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The fashionable thing in certain circles-typically those self-identified as "conscious" or "underground"-is to discuss the impending death of hip_hop and to announce one's general ennui with regard to the state of contemporary black cultural production.1 This sentiment is ordinarily accompanied by assertions supposing hip_hop's declining significance in public life and a deep nostalgia for the hallowed golden era of graffiti writing, b-boying, deejaying, and emceeing. The truth of the matter is that hip_hop has never been merely the sum of its expressive forms. Rather, hip_hop has most often been manifested through these particular modes. And I would argue that hip_hop's aesthetic character, in some senses, has outgrown the performative boundaries of its original elements as well as the limitations of its presumed American singularity, anticipating further revisions of conventional repre- sentations of blackness and Americanness in public discourse. Many of the better innovations in hip_hop practice and reinterpretation-including those geared toward any sort of human rights initiative-are happening outside the United States and outside the traditional modes of expression, for example, in newer digital media and the fine arts.2 The continued evolution of the cultural work will require an active progression beyond the insistent regionalism and essentialist tendencies that have been the hallmark of hip_hop production for the past twenty years. In this way, practitioners might resituate useful standards of resistance and redefine hip_hop as a pragmatic operational strategy. This systemic transition is what I am calling hip_hop redux.
I am plugging in the premise that hip_hop, as it has been conventionally modeled over the past three decades, is broken in several aspects, namely, as a nationalist construction, as a productive underground movement, as a barometer of the real, and certainly as an adequate sign for authentic black identity. In each aspect, the model is broken ironically in its exaggeration. This thematic crisis is attended by a defensive hysteria on the part of those who, until this phase, have been responsible monitors of culture but now lead a mad dash to reestablish the importance of textual elements and patchily documented histories at the expense of cool reasoning about how hip_hop should next be figured. The selective authorization of hip_hop (as) text is coded by occasionally spurious claims about specific spatiality and temporality, the requisite coincidence...