Regional Identity in Contemporary Hip-Hop Music: (Re) Presenting the Notion of Place

Abstract

Significant scholarship in both media studies and the spatial sciences has averred that the creation and consumption of ‘‘place’’ is intimately tied to the political economy of cultural production. Places, as socially constructed spaces, are subject to constant formulation and interpretation, and this is often consciously created by those with vested interests in selling ‘‘place’’ as a commodity. In this article, we hypothesize that the construction of place at the regional scale is reinforced and articulated in part by the hip-hop industry and the political economy thereof. By conducting a detailed multidimensional content analysis of a subset of regionally representative hip-hop music videos, we reinforce the sociotemporally contextual understanding of a cultural region as a scalar understanding of place.