Architecture of Disillusion: A Qualitative Study of Nihilism, Phenomenology, & Spirituality Among Black Men In Detroit Hip Hop

My objective was to investigate the relationship between nihilism among young black men of the inner-city and their creative impulse towards the creation of hip hop music. Using ethnographic methods, I interrogate the interplay between nihilistic dispositions among black men in the city of Detroit and the urge towards creating music as a way of constructing and renegotiating one’s own sense of “meaning” in life. Additionally, I seek to address the moral implications of nihilism in the social spheres of the black inner-city, utilizing Neitzsche’s conceptual distinction of active vs. passive nihilism to discuss the disillusionment with and reimagining of religion and God in the social circles of black men. Here, I argue that for some young black men, hip hop performance has fulfilled a yearning for a phenomenological value of life, in spite of a lingering sense that there is no innate, God-ordained purpose of living. This is indicative of a kind of “constructivist nihilism” that has formed and taken root in the black American underclass, a sense that precisely because life is essentially meaninglessness, they are empowered through conscious experience to find subjective meanings and inscribe alternative value structuring into reality.