Hip hop entrepreneurship: the poetics of the Hip Hop Mogul

ABSTRACT

Scholars of entrepreneurship, business, and economics have been reluctant to consider Hip Hop as a viable means for research and theory-building. Oddly enough, through the 1970s – a period that was generally characterized by stagnation and high unemployment – Hip Hop captivated audiences around the globe, creating innovative and diverse market opportunities for a host of different communities. The term ‘Hip Hop Mogul’ emerged to describe artists whose commercial viability appealed to varied sensibilities and disparate public spheres. Who are these Hip Hop Moguls? What are the interests of these Hip Hop Moguls? Drawing on lyrical content from a sample of Hip Hop Moguls (n = 15), we examine the discursive frameworks that make-up Moguldom, its politics, and its ways of being. Ultimately, our findings shed light on the different ways that marginalized communities negotiate antagonistic economic relations and disrupt traditional business paradigms.

KEYWORDS:

• Hip Hop
• entrepreneurship
• linguistic inquiry
• racial capitalism
• poetics

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The full interview between Jay-Z and Warren Buffet can be found on YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=01Q9R7Da-hI

2 In scholarship on ethnic entrepreneurship, ethnic is used as a meta-descriptor for immigrant and minority communities. See: Volery (2007).

3 The ‘hood’ (slang for neighborhood) is commonly defined as an urban landscape with a high concentration of racialized minorities. For more, see the following: Boyd (1997).

4 Quoted in Neal (2004).

5 Articles that informed our selection include: “10 Top Hip Hop Music Moguls.” Society19. https://www.society19.com/top-hip-hop-music-moguls/amp/”; “Hip Hop’s Top 50 Moguls of All Time.” Zogblog. https://zogblog.substack.com/p/hip-hops-top-50-moguls-of-all-time; “The 20 Richest Rap Moguls in the World.” Musing on Music. http://www.musingonmusic.com/the-20-richest-rap-moguls-in-the-world/

6 Some Hip Hop Moguls have a reputation for being more involved in audio engineering and production (i.e., Timbaland, Pharrell Williams). Others are known to be more active in management (i.e., Russell Simmons). Thus, some individuals were omitted from our sample for those reasons. Participating in these activities compared to rap lyricism does not make someone ‘less of a Hip Hop Moguls,’ but it does come with empirical limitations. Focusing on artists with larger discographies lyrics allowed us to increase the size of our empirical dataset, not just in terms of the number of artists but also the amount of text/material we could examine.