Andreas Suhr

The Imagined Communities of Hip Hop: a Sociological and Political Study of Rap Music As a Revolutionary Medium Andreas Suhr

This book contains the second semester-project of three students at the International House of Social Sciences at Roskilde University. In the project, the authors Thomas Pultz, Anders Jessen and Andreas Suhr try to determine the possible coalition between the community of hip hop and revolutionary tendencies through a combination of lyrical analysis and the theory of "Imagined Communities" by Benedict Anderson. The result is an interesting combination of interpretations of lyrics by some of the the most influential hip hop-artists through time, and a sociological perspective of the "Imagined Communities" involved with the Los Angeles Riots of 1992 and the uprisings of the Arab Spring of 2011. The project is written with a big emphasis on methodology, as it contains a chapter with thorough descriptions of the methods, ontology and epistemology used.