This manuscript examines Marshall Bruce Mathers III, known both as Eminem and Slim Shady, as he employs pedestrian speech acts to walk the edge between “here and there.” Walking is the discursive process through which a subject is constituted by the relationship it creates with the Other. This project seeks to revitalize the humanities with a bit of technical rigor and as a last attempt to resuscitate the undead, parochial, and ethically troubled discipline of Middle Eastern Studies. In the final conclusion, I present an adaptation of Simpson’s Index of Diversity to introduce a means to measure the thematic diversity of the genre of Arabic rap based on a given sample. As primary data, this project created a sample of 100 Arabic language rap and hip-hop tracks released between the years 2008-2017, which were selected using a stratified random sampling strategy. A fully integrated content analysis consists of mutually informing qualitative, quantitative, computational and manual approaches to content analysis. As a generic inquiry, this project conducts an Integrated Content Analysis to characterize the diversity of themes represented in Arabic rap lyrics as a means to asses some of the claims previous scholarship has made.
Presently, there is either too little engagement with lyrical content and too much focus on ethnomusicological or cultural studies approaches which instead of content consider musical intertextuality, an individual artist’s biography, corpus, or their sociopolitical milieu. While there is currently a growing body of academic literature on Arabic Rap and Hip Hop, former research, instead of investigating the content of this genre in a systematic way, has opted for select readings of choice artists or distanced theorizations about Arabic Rap as a general phenomenon.
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