Preventing violence through hip hop: an evolutionary perspective

ABSTRACT

For decades Hip Hop cultural practices have been disparaged for allegedly inciting and being responsible for the eruption of urban violence. This assumption, likely built upon pre-existing biases regarding the street culture and ethnic minorities where Hip Hop emerged, ignored how some of the genre’s main elements – particularly freestyle rap, breakin’ or breakdancing and graffiti tagging – initially served the purpose of providing at-risk youths with real alternatives to direct physical violence in their day-to-day lives, and continue do so today. It has also ignored broader analogies with other cross-cultural and cross-species manifestations of similar practices that have served for millennia as effective mechanisms for reducing the likelihood of potentially lethal violence. By presenting these manifestations – namely song dueling and mark making – in comparative terms with Hip Hop’s freestyle song and dance battles and tagging territorial contests, this article seeks to highlight the relevance and potential of Hip Hop for preventing violence while also suggesting a common evolutionary backdrop within the context of strategies aimed at minimizing intraspecific aggression.