Abstract
In considering the cultural significance of rap music in (mis)conceptualizations of American identity, it is important to point out commercialized rap’s attachment to notions of blackness that are presumed irrefutable. Likewise, constructions of racial discourse in popular culture cannot be divorced from the effects of capitalism and enterprise on the framework of a twenty–first century black American experience. While it would be overly simplistic to dismiss commercial rap music as socially and ethically bankrupt due to the mass consumption and (over)production of corporatized black narratives, it is important to identify rap’s corporatization as a mutual investment by both record labels and artists themselves. Employing regurgitated and thus normalized scripts of blackness and black manhood is rewarded by monetary gain and popularity. The artists’ investment in such scripts sustains public visibility and thus relevance. The commercialization of rap music simultaneously enables rap to become a gauge of the post–Civil Rights experience while it becomes commodified and stereotyped. Thus, hip hop is important in providing alternative forms of negotiating the manifestations— visual, sonic, and political—of blackness that are mass consumed by a multi–ethnic audience. One way we can complicate our understanding of the impetus behind rappers’ performance and identity politics is to examine their negotiations of “black cool.” Of particular interest to this essay are the intersections of enterprise and sonic manifestations of black masculine cool in commercial rap music.