The Construction of Authenticity in Written Rap (Rap Song)

Abstract

For some years now, rap has been strongly taking root among youth groups - either in competitions or through the composition of lyrics. Written and shared in spaces of musical distribution, rap songs constitute a sample of the discursive representations that young people dynamise around their vision of the world, their conceptions about the music they produce and their codification of values. In the light of a broad sociolinguistic approach that integrates contributions from the ethnography of communication (Gumperz & Hymes, 1972), sociocultural pragmatics (Bravo, 2003), critical discourse analysis (Van Dijk, 2008) and image studies (Goffman, 1967) and activities of courtesy and discourtesy, this paper looks into one of the most frequent topics in rap: being “real”. Our research aims to reveal how the idea of authenticity is constructed and how it is linked to the management of social identities.

In relation to the methodological aspect, we build a corpus of 44 rap songs uploaded between 2019 and 2023 on official YouTube channels by the most representative rappers in the music scene of Bahía Blanca city. The lyrics have been transcribed and analysed in terms of their linguistic components, and argumentative and ideological orientation (Del Prato & Melián, 2019). The outcome so far shows that one of the main mechanisms is using the strategy of polarisation between an “us” and a “them”, with a series of intertwined oppositions.