From Beat Street to Main Street: Exploring Cultural Landscapes Through Rap Music, 1980-2000

Abstract

Rap’s evolution throughout the later decades of the 20th century demonstrates how a subcultural product can integrate into popular culture. This thesis investigates how this happened, developing theories of cultural development, taste formation, cultural production, and institutional relationships to understanding the changing landscape of the rap music industry. To support this theory, I constructed a database of songs and albums on the year-end Billboard charts from 1980-2000 and performed quantitative statistical analysis to correlate the relationships between new artist entry, institutional concentration, and popularity. A qualitative content analysis complemented this study, setting a context for the reception of rap during these years. I conclude that the processes of production and taste development are certainly intertwined, and that the changing institutional form of the rap industry contributed to the mainstream-ification of the cultural product.