Paths and challenges of contemporary Brazilian rap

Abstract

One of the most radical aspects of Brazilian rap along its trajectory was the increasing regulation of its aesthetic dimension by a set of fundamental ethical parameters built collectively with the peripheral community. In objective terms, this means that the quality or success of the genre within the music market could not be evaluated only aesthetically. In its most radical moments, rap did not intend to be interpreted only as music, but as the sharing of forms of popular and collective wisdom integrated into the experience of peripheral subjects, with the declared objective of saving lives. However, as the hip hop movement strengthens itself professionally, without solving the basic social inequality that gave rise to it, rap comes to be understood more immediately as a pure aesthetic form, endowing the ethical dimension with an unequivocal performance character. Or rather, making politics itself an aesthetic issue, more linked to the hip hop universe than to the original peripheral community, from which it separated.