Rap, Islam and Jihadi Cool: The attractions of the Western jihadi subculture

Abstract

Recent scholarship has explored the potential of subcultural theory for understanding the convergence of Western street and jihadi subcultures. The role of jihadi rap in this radical hybrid culture, however, is yet uncharted. We argue that subcultural analysis allows an understanding of the aesthetic fascination of jihadism, sometimes referred to as jihadi cool, and that jihadi rap should be seen as an integrated part of this cultural amalgam. To better understand the role of hip-hop in the hybrid street-jihadi culture, this paper offers a historical analysis of the relationship between hip-hop and Islam and detailed insight into the more contemporary, and marginal, phenomena of jihadi rap. We track the continuities and discontinuities from the presence of Black Islam in early hip hop to recent convergences between hip hop and jihadism. Our analysis draws on Lévi-Strauss concepts of bricolage and floating signifiers. Subcultures and hip-hop music are seen as bricolages that draw on a multitude of cultural references with their own particular history. In these cultural bricolages, Islam often acts as a floating signifier, with different and often ambiguous meanings. We argue and demonstrate that Islam has a long history of being part of hip-hop rebellion and attraction and that this, channelled through jihadi rap, can contribute to jihadi cool and the contemporary pull of Western jihadi subcultures.

The street-jihadi spectrum: Marginality, radicalization, and resistance to extremism

“…Much like when anti-Nazi punks provocatively embraced the swastika, the deliberate courting of outrage can in part explain street culture's embrace of images of hyper-violence, and indeed its flirtations with jihadi aesthetics. Where suggesting a capacity for irrational levels of extreme violence is a noted performative element of street culture (see Ilan, 2015), a reference to jihad in gangster-rap (Jensen et al, 2022), or strategically presenting oneself as a jihadist simply to gain a profile with the security services (Hemmingsen, 2010: 14), become subculturally logical as part of the creative portrayal of an oppositional self.…”

Deen and Dunya: Islam, street spirituality, crime and redemption in English road culture

“…Where Rastafari resonated so strongly in the 1970s with young, Black people exposed to street culture there are signs that Islam now occupies a much stronger position as the preferred spiritual modality of the streets (see e.g. Jensen et al, 2021). This resonates with the extent to which those British young people whose Islam is inherited from family invest in their religious identity as a bulwark against experienced racism and islamophobia (see e.g.…”

Finnish and Swedish ‘gangsta rap’ as a window on the dismantlement of the Nordic welfare state

“…Rose, 2008). Scholars have addressed the criminalised, but emancipatory dimensions of these genres in the Scandinavian (Sweden, Denmark, Norway) context (e.g., Berggren, 2013; Dankić, 2019; Qvotrup Jensen et al, 2022; Sernhede, 2000; Söderman and Sernhede, 2013). The Nordic welfare state socially unites the Nordic countries, but Finnish is not a Scandinavian but Finno-Ugric language, so it is often not included in these comparisons.…”