Don’t call it a comeback: a full return to hip-hop subculture in Chicago

Abstract

Long before Nas proclaimed the death of hip-hop, cultural theorists sounded the death knell for subculture. Qualitative data acquired through fieldwork taken from Chicago’s hip-hop underground scene is used as evidence in the contention made here that the death of hip-hop specifically and subculture more generally is greatly overstated. The first position presented here is that subculture does in fact exist and still has value as a sociological measure. Bennett (1999) argues that subculture is not an objective sociological measure because memberships are fluid and temporary. A primary contention put forth in this article is that membership in subcultures, like hip-hop, are not nearly as fluid as Bennett, Redhead and others would suggest. While Bennett says that subculture mainly consists of “temporal gatherings”, my fieldwork revealed a community of people who were not just temporarily defined by the music but had made it a full-fledge part of their adult identity. Moreover, my respondents show that membership in hip-hop’s subculture is actually quite rigidly defined. The second core argument is that the identities that my research respondents described cannot be experienced as fully outside of hip-hop subculture.

Keywords:

• hip-hop
• subculture
• Chicago
• social identity

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.