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This paper studies two specific examples of the rap artist persona as resistance strategy, and builds upon several theories of hip-hop identity and resistance. Using Tricia Rose's concept of rap music as hidden transcript, and Russell A. Potter's idea of rap's postmodern play-as-resistance, I argue that certain hip-hop acts intentionally split or obscure their artist identities to subvert material conditions for the rap performer, and to negotiate their own position within the conflicting standards of authenticity and marketability put forth by the ghetto and recording industry.
Hip-hop authenticity is a commercial value that grew in importance as the music gained a substantial market share of commercial radio. By 1990, with MC Hammer and Vanilla Ice albums at number one on the Billboard pop charts, increased mainstream interest began to foster among hip-hop artists challenges to the authenticity or "realness" of acts making money from rap music and marketing their music to an ever-expanding audience. Scholars such as Tricia Rose, Christopher Holmes Smith, and Adam Krims have theorized the performance of authenticity as necessary to establishing credibility as an artist within hip hop, which values a discourse of lived experience, and has roots in oral traditions of testimony and bearing witness. A successful performance of hip-hop authenticity is one which positions the artist as experienced knower, as in Ice Cube's claim "I'm from the street, so I know what's up" on the NWA song "I Ain't Tha One." This focus on performed authenticity was complicated by the crossover of rap albums, such as MC Hammer's Please Hammer Don't Hurt 'Em (1990), to the Billboard pop charts. Even such a dance/pop-oriented album as Hammer's, which spent twenty-one weeks at number one, included the track "Crime Story," which centered its subject matter on the artist's lived experience in the ghetto. And Vanilla Ice lost all credibility after The Dallas Morning News (Perkins) revealed several discrepancies between his label's official artist bio, which claimed Ice had grown up in a poor, urban neighborhood, and the artist's lived experience growing up in suburban Dallas.
A theory of hip hop's seemingly conflicting concerns of authenticity and marketability may work to reframe W. E. B. Du Bois' concept of double-consciousness in commercial terms as artists work to produce marketable music for...