ABSTRACT

This article examines the absorption of hip-hop into the upper echelons of the popular music charts. It identifies 1997 as a pivotal turning point in this history and focuses on three albums released that year by the Bad Boy Entertainment label, in particular, as decisive: Notorious B.I.G.’s Life After Death, Mase’s Harlem World, and Puff Daddy and the Family’s No Way Out. These releases, the article argues, codify money as a sensuous abstraction and it situates this aesthetic gesture within broader social transformations, including the gentrification of New York, the financialisation of the recording industry, and shifts in the US economy. It argues that hip-hop came to uniquely aestheticise money at a historical juncture where money itself was growing increasingly abstract; ‘floating’ without any attachment to gold or other precious metals. In this respect, the Bad Boy label’s output in 1997 is exemplary of the way different orders of value – economic, cultural and moral – can intersect cultural objects.

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