Since its conception, hip hop has assumed an increasingly important role in today's media society. Today, many swedish hip hop artists often find themselves at the intersection of bottom-up and top-down representations. Despite the genre's many positive features of self-expression and social reflection, artists are constantly faced with a complex challenge. Hip hop artists must constantly navigate prejudice, stereotypes, and sometimes one-sided media representations while trying to convey their voices and perspectives. Through a case study of five Instagram images each of five different Swedish rap artists, a total of 25 images (Yasin, Asme, ADAAM, Z.E and Silvana Imam), a thematic content analysis and a social semiotic analysis, this study aims to investigate and analyze bottom-up representations of Swedish rap artists in social media. The study also aims to contribute to the discussion and problematization of whether, and if so how, rap artists themselves can challenge or reproduce prevailing top-down representations of them. The theoretical framework consists of representation, social semiotics, active choice theory, multimodality, intersectionality and norms. The empirical material has been interpreted and analyzed through the theoretical framework along with a denotative and connotative analysis and the analysis categories camera angle, poses and attributes in order to uncover the underlying meanings of the empirical material. The analysis suggests four identified themes in the empirical material which are power and status, glamorous and exclusive lifestyle, criminality and intimacy. The analysis shows that rap artists use different types of semiotic resources to emphasize and represent different aspects of themselves. For example, camera angles are used in a frog’s-eye view to represent the artists as authoritarian and rich of status, which is linked to norms of status. Expensive and exclusive designer clothes are used to give the appearance of a glamorous and exclusive lifestyle, while black clothes and threatening poses accentuates a criminal image linked with the lifestyle of a Swedish rap artist. Through semiotic resources related to norms of intimacy, the artists help to represent themselves as intimate. The analysis suggests that rap artists can both challenge and reproduce top-down representations of themselves, but that they in most cases only reproduce the perception of them.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UPSALLA1/oai:DiVA.org:kau-98251 |
| Date | January 2024 |
| Creators | Perjans, Filip, Solberg, Tobias |
| Publisher | Karlstads universitet |
| Source Sets | DiVA Archive at Upsalla University |
| Language | Swedish |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Student thesis, info:eu-repo/semantics/bachelorThesis, text |
| Format | application/pdf, application/pdf |
| Rights | info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess, info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess |
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