I Need to Fight the Power, But I Need that New Ferrari : Conspicuous Consumption, New-School Hip-hop and the New Rock & Roll

2017 marked the year in which hip-hop officially became the most listened-to genre in the United States. This thesis explores hip-hop music’s rise to its now-hegemonic position within the music industry, seeking to provide insight into the increasingly popular sentiment that hip-hop is “the new rock & roll”. The “new-school” hip-hop artists of the last six years or so have also been the subject of widespread critical disdain, especially for their heightened degree of emphasis on conspicuous consumption. This study will track hip-hop’s ascent from the mid-1980s through to its current position as both a political vehicle and a commercial product. This will result in a historically informed discussion of Migos’ 2013 hit “Versace,” a song that can be read as a signpost pointing towards many of new-school hip-hop’s most prominent characteristics. Analysis of “Versace” will then inform a broader examination of new-school hip-hop as “the new rock & roll”. This discussion will seek to better understand hip-hop’s new-school artists not necessarily as the harbingers of hip-hop’s death, as has been claimed by so many, but rather as agents of social reorganization, which, I argue, has always been one of hip-hop’s most valued characteristics