"Things Done Changed”: Rearticulating the Real in Hip-Hop

In this talk, I summarize the different ways in which hip-hop artists have over the years defined “the real“ and articulated notions of authenticity in relation to identity and persona, focusing on issues of political discourse, the gangsta ethos, and the socio-economics of hustlin’. I isolate and analyze a crucial shift –– that is still underway –– encompassing the open and unvarnished admission of mental health issues and other inner emotional and psychological issues that differ greatly from expressions of masculine hardness and swagger of hip-hop’s earlier period. Today‘s hip-hop youth (and increasingly older artists as well) are more willing to publicly express their fears, doubts, anxieties, vulnerabilities as well as openly admitting their reliance on prescribed and unprescribed anti-anxiety pharmaceuticals. These shifts contribute to a new or altered concept of “the real“ in hip-hop.

Murray Forman, Professor, Media & Screen Studies, Northeastern University, USA

Murray Forman is interested in media and culture with a primary focus on popular music, age, and culture. For over twenty-five years he has engaged in research about hip-hop culture, contributing to the emerging field of hip-hop studies. He is the author of The ‘Hood Comes First: Race, Space and Place in Rap and Hip-Hop (Wesleyan University Press, 2002) and One Night on TV is Worth Weeks at the Paramount: Popular Music on Early Television (Duke University Press, 2012). He is co-editor (with Mark Anthony Neal) of That’s the Joint!: The Hip-Hop Studies Reader (Routledge, 1st edition 2004; 2nd edition, 2012).

Professor Forman was an inaugural recipient of the Nasir Jones Hip-Hop Fellowship at the Hip-Hop Archive, the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research, Harvard University (2014-2015).