Publications and Research
Document Type
Book Chapter or Section
Publication Date
2024
Abstract
As hip hop has evolved into the dominant form of global popular music, YouTube has become a locus of fan-artist interaction. This chapter examines how hip hop artists and fans produce their identities and engage with hip hop culture on YouTube. This identity work centers around establishing credibility, glocal and ethnic positioning, and signaling stances of resistance and simultaneous alignment with ultralocal and global hip hop personae. Building on a background of research about language and identity in hip hop, particularly in the Internet sphere, the chapter summarizes the state of the art and then highlights the authors’ own explorations of Latinx hip hop culture in the US as instantiated through YouTube, and the multitude of linguistic and paralinguistic practices that artists and fans use in constructing (and challenging) identity and expertise and in establishing credibility and authenticity within the hip hop scene. Artists and fans engage in hybrid, heteroglossic rapping and commenting practices and experiment with dialect writing and creative orthography. Methodologically, these disparate forms of data give us rich data to analyze alongside the discourses and linguistic patterns we can identify in rap lyrics and YouTube commentary.
Included in
Anthropological Linguistics and Sociolinguistics Commons, Discourse and Text Linguistics Commons
