Music Videos, Subculture Media and Social Media – on the Negotiations of Racism in German-speaking Hip-Hop

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Günter Mey, since 12/2021
• Subject Area: Empirical Social Research
• Term: from 2018 to 2022
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 403605416

In the German hip-hop scene the thematization and critical discussion of racism – and sometimes also its reproduction – has a long tradition. Racism as a highly relevant topic within media based scene discourses has – due to methodological shortcomings concerning qualitative analysis of audio visual products from the field of pop culture – not been analyzed yet. This applies to the German-speaking studies on scenes in the field of social sciences as well as to the hip-hop studies in the US. The project aims to reconstruct the negotiations of racism by focusing on the products (music videos), the media relevant for the scene (web presence of hip-hop magazines), the audience’s discussions (comments on the pages of the hip-hop magazines at Facebook). The project makes two highly relevant contributions: (1) With the negotiation on racism and especially the refugee crisis it analyzes two main topics of societal debates within the most influential scene since decades (hip-hop). It also (2) makes an innovation in the field of qualitative methods by using the Grounded Theory Methodology not only for the analysis of music texts or other text based internet data (e.g. columns in web magazines and comments by the audience) but also for the analysis of audio visual data (music videos).

• DFG Programme: Research Grants
• Ehemaliger Antragsteller: Privatdozent Dr. Marc Dietrich, until 11/2021