Hip Hop as Computational Neuroscience: How the Hood Hacked our Global Rhythmic Nervous System

Abstract

Long before the internet provided us with a networked digital system, music exchanges had created a global networked analog system, built of recordings, radio broadcasts, and live performance. The features that allowed some audio formations to go viral, while others failed, fall at the intersection of three domains: access, culture, and cognition. We know how the explosive growth of the hip hop recording industry addressed the access problem, and how hip hop lyrics addressed cultural needs. But why does hip hop make your ass shake? This essay proposes that hip hop artists were creating an innovation in brain-to-brain connectivity. That is to say, there are deep parts of the limbic system that had not previously been connected to linguistic centers in the combination of neural and social pathways that hip hop facilitated. This research is not an argument for using computational neuroscience to analyze hip hop. Rather, it is asking what hip hop artists accomplished as the street version of computational neuroscientists; and, how they strategically deployed Black music traditions to rewire the world’s global rhythmic nervous system for new cognitive, cultural, and political alignments and sensibilities.