Since hip-hop's emergence into the popular scene in the mid 1980's, many postmodern theorists have emerged to hail it as the embodiment of postmodern intertexuality. With its recycling and recontextualization of other music, its lyrical referentiality to popular icons and to the self, rap seemed to embody many postmodern themes of fragmentation and pastiche. And although this might be true, it also articulates the young, lower-class black male in his inner-city environment. Hip-hop and its four manifestations (breakdancing, MCing, rapping, graffiti) were created out of this body to express its realities in and out of its urban space. This foundation in body and space is most often contradictory to many of the post-modern ideas about non static identity and corporal transcendence in that hip-hop forces its listeners to recognize the oppressions that define rappers' existence in the "real" world. But about the same time rap was making it's mark on America's popular culture, a new medium for communication and communities arose: the internet. This promised the other half of the postmodern ideology that hip-hop could not: disembodiment. With it's non-localized space and transcendence of the corporal, internetters could remove themselves from both their body and space and theoretically create a new cyber-reality. In the early 1990's, these two cultural phenomenons met in the form of two hip-hop internet newsgroups, alt.rap and rec.music.hip-hop. Drawing from a group very different from those that created hip-hop and providing an entirely changed space for issues of race, language and class, hip-hop social dynamics were bound to change.

I have read the exchanges on these groups for over a year now and would like to present my interpretations of this transformation of hip-hop from the street to cyber space. I am going to suggest that although some definite changes have occurred in these quasi-community groups, that hip-hop's foundation in a specific and significant body and space has acted as a constant reference that regulates possible abuses and losses of the cybernetic medium. By discussing issues of race, class, language, and space, I will detail the differences between street and cyber hip-hop communities, hopefully leading readers to the same conclusions I have had about these newsgroups' efforts to maintain their foundations in a localized and physical body and to Represent the Real.