“That's hip-hop to me!”: Race, space, and temporal logics of authenticity in independent cultural production

• I explore the roles and forms of authenticity amongst competing cultural producers.
• Perceptions of tradition, convention, and innovation inform temporal logics of authenticity.
• Temporal logics of authenticity are mobilized in relation to racial and spatial logics.
• Socio-economic and demographic factors influence artists’ alignment with temporal logics.

In producer-saturated fields such as popular music scenes, claims to and judgments of authenticity are ever salient in contention for limited resources and prestige. By mobilizing meanings attributed to sounds, objects, individuals, and ideas associated with the past, present, or future of a genre, cultural producer groups are distinguished from each other and unified within themselves. Observing the dynamics of these distinctions allows us to ascertain how artistic professionals think of themselves and others, as well as begin to unpack the role that authenticity work may play in the practice and warrants of cultural production. Drawing on fieldwork and interviews from an independent rap scene in the Midwest, I demonstrate how artists draw on collective memory, modern convention, and projected futures to form competing, temporally rooted logics of authenticity by which to advance their positions.