Abstracthiphop is a genre of hip hop that eschews many of the conventions associated with conventional hip hop. It typically features unconventional beats and lyrics that focus on existentialism rather than braggadocio or everyday problems.
Abstract hip hop has become a popular genre among underground hip hop artists since the early 2000s. It is characterized by the use of a large number of metaphors and symbolic word choice in the lyrics.
The ethos surrounding hip hop is a complex and nuanced cultural form that is inextricably tied to racial subjectivity, black diasporic expressive performance traditions and late modernist (i.e., late capitalist) praxis. As such, the ethos of hip hop is both malleable and resilient.
Within sociology, the ethos of a culture is the social and political foundation on which that culture is conceived. It is a set of values and attitudes that shape a community’s behavior, which in turn engenders a cultural landscape.
Among the most recognizable qualities of a rap artist’s ethos are their commitment to intertextual meaning-making, their loyalty to hip-hop traditions and their willingness to self-correct when they find themselves in breach of these practices.
In addition, a hip hop artist’s ethos is also shaped by their position within the global spectacularity of blackness. Its emergence as a global cultural force is a result of two conditions that converge: the preeminence of black subjectivity in the United States as a dominant exporter of youth-oriented popular cultural products and its role as an inspiration for other struggles to achieve human rights and social justice.
