Digital Flows: Online Hip Hop Music and Culture

by Steven Gamble

Overview

This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International licence. It is free to read on the Oxford Academic platform and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations.

Some fifty years after its birth in the Bronx, hip hop has become one of the most influential cultural phenomena of the internet era. With the internet now enmeshed in our daily routines, hip hop thrives in the digital realm, constituting a third of all music streams. From Drake memes to viral TikTok dances and AI-generated rappers, hip hop is constantly created, shared, and discussed online. This shift challenges hip hop's conventional connections to place, authenticity, and community. Through this book, author Steven Gamble offers a fresh examination of hip hop's latest chapter, intricately interwoven with the interconnected cultural currents of the internet.

With an innovative method encompassing music and cultural analysis, ethnography, and web data analysis, Gamble provides a cutting-edge account of the intersections between hip hop and the internet, supported by the latest practices in digital humanities and data ethics. The book extensively draws on scholarship in hip hop studies, internet studies, popular music studies, media studies, communication studies, cultural studies, Black studies, intersectional feminism, and more. Gamble provides in-depth insights into hip hop in the internet age, new net-native genres like Soundcloud rap and YouTube lofi beats, communities on social media and streaming platforms, online hip hop feminism in rap music videos, cultural appropriation and callout/cancel culture, and hip hop concerts on video game platforms. For old school heads and extremely online memesters alike, for fans and creatives, for students as well as academics seeking to understand digital transformations of music, Digital Flows uncovers what happens when a cultural form born on the streets thrives on the transformative technologies of global reach.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780197656389
Publisher:	Oxford University Press
Publication date:	10/18/2024
Pages:	240
Product dimensions:	6.12(w) x 9.25(h) x 0.72(d)

About the Author

Dr Steven Gamble is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the University of Bristol, specialising in the study of popular music, digital methods, and online music cultures. He is the author of How Music Empowers: Listening to Modern Rap and Metal and co-founder of the Music and Online Cultures Research Network (mocren.org).

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements
List of Figures

1 Introduction: Hip Hop and the Internet
2 How Hip Hop Became the Leading Genre in the Digital Streaming Era: Sharing Culture
3 Internet Rap and Generational Tensions in Hip Hop's Soundcloud Era: 'Famous on the Internet'
4 Lofi Hip Hop and Community in YouTube Comments During the COVID-19 Pandemic: Beats to Quarantine to
5 Online Hip Hop Feminism, Rap Music Videos, and Gender in YouTube Comments: Responses to Black Women Rappers
6 Hip Hop and Online Cultural Appropriation Discourse: Trap, Pop, and Race
7 Virtual Hip Hop Concerts in Video Games: One Fortnite only
8 Conclusion: It's Where You're @

Index

Editorial Reviews

"Internet studies and creator studies are integral to the ways in which we look at contemporary media studies overall. However, there has yet to be a defining text that has highlighted how musicians are early adopters and first movers of both the web and social media platforms. Gamble's text tackles this task in a very refreshing way. His interdisciplinary ethics of care towards theorizing musicians as innovative creators makes this text very accessible and necessary." —Jabari "Naledge" Evans, University of South Carolina and Institute for Rebooting Social Media, Harvard University

"Digital Flows places hip-hop at the very heart of the contemporary internet landscape. This wide-ranging and rigorously researched book provides a forward-looking cultural framework to help scholars untangle the deeply intertwined and ever-changing relationship between hip-hop and the internet. Deftly navigating various digital media platforms, Gamble brilliantly explores hip hop's new online frontiers, including memes, streams, virtual cyphers, and dance crazes. Digital Flows makes a timely and lively contribution to our understanding of music, media, and culture in the Internet age. Considering that hip-hop continues to shape and be shaped by the online landscape, this book will be critical to any scholar researching digital music-making and foundational to thinking about the potential futures of hip-hop and the internet." —Jasmine A. Henry, Assistant Professor of Music, University of Pennsylvania

"Intuitive and accessible [...] Gamble's weaving together of how individual listeners, musical communities, and genre conventions interact with each other marks an interesting intervention into sticky debates over the relationship between popular music and social change." — Olivia Lucas, Popular Music

From the Publisher