ILL COMMUNICATION

The term ‘Ill communication’ is a reference to the album title from the alternative American Hip-hop group Beastie Boys. Released in 1994, in the midst of my adolescence, their music drew a personal and coming of age awareness to the lyrically colourful genre of gangsta rap. In contrast, today the title of the album paradoxically refers to a cognitive dissonance, moral relativism and ignorance to the language articulated in the current convention of Hip-hop, Grime and urban British culture. The language and defining motifs of Hip Hop provides a model of systems and structure, that  offers an opportunity to analyse contemporary society.  The work is grounded in the tradition of existentialism exploring the tension of authentic and inauthentic. However, the premise of the research is founded on Louis Althusser’s concept, ‘ideological state apparatus’, in which the French writer identified the conditions of cultural reproduction. A recontextualisation of these ideas has brought into question the effects that global Hip Hop can have on the relative local sphere. It uses this as a set of apparatus and structure to consider much wider social issues and cultural phenomena. Furthermore, It contributes to our understanding of the conditions of contemporary cultural reproduction, appropriation, linguistics and acculturation. It also goes further to question cultural-relativism or tolerance for others and it provides reflexivity to the meaning of self, selfhood and social constructionism.