Though often assumed to be an incubator for leftist Black politics, hip hop culture and rap music are increasingly being utilized in service of right-wing political priorities. Beginning with an overview of hip hop’s political history and relationship to both major political parties in the USA, this lecture explores right-wing politicians' and commentators’ embrace of particular aspects of hip hop as well as explicitly right-wing rappers’ use of hip hop music and culture. By tracing how hip hop and rap music are discussed and deployed in conservative spaces, this seminar challenges assumptions about the function of hip hop and race in contemporary US politics.

Bio: Loren Kajikawa is Associate Professor (Senior Lecturer) and Chair of the music program at The George Washington University’s Corcoran School of the Arts & Design. His main area of research and teaching is American music of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, with special attention to the dynamics of race and politics. Kajikawa’s writings have appeared in American Music, Black Music Research Journal, ECHO: a music-centered journal, Journal of the Society for American Music, and Popular Music and Society, among others. His book Sounding Race in Rap Songs (University of California Press, 2015) explores the relationship between rap music’s backing tracks and racial representation. In addition to his publications, Kajikawa is a former Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of the Society for American Music (Vol. 12-13) and he currently serves as co-editor of “Tracking Pop,” the University of Michigan Press’s series of books about popular music.

This event takes place as part of the Divided Communities Research Seminar series, a collaboration between George Washington University and Queen’s University Belfast.