Both the state and rap fans have policed forms of masculine embodiment in hip-hop culture for
being criminal (Miles 2020), queer (Penney 2012),or otherwise non-normative (Smalls 2022). In
contrast, this panel examines how people have used the unruliness of hip-hop style to express
belonging, identity, and community. Two papers explore how Black people constitute a
community through unique hairstyling practices, from the hair waves that serve as a metaphor
for the expansiveness of Black community (Corey Miles) to the carework of giving haircuts
within hip-hop crews (Antonia Randolph). Another paper shows how Prince forged an uneasy
alliance with gangsta rap through his style during his Glam Slam era (Elliott Powell). A final
paper criticizes the state for criminalizing Young Thug’s style during his RICO trial, rather than
understanding his crew’s distinctive mode of embodiment as an expression of shared
tenderness (Will Mosley). Taken together, these papers show that Black male rappers’ style
communicates their unique position and desires as people who are simultaneously marginalized
within the dominant culture and exalted within hip-hop culture (Randolph 2006).
INDIVIDUAL ABSTRACTS
Cuts that Bind: Haircuts as Carework in Hip-Hop Crews
Antonia Randolph, antonia.randolph@unc.edu
Jonathon M. Hess Term Assistant Professor
Department of American Studies
University of North Carolina- Chapel Hill
Straight Black men use their personal style, such as their grooming and adornment, to express
desirable masculinity despite being marginalized within dominant culture (Randolph 2006).
Building on that insight, I examine the meaning of shared haircuts within crews, or groups of
three more friends, within hip-hop culture. While the Black barbershop has been studied as a
site of Black male bonding, not enough research has examined the meaning of friends cutting
each other’s hair or paying for a friend’s haircut (Wright 1998). I examine two scenes of shared
barbering in hip-hop culture to argue that the practice is a form of care work and an expression
of caring masculinities (Elliott 2015). In one scene, the members the Wu-Tang Clan pay for the
haircut for rapper Cappadonna who joined the 10 member rap group on tour after being
released from prison (Jenkins 2019). The members’ communal investment in Cappadonna’s
grooming is care that recognizes his humanity after prison’s dehumanization and establishes his
identity as a crew member, not just a carceral citizen (Burton 2021; Miller and Stuart 2017). In
the other example, a photograph shows a shirtless Scoop Lover, a dancer for 1980s rap star Big
Daddy Kane, freshening up Kane’s signature high-top fade haircut before a show (Tobak 2018).
The intimacy of the haircut and the high-top fade hairstyle that Kane shares with his two
dancers is care work that re-enforces the bond among the crew members. Both scenes show
the production of group belonging through acts of physical care among men.
Waves: Black Hair, Hands, and Hearing as Placemaking in the Uninhabitable
Corey J. Miles; cmiles6@tulane.edu
Assistant Professor
Department of Sociology & Africana Studies Program
Tulane University
What does it mean to forge home in a place that is violent and will soon no longer be
inhabitable? This project journeys up and down the U.S. South through Black coastal cities,
specifically to Beaufort South Carolina and New Orleans Louisiana, to capture Black
experiences with hurricanes, policing, and environmental erosion. Through ethnography it looks
at the silent, disquiet, and creative movements of everyday life to hear, feel, and see the small
ways Black southerners survive these multiple registers of disaster in community. No matter
how good young people are at avoiding police contact, they still choke on air that smells like a
paper mill while waiting for their neighborhood to inevitably be underwater. Thinking alongside
southern coastal music artists, barbers, and storytellers, this work theorizes the many ways that
waves allow coastal Black southerners to stay afloat. The way that Black people wave at each
other when they are the only Black people in a space, create sonic waves, move with waves in
their walk, and gel waves into their hair all serve as a frame to make sense of the relational
ways southern Black people gesture towards glimpses of freedom in the face of black death. To
be of and from a place is less about the avoidance of violence, but rather about the beautiful
and creative ways people stay afloat and drown together. It is in the style of living and dying.
Gangster Glam: Prince, Hip Hop, and Black Queer Masculinity
Elliott H. Powell
Associate Professor
Department of American Studies
University of Minnesota
Scholarship on multi-instrumentalist, producer, arranger, singer-songwriter Prince has long
explored the ways his music and sartorial styling transgressed norms of gender and sexuality.
From his high heels to his falsetto to his gender nonconforming alter-ego Camille to his makeup
to play with pronouns, Prince reveled in the musical and visual aesthetics of impropriety. Yet,
both in popular imagination as well as academic discourse, much of these Black queer
representations and performances of Prince are situated within his 1980s heyday or his 2000s
popular resurgence. This paper is, instead, invested in the Prince (and artist formerly known as
Prince) of the 1990s. This is a period wherein Prince incorporated more hip hop music and style
into his artistry, selectively appropriating elements of gangsta rap. Thus, this paper asks: in what
ways does Prince’s queer subversion of norms complement and/or compete with the assumed
rigid (if not toxic) formations of gangsta rap of the 1990s? In what ways might gangsta rap
provide Prince a space to further pursue transgressive performance practices? Through a study
of songs and music videos, this paper explores the “gangster glam” era of Prince to illustrate not
only how Prince disidentified with (in the Muñozian sense) the racialized gender formations of
glamor and the gangsta/gangster, but also how such disidentificatory practices provide new
ways for us, as popular music studies scholars, to conceive of the gangsta rap period.
Songs for RICO: Young Thug and the Case against Black Queer Expression
Will Mosley
Assistant Professor
Harriet Tubman Department of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies
University of Maryland, College Park
When the District Attorney of Fulton County (DA) Fani Willis charges members of the alleged
street gang “Young Slime Life” (YSL), she included Grammy-award winning rapper Jeffery
Williams, aka Young Thug, aka Slime (Thug), with conspiracy to violate the Racketeer
Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act. Across the fifty-six count grand jury
indictment, crimes spanning armed robbery, drug dealing, and murder are corroborated by the
DA’s application of the “overt act,” a feature unique to RICO cases in which non-evidence can
be leveraged against defendants anyway. No longer just enigmatic lyricism, irreverent music
videos, and the provocative Instagram posts of a successful rapper, whose content is
celebrated by fans. No, under the RICO Act, social media posts and music have been
decontextualized to now “constitute acts of racketeering activity” (13). Other scholars have
documented rap music’s history of political scrutiny, in which studies rap becomes a site of
resistance, possibility, freedom of expression, and any charge of deviance is a misreading of
Black art as such. In this paper, I trouble the impulse to recuperate trap culture, to make deviant
Black seem less problematic, to defang it if you will. I do so in order to appreciate trap music as
an
