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»Hip hop today thrives on a sense of its own past.«1
Bill Brewster and Frank Broughton
»Some say this is the first generation of black Americans to experience nostalgia. And it all showed up in the music.«2
Nelson George
»With hip hop, born in the Bronx, these guys created something out of nothing. That's amazing. That's alchemy. That's magic.«3
Johan Kugelberg
The complex relationship between an artistic culture and its history can be investigated from two large-scale methodological angles. First, there is the relationship between that culture and its historical influences and precedents, linking past to present to form a network of lineage or traditions. The second method looks at the relationship between a (self-conscious) culture and its own internal history: its origins, development or evolution, and its defining features. Though elements of a culture shift over time, the importance of their defining features (e.g. lifestyles, worldview, philosophies, images, objects and products) are what keep cultural objects bounded in an imagined community. While such objects and concepts are never fully bounded in actuality, these features are the crucial signiflers which form cultural identity, and to many, its essence. Despite the contestation that some of an art world's essen tialism may invite, the truth content Wahrheitsgehalt) of an artistic culture is of great importance for those who participate. In popular music cultures, this >truth content< is part of a larger issue, widely theorized in popular music scholarship, known as authenticity.5 This chapter, by way of the second method, explores the links between hip-hop's self-conscious cultural history and notions of authenticity.
African-American culture, and its reception, has had a unique and problematic relationship with history, exposed to interpretations ranging from praise of artistic lineages (Stuckey 1987; Gates Jr. 1989; Floyd 1996; Demers 2003; Cobb 2007; Dyson 2007) to claims of having no history at all (Hegel's contention of African culture's »historyiessness«! Geschichtsbsigkeit as antithetical to Europe's).6 In terms of art produced by AfricanDiasporic communities, there may exist what Lois Zamora calls an »anxiety of origins« within North American and Latin American (more specifically »New World«) literary cultures.7 Zamora writes: »I consistently find that an anxiety about origins impels American writers to search for precursors (in the name of community) rather than escape from them (in the...