229th & Bronxwood Ave

“At the outset, hip hop was a countercultural movement that validated the collective marginalization of Black folks in U.S. ghettos; it was “a vehicle of artistic discourse which echoed the concerns, anger, hate, love, pain, hope, vision, anxiety, desire, and joy which had gone unheard in the public sphere known as the American media” (Miller et al., 2014, p. 1). Joan Morgan (1995) points out that this musical form was particularly important for Black men who would otherwise be ostracized for expressing their emotions; “[h]ip hop is the only forum in which young black men, no matter how surreptitiously, are allowed to express their pain at all (p. 154). While their expressions sometimes included unbridled instances of misogynoir (Bailey, 2021) and homophobia, hip hop was also a space for poignant analyses of racialized oppression and anti-Blackness. They used this music to turn “a defiant middle finger to a history that racistly ignored or misrepresented them” (Morgan, 1999).

It is a particularly appropriate form within which to study the discourse surrounding conspiracy theories related to crack, as the crack epidemic and the rise of hip hop as a national phenomenon occurred concomitantly. Black rappers and producers astutely observed their circumstances amidst the crack epidemic, making space for them to develop theories that explained the gaps between what they knew to be true and what mainstream (white) publics told them about themselves and their lived realities. This music was a part of a larger Black counterpublic discourse, allowing for alternative explanations for Black suffering, sometimes in the form of conspiracy theories. As a public which sought to upend the U.S.’s historically dominant racial order, their attempts at theorizing how white supremacy was materially affecting them positioned their interests as “counter” to those of dominant white publics (Jackson & Kreiss, 2023), and hip hop was a flourishing space where these ideas took root and spread.”

Chapter 2 Paranoid or Perceptive?: Theorizing the Crack Conspiracy in Hip-Hop Music