"I think of crime when I´m in a N.Y state of mind" : Hur hiphopmusik utrycker det amerikanska samhället.

Sammanfattning: This bachelor thesis examine how the early hip-hop music mirrors the society in the US ghettos in the 80s and 90s in order to explore how the artists' individual experiences take the expression in artistic form of coherent discourse on public issues. It uses structural textual analysis thatencode and analyze lyrics from ten hip-hop songs. The material was studied with the help of Elias and Scotsons theories established and outsiders, Bourdieu's capital types, field and habitus, and postcolonial theory that Eriksson, Eriksson Baaz and Thorn highlights in there book GlobaliseringensKulturer. The survey shows that the songs we analyzed tells of similar problems, which we divided into five themes: crime, poverty, ideals, discrimination and depression. In this way, we concluded that there are common patterns in the songs we chose. In conclusion, the study shows that the analyzed songs express the artists’, both individual problems such as depression, poverty, criminality in an artistic form. But also other issues such as discrimination and racism in a larger level.