International Journal of Cultural Studies 1 –17© The Author(s) 2014Reprints and permissions: sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.navDOI: 10.1177/1367877914528529ics.sagepub.com

Who said hip-hop was dead? The politics of hip-hop culture in Immortal Technique’s lyrics

Christopher VitoUniversity of California, Riverside, USA

AbstractWhile much of mainstream hip-hop has been corporatized and commercialized by major corporations, strands of independent hip-hop have attempted to remain separated from the major record labels. Using hermeneutic methods, this article examines the lyrics of independent hip-hop artist Immortal Technique. This article identifies three central themes in Immortal Technique’s lyrics that illustrate how he expresses resistance to class domination. First, he argues that class conflict occurs in hip-hop and thus there needs to be a pull away from major corporations. Second, his lyrics point for the need for independent hip-hop to escape from false consciousness and resist hegemony. Finally, his work indicates that the creation of knowledge through independent hip-hop culture and language present a means to resist class domination.

KeywordsAdorno and Horkheimer, culture and society, Gramsci, hip-hop culture, Immortal Technique, independent hip-hop

Hip-hop just died this mornin’And she’s dead, she’s dead. (Nas)

Tricia Rose, author of Black Noise (1994) and The Hip-Hop Wars, proclaims that ‘hip-hop is not dead, but it is gravely ill’ (2008: ix). She argues what was once a culture that

Corresponding author:Christopher Vito, University of California, Riverside Department of Sociology, 1206 Watkins Hall Riverside, CA 92521, USA. Email: cvito001@ucr.edu

528529 ICS0010.1177/1367877914528529International Journal of Cultural StudiesVitoresearch-article2014

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proposed resistance to oppression and domination has now become a commercial fad dominated by corporate elites. A number of other scholars have similarly critiqued hip-hop culture, focusing on hip-hop’s privatization and corporate co-optation (George, 1998; Perry, 2004; Watkins, 2005). This literature focuses on mainstream hip-hop, which is broadly defined as music produced and released by artists of the three major record labels in the music industry (Universal Music Group, Sony Music Entertainment and Warner Music Group). Independent hip-hop, broadly defined as music produced and released by artists outside of the three major record labels and concordant mainstream outlets, has not been given as much attention because it operates outside of the major corporate entities (Perry, 2004: 202; Terkourafi, 2010: 333).

These definitions of mainstream and independent hip-hop are not intended to be dichotomous, static and reducible to a ‘set of sine qua non’ (Terkourafi, 2010: 3). Instead, it is a spectrum that is interrelated, overlapping, emergent, and discursively constructed (Terkourafi, 2010: 13). For example, some artists may gain notoriety in the independent hip-hop circuit but eventually sign with a major record label while some mainstream art-ists may later choose to become independent after their record deal is completed. In addition, there is much crossover between the two as some independent labels use larger corporations for distribution deals, which allows for less creative control, and some major record labels will create sub-labels with varying degrees of autonomy. But for the purposes of this article I use Immortal Technique’s conception of mainstream (‘the majors’) and independent hip-hop (the ‘3rd World’) in the United States from his 3rd World (2008a) album, as loosely defined in the previous paragraph.

My study contributes to the existing literature on independent hip-hop (Aldridge, 2005; Asante, 2008; Ball, 2009; Bennett, 1999; Harrison, 2006; Kitwana, 2002; Maher, 2005; Ogbar, 2007; Smalls, 2011) by attempting to understand the ability of independent hip-hop culture to resist corporate domination. I do so by using hermeneutics to examine the class politics of independent hip-hop culture through the lyrics of Immortal Technique. I argue that Immortal Technique’s lyrics illustrate the potential of independent hip-hop culture to provide a means of resistance to class domination through critical thought and social consciousness. My research thus illustrates the limits of Adorno and Horkheimer’s (1944) theory of mass culture for understanding the content of contemporary popular culture. Rather, this article argues for the importance of Gramsci’s (1971) organic intel-lectuals in aiding the formation of a critical social consciousness to fight against class domination.

Immortal Technique is a rapper born in Lima, Peru and raised in Harlem, New York. Half black and half Peruvian, he was born on 19 February 1978 under the name Felipe Andres Coronel. He attended Pennsylvania State University for a short period before being incarcerated for a year under multiple aggravated assault charges. After his release in 1999, he attended Baruch College for two semesters while living with his father. He is currently an independent hip-hop artist and political activist engaging in projects ranging from building an orphanage in Afghanistan to participating in the Occupy Wall Street Movement.

Immortal Technique was chosen for this study because he has willingly remained an independent hip-hop artist for over a decade and has written various songs advocating for the importance of independent hip-hop culture. Although there has been a growing

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literature on hip-hop outside mainstream culture and outside the US (Bennett, 1999; Harrison, 2006; Maxwell, 1994), other than Williams’ (2008) work on hip-hop and Jeremiad, Immortal Technique has largely remained understudied as he has remained underground and not promoted by mainstream media. This occurred despite him gaining success in the independent hip-hop circuit and selling around 200,000 copies of his three first albums.

I address this gap in scholarship, identifying three key themes found in Immortal Technique’s work that demonstrate how some hip-hop artists are maintaining the critical edge of hip-hop. First, despite class conflict within hip-hop culture, independent hip-hop can be a source of creative control salient to less powerful groups in society because these artists produce outside of mainstream hip-hop culture’s large conglomerate record labels. The second theme addressed is the problem of hegemony, or the dominant social and cultural order enforced by the wealthy elite (Stapleton, 1998: 221), which can per-petuate false consciousness even among those in independent hip-hop culture. The final theme addressed in his lyrics is that despite hip-hop’s struggle with false consciousness, independent hip-hop is not dead and still has the ability to present messages and lyrics which resist hegemony through the creation of knowledge and the appropriation of language.

Literature review

In the earliest stages of hip-hop, culture became a medium and an outlet for disenfran-chised youth of color in the United States. In its beginnings hip-hop expressed ‘individ-ual and collective experiences, grievances, and dreams [that] were talked about and reflected upon in the hidden social spaces that tend to fall between the cracks of political history’ (Kelley, 1994: 52). But as hip-hop grew and spread, it faced problems of privati-zation, commodification and commercialization by large corporate entities (Myer and Kleck, 2007: 140). Particularly in the 1990s there was a shift to larger, centralized com-panies that controlled not only the artistic direction of mainstream hip-hop but also the majority of the revenues from record sales and related industry products. By 2000, hip-hop’s total sales had skyrocketed to $1.8 billion and some 90% of the gross revenue went to major corporations such as Seagram (Myer and Kleck, 2007: 140).

Hegemony in mainstream hip-hop culture

The corporatization and commercialization of the hip-hop industry by major corpora-tions has led many scholars to try to identify how this shift has occurred (Chang, 2005; Dyson, 2010; West, 2004). Strands of literature on hip-hop culture are influenced by the Frankfurt School members Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer and western Marxist Antonio Gramsci (Blair, 1993; Myer and Kleck, 2007; Shusterman, 1992). These scholars critiqued classical economic deterministic arguments in Marxism in which economics was the main determinant that shaped society. Instead, these theo-rists focused on how culture is not only a byproduct of the economic mode of produc-tion in capitalism, but how culture also shapes the economy and itself reinforces the status quo (Jones, 2006: 4).

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Adorno and Horkheimer’s (1944) view of mass culture states that the culture industry, which is a capitalist and bureaucratic structure that disseminates modern popular culture, is nothing more than a capitalist-dominated tool to maintain power over the conscious-ness of the masses. They write that this culture industry ‘is in fact forced upon (the sub-ordinate class) by the power of society’ and gives the masses the ‘artificial impression of being in command’ (Adorno and Horkheimer, 1944: 124). But for Adorno and Horkheimer, this is nothing more than a false consciousness wherein the masses are actu-ally conforming and showing ‘obedience to the social hierarchy’ (Adorno and Horkheimer, 1944: 131). In regards to hip-hop culture, their ideas are useful in understanding the privatization and commercialization of mainstream hip-hop culture (Perry, 2004: 6). Shusterman (1992: 472) states that, rather than being a site of resistance, hip-hop culture has now become a mass administered culture created by the ruling class, designed to reinforce hegemonic ideas, reproduce the status quo and distract the masses.

Much of the research on the commercialization of hip-hop culture also draws insights from Gramsci’s (1971) theory of cultural hegemony. Gramsci argues that class domi-nance is maintained through coercion, but also through consent of the masses. He thus acknowledges the active role of the subordinate group in the operation of power (Jones, 2006: 41). According to Gramsci, hegemony often exists because ‘those with power and wealth promote hegemonic ideologies that normalize the status quo’ (Tanner-Smith et al., 2006: 684). Second, those in the subordinate class also promote the status quo by adhering willingly to the practices of the dominant group. Drawing on these ideas, Blair (1993: 499) argues that hip-hop artists willingly support the status quo by reproducing the hegemonic practices of the major record labels, or those of the dominant class.

Rise of an independent hip-hop culture

The emergence of mainstream and company-controlled music has created a revival of an underground hip-hop culture. The use of independent media, such as small radio stations, the internet, small show venues and independent record stores, help to spread independ-ent artists’ music without filtering (or the selection process by corporate executives) (Ball, 2009: 616). While independent hip-hop has been pushed into the underground, it still a plays a major role within hip-hop culture for minorities (Aldridge, 2005), women (Smalls, 2011) and the underclass around the world (Bennett, 1999; Harrison, 2009).

I argue that independent hip-hop artists like Immortal Technique can be organic intel-lectuals who resist hegemonic practices of the dominant class. As Gramsci states, in order for the dominated class to fight hegemony they must develop their own organic intellectuals who can aid in developing class consciousness among the subordinate group (Gramsci, 1971: 7). For Gramsci, these intellectuals (including artists) have the social function of formulating ideas that address political and social consciousness in order to resist dominant hegemony. I assert that there is the possibility that independent hip-hop artists as organic intellectuals can create counter-hegemonic ideas that represent the interests of the people by ‘understanding the aspirations of the people and representing them to those above’ (Jones, 2006: 91). In doing so, independent hip-hop culture has the potential to form critical class consciousness, as well as resist the hegemonic practices of capitalism, by allowing the creation of music and culture outside of capitalist-controlled

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industries (Ogbar, 2007: 107). It encourages resistance to the status quo as well as the need for critical consciousness (Asante, 2008: 71).

The concept of organic intellectuals has two significant impacts for the critical social consciousness of the independent hip-hop community. The first is that this segment of hip-hop can allow for more opportunity for political lyricism, or the use of language to resist domination by the corporate elite. Political and class consciousness in segments of independent hip-hop confronts hegemony by arguing for a higher level of awareness and an alternative medium of expression not under the control of the commercial music industry (Kitwana, 2002: 147).

A second important impact is the revitalization of creativity and innovation in its music. Since independent hip-hop tries to remain outside mainstream music’s large cor-porations, one of its core features is a more democratically controlled industry where artists and their albums provide more open conduits of social and cultural transmission (Maher, 2005: 138). A democratically controlled industry is defined as the self-produc-tion of music evaluated by other artists and listeners rather than label management (Maher, 2005: 139). Although this does not always occur because there is heterogeneity among independent hip-hop labels, ideally this type of industry could allow for more innovation among artists as they are not controlled musically by major record labels.

Thus, independent hip-hop can offer a form of resistance to dominant hegemonic ideas. It is a site of contestation and cultural resistance to the domination and oppression in society. To demonstrate this, I analyze the key themes in the lyrical content of inde-pendent hip-hop artist Immortal Technique. In particular, I focus on his response to the commercialization of the mainstream hip-hop industry and the interests of the corporate owners, as well as the economic and political structures that are shaped primarily by the white elite ruling class. This study finds that hip-hop, particularly independent hip-hop culture can be a symbol of this resistance, despite the problems of cultural hegemony and passive uncritical consumption in the music industry that may hinder critical thinking and action within hip-hop.

Data and methodology

The chosen methodology for this work is hermeneutics. Hans-Georg Gadamer (1960) created an interpretive science ‘that sets out to express the way we, as human beings, understand ourselves and the world’ (Metro-Roland, 2010: 561). He argues that the understanding of text is contextual, historically based and mediated through language. This framework treats the lyrics of Immortal Technique as texts to be interpreted and analyzed as a medium of expression not divorced from their specific contexts of use (Dimitriadis, 2009: 153). In doing so, I identify the key themes of independent hip-hop culture that ground his music and demonstrate the ability of hip-hop to resist domination and hegemony.

The analysis of hip-hop’s lyrics follows the mold of previous works by others in the field. For example, Trapp (2005: 1285) argues for the need to study artists’ lyrics because they are the primary evidence that hip-hop culture leaves behind. Tickner (2008: 122) uses a similar framework in studying hip-hop culture in Colombia, Cuba and Mexico. She utilizes an analysis of artists’ lyrics to determine how rap narratives reflect the

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experiences of artists, who are usually voices of a disenfranchised group. Similarly, Shusterman (1992) argues that we can also use this technique to understand the history and experiences of artists through an analysis of the music and beats that accompany lyrics. My work adds to this literature by studying an artist who has not been at the fore-front of hip-hop literature.

The sample includes all accessible lyrics by Immortal Technique. He currently has four albums: (1) Revolutionary Volume 1 released in 2001 (16 tracks: 57 minutes), (2) Revolutionary Volume 2 released in 2003 (18 tracks: 67 minutes), (3) The 3rd World released in 2008 (16 tracks: 63 minutes) and (4) The Martyr released in 2011 (16 tracks: 64 minutes). Also included in the sample are songs in which Immortal Technique is a guest artist (25 miscellaneous tracks). Finally, recorded video interviews and website biographies were used as supplemental documents to aid in the understanding of Immortal Technique’s background and influences.

The unit of analysis is bars, which is loosely defined as a line in a rap verse. There were roughly 792 bars used. The lyrics were recorded utilizing numerous lyrics websites. The lyrics for each song were recorded by more than one site and then checked against each other for accuracy. In specific cases where lyrics were unknown or did not match, the song was transcribed first-hand. All lyrics were then placed into NVivo, a qualitative program to help store and code the data.

Once all the lyrics were transcribed and placed into the database, all phrases that ref-erenced key themes or concepts were documented in a separate file. Further coding occurred wherein each set of phrases and lines was placed into categories based on theme and context. One example of the coding process is from the lyrics: ‘Remember that his-tory isn’t the way the corporate controlled media made it look like … thank you for sup-porting independent hip-hop, the heart and soul of our culture’ (Immortal Technique, 2003b). Here, these lyrics were placed into two sub-categories: media and independent hip-hop culture. It is important to note that these thematic categories are not mutually exclusive; phrases could be placed into more than one category if they addressed multi-ple issues. This methodology allowed for more malleability in the key themes as many of the sub-categories overlapped or were interconnected. Table A lists the 16 key themes, as well as their frequency in terms of bars, found in Immortal Technique’s lyrics.

While I found 16 key themes in his lyrics, these were highly interrelated and could be grouped into three larger key themes revolving around the concept of independent hip-hop cultures: (1) class conflict, (2) hegemony and false consciousness and (3) hip-hop’s resistance to hegemony and domination. Presented below are elaborations of these three key themes along with lyrics that are exemplars of each theme.

Key themes

Class conflict in hip-hop cultureWe need to understand that classism is the real issue. Many of us are in the same boat and it’s sinking, while these bougie mother-fuckers ride on a luxury liner. And as long as we keep fighting over kicking people out of the little boat we’re all in, we’re gonna miss an opportunity to gain a better standard of living as a whole. (Immortal Technique, 2001b)

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A key theme in Immortal Technique’s (2001b) lyrics is class conflict in modern society. He argues that class conflict is endemic to our society. In our modern economic mode of production, capitalism reigns supreme. The goal of the capitalist ruling class is to increase capital and maintain ownership of the means of production. On the other hand, the pro-letariat class is consistently exploited in capitalism via extraction of surplus value and remains dependent on subsistence wages in order to survive (Tucker, 1978: 473). As Immortal Technique points out, these subsistence wages keep workers subservient in capitalism and competing with one another just to stay afloat.

Immortal Technique’s lyrics raise the question: does hip-hop reproduce these same class divisions within its own culture? He argues that the economic structure of the hip-hop industry mirrors the larger capitalist economy. The bourgeoisie own the means of production, such as the record labels and all of their resources. Meanwhile the proletar-iat, or the artists themselves, need to sell their labor power and usually work for subsist-ence wages. In cases where artists do get paid well, many of them still do not own the means of production and need to continue to sell their labor power in order to maintain profits. As part of a structure that mirrors this capitalist economy, it appears that hip-hop merely serves to produce a culture of competition and profit-making just as intensely as the capitalist structure. Therefore, Immortal Technique’s assessment of class conflict in our society is also discussed in terms of the class conflict found within the hip-hop indus-try as a whole.

Another important question for independent hip-hop artists like Immortal Technique is: how is it that artists who are part of the proletariat class embrace an ideology that consistently puts them in a position of unequal distribution of capital? If artists are losing out in an unequal economic system, one may propose that they should come together and change the unequal power structure. Locating this problem in his lyrics, Immortal Technique recognizes that the problem of false consciousness among the artists pressures them into reproducing capitalist ideologies. In ‘Treason’ (Akir, 2006, featuring Immortal Technique), Immortal Technique writes:

Capitalism’s a religion that makes Satan a GodAnd teaches self-righteous people to embrace a façade.

Thus, though our society appears to be a culture created by the proletariat it is merely a ‘façade’ that reproduces inequality. Hip-hop also suffers from the same fate. Immortal Technique mirrors the concerns of Adorno and Horkheimer when he states that hip-hop has been co-opted to provide a powerful medium to teach the false ideologies of the capi-talist class to the masses.

A call for independent hip-hop

In response to this class conflict, Immortal Technique’s earlier albums present an argu-ment for a revolution in the hip-hop industry predicated on pulling away from the control of mainstream corporations. This revolution, which is primarily class based, calls for a change in the economic structure of hip-hop culture wherein the artists take back the means of production and change the economic relations of production. Unfortunately,

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much of the creative freedom is inhibited because the bourgeois class still owns the means of production and their ideological forces are reproduced by the artist, which are embodied for Kitwana (2002: 85, 121) in the misogyny of Jay-Z’s ‘Big pimpin’ and the violence and nihilism of MC Eiht’s ‘Streiht up menace’.

As a result of this disjunction, Immortal Technique and other artists have made the attempt to break free from the economic control of major record label companies. For example, in ‘Watch out remix’, Immortal Technique (2008b) raps:

100 percent independent, I’m the fucking bossI sold 80,000 off a quotable in the sourceThe hood is not stupid, we know the mathematicsI made double than what I would going gold on AtlanticCause EMI, Sony, BMG, InterscopeWould never sign a rapper with the White House in his scope.

Instead they have decided to make music through the underground mode of production. The days of battling (artists rapping with and often against one another in front of specta-tors) and ciphers (informal gathering of artists engaging in freestyle raps) may have quickly been replaced by recorded song, but the increase in technology has allowed more artists to utilize mixtapes, singles, LPs and EPs outside the traditional mass media mar-ket. This shift in the economic mode of production should allow for artists to obtain crea-tivity and freedom of speech, while also maintaining profits that are not subservient to the dominant bourgeois class. When listening to Immortal Technique, one still wonders if this is enough to overturn a music industry based on a capitalist economy that oppresses artists who are part of the proletariat class.

Immortal Technique and the issue of cultural hegemony

Immortal Technique’s early call for a revolution in the hip-hop industry through inde-pendent hip-hop regaining economic independence appears to have failed. The issue of economic independence alone is not sufficient to address the issue of hegemony.

Instead of finding emancipation from mainstream culture through independent hip-hop, it has been set back because hip-hop itself forgot that it still engages in and repro-duces the hegemonic practices of capitalism. For example, Immortal Technique points out that many artists are merely struggling in the rut of daily life. In ‘Harlem streets’ (2003a) he writes:

Check to check, constant struggle to make the paymentsWorking your whole life wondering where the day wentThe subway stays packed like a multi-cultural slave shipIt’s rush hour, 2:30 to 8, non-stoppin’And people comin’ home after corporate share croppin’And fuck flossin’, mothers trying to feed childrenBut gentrification is kickin’ them out of their buildin’A generation of babies being born without health careFamilies homeless, thrown the fuck off the welfare.

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These artists use the independent hip-hop scene to obtain capital and ultimately sign with major labels to escape the ecology of poverty. But without understanding both the eco-nomic and cultural aspects of capitalism, those who make it in independent hip-hop will merely be reproducing capitalist logic. In the song ‘Voice of the voiceless’, Immortal Technique (2009) raps:

Birthing a screaming bastard, post-colonial nationSubject to childhood diseases, famine, war and inflationEducation molded you into your master’s imageAnd you forgot who the fuck you were before the war was finished.

Immortal Technique points out much more clearly in his later albums that if we do not address culture and education, for example, we are destined to repeat the mistakes of the past and the dream of revolution in the hip-hop industry will not come to fruition.

Addressing the issue of hegemony in hip-hop

Although Immortal Technique’s lyrics present the argument that economic independence alone is not the answer, he presents two distinct arguments regarding which the inde-pendent hip-hop community can act as organic intellectuals in addressing the issue of cultural hegemony: (1) by forming consciousness within independent hip-hop culture, and (2) by forming consciousness through all of hip-hop culture to resist domination and oppression by the ruling hegemonic class.

First, Immortal Technique’s lyrics address the question: if economic independence alone is not the answer, then what is? Immortal Technique presents the argument that the independent hip-hop artists can act as organic intellectuals who address the issue of hegemony by forming consciousness among independent artists and their culture. He also argues that since these alternative views are often overlooked by mainstream media, any form of ‘systemic’ opposition to the status quo has been forced to hip-hop’s under-ground, or what he terms the ‘3rd world’ (2008a). In Rockin’ Squat’s (2009) song ‘Démocratie fasciste’, Immortal Technique writes:

The world is fucked up cause that’s the way we made itAnd it’s easy to think that nothing can change itI paint a picture of a possibility for all of youRevolution’s universal vision is volatile.

Immortal Technique’s lyrics support the notion that underground and independent hip-hop must be the site where the defiance of the status quo must occur. For Immortal Technique this form of hip-hop operates outside the traditional confines of large, capitalist-controlled industries. In doing so, it resists hegemonic domination by pre-senting ideas that force artists and listeners who interpret them as such to question capitalist ideologies rather than be passive consumers of culture. Ultimately, he pre-sents the argument that independent hip-hop can provide a form of liberation through critical thought and action if artists and listeners are willing to engage in it. And this

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challenge of hegemonic control must come from organic intellectuals, or independent actors who have an understanding of the repressive logic of mass media in capitalist economies.

But his first argument asks this question of its listeners: is mainstream hip-hop noth-ing more than mass culture? And does independent hip-hop, which can provide more opportunities for artists to produce music without corporate oversight, provide the only means for resistance and change? Or does this dichotomy recapitulate the already exist-ing bifurcation between bourgeois ideals and proletariat resistance? In response to these problems, this article argues that Immortal Technique’s later lyrics depart from Adorno and Horkheimer’s pessimism regarding the ability of popular music to truly address class consciousness (Hill, 2009: 6). Rather, his lyrics address this issue and present a second theme wherein all of hip-hop culture, and in particular independent hip-hop, has the potential to address issues of hegemonic control.

The second theme presented in Immortal Technique’s later lyrics addressing cultural hegemony follows the notion that critical thought must occur in all of hip-hop culture. From what we have seen, both mainstream and independent hip-hop cultures are suscep-tible to the dominant ideologies of capitalism. Thus, even though independent hip-hop operates outside mainstream media, much of its culture still reproduces oppression and inequality.

The conflict is exemplified in Immortal Technique’s lyrics that focus on social change that requires consciousness on the part of the masses, not just independent hip-hop cul-ture. Based on his lyrics, I argue that Immortal Technique does not want a society wherein the workers are still following an ideal merely presented by others. For example, in ‘The martyr’ (2011) Immortal Technique raps:

The purpose of life is a life with a purposeSo I’d rather die for a cause than live a life that is worthlessI don’t need the circus or the day of national observanceI need you to think for you and stop being a servant.

Rather, this more nuanced argument states that all of hip-hop needs to be a site of contes-tation, struggle and reflection on the current state of our society. Thus, independent hip-hop needs to critique mainstream hip-hop culture but also critique independent hip-hop culture as well. Within this contestation, there is the possibility of hip-hop being able to obtain consciousness through critical thought within and between both mainstream and independent hip-hop culture.

A dialectical approach to Immortal Technique’s later lyrics demonstrate that while a culture of commodification has occurred, hip-hop also provided Immortal Technique and other rappers with the ability to fight back. As Gottdiener argues:

Marxist theorists who advocate ideological domination fail to appreciate the importance of the relative autonomy of sub-cultural life. It is true that the consumption habits of individuals are so manipulated by the mass culture industries as to transform the production of meaning by subcultures into a managed market purchase. But this does not always happen because consciousness itself cannot be controlled. (quoted in Blair, 1993: 501)

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Gottdiener reminds independent hip-hop artists that no matter how much money the ‘capitalist hip-hop industry’ puts into the game, they can never fully take away the cul-ture of the people. It just so happens that its subversion has left resistance either in the underground or hidden underneath multiple layers of hip-hop’s politics. As Immortal Technique (2001a) writes in ‘Caught in a hustle’:

So if I should ever fall and get caught in a hustleLet em know that I died while I fought in the struggleFrom the hood rats to the rich kids lost in the bubbleSpray paint it on the streets and the subway tunnelsWrite it down and remember that we never gave inThe mind of a child is where the revolution beginsSo if the solution has never been to look in yourselfHow is it that you expect to find it anywhere else?

Here, Immortal Technique reminds listeners that rather than simply stating that resist-ance is non-existent in popular culture, there may actually have been pockets of resist-ance there all along. A source of liberation can be found in the streets of hip-hop culture written on the walls underneath the ‘bling-bling’ of mass media. Thus, Immortal Technique believes in his later albums that hip-hop can provide us with liberation, even though the same music can be a source of exploitation. These contradictions are issues that Immortal Technique had to address if his vision of social change were to occur.

Immortal Technique’s lyrics reflect the need to study both mainstream and under-ground/independent hip-hop in order to understand who the bearers of meaning are and what those meanings are. If this is the case, then hip-hop culture must be seen as a per-petual theatre of struggle. So for Immortal Technique, we need to change the whole system to stop a culture of oppression and domination in hip-hop. His argument, while taking into account the problems of hegemony and the co-optation of mass media to perpetuate the status quo, presents a critique of Adorno and Horkheimer and visualizes a more optimistic future for hip-hop wherein hip-hop’s actors can become intellectuals who resist domination by hegemonic rule.

How can independent hip-hop culture resist domination and oppression?

As the previous sections indicated, Immortal Technique’s lyrics provide a useful under-standing of cultural and economic hegemony but this article has yet to address any poten-tial alternative solutions to the inadequacies of the theories proposed by Gramsci, Adorno and Horkheimer. This brings us to Immortal Technique’s third key theme. For him, resistance comes from creating knowledge that is not controlled by the hegemonic forces of the elite and using the language of hip-hop culture as a tool for fighting domination and oppression. Simply put: we have to focus on both the site of production and how it works in relation to power, as well as the interpretation of language and music.

Immortal Technique’s first key to emancipation is to alter the relationship between the artists and their audience. Traditional relationships between artists and listeners remain

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non-critical when artists are merely reproducing an education from the bourgeois class for the listeners. Rather, hip-hop artists need to think critically about issues and actively try to understand the world around them. In turn, Immortal Technique argues that listen-ers cannot passively accept the information as truth, but rather must analyze the music to determine if what the music is saying challenges the status quo. This would attempt to deal with the potential problem of organic intellectuals merely inputting thoughts into the proletariat. As Immortal Technique (2003c) raps in the song ‘Point of no return’:

South Paw, murderous methodology niggaRemember I’m just a man don’t follow me nigga.

Here he tells his listeners not to follow blindly everything he or anybody in hip-hop says, but rather engage in dialectical thought with one another. More importantly, he does not want his listeners to simply follow him or any other artists and take the message as ulti-mate or objective truths without critically thinking for themselves. Rather, those in power use the passivity to reproduce inequality and to reorient the world by filling us with ‘knowledge’ to their advantage. But Immortal Technique’s lyrics ask: how will they con-tinue to maintain power if we are not drones or empty receptacles to simply be filled with ‘information’ that distorts reality?

For Immortal Technique, society cannot be static and created only by those in power. Rather it is fluid and co-created between individuals: it is dialogical. It can never be one grand narrative being told to all as the only truth, but rather it must be continuous dia-logue with one another in order to engage in critical thought and praxis. A dialogue can free the masses from the dominant class’s hegemonic practices that teach us to be afraid of freedom and emancipation (Freire, 1970: 43).

Even more important in the analysis of critical issues is that if we know we are oppressed, then we have to develop the will to fight for liberation. In the song ‘Street hustle,’ Immortal Technique (2007) writes:

And I’m not a hypocrite because I’m aggressive and violentI’d be a hypocrite if I was peaceful and silentAnd I let them get away with the shit they say.

Here he writes of the irony of being peaceful and silent, which coincides with false con-sciousness and reproducing hegemony. Instead he writes that he would be a hypocrite if he did not call out the oppression he sees. For Immortal Technique, this means that he must exercise his resistance to domination through his creativity and music. This resist-ance must be reclaimed, protected and cultivated.

A second key theme for Immortal Technique is that social change and resistance to hegemony can occur in hip-hop through ideas and language, as it is a form of resistance itself. Without ideas and language, action can lack an ethics and quickly dissipate. In order to act, one must have a language to create social change. Currently, the language we speak is one of imperialism and domination. It is a ‘double bind’ in that we are still playing by the language games set up by the oppressor. But language can also be a means of revolu-tion. As Immortal Technique (Breez Evahflowin, 2004) raps in ‘Land of the gun’:

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Fight for my land with physical forceSpeak through music, the subliminal courseI need a tech and a clip, fuck a chain and a Porsche.

The ‘Mic’ can be a weapon of liberation, just like those who are armed in the struggle against domination. Language allows us to engage in an open and honest dialogue. It can submerge meanings and change narratives that we believe to be true. In this sense, for Immortal Technique hip-hop’s power lies in its ability to change language and reshape reality.

Immortal Technique’s lyrics suggest that we must take back language from those in power who use it to control us. We must fight to expose these ideologies that continue to hurt us. Rather than believing in a universal and global history, we have to embrace our local histo-ries. Hip-hop is vital in connecting our local community with the global perspective simulta-neously. Immortal Technique’s lyrics also state that local guerrilla tactics are necessary to subvert the language of oppression. Guerrilla tactics, according to Potter (1995: 76), provide an ‘incursion that steals language, sounds, the media spotlight, then slips away, regrouping at another unpredictable cultural site’. This is a powerful weapon that can never be taken away as resistance can be created anywhere at any time. More importantly, it cannot be contained. At the local level it fights against the homogeneity of language. At the larger scale it questions and challenges the power relations we live in today.

For Immortal Technique, language is important because its possibilities are endless and can never be fully colonized. It can change at any moment. If hip-hop embraces language, then its power is in its ability to delegitimize knowledge and create a new knowledge based in hip-hop culture. This language already made us aware that we can produce false consciousness. But this same language can also make us aware that there are opportunities for change if we are willing to find them. In this sense, language for Immortal Technique is revolutionary.

Conclusion

Through hermeneutics, I have examined Immortal Technique’s lyrics to demonstrate how independent hip-hop culture can provide a critical message of social consciousness to resist domination and oppression from hegemonic control. This article shows that Immortal Technique expresses resistance to ruling-class control over the mass media in general and hip-hop in particular. These findings run counter to Adorno and Horkheimer’s (1944) argument that mass culture is doomed to reproduce capitalist ideology, as well as prior literature depicting hip-hop culture as co-opted by large corporations (Johnson, 2008; Myer and Kleck, 2007; Tanner-Smith et al., 2006). Rather, it demonstrates that artists such as Immortal Technique can be organic intellectuals who aid in forming criti-cal social consciousness. Independent hip-hop, as exemplified by Immortal Technique’s lyrics, does indeed provide a means of resistance to domination and oppression for those who are disenfranchised by addressing the issue of cultural hegemony. I argue that a more critical look at independent hip-hop culture provides us with insight into how hip-hop culture can challenge hegemonic control and create language to resist domination (Watkins, 2005: 7).

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14 International Journal of Cultural Studies

However, two major limitations are: (1) it focuses on the content of song lyrics, and (2) it does not address the issues of race, gender, and sexuality. This work can be expanded upon by utilizing interviews with Immortal Technique to further understand his ideas on hip-hop culture, politics and economics. Further, the topics of gender and race were not included but the contradictions within Immortal Technique’s lyrics must be addressed. Similar to Immortal Technique, much of independent hip-hop is radical in its position on race and class inequality by challenging white elites who control major record labels. But male artists still dominate production (Balaji, 2010: 6) and their lyrics often remain sup-portive of the status quo in its portrayal of a static heterosexual narrative (Miller-Young, 2008: 264) that is not radical. Thus, more work by academics in the field is needed to explore Immortal Technique’s and other independent hip-hop artists’ views on sexuality and gender to address its contradictions.

Despite these limitations, there are two scholarly implications. First, further analysis focusing on independent hip-hop culture needs to be carried out. Many scholars have focused on mainstream hip-hop culture as a monolithic black male culture (Dyson, 2010; Rose, 1994). But recent studies have found that hip-hop culture is increasingly heteroge-neous (Harkness, 2012: 284), particularly with an increase in female and non-black art-ists. As a result, academics must continue to follow the lead of those academics who are uncovering these diverse pockets of hip-hop culture both in the United States (Ball, 2009; Harrison, 2006; Smalls, 2011) and globally (Androutsopoulos and Scholz, 2003; Bennett, 1999; Lin, 2006; Mitchell, 2000; Solomon, 2005) in order to obtain a rich in-depth understanding of its complexities and contradictions. In particular, academics must follow Maxwell’s (1994: 133) lead in continuing to address hip-hop (particularly inde-pendent hip-hop) as a complex and incomplete object of struggle bounded by a dialecti-cal process of complicity and resistance. An analysis of Immortal Technique’s lyrics adds to this earlier research by delving into these issues in independent hip-hop through an artist who has been largely overlooked.

Most importantly, I remind readers that hip-hop is not dead. As UK independent hip-hop artist Lowkey (2008) states, it may have just moved to the underground. If this is the case then hip-hop remains an important means to resist domination not only for the art-ists, but also for listeners, academics and society as a whole.

Funding

This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.

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Author biography

Christopher Vito is a PhD candidate in Sociology at the University of California, Riverside. His main area of research is the connection between independent hip-hop culture and critical pedagogy.

Appendix

Table A. Number of occurrences (measured in bars) of major themes in Immortal Technique’s lyrics separated by album.

Themes Rev. Vol. 1 Rev. Vol. 2 3rd World Martyr Misc Total %

Class conflict 12%Economics, class, capitalism 13 11 9 19 10 62 8%Ghetto and poverty 5 5 4 4 14 32 4%Hegemony and false consciousness

31%

Colonialism, neo-colonialism, globalization

6 16 13 21 10 66 8%

Independent and mainstream hip-hop

11 21 23 3 14 72 9%

Media 1 13 4 1 6 25 3%Politics and government 10 24 16 17 21 88 11%Hip-hop’s resistance to hegemony + domination

22%

Critical thought and education

7 16 6 15 20 64 8%

Critical action and praxis 5 7 9 12 18 51 6%Revolution and social change

15 10 14 11 17 67 8%

Other: 35%Drugs 3 4 6 1 6 20 3%Gender 2 2 4 6 0 14 2%Military 1 7 9 3 13 33 4%Police, brutality, corruption 3 2 3 2 5 15 2%Prison 2 8 10 5 4 29 4%Race 26 14 12 20 28 100 13%Religion 3 13 9 8 21 54 7%Total 113 173 151 148 207 792 100%

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