‘I Want Your Hands On Me’: building equivalences through rap music

Abstract

In attempting to evaluate the subversive potential of popular culture generally, and rock music specifically, much recent Marxist theory has been caught in a dichotomy. At one pole has been a structuralist view of the subject as always already constructed (Althusser 1971): a notion leading to an analysis of popular culture as – yet another – agency of co-optation. At the opposite pole has been a view of popular culture as a set of subcultures, capable of expressing resistance to the dominant culture. Here, the subject is seen as pre-existing its construction through various modes of representation. Both sides of the dichotomy have therefore been implicated in a kind of holism that proves debilitating to cultural criticism: the one sees the (co-opted) subject as a coherent, albeit coherently written support for the system which has constructed it; the other sees the subject as a unitary resisting agent, unified through its class constitution and expressing its resistance in and through subcultural forms.

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