving and unapologetic ‘black liberation’ lens to social movements in the city.

Author

• George Allen Onas Villanueva, Loyola U - Chicago