Listening to the video: Hip Hop videography and Rural Black Aesthetics

ABSTRACT The Black Hip Hop tradition, specifically rap, has appropriated and rechanneled music technologies and inscribed new meanings for cultural, economic, social, and political gains, videography included. Through an ethnographic study of Hip Hop in rural northeast North Carolina, USA, this project incorporates the voices of local Hip Hop videographers and rap artists to suggest that Hip Hop videography is a form of performative Blackness that exemplifies how the visual is a site of vernacular possibility. It shows how Black artists in rural northeast North Carolina work within the specific structure of the trap subgenre, which originated in urban centres, only to rupture it with visuals of rural Blackness. By demanding audiences to ‘listen’ to images, Hip Hop artists in the area known as ‘the 252’ use local history and the visual subjectivity of the surrounding region to alter the sonic experience of songs to set forth a local identity. This research positions Hip Hop videography as a relational space where identities are inhabited, imagined, and transformed.