This chapter offers an overview of the various spaces which have led to the racialisation of rap music in France using tools available to cultural sociology. It relies on several extensive case studies conducted in the past ten years on French rap music, its production, its consumption, and its media treatment. With the help of the “production of culture perspective”, the chapter describes how the music industry seized the opportunity to exploit a commercial niche that would later become a racialised professional segment central in its business. Focusing on the consumption of music, we then contest the representation of rap audiences as exclusively or initially male, non-White and working-class based, and demonstrate how these audiences have been socially diversified from the outset. These empirical findings are not contradictory with the capacity of rap to serve as a formative medium for racial self-understandings in contemporary France. Finally, the sociology of cultural legitimacy offers a framework to examine the political, legal, and mediatic racialisation processes which have incited moral panic relating to rap and rappers, such as lawsuits or attempts to censor their work.

This chapter centres Paul Gilroy’s warning at the dawn of hip-hop studies against a scholarly trend wherein “the phenomenology of musical forms is dismissed in favour of analysing lyrics, the video images that supplement them and the technology of Hip hop production.” This chapter is thus a methodological overview examining how leading journalists and scholars have approached the tricky job of writing about hip-hop’s musical sound. Drawing examples from the history of writing about rap music, it offers tips on how to develop our sound writing toolkits and challenges us to improve our understanding of the relationship between the sonic and the social. Because “music” remains such a conservative frame in the university, this chapter approaches the topic with a broadly decolonial, practical, and sound-centred approach. Such an approach opens us up to the important sonically minded contributions of arts practitioners, journalists, and scholars outside of music departments, while focusing in on the recent methods of scholars in the increasingly interdisciplinary fields of musicology, ethnomusicology, music theory, popular music studies, and sound studies. The chapter is a resource to help hip-hop scholars enrich their thinking (and feeling) about sound and make their research and writing more musical.

This introductory chapter begins with a provocation from Busta Rhymes at the 2023 BET Awards, where he advocates for the multi–locational precedents of hip-hop music, most notably its Jamaican forebears. Accordingly, and following this, it sets out this book’s core agenda and goals. Firstly, through calling for a a deepening of our gaze on rap, as a performed verbal art, specifically. Secondly, a widening of our gaze to acknowledge the truly global significance of this art form. It also addresses the dangers of lionising ‘foundational’ figures and moments in popular histories rap, and advocates for a critical engagement with global rap and the myriad cultures produced through this art-form. The introduction closes by detailing the book’s four key sections – “Historical and Cultural Perspectives”, “Approaches to Rap”, “Applications of Rap”, and “Contexts for Rap”. In both its theoretical and empirical endeavours, the Cambridge Companion to Global Rap enters into communion with artists, their work, and their lives. Rap’s status as a global force therefore demands appreciation of myriad cultural contexts, approaches to performance, and means by which this art form is sustained.

This chapter argues that rap has been undervalued by English studies. It conducts a close analysis of the work of Roots Manuva to develop a nuanced account of how his rap songs engage with contemporary human experience, and to demonstrate how literary critics might respond to them. It draws on the work of Jaques Derrida and Giorgio Agamben to examine the literary singularity of Roots Manuva’s third album Awfully Deep. Rodney Smith can be seen to play with with forms of temporality, the tension and difference between sound and sense, and understandings of the self in a digitally mediated world. The chapter proposes that by drawing on the concept of the semiotic-performative alongside that of the semantic and semiotic-poetic, students of English literature might be better able to engage with the significance of Smith’s oeuvre.

This chapter contributes an Australian perspective to a growing body of scholarship that explores “applied” hip-hop programs. It begins by introducing international studies that examine how and why hip-hop is used for applied aims, including concerns that hip-hop culture may be trivialised or exploited in institutional settings. The focus then shifts to Australia, where hip-hop workshops have been running since the 1980s. This background informs a literature review that outlines how hip-hop is drawn on in diverse settings from schools to youth centres with an emphasis on hip-hop music (rhyme writing / music production). The review suggests that applied programs are important creative outlets that achieve diverse educational and wellbeing outcomes. However, a recurrent theme is the need for further research. The chapter concludes by linking the literature review with a case study: a pilot project that evaluated hip-hop workshops for First Nations young people in Adelaide. This project found that mentors who run applied programs view hip-hop as a vital tool for self-expression and emotional healing. Together, the literature review and case study demonstrate the potential power of hip-hop but also the need for more evaluations of applied hip-hop programs especially in settings outside of North America, like Australia.