Tricia Rose points our gaze to the "funky cyborg": "If we understand the machine as a product of human creativity whose parameters are always suggesting what's beyond them, then we can read hip-hop as the response of urban people of color to the postindustrial landscape" (Dery 213).
The hip-hop culture is an interesting study in technological subversion, a potent effort to use the master's tools to bumrush the master's house. In more formally critical terms, hip-hop culture uses the technology of the dominant culture to reformulate and to subvert (Dery 185). The landscape of the postindustrial city inspired early electro and hip-hop artists because it "shaped their cultural terrain, access to space, materials and education...They found themselves positioned with few resources in marginal economic circumstances, but each of them found ways to become famous as an entertainer by appropriating the most advanced technologies and emerging cultural forms" (Rose 34-35). Samuel Delany underlines the fact that hip-hop artists deliberately "mis-use" the technology, a technology in which they have no "equitable input" (Dery 193). The disenfranchised artistically enfranchise themselves when they master the technology.
The term "hip-hop culture" encompasses many aspects: the cult of the DJ, graffiti art, and rap music. Rap music is a decidedly postmodern art form for several reasons, according to Richard Shusterman:
1) Its proud use of sampling overturns the Romantic valuation of originality in art and the Aristotlian concept of unity (617-618).
2) It scoffs at the ideas of universality and permanence with its focus on local, immediate concerns and its enthusiastic desire for "freshness" (619).
3) It feeds off of mass culture and technology; "its technological character allowed its artist to create music they could not otherwise make," and the mass media of the information age made its dissemination possible (620-621).
4) It revels in pastiche and the "cannibalization of past styles", toying with our notions of history (624).
There are few art forms more postmodern or technologically-oriented than the urban and largely black and Latino-created rap music.
Rose, Tricia. Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America. Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1994. Shusterman, Richard. "The Fine Art of Rap." New Literary History 22:3. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991. 613-632.