Check Yo Self Before You Wreck Yo Self: The Death of Politics in Rap Music and Popular Culture

Abstract

One of the most interesting discussions has involved the thematic resurgence of a politically charged voice that these forms provide a perfect venue for expressing. The rise and eventual fall of this political discourse in popular culture is closely tied to the public presentation of popular forms. In its political dimensions, popular culture, having reached an apex with the release of Public Enemy’s second album, It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back (1988), seems to have functioned as a genre whose popularity had passed, instead of a sustained movement which connected both cultural artifacts and “real” political events, as did similar movements in the late 1960s and early 1970s.2

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