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Volume ! n°17-2 Legitimacy & Authenticity in Hip-Hop

2020

Ever since the genre’s inception, questions of “legitimacy” and “authenticity” have been at the center of hip-hop narratives and analyses. For a long time, journalists and academics considered the genre as an “authentic” expression of marginalized, urban populations, which supposedly gained legitimacy when it escaped the ghettos and smuggled its way into major cultural institutions. However, the dynamics that structure hip-hop music and account for its recognition are much more complex. By shedding light on a new wave of hip-hop studies research based on original and diverse research fields, this issue of Volume! considers how such issues of legitimacy and authenticity have influenced the way this music has been practiced and received by a variety of agents, within different spatial and historical contexts, in France as well as in the rest of the world.