When we acknowledge that an idea, history or tradition is not ours, we distance ourselves from it. When we then proceed to use, incorporate or represent it, we arrogate the right to employ what we acknowledge as not ours. It is not something we dodespitethe foreignness of our subject; it is something we do because of our perception of it as other. The implicit hierarchical nature of otherness invites seemingly innocuous practices of representation that amount to (often unknowing) strategies of domination through appropriation. (Dominguez 1987, p. 132)
This chapter explores the process of improvisation by emcees in freestyle, or improvised, rap. Drawing on interviews with and writings by freestyle practitioners as well as on recent scholarship in linguistic anthropology, social psychology, and sociology, it argues that freestyle is an everyday activity and a fundamentally social act. The chapter examines a recent study that uses functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to measure cognitive activity of improvising emcees, and it suggests that the study’s physical constraints on the emcees, its focus on emcees in isolation rather than on those improvising in a cipher (a group of people who take turns improvising rhymes), and its lack of attention to the effects of gender, race, ethnicity, and other identifications on freestyle performance limit the force of its conclusions.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.