Any given nation should be seen as a form of collective action and thought. According to Hesmondhalgh (2013), a community could be maintained by means of cosmopolitanism, which is a form of moral standing that makes every person equal. As a musical genre, rap music seems perfectly related to cosmopolitanism, beginning in the early 1980s as a form of political protest in the urban ghettos of Los Angeles and New York. According to Guerrero (2022), the “ghetto,” as an environment, represented a vital concept for the local individuals who could not express their cultural creativity or discover positive mobility opportunities. Due to the racial composition of the ghetto, rap music is known to articulate the struggle of the minority population (Kelley, 2020). The growing popularity of rap music has led to a situation where self-assertion, freedom, honor, and conflict became symbolic of all the representatives of the genre. Hence, the ghetto can be seen as a cosmopolitan concept that went beyond sociology and contributed to the development of rap music across the globe.
The narratives associated with ghetto life were always portrayed in association with gang violence, criminal activities, and sexual exploitation. The beginnings of the cosmopolitan nature of rap music might have been established by powerful marketing and the devastating conditions of predominantly minority-populated ghettos (Oware, 2018). Despite being a predominantly Black genre, rap music was popularized to an extent where it could appeal to White consumers while not overstating racist ideas and expectations. The ghetto-centric vision employed by contemporary rap stars, such as Jay-Z or 50 Cent, can be described as a historically specific framework of narration. The latter eventually turned ghettos and street credibility into the two key variables utilized to validate a rapper’s trustworthiness (Polfuß, 2022). As a cosmopolitan term, rap music became much more important as a business instrument and not an account of ghetto stories about the hardships of minorities.
Even though the ghetto is often permeated with affirmations regarding hard life and vivid political expressions, the cosmopolitan nature of rap music made it harder to appropriate the true ghetto lifestyle. The roots of cosmopolitan rap music are connected to the context of authenticity and the hunger that was required to attain something valuable in life (Oates, 2019). The growing popularity of materialist and misogynistic outlooks seems to have destroyed the true notion of the ghetto. Thus, cosmopolitanism and marketing allowed rap artists to soften their approach to the audience and create songs that disingenuously describe their lifestyle and achievements. Nowadays, rap music is a cosmopolitan term due to the advent of falsified gangsters who came from the ghetto and tended to popularize violence and materialism (Hellemont, 2018). Despite lacking a universal meaning, the ghetto became a marker of cosmopolitan tastes that go beyond American borders nowadays.
The bottom line is that cosmopolitanism is a social term which means a well-defined perception of society and how individuals interact within it. The overall cultural reception of the rap genre was questionable from the beginning, but some of the artists were able to make a name for themselves due to living the lives they portrayed in their songs. As a pillar of cosmopolitanism in rap, the ghetto was introduced as one of the central topics touched upon by Black artists. Social and political privileges were rejected by rap artists due to the protest culture, but modern iterations of the rap genre seem to erase the thin line between the ghettos and urban locations. The universal nature of rap music makes the latter a vivid representation of cosmopolitanism and how it penetrated mainstream social ideology across the globe.
References
Guerrero, J. (2022). Ghetto: Misfortune’s wealth. Bloomsbury Academic.
Hellemont, E. V. (2018). Legalization by commodification: The (Ir)relevance of fashion styles and brands in street gangster performance. In Outlaw Motorcycle Clubs and Street Gangs (pp. 45-68). Palgrave Macmillan, Cham.
Hesmondhalgh, D. (2013). Why music matters. John Wiley & Sons.
Kelley, R. D. (2020). Kickin’ reality, kickin’ ballistics: “Gangsta rap” and postindustrial Los Angeles. In Crime, Inequality and the State (pp. 84-91). Routledge.
Oates, T. P. (2019). Where I’m from”: Jay-Z’s “hip hop cosmopolitanism,” basketball, and the neoliberal politics of urban space. Sociology of Sport Journal, 37(3), 183-191.
Oware, M. (2018). I got something to say: Gender, race, and social consciousness in rap music. Springer.
Polfuß, J. (2022). Hip-hop: A marketplace icon. Consumption Markets & Culture, 25(3), 272-286.