Like the scratch, hip-hop aims to rupture the status quo. Hip-hop began as an expression of the dispossessed, an artistic form of opposition in impoverished neighborhoods. From the beginning, the genre refused to underwrite the sentimentalities of society. Rather than reinforcing existing cultural narratives, hip-hop artists subvert the familiar.
This flipping of the script can take a number of different forms. Unique spellings, semantic inversion, and community-specific language are small ways that hip-hop flips the script. On a broader level, hip-hop artists subvert the familiar as they rap about raw, real, and troubling topics that are often ignored in mass media.