Digital Flows

This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International licence. It is free to read on the Oxford Academic platform and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations.

Some fifty years after its birth in the Bronx, hip hop has become one of the most influential cultural phenomena of the internet era. With the internet now enmeshed in our daily routines, hip hop thrives in the digital realm, constituting a third of all music streams. From Drake memes to viral TikTok dances and AI-generated rappers, hip hop is constantly created, shared, and discussed online. This shift challenges hip hop's conventional connections to place, authenticity, and community. Through this book, author Steven Gamble offers a fresh examination of hip hop's latest chapter, intricately interwoven with the interconnected cultural currents of the internet.

With an innovative method encompassing music and cultural analysis, ethnography, and web data analysis, Gamble provides a cutting-edge account of the intersections between hip hop and the internet, supported by the latest practices in digital humanities and data ethics. The book extensively draws on scholarship in hip hop studies, internet studies, popular music studies, media studies, communication studies, cultural studies, Black studies, intersectional feminism, and more. Gamble provides in-depth insights into hip hop in the internet age, new net-native genres like Soundcloud rap and YouTube lofi beats, communities on social media and streaming platforms, online hip hop feminism in rap music videos, cultural appropriation and callout/cancel culture, and hip hop concerts on video game platforms. For old school heads and extremely online memesters alike, for fans and creatives, for students as well as academics seeking to understand digital transformations of music, Digital Flows uncovers what happens when a cultural form born on the streets thrives on the transformative technologies of global reach.