It is probably valid and certainly tempting to conceive of hip hop culture as providing spaces of resistance. In the field of hip hop studies, understanding hip hop culture at least partially along the lines of resistance has served as a productive trajectory since its inception. Tricia Rose already looked for the potential of resistance in her groundbreaking monograph Black Noise (1994), which is often regarded to be one of the founding texts of the field. In a much-quoted passage on “flow, layering, and rupture” (39), resistance figures prominently, even if Rose introduces the idea via the notion of rupture as a way to describe the potentialities of hip hop in relation to a socio-economic and political status quo. She writes: "What is the significance of flow, layering, and rupture as demonstrated on the body and in hip hop’s lyrical, musical, and visual works? Interpreting these concepts theoretically, one can argue that they create and sustain rhythmic motion, continuity, and circularity via flow; accumulate, reinforce, and embellish this continuity through layering; and manage threats to these narratives by building in ruptures that highlight the continuity as it momentarily challenges it. These effects at the level of style and aesthetics suggest affirmative ways in which profound social dislocation and rupture can be managed and perhaps contested in the cultural arena. Let us imagine these hip hop principles as a blueprint for social resistance and affirmation: create sustaining narratives, accumulate them, layer, embellish, and transform them" (Black Noise 39). All of the above, Rose lets us know, does not become meaningful unless we use it “as a blueprint for social resistance.” The social that Rose is interested in here is crucially produced and policed by experiences rooted in racialization (with its ultimate pseudo-neutral signifier of whiteness), but also in the ways hip hop itself has impacted the social lifeworlds of practitioners across the globe, since it first became culturally visible and viable in the late 1970s and in the course of the 1980s.