Hip Hop has found a incubator in Los Angeles over the years, producing artists that have gone into the stratophere like Ice Cube and Snoop Dogg as well as an influential underground scene, just on the cusp of mainstream consciousness, like Aceyalone and Medusa, Dom Kennedy and Dam-Funk.

The current LA scene is filled with rising independent artists using digital means to communicate directly with their fans, in turn doing their own marketing and using that power cut out the middle man record company or record store. Indeed.

That is what USC master's student Marguerite de Bourgoing saw as she documented the scene while launching LAstereo.TV. She just earned her communcations degree in the Annenberg Program on Online Communities (where we became friends as well). She deploys YouTube and social network sites to showcase the Los Angeles hip hop scene.

A Movement

Some are calling it the "L.A renaissance" or "New West," marked by such sentiments of "Be the Change You Want to See," "Authentic yet Marketable" and Collaboration.

"For an artist/group to be successful it is important to strike your audience's imagination with something bigger than yourself. The idea of unity has always been a strong theme in hip hop," said Marguerite, as she nodded to the election of Obama, "the biggest transmedia movement to date."

Making all this possible - social networking tools, like Faceook, Twitter, Youtube and LAstereo.TV, adopted by young entrepreneurs/artists mainly in South Los Angeles.

"In hip hop every artist is its own brand (for lack of a better word) with an active online presence that started with MySpace a few years ago and today culminates with Twitter," Marguerite said. "Many artist are avid experimenters using gimmicks such as bubble tweet, twitpic, but also tumblr, blog and other devices."

This self made man, woman or group contradicts what would have happened with a record contract - They often give music away for free and have "re-appropriated music videos as a strong visual support for the music."

All this in some contrast to the reputation of Gangsta Rap. Yet she also has glimpsed the hierarchy of elders that has developed in what has always been described as a lifestyle, much more than a music genre.

"However, to exist in hip hop you ultimately have to be embraced by the community of rappers, made of the pioneers, the golden era," Marguerite says. "It's actually remarkable how that older community is still active. On Twitter one can follower rev from Run DMC who gives spiritual words of advice or legend rapper and producer QTip."

Below artist Basicali talks about making "Nobody Cares" in a Mac Genius Bar in Los Angeles.


Henry James, the iconic USC professor who is a pioneer in studying online social networks, reprinted Marguerite's research paper in full on his blog, with several videos and photos to illustrate her points.

"Bourgoing represents the Trojan spirit at its best -- a social and cultural entrepreneur who is taking what she's learned as a media maker and deploying it to serve her larger community," Jenkins wrote.

Marguerite graduated from Oxford University and the Sorbonne Paris IV. She created urbansalt.com with four classmates as a final project at USC.

LA rappers descried the current scene from the LBC to Inglewood: