This paper studies two specific examples of the rap artist persona as resistance strategy, and builds upon several theories of hip-hop identity and resistance. Using Tricia Rose's concept of rap music as hidden transcript, and Russell A. Potter's idea of rap's postmodern play-as-resistance, I argue that certain hip-hop acts intentionally split or obscure their artist identities to subvert material conditions for the rap performer, and to negotiate their own position within the conflicting standards of authenticity and marketability put forth by the ghetto and recording industry.

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Hip-hop authenticity is a commercial value that grew in importance as the music gained a substantial market share of commercial radio. By 1990, with MC Hammer and Vanilla Ice albums at number one on the Billboard pop charts, increased mainstream interest began to foster among hip-hop artists challenges to the authenticity or "realness" of acts making money from rap music and marketing their music to an ever-expanding audience. Scholars such as Tricia Rose, Christopher Holmes Smith, and Adam Krims have theorized the performance of authenticity as necessary to establishing credibility as an artist within hip hop, which values a discourse of lived experience, and has roots in oral traditions of testimony and bearing witness. A successful performance of hip-hop authenticity is one which positions the artist as experienced knower, as in Ice Cube's claim "I'm from the street, so I know what's up" on the NWA song "I Ain't Tha One." This focus on performed authenticity was complicated by the crossover of rap albums, such as MC Hammer's Please Hammer Don't Hurt 'Em (1990), to the Billboard pop charts. Even such a dance/pop-oriented album as Hammer's, which spent twenty-one weeks at number one, included the track "Crime Story," which centered its subject matter on the artist's lived experience in the ghetto. And Vanilla Ice lost all credibility after The Dallas Morning News (Perkins) revealed several discrepancies between his label's official artist bio, which claimed Ice had grown up in a poor, urban neighborhood, and the artist's lived experience growing up in suburban Dallas.

A theory of hip hop's seemingly conflicting concerns of authenticity and marketability may work to reframe W. E. B. Du Bois' concept of double-consciousness in commercial terms as artists work to produce marketable music for mainstream listeners yet at the same time to maintain a necessary level of authenticity to a place of cultural origin. Paul Gilroy situates rap music as one of a series of modern black cultural forms that draw special power from "a doubleness" through artists' understanding of their practice as "autonomous domain," and of "their own position relative to the racial group and of the role of art in mediating individual creativity with social dynamics" (73). Smith, illustrating such doubleness for rap music, positions the ghetto as both crucial signifier of authenticity and a marketable aspect of self, arguing that the ghetto becomes "simultaneously commodity and safe-haven" as MCs market themselves through narratives of their place as other within mainstream commercial culture (348). In light of Smith's theory, Ice Cube's claim to be from the streets can work to authenticate his image and at the same time market it to an audience not from the streets. Krims argues that, for a rap act to achieve credibility and marketability, the performer must be symbolically collapsed onto the artist, so that, when O'Shea Jackson performs as Ice Cube, the experiences Ice Cube reports are accepted as Jackson's "speaking from authentic experience" (95).

A consistent performed identity here seems crucial to credibility, but Krims' theory of the collapsed identity ignores hip hop's persona artist. Like David Bowie performing as Ziggy Stardust or Garth Brooks performing as Chris Gaines, certain hip-hop acts perform a second artist persona. This phenomenon can take shape, through costumes, playfully evasive lyrics, and samples, as resistance to the material conditions of the musician. Rose and Russell A. Potter each explore the often subversive politics of hip hop as it grew from an oppressed culture, and cite forms of communal resistance through musical performance. Rose applies James Scott's investigation of power relationships through social transcripts to acknowledge rap music's "hidden transcript" of resistance, which plays a key discursive role, outside the music's direct critique of oppression in the public transcript, in engaging in "symbolic and ideological warfare with institutions and groups that symbolically, ideologically, and materially oppress African Americans" (100-01). Potter explores rap music as radical postmodernism, and he synthesizes Theresa L. Ebert's dichotomy of ludic and resistance postmodernism to argue that hip-hop culture often stages resistance through play itself. For Potter, rap music's resistance through play can become "the mask for a potent mode of subversion" (2).

I argue that such play can take the form of a mask itself, as rap artists obscure, confuse, or split their identities to subvert the often conflicting standards of authenticity and marketability. The persona artist constructs a second, distinct identity that goes beyond a change in name. Although a mainstream artist like Eminem may alternate names to form his trinity of Eminem, Slim Shady, and Marshall Mathers, none of these is an entirely separate persona as much as an aspect of the same MC. Nell Drumming discusses this distinction between naming and performing in persona, by which rap artists experience "much more dynamic character arcs" (1). In one example of such identity play, Greg Jacobs performs in the group Digital Underground both as Shock-G and MC Humpty Hump, distinct artists with individual personalities, vocal styles, and physical images, their identities distinguished Visually through Humpty's trademark mask. Jacobs preserves in Shock-G a traditional, "collapsed" identity, which is presented as authentic both to the performer's experience and to hip-hop culture, while at the same time he performs through Humpty Hump a comic-sexual persona which has proven appeal for the mainstream listener (see Diehl 125-27). Digital Underground uses the Humpty Hump persona to increase the group's commercial appeal and at the same time to criticize mainstream emphasis of image over rhyme skill, thereby aligning themselves with an "underground," "hardcore," or "real" hip-hop aesthetic even as they enjoy widespread commercial success.