VIRTUAL SPACE .

Hip Hop Videos and Black Identity in Virtual Space

Joel Rubin
In this paper, I present an understanding of music videos as useful representations of the dynamism of
blackness and black identity and in fact indicative of a post-regional turn in Hip Hop. In order to
illustrate, I first examine how blackness is expressed in physical space with the advent of New York
City’s block parties and the Bay Area’s “hyphy” movement. I then situate the importance of the music
video in a contemporary understanding of visualized culture in virtual space. Applying this
understanding to the performance and perception of blackness, I use the example of Canadian Hip Hop
artist Drake’s journey of self-representation and identification, following the trajectory of his career
through music video creation. In doing so, I argue that technological innovation serves as the moment
and the means to visualise evolving identity as is articulated by Hip Hop and the music video.

Blackness as an identity has never been fixed to place but rather finds itself
articulated through space and, more importantly, time. Movement has defined black
identity and served as an origin in and of itself. Simultaneously, technology has
provided Hip Hop and the black community with the necessary vehicle to
communicate the fluidity of American blackness. In this paper, I argue that
technological innovation serves as the moment and the means to visualise evolving
identity as is articulated by Hip Hop and the music video.
While plenty has been written on the political, economic, social and sexual
nature of Hip Hop and its contribution to underscoring the black experience in North
America, often the narrative is simply essentialised into monolithic blackness with a
fixity rooted in time, as if to present an identity that is static and unchanging. I argue
that further exploration of the music video as a tool will aid in the effort to problematize
a monolithic black American narrative that has been fixed in time. I will first explore
Paul Gilroy’s work on the Black Atlantic, which frames the background of black music’s
emergence directly as a consequence of enslavement and forced migration out of West
Africa.1 I will then briefly explore two case studies, which relate a spatial understanding
of contemporary Hip Hop movements and resistance in American cities. I will then
pursue a critical analysis of the music video as a tool and emerging art form, which is
useful in representing the black experience in virtual space. Lastly, an analysis of one
artist’s journey of self-representation and identification through music video
production will challenge the temporal fixity of this experience, one that is often
misconceived as “doggedly monocultural, national and ethnocentric,”2 and provide
insight into an understanding of blackness that defies Hip Hop regionalism and archaic
geographic binaries.
The ubiquity of the screen is undeniable. Resting in our pockets, on our desks,
and next to us when we sleep; screens have become the first thing we see in the
morning and the last thing we check at night. Thus spatially, the screen has become

1 Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness, (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
UP, 1993)
2 Ibid., 80.
 JOURNAL OF HIP HOP STUDIES .

more pervasive and the visual, more powerful. Doreen Massey writes that, “As a result
of the fact that it is conceptualized as created out of social relations, space is by its very
nature full of power and symbolism, a complex web of relations of domination and
subordination, of solidarity and co-operation.”3 It is precisely this concept of space that
I will apply to the scope of this paper. In doing so, I hope to address the following
questions: Where is black identity contested? How is black identity asserted? What role
do music videos have in representing black identity?

The Music Video

The music video has been overlooked as simply a by-product of an overly

commercialised music industry. Relegating it to the status of commercial rather than
art, however, detracts from meaning and, consequently, as Diane Railton and Paul
Watson contend in their work on the music video and the politics of representation,
“academic work on music video is not common.”4 I argue that the music video is
important as a site of technological advancement as well as an articulation of spatial
presence. Through an exploration of these elements, the usefulness of the music video
as an instrument to articulate identity will become evident.
No longer confined to cable television programming and MTV-curated playlists
that dominated the television screens of the 1980s and 1990s, the advent of mobile
technology has created a venue whereby artists can produce music videos that
necessarily challenge previously enforced restrictions and censorship rules.
Additionally, videos can challenge the tastes of image producers who previously held
the reigns in video production and distribution. Consumers are not forced to adhere to
the old top-down system of media distribution and, as technology democratises the
process of production and consumption, “the same technological infrastructure that
allows record companies to promote their products more widely [enables] consumers to
circumvent these official channels of broadcast and, instead, redistribute the music
videos which they deem significant.”5 Railton and Watson contend that this process
allows music videos to experience a much longer shelf life and to find reintroduction
into pop culture more readily due to their immediate availability on websites that host
content and make it available, largely, for free such as Youtube and Vimeo. 6 More
importantly, contemporary video production is able to easily bypass corporate taste
making and produce more culturally salient work. This process of democratisation has
provided black artists the ability to hire black production companies to better articulate
their own identity. Baldwin writes, “Due to video training, these positions have

3Doreen Massey, "Politics and Space/Time," Place and the Politics of Identity, ed. Michael Keith and

Steve Pile, (London: Routledge, 1993), 156.

4 Diane Railton and Paul Watson, Music Video and the Politics of Representation, (Edinburgh:

Edinburgh UP, 2011), 2.

5 Ibid., 6.
6 Ibid.
 VIRTUAL SPACE .

bypassed the white male unions that control apprenticeship systems and employment
networks.”7
The prominence of the music video also rests in its accessibility. When the
desktop computer became mobile in the first decade of the twenty-first century, media
achieved emancipation from the living room and screens began to occupy public space.
Railton and Watson take this even further: “Indeed, in the planning and organisation of
the social environment the design and management of screen light is often seen to be
every bit as vital as the design and management of natural light.”8 Thus the video is no
longer consumed as a secondary product but rather as primary content. Additionally,
the impact of an increasingly visualised culture requires that we examine the visual
with a more nuanced approach. Visual culture theorist Nicholas Mirzoeff contends that,
“This globalisation of the visual, taken collectively, demands new means of
interpretation.”9 Mirzoeff’s work on the exploration of the visual reinforces the cultural
impact of the music video and necessitates a stronger focus on visual content
production. If we are to comprehend the music video’s power as a tool, we must first
explore the role of music in black movement.

Black Movement, Music, and (Post) Regionality

Hip Hop has had a considerable amount of influence in the communication of

black identity in North America. To better understand this phenomenon, attention must
be paid to the migratory nature of black music, which has always been characterised by
movement. Artist KRS-One raps on the track “Hip Hop Lives,” “Hip and Hop is more
than music / Hip is the knowledge, hop is the movement / Hip and Hop is intelligent
movement.”10 But the movement we’re discussing here is not restricted to dance; rather
it is related to the manner in which Hip Hop emerged as a result of black migration
across the Atlantic and the resulting flows of music and style from Africa to North
America and from North America back to Europe and beyond.11
Gilroy’s argument in his chapter “Jewels Brought from Bondage,” asserts that
music and musical style were the only forms of language that were transportable for
enslaved Africans coming to the new world. In what he refers to as the “Topos of
Unsayability,” Gilroy contends that inaccessibility to traditional western forms of
literacy gave black music disproportional importance as it replaced written and spoken
language.12 The mobility of music and its ability to trespass social and linguistic lines
lent Hip Hop its necessary rootedness in intertextuality. Stuart Hall remarks that this

7Davarian Baldwin, "Black Empires, White Desires: The Spatial Politics of Identity in the Age of
Hip Hop," Black Renaissance 2.2 (1999), 156.
8 Diane Railton and Paul Watson, Music Video and the Politics of Representation, (Edinburgh:

Edinburgh UP, 2011), 7.

9 Nicholas Mirzoeff, An Introduction to Visual Culture, (London: Routledge, 1999), 4.
10 KRS-One, Hip Hop Lives, Koch Records, 2007, MP3.
11 Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness, (Cambridge, MA: Harvard

UP, 1993)
12 Ibid., 74.
 JOURNAL OF HIP HOP STUDIES .

tendency is part and parcel of “the black experience as a diaspora experience, ...the
consequences which this carries for the process of unsettling, recombination,
hybridization and ‘cut-and-mix’ – in short, the process of cultural diasporia-zation which
it implies.”13 The reduction of black identity to one idea is impossible. Gilroy remarks
that there can be no one “totalising conception of black culture” and that to believe that
such an identity could exist only detracts from the complexities of black identity. He
further explains that “what is more significant for present purposes is that in the
Africentric discourse on which both sides of opinion draw, the idea of a diaspora
composed of communities that are both similar and different tends to disappear . . .”14
Gilroy’s concept of diaspora mirrors the contemporary shift in what I term “post-
regional Hip Hop” geography. For Gilroy and Hall, there is a tension in the implicit
desire to articulate blackness while simultaneously allowing for an evolving experience
upon which the black diaspora is rooted.
While region-specific Hip Hop gained visibility through music video
proliferation and as consumption of music has shifted from purely aural to a mixture of
aural and visual, I argue that Hip Hop has entered a post-regional phase wherein the
virtual space of the internet and mobile media have allowed artists to dissolve regional
borders and foster more fluid identities. The popularity of a song is now measured in
views on Youtube rather than plays on the radio. Hip Hop regionalism, in a sense, has
become obsolete as Kendrick Lamar (from Los Angeles) can insist that “I'm Makaveli's
offspring / I'm the King of New York / King of the Coast, one hand, I juggle them
both”15 while Drake (from Toronto), boasts that, “All my exes live in Texas like I'm
George Strait / Or they go to Georgia State where, tuition is handled / By some random
nigga that live in Atlanta.”16 Music videos, now a product of mobile media, directly
reflect the fluidity of Hip Hop and black identity. Digital media provides Hip Hop the
opportunity to defy archaic binaries and regionalism, and instead foments unity around
a post-regional blackness that opposes white supremacy, police violence and deeply
rooted racial inequality. With the focus of anxiety no longer directed towards other
black communities, rappers like Kendrick Lamar reinvigorate claims to unified
blackness with lyrics like, “I’m African-American, I’m African / I’m black as the moon,
heritage of a small village / Pardon my residence / Came from the bottom of mankind”
and “You sabotage my community, making a killin’ / You made me a killer,
emancipation of a real nigga.”17 Additionally, Lamar’s lyrics mirror the anxiety and the
fear of impure art, commodification and dilution while establishing the desire for “real”
blackness. Earl Sweatshirt explains in the song “Chum” that he’s, “Too black for the
white kids, and too white for the blacks / From honor roll to cracking locks off them

13Stuart Hall, Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies, (London: Routledge 1996), 447.
14Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness, (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
UP, 1993), 87.
15 Big Sean featuring Kendrick Lamar, Control, Def Jam Records, 2013, MP3.
16 Drake, HYFR (Hell Ya Fucking Right), Cash Money Records, 2011, MP3.
17 Kendrick Lamar, The Blacker The Berry, Interscope Records, 2015, MP3.
 VIRTUAL SPACE .

bicycle racks / I’m indecisive, I’m scatterbrained, and I’m frightened, it’s evident.”18
With anxiety surrounding difference and definition, the assertion and preservation of
blackness are at the heart of post-regional black identity formation. The struggle
becomes that of maintaining authenticity and is best exemplified in spatial resistance. In
other words, since relevance is no longer directly tied to origin, importance rests in
developing authenticity by other means. In this instance it can be derived and asserted
through physical resistance in space (be it physical or virtual).

Space and Authenticity

For Hip Hop artists, rooting music in place was a means of asserting authenticity.
Knowing, defending and representing one’s origin has persisted as a key tenet of Hip
Hop music production and with the music’s beginnings rooted in the South Bronx, the
focus on Hip Hop relied on the New York Hip Hop scene. This reliance, or
“overemphasis” as Caspar Melville and David Hesmondhalgh contend, “can lead to
difficulties in accounting for other variants of Hip Hop culture, not only on the U.S.
West Coast, but in Houston, in Jamaica, in Britain, and elsewhere.”19 In response, the
contemporary American Hip Hop scene has made a point to generate regionally
specific Hip Hop sounds and styles. From Southern to Midwestern, Los Angeles to the
Bay Area, success in the music industry was tied to regional representation in order to
challenge the perceived homogeneity of black music and identity in America. Michael
Keith and Steve Pile, introducing their collection of works on place and the politics of
identity, echo this point:
Narratives of identity formation in mainstream social science have frequently
spoken to an interplay of commonality and difference that erases spatiality through a
homogenization of the specific – not a process of misrepresentation through over-
generalization but instead a naturalization of particular experiences within a frequently
implicit spatial frame of reference.20
As the lines and divisions that forged early Hip Hop rivalries have diminished in
post-regional Hip Hop culture, authenticity has remained a necessary component of
Hip Hop and black identity.
Authenticity in Hip Hop has relied on purity and resistance. Davarian Baldwin,
in his article on the spatial politics of identity in the age of Hip Hop, contends, “Racial
authenticity is best articulated in these instances through the stance that the artistic
production is pure and untouched by any means of dilution.” 21 With the following two

18 Earl Sweatshirt, Chum, Tan Cressida, 2012, MP3.

19David Hesmondhalgh and Caspar Melville, "Urban Breakbeat Culture - Repercussions of Hip
Hop in the United Kingdom," Global Noise: Rap and Hip Hop outside the USA, (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan
UP, 2001), 106.
20 Michael Keith and Steve Pile, Place and the Politics of Identity (London: Routledge, 1993), 16.
21 Davarian Baldwin, "Black Empires, White Desires: The Spatial Politics of Identity in the Age of

Hip Hop," Black Renaissance 2.2 (1999): 141.

 JOURNAL OF HIP HOP STUDIES .

examples, I will illustrate the connection between purity, resistance and space in Hip
Hop and the manner in which they inform authenticity.

The Block Party and the Sideshow

In 2005, American comedian Dave Chappelle, with French director Michel

Gondry, ventured to organize (and document) a concert in the heart of one of
Brooklyn’s oldest black communities, Bedford Stuyvesant. The goal, Chappelle
articulates in the documentary, was to bring together some of the most influential black
Hip Hop artists and to stage a free performance in the centre of the historically black
community. The documentary and the performances are rife with symbols and
statements regarding American black identity and Hip Hop as a site of resistance.
Situating the concert in the streets of Bed Stuy, rather than a formal venue in
Manhattan for example, is Chappelle’s first site of resistance. He refuses to support the
commodification of black music in mainstream markets and he necessarily situates the
concert in a poorer community in order to emphasise his classist critique of the music
industry. Davarian Baldwin, in his article “Black Empires, White Desires,” explains that
much of black authenticity has rested in a rejection of middle class consumptive
practices. He writes that, “The gatekeepers of ‘authentic blackness’ are anxiety-ridden
over public displays of the black good life society, exemplified in the emergence of a
new hip hop identity”.22 Notably, this is exemplified in the emergence of gangsta rap
and “ghetto authenticity” as a rejection of “black bourgeois respectability”. 23 Locating
the performance within a historically black community, Chappelle attempts to preserve
the purity of the music, unburdened by commercialism and distortion. Hip Hop
drummer, Questlove, explains in an aside with Chappelle, “All of us have...what we
have in common, is that our audience doesn’t look like us. And it’s the same for [Dave
Chappelle].”24 In other words, American black artists are faced with the predicament
whereby the material they produce and intend for black audiences is being shared and
consumed, largely, by white middle class communities, who are less equipped to
receive or interpret the art in the manner in which the artist intended. Thus the art
might not resonate with some audiences as effectively as it will with others. It is worth
noting that the name of the documentary and the performance was simply “Block
Party.” The block party in New York has always held a very special social, political and
spatial significance for poorer diaspora communities. It has served as a space for
gathering, cultural exchange and of course musical performance, similar to the

22Davarian Baldwin, "Black Empires, White Desires: The Spatial Politics of Identity in the Age of
Hip Hop," Black Renaissance 2.2 (1999), 151.
23 Ibid.
24 Dave Chappelle’s Block Party, DVD, Dir. Michel Gondry (2005; Prod. Bob Yari Productions; Distr.

Rogue Pictures) Film.

 VIRTUAL SPACE .

“autonomous black cultural spaces” that were created in the United Kingdom, which
led to sound system culture.25
Similarly, the hyphy movement in the Bay area of California emerged in the late
90s as a social movement articulating American blackness in the midst of deep social
and racial inequality on the American west coast. DJ Vlad’s documentary, Ghostride the
Whip, explores the beginnings of hyphy music in the Bay Area, as well as the advent of
the Sideshow, a term for the public displays of reckless driving, as well as music and
dance specific to the Bay Area Hip Hop style. Mac Dre, the godfather of the hyphy
movement, explains that the “ ‘Street gatherings [are] called ‘sideshows’. A sideshow is
just super campaigning. It’s a parade. It’s a mobile party. It’s cats swingin em. Cats
stuntin.’”26 Like the block parties of New York and the sound systems of London, the
sideshows of the Bay Area provide the community with a space to explore cultural
difference and to establish “autonomous black spaces” that stand in resistance to the
white power structure.
Hyphy, which essentially draws its meaning from a manipulation of the word
hyper, connotes an entire spirit as well as a genre of music and a style of dance. Hyphy
performance is a rejection of the mainstream and an intentional deviation from what is
socially acceptable. Thus the dance moves are seemingly arrhythmic and the parlance
often unintelligible. Hyphy serves as a direct response to under-representation through
subversion. During a sideshow, the driver spins his car around in circles, producing
smoke in a show of prowess and symbolically asserting control over the street and
public space in general. Another style of hyphy driving is called ghostriding whereby a
driver will exit the car while it is in motion and walk alongside it for several blocks.
Using the car as an instrument and the street as a canvas, the youth challenge authority
and establish an identity against the perceived order. Thus hyphy is not simply a style
of music or a type of dance. It is not reducible to one particular idea. Rather, it is part of
the story of Hip Hop, which, as Hesmondhalgh and Melville conclude, “[can be seen] as
one of a number of elements that can be recombined to make important statements
about cultural identity.”27 Cultural theorists place a great deal of emphasis on the idea
of recombination as a means of reimaging and representing identity.28 We have seen
Hip Hop’s ability to construct identity through the subversion of physical space. Using
Hip Hop videos as a tool, we can explore identity formation in virtual space as well.
Situating several videos in a post-regional context will not only provide a visual
aid but will also support the claim that time and space are inextricably tied to identity

25David Hesmondhalgh and Caspar Melville, "Urban Breakbeat Culture - Repercussions of Hip
Hop in the United Kingdom," Global Noise: Rap and Hip Hop outside the USA (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan
UP, 2001), 88.
26 Ghostride The Whip. Dir. DJ Vlad, (Rugged Entertainment, 2008), Web.
27David Hesmondhalgh and Caspar Melville, "Urban Breakbeat Culture - Repercussions of Hip

Hop in the United Kingdom," Global Noise: Rap and Hip Hop Outside the USA, (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan
UP, 2001), 97.
28 See Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness, (Cambridge, MA:

Harvard UP, 1993); Stuart Hall, "New Ethnicities," Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies,
(London: Routledge, 1996).
 JOURNAL OF HIP HOP STUDIES .

formation as I have introduced above. With this in mind, I turn now to four music
videos, which, I assert, represent both the fluidity of black identity as well as the video’s
capacity to represent and communicate mobility.

Drake and the Post-Regional Rap Game

The following case study will focus on the emergence of Canada’s most
influential Hip Hop artist to date. Aubrey “Drake” Graham started his career in show
business as a child actor on the hit Canadian teen drama, Degrassi. He began producing
rap albums in 2007 and, with a white mother, a black father, and roots in a prominent
Jewish neighbourhood in Toronto, Graham’s identity has been problematic and, as a
result, endured scrutiny and contestation. Following the trajectory of his career, an
exploration of Drake’s music videos will reveal how his identity has evolved alongside
the establishment of his authenticity. I argue that, in order to be taken seriously as a Hip
Hop artist, Drake had to first root his identity in obscurity and with respect to his
predecessors before he could present himself as a “mixed-race” Jewish rapper from
Canada. For this paper I will look at four videos in particular: “Successful,” “The
Motto,” “HYFR” and “Started from the Bottom” produced in 2009, 2011, 2012 and 2013,
respectively.
The video for the song, “Successful,” opens with the artist positioned in front of a
blurred cityscape. Drake stares pensively out of a window but the shot focuses on the
artist himself rather than following his gaze, thus the audience fails to see what he sees.
The remainder of the video alternates between an interior shot to that of Drake and
another artist, Trey Songz, driving through an anonymous city at night. A woman,
scantily clad and shrouded in darkness, reclines on a bed while Drake and Trey Songz
repeat the hook, “I want the money / Money and the cars / Cars and the clothes / I
suppose / I just want to be successful.” Success for Drake, at this point in his career,
resides in the material. The video represents Drake’s attempt at solidifying his identity
as being rooted in obscurity. He claims to want success and yet it seems to be out of his
grasp as he aimlessly roams the streets at night. Jamieson Cox, writing for Pitchfork
magazine, authored an article on Drake’s Toronto. He affirms that, “Drake’s lyrical
relationship with his city has shifted and grown over the years. On mixtapes like
2009’s So Far Gone...his interactions with Toronto were vague and distant; any
references to the city were typically oblique...”29
The video accompanying the second song, “The Motto,” takes the audience and
our understanding of Drake’s identity even further away from Toronto. The first scene
cuts to a shot of a woman speaking to the camera. She says, “So Andre wanted me to be
a strong black woman. If you could see me now....” The Andre she is referring to is her
deceased son and the aforementioned godfather of the Bay Area’s hyphy movement,
Mac Dre. Drake not only pays homage to an innovator of Hip Hop but he also removes
his identity from regional restriction. Drake embodies post-regional Hip Hop directly

29 Jamieson Cox, “Views from the 6,” Pitchfork, March 5, 2015

 VIRTUAL SPACE .

and subsequently provides further evidence of his authenticity as a black artist.

Lyrically, the song takes the audience around the country, “Go uptown, New York City,
bitch / Them Spanish girls love me like I’m Aventura / Tell Uncle Luke I’m out in
Miami too” before returning to one of Hip Hop’s sites of origin as he concludes, “Rest in
peace Mac Dre, I’m-a do it for the bay.” Visually compelling, the video is comprised of
scenic and spectacular shots of the entire Bay Area.
After paying homage and asserting his authenticity through his struggle for
acclaim as well as the escape from the perils of poverty, Drake is ready to explore the
more controversial elements of his identity. The artist, in the video for the song “HYFR
(Hell Yeah, Fucking Right),” recreates a scene from the Jewish rite of passage, his Bar
Mitzvah. The first scene is a home video clip from Drake’s youth. His mother leans over
and asks the young boy what he has to say to which he replies, “Mazel Tov.” Then
several lines of text appear on the screen: “On October 24th 2011 Aubrey ‘Drake’
Graham chose to get re-bar mitzvah’d [sic] as a re-commitment to the Jewish religion.”
The remaining four minutes of the video display Drake, his friends and his family
reenacting the Jewish ceremony with scenes of prayer, dance, excessive drinking and
partying. The video marks a departure for the artist from earlier image development.
Initially, this video would have been impossible when he was situating his identity as a
black artist. This moment in his career marks a dislocation. Drake is simultaneously
subverting static blackness and monolithic Jewishness. Thus he brilliantly positions
himself as an emblem of post-regional Hip Hop.
The final video discussed in this paper marks the artist’s homecoming. Having
established himself as a true artist, Drake brings the audience back to his hometown of
Toronto in the most direct and blatant tribute to his city yet. The song, “Started from the
Bottom” (and the main hook of the track, “Started from the bottom now we’re here”) is
an anthem for Drake’s progress as an artist as well as a direct statement regarding
blackness in North America. The video is rife with borrowing and recombination.
Drake is seen ghostriding around his old neighborhood, mirroring Bay Area style and
again dissolving regional borders. Notably, the cityscape is no longer blurred. Clear
gorgeous shots of the CN Tower, Canada’s tallest structure, occupy large chunks of the
video. Drake’s Canadianness is unencumbered by a requirement to prove blackness.
The final scene of the video is simply a shot of the artist’s jacket, which reads
TORONTO in bold lettering. Drake’s journey has taken him back to where he started
yet, in order to return, he first had to depart.

Conclusion

I have argued that Hip Hop serves as a means of communicating black identity
made necessary by a “Topos of Unsayability” that accompanied black migration to
North America during slavery. Challenging fixity and static blackness in North
America, an understanding of Hip Hop’s use of space and time to subvert a white
supremacist structure was explored through New York’s block parties and the Bay
Area’s sideshows. Desiring a tool to better articulate this practice, I asserted that the
 JOURNAL OF HIP HOP STUDIES .

growing prevalence of the screen in an increasingly mobile and technologically

advanced society has served as a moment of dislocation and thus the music video is an
excellent tool for such a study. I used the example of Drake’s journey in Hip Hop to
articulate how blackness and Hip Hop are intertwined and that the necessary steps an
artist must take to assert authenticity reflect the complexity of blackness and black
identity. Drake exemplifies a movement towards a post-regional understanding of Hip
Hop and, subsequently, black identity in general, which reflects the fluidity of blackness
as well as the intertextuality that Stuart Hall discusses. Challenging old binaries and
dissolving archaic borders, a post-regional understanding of Hip Hop problematizes
monolithic and static blackness, which is increasingly finding representation in the
media.

I would like to express my very great appreciation to Dr. Caspar Melville for his assistance and
guidance in the planning and development of this work. His willingness to give his time so
generously has been very much appreciated.
 VIRTUAL SPACE .

Bibliography

Baldwin, Davarian. "Black Empires, White Desires: The Spatial Politics of Identity in the
Age of Hip Hop." Black Renaissance 2.2 (1999): 139-59. Web.

Block Party. Dir. Michel Gondry. By Dave Chappelle. Bob Yari Productions, 2005. Film.

Cox, Jamieson. “Views from the 6.” Pitchfork Media, Mar. 5, 2015. Web.

Drake, Weekend, Rihanna, Birdman, Nicki Minaj, Rick Ross, Lil Wayne, and Andre
3000. “HYFR.” Cash Money Records/Universal Republic, 2011. MP3.

Ghostride the Whip. Dir. DJ Vlad. Rugged Entertainment, 2008. Web.

Gilroy, Paul. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. Cambridge, MA:
Harvard UP, 1993.

Hall, Stuart. Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies. London: Routledge, 1996.

Hesmondhalgh, David and Caspar Melville. "Urban Breakbeat Culture - Repercussions

of Hip Hop in the United Kingdom," Global Noise: Rap and Hip Hop outside the
USA. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan UP, 2001.

Hesse, Barnor. "Black to Front and Black Again." Place and the Politics of Identity. ed.
Michael Keith and Steve Pile. London: Routledge, 1993. 162-82.

“HYFR (Hell Ya Fucking Right).” Dir. Director X. Perf. Drake and Lil Wayne. Youtube.
Cash Money Records, 26 Aug. 2012. Web. 23 Apr. 2015.
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0KCWqnldEag>.

Keith, Michael, and Steve Pile. Introduction. Place and the Politics of Identity. London:
Routledge, 1993.

Lamar, Kendrick. “The Blacker the Berry.” Kendrick Lamar. Boi-1da, 2015. MP3.

---. “Control.” Big Sean. 2013. MP3.

Massey, Doreen. "Politics and Space/Time," Place and the Politics of Identity. ed. Michael
Keith and Steve Pile. London: Routledge, 1993. 141-61.

Melville, Caspar. "Urban Breakbeat Culture - Repercussions of Hip Hop in the United
Kingdom," Global Noise: Rap and Hip Hop outside the USA. David Hesmondhalgh.
Middletown, CT: Wesleyan UP, 2001.
 JOURNAL OF HIP HOP STUDIES .

Mirzoeff, Nicholas. An Introduction to Visual Culture. London: Routledge, 1999. Print.

“The Motto.” Dir. Lamar Taylor and Hyghly Alleyne. Perf. Drake Featuring Lil Wayne
and Tyga. Youtube. Cash Money Records, 10 Feb. 2012. Web. 23 Apr. 2015.
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BYDKK95cpfM>.

Railton, Diane, and Paul Watson. Music Video and the Politics of Representation.
Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2011.

“Started from the Bottom.” Dir. Director X. Perf. Drake. Youtube. Cash Money Records,
13 Feb. 2013. Web. 23 Apr. 2015.
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RubBzkZzpUA>.

“Successful.” Dir. Jack White. Perf. Drake and Trey Songz. Youtube. Atlantic Records, 1
Oct. 2009. Web. 23 Apr. 2015.
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j5DySYu5Bfw>.

Sweatshirt, Earl. Chum. Earl Sweatshirt. Columbia Records, 2013. MP3.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without
permission.