Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-rdxmf Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-24T02:47:22.189Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

‘I Want Your Hands On Me’: building equivalences through rap music

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 November 2008

Katrina Irving
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

In attempting to evaluate the subversive potential of popular culture generally, and rock music specifically, much recent Marxist theory has been caught in a dichotomy. At one pole has been a structuralist view of the subject as always already constructed (Althusser 1971): a notion leading to an analysis of popular culture as – yet another – agency of co-optation. At the opposite pole has been a view of popular culture as a set of subcultures, capable of expressing resistance to the dominant culture. Here, the subject is seen as pre-existing its construction through various modes of representation. Both sides of the dichotomy have therefore been implicated in a kind of holism that proves debilitating to cultural criticism: the one sees the (co-opted) subject as a coherent, albeit coherently written support for the system which has constructed it; the other sees the subject as a unitary resisting agent, unified through its class constitution and expressing its resistance in and through subcultural forms.

Type
Articles
Information
Popular Music , Volume 12 , Issue 2 , May 1993 , pp. 105 - 121
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1993

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Aletti, V. 1986. ‘The single life: dirty talk’, Village Voice, 28 01, p. 78.Google Scholar
Aletti, V. 1988. ‘The single life: sexual healing’, Village Voice, 28 06, p. 95Google Scholar
Althusser, L. 1971. ‘Ideology and ideological state apparatuses’, in Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays (London)Google Scholar
Baker, H. 1984. Blues, Ideology and Afro-American Literature: A Vernacular Theory (Chicago)CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Berlant, L. 1988. ‘The female complaint’, Social Text, 19/20, pp. 237–59CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Chambers, I. 1985. Urban Rhythms: Pop Music and Popular Culture (London)CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cooper, C. 1987. ‘Salty gals’, Village Voice, 27 01, p. 75Google Scholar
Coward, R. 1977. ‘Class, “culture” and the social formation’, Screen, 18:1, p. 76CrossRefGoogle Scholar
DeMott, B. 1988. ‘The future is unwritten: working-class youth cultures in England and America’, Critical Texts: A Review of Criticism and Theory, 5:1, pp. 42–56Google Scholar
Frith, S. 1988. ‘Britbeat: police and thieves’, Village Voice, 14 06, p. 81Google Scholar
George, N. 1987. ‘Hyper as a heart attack’, Village Voice, 25 08, pp. 71–2Google Scholar
Gilroy, P. 1987. There Ain't No Black in the Union Jack: The Cultural Politics of Race and Nation (London)Google Scholar
Hebdige, D. 1987. Cut 'N' Mix: Culture, Identity and Caribbean Music (New York)Google Scholar
Hirst, P. 1979. ‘Althusser and the theory of ideology’, in On Law and Ideology (London)CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Horkheimer, M. and Adorno, T. 1987. Dialectic of Enlightenment (New York)Google Scholar
Jameson, F. 1984. ‘Postmodernism: or, the cultural logic of late capitalism’, New Left Review, 146, pp. 53–92Google Scholar
Jones, G. S. 1983. Languages of Class: Studies in English Working Class History 1832–1982 (Cambridge)Google Scholar
Kaplan, E. 1987. Rocking Around the Clock (New York)Google Scholar
Kogan, F. 1987. ‘Sex don't love nobody’, Village Voice, 8 09, pp. 71–2Google Scholar
Laclau, E. and Mouffe, C. 1985. Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Toward a Radical Democratic Politics (London)Google Scholar
Laing, D. 1985. One Chord Wonders: Power and Meaning in Punk Rock (Milton Keynes)Google Scholar
Lipman, A. 1985. ‘Sistas talk culcha’, Spare Rib, 160, 11, pp. 15–19Google Scholar
Mouffe, C. 1983. ‘The sex/gender system and the discursive construction of women's subordination’, in Rethinking Ideology, ed. Hanninen, S. and Paldan, L. (New York), pp. 139–43Google Scholar
Sivanandan, A. 1982. A Different Hunger: Writings on Black Resistance (London)Google Scholar
Stephanson, A. 1988. ‘Regarding postmodernism – a conversation with Fredric Jameson’, in Universal Abandon?: The Politics of Postmodernism, ed. Ross, A. (Minneapolis), pp. 3–30Google Scholar
Tagg, J. 1992. ‘Practising theories: an interview with Joanne Lukitsh’, in Grounds of Dispute: Art History, Cultural Politics and the Discursive Field (Minneapolis), pp. 69–96CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Tate, G. 1988. ‘The Devil made em do it’, Village Voice, 19 07, pp. 71–4Google Scholar
Toop, D. 1984. The Rap Attack: African Jive to New York Hip-Hop (Boston)Google Scholar
Walters, B. 1988. ‘Just call her Joe’, Village Voice, 5 04, pp. 85–6Google Scholar