Straight Outta Brixton: Hip-Hop, ‘the Ghetto’, and the Transatlantic Politics of Race and the Urban Environment, c. 1986-2003
As a predominantly Black, and radically new, form of popular music, hip-hop was inevitably received on both sides of the Atlantic through a racialized lens in the late 1980s. Given its roots in heavily ghettoized areas of American cities, responses to the genre also strayed into wider racialized discourses on the ‘inner city’ that had becoming commonplace by this period. This paper asks how associations between hip-hop, Blackness, and the ‘the ghetto’ shaped the broader cultural politics of race and the urban environment over a near twenty-year period. Drawing on a rich variety of source material - including newspapers, song lyrics, fanzines, legal documents, and television programmes - I demonstrate the significant extent to which hip-hop has produced new racialized imaginings of Black youth and the city in contemporary Britain. The paper thus offers a distinctively transatlantic perspective on the history of race and urbanism in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century.
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