Beyond gangsta: hip-hop, web culture and racial masking in the musical work of Tyler, The Creator

Tyler, The Creator (Tyler Gregory Okonma), is an African American rapper, music producer and entrepreneur who has been vigorously challenging tropes of black American masculinity. From chattel slavery to blackface minstrelsy, the African diasporic experience in the West is marked by a series of stigmas, contradictions and dichotomies evidenced in the challenge of being black in a white world. This duplicity denounced and analyzed by scholars such as W.E.B. DuBois and Frantz Fanon informs the theoretical frame of this dissertation but also reflects Tyler’s investments in subverting American racial ideology in his controversial audio-visual performances. Through his participation in and appropriating of skateboarding and web culture, Tyler denies common associations and stereotypes of blackness related to gangsterism which allowed him to become an internet phenomenon at the age of 19 with his music video “Yonkers” (2011). This study analyzes Tyler’s systematic move beyond gangsta through close media analysis and through ethnographic work in and around the black suburbia of Tyler’s upbringing in Southern California.

Grantor dc:publisher

University College Cork

Year dc:date.issued

2021

Author dc:creator

• Marques, Gustavo Souva

Advisors dc:contributor.advisor

• Rollefson, J. Griffith
• Kulezic-Wilson, Danijela

• Hip-hop
• Web culture
• Critical race theory
• Media studies
• Skateboard culture
• Tyler, the Creator

Statement dc:rights

• © 2021, Gustavo Souva Marques.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/

Language dc:language.iso

en

Handle dc:identifier.uri

https://hdl.handle.net/10468/12025

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:cora.ucc.ie:10468/12025