Who Got the Camera? A History of Rap and Reality

This music history/cultural study by Harvey (multimedia studies, Sch. of Communications, Grand Valley State Univ., Allendale, MI) contends that neither reality television nor reality rap ever made any pretension to the dry objectivity of the mainstream American newsroom; the intention instead was to hook American perceptions to the stories that those newsrooms habitually ignored. Harvey argues that hip-hop was one of the first cultural genres to not only engage with this new reality but also leverage its practices for itself. His argument has a solid evidence base, in the assertion of rap as a form of journalism, the emergence of the music video as a storytelling medium, and rap artists’ insistence that their work was real but not autobiographical. In borrowing the title of his book from the Ice Cube song of the same name, Harvey focuses not only on what reality is being depicted but whose reality it is. Small wonder that today, hip-hop careers can emerge from reality television and social media, as aspiring artists figure out how to make this media landscape work for them. It works the other way too: Harvey draws a direct line between the recording of Los Angeles police officers beating Rodney King in 1991 and contemporary videos posted on social media of the deaths of Michael Brown and George Floyd. The answer to Ice Cube’s question “Who got the camera?” is, increasingly, all of us.