Materialism and consumerism within hip hop is another common issue; condemnations of its materialism have accompanied hip hop throughout its history, particularly in conservative media, while defenses of this overt consumerism often tend toward illuminating the broader context in which rappers, typically young Black men, engage in such ostentatious display. “Their flaunting of wealth,” Ekow Eshun argues, “is intended as provocation against a society that has striven to confine the aspirations of black people.” For Mark Anthony Neal, this materialism contributes to a “hip-hop cosmopolitanism” that is “undergirded by desires for physical, social, and economic mobility” and challenges “stridently parochial notions of masculine identity (and gender) in hip-hop.” Or in the words of one of our greatest critics, Greg Tate, “Hip-hop is inverse capitalism. Hip-hop is reverse colonialism. . . . Hip-hop is the perverse logic of capitalism pursued by an artform. Like capitalism, hip-hop converts raw soul into store rack commodity." Beyond ideological interpretations such as these, however, analyses of the way hip hop’s broader economic and industrial dimensions interact with its cultural aspects are not as common.

SEED: Angle: interrogate the defense of hip-hop materialism as provocation — does the counterargument hold given hip hop's corporate absorption?

Andrew deWaard, Derivative Media, loc. 327