There is no real debate on hip-hop’s place within the general culture. Most think of hip-hop as being a low-brow art form and even many hip-hop fans do not attempt to defend hip-hop’s cultural status. Yet, all these analyses are limited. Hip-hop is neither found in the sole domain of high-brow art or low-brow art, and we can even use hip-hop to diversify our thinking about art to get aesthetic enjoyers to consider middle-brow art as a viable cultural category. In this piece, I show that classification of hip-hop as middle-brow music exposes the fundamental non-inherent existence of high-brow and low-brow culture in general.
The cultural categorizations of high-brow, low-brow, high-culture, and low-culture are ultimately meaningless shams, especially since culture cannot be universally defined. There is nothing that inherently makes a cultural piece high-brow or low-brow, and who decides what is a part of high-culture or low-culture. Placing culture pieces, including musical pieces into high or low cultural categories has always been a class, race, ethnicity, and gender matter. Cultural rank is a sheerly a matter of cultural relativism, there is no means to measure The Eagles as producing higher art than Clipping or vice versa. While we cannot fully trace the roots of cultural relativism here, it is reasonable to suggest that it is as old as cross-cultural contact. We can read Aristotle considering the barbarians as being only worthy of slavery. And in this arbitrary dichotomous understanding of culture, culture is set as either a high or low thing. High culture is formulated properly around the European aristocrats viewing their culture practices as high and the cultural practices of the lower classes as low.
We need look no further than jazz, due to racialization jazz was seen as a low-class and thus a low-brow, low-culture music genre. However, contemporarily jazz is seen as high-class, high-brow, and a part of present high-culture. What changed about jazz was not the sound. Old-school jazz has always been played, Jazz simply became a part of high culture via acceptance into ‘high-culture’ in part due to George Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue. We can be straightforward: jazz was not considered a part of high-culture until white people began participating in jazz culture en masse.
Yet, we know there is nuance here. Since “the second half of the twentieth century, the boundaries between high and low culture are often said to have become blurred.” To be highly cultured in the present sense is not to listen to certain cultural pieces but to be eclectic in your cultural tastes. Instead, of matters of high and low culture or high and low brow being unfounded due to discrimination, now the categories are non-existent due to mass consumption of all cultural kinds by cultural elites. But this does not mean the discriminatory aspects of cultural distinction do not still exist or that there is an end of cultural judgments. What is found instead is a deemphasis of those in the upper classes discriminating against cultural inputs and we see upper class individuals embracing hip-hop and thus shaping hip-hop culture. We can see how monied influences hollowed the culture of hip-hop through white music executives and their mediators like P. Diddy. It is through monied influences that hip-hop shifted into being marketed as low-brow music. Hip-hop is framed as thugish, ghetto and this is not without reason. Often hip-hop executives and artists themselves have tried to sell their acts as street or for the hood, as exposed by people like Ray Daniels. There is nothing wrong with this – the issue at hand is when this is used to demean a whole genre of music. This is not to say there were no novelty rap songs like Rappin’ Duke, but hip-hop was more so on the track of jazz’s cultural cache but has so far been denied the same ascent. It has taken a great deal of time for hip-hop to work its way out of a low-brow perception into a relatively common middle-brow perception.
Middle-brow stuff, be it culture or art, is a designation as the name suggests in the middle or high-brow and low-brow matters. While middle-brow notions are also a sham, it opens up the breadth of cultural thinking to include work that covers difficult themes but in a manner that is accessible. When one’s work is considered or labelled middle-brow, this is not a compliment. The labeling assumes a work is unable to reach certain heights. Much of hip-hop finds itself categorized by listeners of mostly educated backgrounds as middlebrow, and this includes some of the genre’s most prolific artists. Both Childish Gambino and Tyler, The Creator have been labeled middlebrow artists (Professor Duri Long regarding Tyler and Niall Smith for Gambino as respective examples), yet what sort of cultural lack is in their music?
Cultural pieces never lack culture in and of themselves, instead all cultural pieces simply present a particular form of culture. The value of a cultural piece is determined by those who intake particular cultural pieces. This is not to say that cultural pieces don’t have more or less depth. It is defensible to suggest that say Childish Gambino’s Pink Toes is a deeper track than Lil B’s Ellen Degeneres as Pink Toes is a song about how drugs can expand our understanding of love and the latter is a meme song. But a great deal of or lack of depth within a cultural piece does not determine its cultural rank. Cultural pieces may be more influential than others but the lack of influence a cultural piece has does not remove it from cultural participation. Instead, we should consider culture a value neutral term. Cultural rank will continue to exist, yet it is always arbitrary, relativized, and subjectivized. Cultural participation is found in the enjoyment of any cultural piece be it listening to Hustle Bones by Death Grips or viewing a self-portrait of Frida Kahlo, thus making cultural participation open-ended.
The Harvard Gazette wrote of Marcyliena Morgan who helped pioneer hip-hop studies as a study of high art. While Morgan’s work as hip-hop archivist is beyond respectable, Morgan did not make hip-hop high art, as if Grandmaster Flash and The Furious Five’s The Message was not already art. Morgan instead noticed that hip-hop is and was indeed art worth protecting and placing amongst other forms of art considered high art. Hip-hop already always is art and culture, yet hip-hop is not allowed to ascend any higher than the middlebrow by and large.
The argument here is not that hip-hop ought to be considered high-art. Instead, putting music in various brows has only falsely delegitimized hip-hop. Hip-hop is neither low-brow, middlebrow, nor high-brow. Instead hip-hop is multifaceted as are all musical forms. Hip-hop shows music about religious salvation like Chance The Rapper’s and Noname’s Israel can exist alongside Gucci Gang from Lil Pump. Here we can also clearly state that hip-hop artists have gone about multi-genre collaborations with artists like Aerosmith and Nickelback have expanded hip-hop’s reach. The notion of middlebrow-ness has been weaponized against hip-hop. Kendrick’s winning of a Pulitzer Prize still has not ascended the genre as a whole, Kendrick is seen as a high-art exception despite Killer Mike, Mick Jenkins, and Noname making music of equal depth. In this hip-hop as a genre has shown the very flaccidness of cultural ranking, hip-hop has no home in any brow, especially since it was invented in the second half of the twentieth century and came up through the internet. This multigenre expansion of hip-hop only grew with multigenre acts that infused hip-hop elements like the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Rage Against The Machine, and Limp Bizkit.
We can sadly say that hip-hop has begun being considered high-art thanks to acceptance from white academics like myself. But no special acceptance needs to be given to hip-hop. Hip-hop artists will make what they will and culture holds enough strength independent of anyone’s judgment. Either you rock with it or you don’t. There is no such thing as high-brow, middle-brow, or low-brow hip-hop.
