Phat Beats, Dope Rhymes, and Def Moves

Abstract

The cultural history of the Americas is partially defined by African continuities, reinventions, adaptations, and significations. As in any culture, these constitute actual modalities of representing and negotiating the self as subject in the social world through expressive values. One reading of the sociopolitical history of the Americas is the attempt to control this aesthetic and its black producers, while simultaneously appropriating it for economic gain and for forging various national cultural identities (i.e., Jamaica, Cuba, Trinidad, Brazil, the United States). Hip-hop youth culture is the current cultural practice in a long history of vital black expressivity lodged within the ambivalent realities of U.S. cultural history. Dance Studies scholar Brenda Dixon Gottschild reveals that in the new-millennium-hip- hop-era, “it is not only rap’s content that rankles; it is also the form. This genre is all about rhythm, a component that can inspire fear in a Europeanist culture that knew enough about the power of African rhythm to prohibit drumming by enslaved Africans.”¹ The exploration of this seductively powerful and often threatening Africanist aesthetic in hip-hop, as a global export, is the subject of this chapter.