Conscious hip hop: Lupe Fiasco’s critical teachings on raced and gendered representations

This article examines the critical pedagogy of Lupe Fiasco’s music video ‘Bitch Bad’ (2012). Situating Fiasco’s work as an instance of hip hop teaching, we propose an analytic model to facilitate the interpretation of genre conventions evident in the multimodal music video text. We place genre theory into dialogue with critical discourse analysis in order to bring forward the ideologies, social values and cultural norms invoked in Fiasco’s portrayal of hip hop video actors and spectators. The analysis reveals Lupe Fiasco’s and videographer Gil Green’s critique of racist and misogynist stereotypes perpetuated in the music industry. Fiasco and Green present the hip hop performer as a labourer who is asked to portray specific conventions of gender, race and class. They explore the impact of the genre conventions upon children who grow up in the context of these cultural norms; they situate Fiasco as a cultural critic and teacher; and they demonstrate the potential of the music video to function as a pedagogical text.