Between rhyme and routes: rap as a political and affective language of the peripheries in urban ethnography¹

Entre rimas e rotas: o rap como linguagem política e sensível das periferias na etnografia urbana

Abstract:

This article considers the use of rap as a political and affective language of the peripheries in the construction of ethnographic listening in precarized urban contexts. Based on fieldwork experiences with app-based delivery workers in Rio de Janeiro and Paris, it investigates how peripheral music production articulates narratives of belonging, resistance, and dignity in work. Rap emerges not as an object of analysis, but as a shared expression and relational resource for the field, expanding the methodological possibilities of urban anthropology by recognizing the centrality of subaltern aesthetics. In dialogue with the work of Roberto Cardoso de Oliveira, José Carlos Gomes da Silva, Rafael Abdala Norberto, Anthony K. Harrison and Baptiste Cléret, the article argues that an engagement with the poetic and sonorous language of rap enables the construction of an ethnography that is sensitive to the cultural and political dynamics of contemporary peripheries.

Keywords:
Labour; Rap; Urban Ethnography; Periphery; Culture

Resumo:

Este artigo propõe uma reflexão sobre o uso do rap como linguagem política e sensível das periferias na construção da escuta etnográfica em contextos urbanos precarizados. A partir de experiências de campo com entregadores por aplicativo no Rio de Janeiro e em Paris, examina-se como a produção musical periférica articula narrativas de pertencimento, resistência e dignidade no trabalho. O rap é mobilizado não como objeto de análise, mas como expressão compartilhada e recurso relacional no campo, ampliando as possibilidades metodológicas da antropologia urbana ao reconhecer a centralidade das estéticas subalternas. Ao dialogar com os estudos de Roberto Cardoso de Oliveira, José Carlos Gomes da Silva, Rafael Abdala Norberto, Anthony K. Harrison e Baptiste Cléret, o texto defende que o engajamento com a linguagem poética e sonora do rap permite construir uma etnografia sensível às dinâmicas culturais e políticas das periferias contemporâneas.

Palavras-chave:
trabalho; rap; etnografia urbana; periferia; cultura

INTRODUCTION

Cultural production in the periphery has emerged as a privileged site for understanding the social, political, and economic dimensions that traverse contemporary cities. Among the many expressions to surface from these territories, rap takes a central place, not only as an artistic manifestation, but as a language that articulates identities, forms of sociability and resistance practices. Based on research carried out among app-based delivery workers in Rio de Janeiro and Paris, this article analyses, through ethnographic practice, rap as a political and affective language of the peripheries. Taking music as a way of listening to and becoming close with the field, the study reveals how rap operates as a symbolic, political, and affective mediator between researcher and interlocutors, contributing to the establishment of bonds and enabling the situated interpretation of experiences of working and living in the peripheries.

The use of rap as a methodological instrument is not a methodological choice taken prior to the start of research, but, instead, a decision that springs from it. During pauses between deliveries, via earphones or verses posted in social networks, music is the soundtrack of the everyday, and a vehicle for narratives about work, exclusion and belonging. Inspired by the reflections of Roberto Cardoso de Oliveira (1996), this study takes listening as a constitutive dimension of the anthropological gaze, proposing that rap acts as a shared language that heightens an affective ear: one which recognizes, beyond verbal content, the aesthetic and affective modes by which subjects construct meaning in their trajectories.

The methodological sensibility I propose here harks back to an anthropological tradition that values the expressive aspects of experience, and incorporates hearing as an epistemological gesture. As José Carlos Gomes da Silva (2020) highlights, music, when integrated with anthropological praxis, affords access to affective worlds that span the body, memory and history. Ethnographic knowledge is not limited to the visible or the enunciable, but also includes that which is felt, sung, vibrated, which resounds. This approach is in tune with the propositions of Norberto (2020), who argued that the use of music in fieldwork not only amplifies what we hear, but transforms the very positioning of the anthropologist, demanding an ethical, aesthetic, and affective engagement with her interlocutors and their territory.

Taking music to be a tool for listening and interlocution, this research speaks to the contributions of Anthony K. Harrison (2015), who analyses hip-hop as practice for the production of situated knowledge, shot through with racial markers and urban experiences, articulating aesthetics and politics in daily life. Inspired by Cléret (2013), who analyses French rap as a form of discursive agency in the urban peripheries of Paris, thereby revealing its counter-hegemonic dimension and ability to generate belonging in the midst of policies of exclusion, this article seeks to understand rap not only as an object of analysis, but as a language and methodological device that can bring together listening, memory and social critique.

In informal contexts characterized by mobility and inequality, as is the case in app-based delivery work, music gives access to subjective and collective dimensions that evade conventional approaches. The use of rap as an instrument for listening during fieldwork with delivery workers enabled the recognition of the narratives and repertoires that organize their experiences of precarity. More than a soundtrack, music becomes the means for mutual interpellation between researcher and interlocutor, bridging language and affect. The practice is similar to what Cardoso de Oliveira (1996) discusses as ‘anthropological listening’, founded on an attention to how subjects express their interpretations of the world.

The analysis of app-based work also benefits from the critical perspective on contemporary regimes of control over individuals, as proposed by Deleuze (1990). In this model, traditional subordination is replaced by diffuse forms of power, mediated by technology and discourse that promote an autonomy that is only apparent. As Abílio (2020) argues, the ideology of entrepreneurship, which can be glimpsed in the discourse of app-based workers, acts as a rhetoric of individualization of the workforce, eliding relations of exploitation and hindering collective action. In this landscape, rap emerges as a counter-narrative, contesting imperatives of individual resilience and affirming the collectivity as the ethical and political axis of urban life.

This critique of the rhetoric of absolute autonomy and meritocracy is more potent still when it is observed in two distinct urban contexts: Rio de Janeiro and Paris, where experiences of precarity are interlinked with peripheral cultural output. The comparative analysis of these cities reveals both the local specificities of and the convergences between workers submitted to a platformized logic. In such territories, rap operates as a transnational language of resistance by means of which subjects proclaim their existence, narrate their pains, and produce shared meaning. Music connects experiences that cut across geographical and symbolic borders, unveiling a common dynamic of exclusion, mobilization and political creation.

The present proposal is inscribed in the field of economic anthropology, taking, as its starting point, the idea that labour relations cannot be understood in their material dimensions only. Authors such as Weber (1974), Polanyi (2000), and Mauss (2003) recognize that work involves symbolic, social, moral, and political dimensions that are constitutive of the experience of subjects. In this sense, rap is a dispositif through which these dimensions can be brought together and assume a public form. It is inscribed in the biographies of the delivery workers not only as a soundtrack, but as a resource for interpreting the world, an aesthetic expression of their social inclusion and a tool for making demands.

This article is organized in four main sections. The first discusses rap as a peripheral cultural product and a language of resistance in the urban context. The second takes rap as a political language and affective method in urban ethnography, analysing its potential as an instrument for listening, mediating, and constructing ties in the field. The third part presents a comparative analysis of the experiences of delivery workers in Rio de Janeiro and Paris, focusing on the transnational articulations of rap and its relation to struggles for dignity in work. Finally, in conclusion, the contributions of this study to urban anthropology are summarized, and I reflect on the methodological usefulness of cultural languages in ethnography.

By proposing rap as an affective method, this work is not seeking to congeal a technique, but to take cognisance of a possibility for listening that emerges from the field and respects how subjects express themselves. Its aim is to widen the possibilities of ethnographic research, incorporating peripheral languages as legitimate devices for producing knowledge and generating approximations between worlds which often remain distant, betwixt rhymes and routes, researcher and delivery worker, the centre and its margins.

Starting from my ethnographic experiences in Rio de Janeiro and Paris, this article reflects on the potency of rap as a language proper to the urban peripheries, and as a methodological key for listening to forms of living that evade the dominant logic. The idea of periphery is here not limited to a geographical locale, but rather functions as a critical concept revealing relations of inequality, symbolic production and forms of transnational resistance.

RAP, PERIPHERY AND WORK: FROM CULTURAL EXPRESSION TO A STRATEGY FOR LISTENING

Taking rap as peripheral cultural product implies recognizing peripheries as territories that produce knowledge, aesthetics, and forms of political intervention. The language of rap, articulated with urban experience, describes how subalternized subjects construct narratives of the self, work and the world.

Urban peripheries are vibrant hubs of cultural production and the elaboration of meanings about life and work. In this effervescent landscape, rap emerges not only as a musical genre, but as a language intrinsic to peripheral experience, one that can articulate life narratives, condemn policies of exclusion and elaborate strategies for confronting the deep-seated inequalities that structure cities. This cultural production thus transcends the aesthetic dimension when it is actively constructed through collective subjectivities and in the political mobilizations of those subjects who produce and consume it.

In Brazil, rap is intimately tied to the emergence of voices in communities that have historically been marginalized. It became established as a channel for drawing attention to institutional violence, structural racism, and the economic iniquities which stamp day-to-day life. This cultural manifestation is part and parcel of a larger process of symbolic production which, challenging hegemonic representations, creates spaces of belonging and social recognition for those who would otherwise remain invisible or stigmatized (Filgueiras and Antunes 2020).

I take as a basic premise the fact that every ethnographic gaze is, first and foremost, theoretical. As Cardoso de Oliveira reminds us, “the theoretical and disciplinary paradigms to which the researcher is attached condition both his eyes and his ears”; and it is social theory that pre-structures the anthropologist’s gaze and embellishes her capacity to observe (Cardoso de Oliveira 1996: 21). In this context, music ceases to be mere object: it acts as a form of theoretical listening, as a methodological bridge, as a sonorous body that resonates in the encounter between researcher and interlocutor.

Ethnographic fieldwork requires that we listen. Some ethnography attempts to translate the world of the other into academic language; other ethnographies, when they succeed, allow the world of the other to speak in its own cadence. In fieldwork with app-based delivery workers, it was not enough to ask, it was also essential to listen. Many times, what my interlocutors had to say was not available to me as direct answers to my questions, but could be located in the sounds that percolated from their deliveries: what they sang, heard, posted online, what they played on their speakers while they waited from the next delivery.

This perspective is in dialogue with an anthropological tradition that recognizes the importance of sensible and aesthetic elements in the construction of ethnographic knowledge. Work such as that of Cardoso de Oliveira on anthropological “seeing” and “listening” recognizes that ethnographic experience is not limited to the verbal or visual register; it involves a multiplicity of sensory and expressive channels. In this context, rap offers privileged access to symbolic and practical universes that would otherwise remain opaque or inaccessible to the researcher.

In Paris, rap is equally a cultural mediator between migrant delivery workers and the urban spaces that they inhabit. Many of them are of West African origin, and listened to French artists who rhymed about racism, exclusion, and the struggle for recognition in the banlieus. Music circulates between apps and digital platforms, conjoining trajectories that, while geographically distant, share experiences of subalternity. As Baptiste Cléret (2013) has observed, rap can be a space of mediation between the self and the other, between here and there, individual experience and collective memory. In ethnography, this took shape through conversations interrupted by song, in acts of sharing and constructing a common vocabulary through sound.

It is important to note that listening to rap is not tantamount to decoding it. The researcher need not become a specialist in music, nor recognize all of the pertinent references for music to function as a listening device. What is at play is a disposition to recognize the centrality that it occupies in the lives of subjects, and to allow oneself to be affected by it. Rap is hence not only the soundtrack of the field; it is the field.

Rap’s potential as an ethnographic language lies in its capacity to condense, as sound, elements that traverse contemporary urban life: inequality, desire, pain, hope, belonging. Approaching this language, the researcher amplifies her possibilities for listening and recognizing the legitimacy of the expressive forms produced at the margins. This methodological choice is at once affective and political: it affirms that the peripheries have their own voice, rhythm, and cadence and that by listening to them it is possible to construct an anthropology that is more attentive to aesthetics and the struggles that permeate urban day-to-day life.

The collective dimension of rap is, without a doubt, one of its fundamental pillars. In contrast to the individualist emphasis of much contemporary popular culture, rap frequently celebrates solidarity, shared memory, and the construction of networks of mutual support. This characteristic has a deep resonance with the practices of resistance and organization that we can observe in the daily life of app-based delivery workers. Immersed in the dynamics of platformized labour, these workers navigate between competition and the incessant search for forms of sociability and affirmation that enable them to resist isolation (Guimarães Junior et al. 2022).

The context of the platform economy, characterized by the radical flexibilization of labour relations and by the transference of risks and costs to the workers themselves (Srnicek 2017; Abílio 2020), creates specific conditions for the emergence of new forms of subjectification. The entrepreneurial discourse of the platforms (Abílio 2019), which promotes the idea that each individual can be “their own boss”, encounters, in rap, both a vehicle for its reproduction and a space for its contestation.

Rap is furthermore a notable affective mediator. It establishes profound emotional connections between subjects, strengthening ties that transcend physical and cultural barriers. This aspect of rap is particularly crucial in contexts of intense mobility and social fragmentation, intrinsic characteristics of digital app-based work (Filgueiras and Lima 2020; Gómez 2022). The circulation of narratives through the city entailed in rap strengthens the presence of the periphery in the urban centre and challenges the spatial and symbolic hierarchies that have historically marginalized these territories, conferring them with visibility and agency. As Marins (2024) analyses in a different context, peripheral communicative practices, such as those of domestic workers using social networks, also produce symbolic recognition and activate forms of political subjectivity at the margins of traditional institutions.

Peripheral cultural production cannot, thus, be reduced to a mere passive reflex of social conditions. It constitutes an active field of creation and dispute, where meanings, identities and political projects are articulated. Rap, in this way, is a central element in understanding the cultural and social dynamics of contemporary urban peripheries, contributing to the construction of collective subjectivities that resist contemporary forms of exploitation and exclusion (Antunes 2020; Pires 2017).

As a cultural expression, rap speaks directly to the material conditions of work, particularly in the context of app-based work, which has spread like wildfire in cities across the globe. This expansion is marked by processes of flexibilization, informality, and a deep reconfiguration of labour relations which directly impact the subjectivities of workers (Abílio 2019; Grohmann and Qiu 2020). In this landscape, rap does not limit itself to expressing the tensions and contradictions of precarized work; it offers symbolic repertoires for constructing identities and strategies of resistance. Music, with its rhymes and beats, acts as a space which questions hegemonic narratives on autonomy, entrepreneurship, and meritocracy, revealing the limitations and challenges faced by workers from the peripheries.

More than ambience, rap has become a door to conversations and experiences. The use of music as a tool in the field was not simply a way to “break the ice”, but a means to claim a vantage point from which to listen, one which respects the aesthetics, the repertoire, and the language of the other. Connection was established when rhymed words created recognition: between researcher and interlocutor there emerged a shared field of codes, not always explicit, but deeply political.

The methodological choice to incorporate rap as a tool of research was not arbitrary; it emerged from the dynamics of the field itself. While they waited, travelled or took pause, delivery workers frequently shared music, cited verses or made reference to artists that they considered to be important. This constant presence of music in the daily tasks of my interlocutors revealed itself a unique opportunity to understand not only their aesthetic tastes, but also their worldviews, their aspirations, and their ways of interpreting social realities.

An analysis of the song “Grand Paris”, by Médine, which was frequently heard by immigrant delivery workers in Paris, provides a lyrical portrait of what ethnography confirmed in gesture and speech: that the margins influence the centre. “Le 93 influence Paname, Paname influence le monde”, goes the chorus, drawing a dynamic in which cultural fluxes are reversed, where the periphery does not only consume, but also produces meaning, aesthetics, politics. The reference to 93, the number of the départment of Seine-Saint-Denis, a peripheral and largely immigrant part of Paris, is inscribed in the song as a culture-generating pole.

This symbolic inversion expressed in the song reflects wider processes of urban and cultural transformation that characterize contemporary metropolises. The peripheries, seen by some a space of absence and lack, emerges as a territory of creation and innovation, able to influence the centres of power and prestige. Rap, in this context, is a vehicle for this inversion, offering a language through which peripheral subjects can affirm their presence and agency in urban space.

RAP AS A POLITICAL LANGUAGE AND AN AFFECTIVE METHOD OF THE PERIPHERIES IN URBAN ETHNOGRAPHY

The different grammars are readily apprehended in the parts of songs quoted in the field, in references to specific artists and in the engagement of rap as a tool for social critique. It is precisely this performative, aesthetic, and political potential of rap that depicts its force as an affective method of listening. It is not a systematic technique, much less a previously established analytical protocol, but an overture, an affordance to the presence of music in the everyday of the field, and to ways of listening and being drawn by it. Rap is in this way an affective methodological device, engaged not only as a means to describe reality, but to inhabit it and understand it according to its own codes.

I have mentioned that rap as a methodological tool is part of an understanding that the production of knowledge in ethnography is shot through with affects, languages and aesthetics. Roberto Cardoso de Oliveira (1996) reminds us that ethnographic fieldwork demands, from the researcher, an exercise of listening that goes beyond the mere reception of the other’s speech, involving an affective opening up to alterity, an attention to how the other speaks and constitutes meaning. This “anthropological listening” is neither neutral nor objective, but situated, conditioned by theoretical paradigms that inform the anthropologist’s gaze and by relations that she establishes in the field.

It is in this vein that rap acts as a mediator of experiences, as a means for the enunciation of reality and as a key to access the lived worlds of app-delivery workers. During fieldwork, the music that was heard, shared or referenced in conversations was not simply a backdrop: it structured narratives, activated memories and expressed critiques. Music did not only create an ambience for fieldwork, it constituted it. Instead of seeking to “interpret” rap with the classic instruments of theory, my challenge was different: to enable rap to guide how I listened, opening up paths toward ethnographic understanding.

This is similar to the approach that José Carlos Gomes da Silva (2020) calls “anthropology of the senses”. He argues that we must accept that affectivity is not background noise in the production of knowledge, but a legitimate source of information and affectation. The author stresses that, in urban life, sounds have a fundamental role in the organization of social experience, they are a way of inhabiting time and space, an affective technology that organizes relations and projects identities. Incorporating rap into ethnography is thus not only about listening to songs, but about being attentive to how subjects use this language in daily affairs and to the ways of listening that it affords the researcher.

During fieldwork, earphones were used by the delivery workers, but they were not mere instruments of distraction. At various times, listening to rap was activated as a sort of self-comfort, an expression of indignation, and a gathering of strength. Bits of songs appeared in posts, subtitles to photos and WhatsApp messages. Fieldwork very often took place within these fragments: in loose verses, pronounced beats, in acts of shared sound.

The musicality of the field, however, should not be reduced to aesthetic relief. Rafael Abdala Norberto (2020), reflecting on rap in peripheral contexts, suggests that musical production must be construed as a language of knowledge, as situated epistemology. Norberto argues that rap is a political and pedagogical technology by way of which racialized and subalternized subjects enounce knowledges and construct narratives of the self. Listening, in this context, becomes an ethnographic tool not because it enables the “collection of data”, but because it summons the researcher to put herself in the position of a learner through ethical and committed listening with the worlds she observes.

This listening, as Cardoso de Oliveira (1996) proposes, demands, from the anthropologist, an overture to the unprecedented, the indeterminate. The affective method, in this case, is less a preestablished path and more of a disposition to follow through the meanings that emerge from relations in the field. By activating memories and identities, music enables the researcher to access experiential dimensions that cannot not be captured by formal interviews of observations. It shifts focus from objective description to the sharing affective worlds.

In Paris, this shift was even more significant. Following migrant delivery workers from West Africa, I noticed that French rap, particularly those from the banlieus of Paris and Marseille, was a bridge between worlds. The music of artists such as Médine, Kery James or Ninho circulated among workers through shared playlists and short videos. Parts of these songs would come up in casual conversation, or were admired while workers waited between delivery.

This mediation is also studied by Anthony K. Harrison (2015) in his analysis of how rap is a type of cultural and political translation of experiences of the Black diaspora. Rap, he argues, condenses histories, pains, and hopes, configuring an affective archive that circulates between contexts and connects subjects. This perspective illuminates the symbolic bridges between rappers from Rio de Janeiro favelas and the artists from the French peripheries, as well as between Brazilian and French delivery workers, who, despite being separated by geographical and linguistic distances, share the same repertoire of exclusion and resistance.

In ethnographic practice, rap has become a catalyser of events. At times my approximation to interlocutors occurred as we commented a song, or because I recognized references to lyrics that they shared. Listening, in this sense, was itself shared, not as if our experiences matched perfectly, but as an opening up to mutual recognition. Cardoso de Oliveira (1996) reminds us that alterity is not only an object of anthropological knowledge; it is the condition of the possibility of this knowledge. Listening to rap with or from my interlocutors was thus a means to recognize this alterity as generative of meaning and relationship.

There is a political dimension to this process that cannot be ignored. What is constructed from rap is not just aesthetic or affective, it is also an ethical and epistemic choice. Recognizing the legitimacy of peripheral forms of expression as producers of knowledge, ethnography shifts from an external means of analysis to an implicated listening. It ceases to speak about and comes to listen with. This demands from the researcher constant vigilance over her own interpretative filters and the risks of exoticization, as well as the limits of listening.

This vigilance is all the more necessary because of the risk of instrumentalizing the culture of the other. Incorporating rap into fieldwork cannot be an opportunistic move, stemming from its ubiquitous presence among our interlocutors. As Cardoso de Oliveira stresses, it is necessary to “sophisticate our listening”, which implies developing a sensibility to contexts, to silences, and to the ambivalences that traverse the use of music.

Rap, as affective and insurgent language, provides clues to this commitment. Its rhymes explore inequalities, but also future projects. It beats mark pain, but also drive movements. Its verses condemn, but also imagine. Listening to rap in the field is therefore listening to multiple tempos and meanings: the present of precarity, the past of exclusion, and the future of vindication. Abiding by this, ethnography is rendered less a technique for observation, and more a situated practice of listening, marked by exchanges, by aesthetics, and by the tensions that constitute social worlds.

It is yet important to underscore that rap as an affective and political language in ethnography is not a universal methodological solution, but a situated response to the specific conditions of a field characterized by displacements, inequalities, and expressive potential. It is thus constituted not because the researcher decided that this is as it should be, but because interlocutors made it present and pregnant, gave it meaning, and made it circulate as a shared language. The task of ethnography is, in this case, less that of representing this language than of listening attentively, with care and respect.

This article is based on an ethnographic approach, guided by an interest in accompanying, in situ, the plots, affects, and movements that cover the experiences of app-based delivery workers in urban contexts marked by informality and algorithmic administration of labour. It takes as a starting point the fact that the ethnographer’s gaze is always situated, traversed by theoretical affiliations and analytical sensibilities that condition both what is seen and what is heard.

In this way, the ethnography is not a simple set of techniques, but a way of being present in the field, mindful of native categories, narratives and how workers themselves interpret their careers, their limits, their possibilities in the daily toil of their jobs.

The methodological strategies employed included participant observation, interviews and informal conversations, taking into account the fact that app-based delivery work produces inescapably fragmented interactions, interrupted constantly by displacements and different rhythms of availability.

Interlocutions did not observe a rigid or homogenous pattern: some took place individually, others in small groups, and many in brief exchanges during the intervals of a delivery or another, in improvised stopping points during the routine of work. On some occasions, these brief conversations proved to be particularly dense, condensing perspectives, tensions, and positionings that often were more expressive than longer and formal interviews.

Fieldwork developed comparatively in the cities of Rio de Janeiro and Paris, over some three years, starting in mid-2020. In Rio de Janeiro, interlocutions included delivery workers in different parts of the city, with different social trajectories and careers. In Paris, fieldwork was defined by the high density of immigrant workers, which created linguistic, cultural, and relational challenges, demanding strategies that were adjusted to this context.

In quantitative terms, some 150 interviews and interlocutions were held in Rio de Janeiro and 80 in Paris. These numbers should not be taken as a strictly closed set, since much of the empirical material was produced in collective interactions and in various conversational formats which are refractory to enumeration, at the risk of impoverishing the very nature of ethnographic work.

Alongside in-person interactions, research also included a continuous monitoring of the social networks and public profiles of app-based delivery workers and the category’s collective organizations, taking these spaces as central dimensions of sociability, of the circulation of information and the construction of political engagement in the context of platformized work. This material was analysed in light of public debate, legal hearings, and normative acts related to the regulation of platform work.

The comparative perspective does not seek to equalize the peripheries, nor to homogenize experiences, but to identify how the same global phenomenon translates into situated configurations, inflected by specific urban histories, regimes of inequality, and localized forms of resistance and the production of dignity.

BETWEEN RIO AND PARIS: RAP AS TRANSNATIONAL RESISTANCE AND WORK DIGNITY

In the midst of the precarious flux that structures urban life in the metropolises of platform capitalism, rap emerges as a language that articulates forms of resistance and elaborations of dignity for app-based delivery workers. What might at first glance appear to be a soundtrack to daily life reveals itself, to fieldworkers who listen attentively, as an affective device that organizes and crosses through temporalities and forms of being present. Rap, in words listened, gestures observed, and music played during work, constitutes one of the ways by which workers narrate, withstand and resignify their workday.

In this section I analyse how this peripheral language is a symbolic mediator between two distinct ethnographic contexts, Rio de Janeiro and Paris, composing a cartography of transnational resistance and production of meanings about dignity and work.

During fieldwork in the two cities, the presence of music, particularly rap, was a constant, during stopovers, deliveries, and moments of rest. In Rio de Janeiro, in the bike stations near the Carioca, Tijuca or Jardim Botânico; in Paris in the Vélib’ stations around Bastille, République or Montparnasse, music was not a backdrop: it was an active part of the scene.

Listening, almost always mediated by earphones, organized time, protected the body, and created a subjective atmosphere in the context of algorithmic work. As I claim in my thesis, observing these moments allowed me to see that “waiting time” is also a time of symbolic re-composition, and, in these pauses, music emerges as the affective strategy of subjectification.

This perception is in tune with José Carlos Gomes da Silva’s (2020) proposition that music is a path toward accessing memory, affective experience, and the construction of subjectivities. More than mere cultural expression, rap is a form of language, a common repertoire, and a technology of listening between researcher and interlocutors. As Norberto (2020) points out, this listening transforms not only the understanding of the other, but also the position of the anthropologist. The use of music in fieldwork does not only enlarge listening, it also displaces the researcher into an ethical, aesthetic and affective position in relation to subjects.

In Paris, this displacement was put into effect by encounters with migrant delivery workers, most hailing from countries in West Africa. Many times, my initial contact with these workers occurred through music. A Senegalese worker, upon noticing my interest in the Bastille Waiting Point, smiled when I recognized in his cell phone a song by Kery James. In heavily-accented French, he told me “He tells it like it is. France says we are a problem, but in rap we are the story”. Albeit brief, this phrase synthesizes a form of symbolic resistance: narrating oneself not as deviance, but as a constitutive part of the city.

As Baptiste Cléret (2013) analyses, French rap is structured as a space for the symbolic expression of urban peripheries, where senses of belonging and recognition are formed against the universalist republic’s logic of exclusion. This very same movement appears in ethnographic experiences in Rio de Janeiro, with its distinct inflections. During conversations with delivery workers in waiting stations in the North and West Zones of the city, some mentioned artists such as Djonga, BK’, or Orochi as part of their daily repertoire. Even when artists were not directly mentioned, parts of their lyrics were spontaneously incorporated into discourse. One of my interlocutors, commenting on the difficulties of working a twelve-hour day, declared: “There are days where only the sound keeps us sane. I listen to BK and it seems like he’s talking to me”. Music is not just relief, but a way of naming that which is lived. It is a bridge between precarity and the symbolic elaboration of workers’ very condition.

The recognition of these expressions as legitimate ways of producing knowledge is echoed in Anthony K. Harrison’s (2015) analysis of hip-hop as a practice rooted in subaltern urban experience, capable of articulating aesthetics, politics, and knowledge. Instead of translating the words into external analytical categories, we should recognize the legitimacy of their own forms of political, aesthetic, and theoretical production, through a perspective that inspires readings of hip-hop as a possible, insurgent epistemology.

The constant use of earphones while driving, for example, cannot be interpreted as a simple technological habit. A Guinean interlocutor in Paris stated: “with the earphone I go into my world. I’m free there. No police, no clients shouting at me, no one telling me what to do. Just me and music”. This statement is a gesture of the construction of subjective autonomy, even if ephemeral. By listening to music, he safeguards a symbolic space in the midst of external control.

Ludmila Abílio’s (2019) analysis helps us to understand this dynamic: the discourse of full autonomy promoted by digital platforms functions as rhetoric which transfers responsibility over success or failure to the worker, concealing the structures of exploitation behind them. In this context, freedom is a promise that is never realized in practice. What remains is the creation of pockets of refuge, such as music, where it is possible to sustain some form of agency.

These refuges, however, are not isolated. Rap, even when listened to individually, produces ties. In WhatsApp groups that I followed during research, both in Brazil and France, songs, parts of lyrics, videoclips and references to artists were often shared. Music is thus transformed into a common language, a code of belonging. Roberto Cardoso de Oliveira (1996) stresses that listening is also a way of seeing. By listening to what our interlocutors listen to, we researchers can come closer to how the perceive and construct their world. Listening to rap is here an ethnographic gesture.

Listening also reveals how dignity is constructed in the opposite direction of official discourse. In the words of the delivery workers, dignity was not linked to the formalization of work or institutional stability. As I discuss in my thesis (Viana 2024), some of my interlocutors refused the idea of formal employment, structured workdays, and the figure of the boss as a forceful way to demarcate ideas of “autonomy” and “liberty” as representations of this construction of dignity. As one delivery worker told me in Rio de Janeiro: “For me, formal employment never again. I prefer to earn less but to keep my dignity”.

At the same time, the idea of freedom was constantly put into tension by other statements, as with my interlocutor Zeca, who told me: “So this is good for who? Because it’s the app that tells me how my day is going to be”. The contradiction between a discourse of autonomy and daily control stamps platformized work, and rap, yet again, is the language that condemns this mismatch.

In Pars, the relation to freedom is more complex because of the migrant condition of many workers. Many delivery workers were in France illegally, which prevented them from having access to labour legislation and made them more vulnerable to the police. As I argued in my thesis, earphones act as a symbolic barrier against constant vigilance, as an attempt to sustain a subjectivity free of the control of the state and platforms.

The comparative analysis between Rio and Paris does not therefore seek to level diverse experiences, but to bring to the foreground common grammars of resistance that are being produced in urban peripheries. Deleuze reminds us that contemporary regimes of control operate through diffuse forms of power, mediated by technologies that promote an apparent autonomy. App-based work is the concrete manifestation of this logic, and rap is a language that unveils its contradictions. It condemns the overlap of precarity and entrepreneurship, mobility and vigilance, freedom and subordination.

This language, which circulates between delivery workers in the two cities, makes evident the transnational force of peripheral cultural expressions. Like the song “Grand Paris”, another which is frequently heard by immigrant workers in France is “Banlieusard” by Kery James, which states: “On n’est pas condamne à l’échec, voilà l’chant des combattants. Banlieusard et fier de l’être, j’ai écrit l’hymne des battants [...] C’est c’qu’ils attendent de nous, mais j’ai d’autres projets qu’ils retiennent ça Je ne suis pas une victime mais un soldat [...] J’ai envie d’être plus direct, il est temps qu’on fasse de l’oseille (argent) C’que la France ne nous donne pas on va lui prendre”.

Kery James’ rhymes reenforce the contradictions mentioned above, pitting the desires of the entrepreneur - “the will to take what France won’t give” - and the working conditions faced by app-based workers - “We are not condemned to failure”. The banlieusard, which in the song references the inhabitants of the peripheral areas of French cities (banlieus), is the subject who, by way of his connections and affects, reenforces rap as a symbolic marker of resistance, invoking, in its lyrics, a dignity forged at the margins.

Dignity does not refer to institutional recognition or to the acquisition of rights, but to the capacity to construct meanings of the self and the world through one’s own experience. It is a dignity expressed in listening, in rhyme, in the body-in-movement. As a delivery worker told me in Paris: “If it weren’t for sound, we’d go crazy”. Music is not an ornament; it is structure. It sustains the day, organizes time, protects subjectivity. As Norberto (2020) writes, the presence of music in the field transforms the temporality of ethnography itself; it does not just amplify listening, but invites us to listen in a different way.

Rap, then, is not just the soundtrack of the field: it is part of the field itself. It structures ways of being, speaking, and resisting. Betwixt rhymes and routes, bikes and algorithms, Rio and Paris, the daily practices of delivery workers produce a language that challenges silence and affirms other forms of existence. To listen to them is also to listen to the city from another angle, one in which dignity is not given, but constructed, word by word, beat by beat.

FINAL THOUGHTS

This article has explored the potentialities of rap as a methodological tool in urban ethnography, taking, as its starting point, fieldwork experiences with app-based delivery workers in two metropolises, Rio de Janeiro and Paris, marked by inequalities, mobilities, and resistances. Through the text, I have argued that rap operates as a language and a method, as an affective and political mediator capable of amplifying the possibilities for listening by the researcher, and for revealing the social world.

More than an object of analysis, rap has been an epistemological operator. It enables access to experiences that did not necessarily present themselves verbally, but in sonorities, gestures, affectations, and shared codes that traversed the everyday of the workers. This approximation is inspired by the perspective of Roberto Cardoso de Oliveira (1996), who highlights the importance of affective listening as a constitutive dimension of the ethnographic relation. As he claims, the anthropologists’ eyes and ears are moulded by theoretical and disciplinary paradigms, but they also open up to the unexpected - and it is here, between the known and the unknown, that rap makes itself a method.

Circulating between earphones, social network posts, and waiting time between one delivery and another, music has become the privileged channel for expression. In Rio, sounds echoed with a mixture of success and freedom, condemning racism, abandonment by the state, and police violence. In Paris, the artists of the banlieue narrate in French, but also in Arab, experiences of exclusion and resistance familiar to immigrants. Much as Baptiste Cléret (2013) has proposed, rap functions as a space of symbolic mediation between the self and the other, between individual experience and collective memory. In this sense, music articulates territories, subjectivities and affects, making it an interpretative key to unravelling cities and their margins.

This way of listening, however, only emerged as a possibility because my ethnography was open to the language of my interlocutors. The choice of incorporating rap as a methodological resource is no artifice, but a response to the demands of the field. It is a listening that does not require a full translation, but rather the disposition to be affected, without the need for technical decoding, just the recognition of the symbolic centrality of music in the life of subjects. As we have seen, it is not a matter of taking rap as the soundtrack of the field, but as constitutive of it.

Furthermore, this work has shown how rap is articulated to contemporary transformation in labour relations, particularly in the context of platform capitalism as described by Srnicek (2017). The precarization created by apps, the fragmentation of time, institutional invisibility, and the discourse if individualized autonomy are often times encountered as collective strategies of affirmation and condemnation produced in rhymes. While the logic of “being your own boss” entraps and isolates workers, rap offers other possible narratives, valuing belonging, solidarity and resistance.

Listening to rap in this context does more than enrich the methodological repertoire of urban anthropology; it challenges the very means for making theory. It points to the need to construct an ethnography that allows itself to be inflected by peripheral languages, that legitimizes knowledges produced at the fringes, and which welcomes expressive forms that still resist the logic of the full commodification of life. Rap is not just a mirror of social reality, it is also a motor for interpreting it.

Finally, taking rap as an affective method is to claim that there is knowledge in rhymes, in beats, in silences. It is recognizing that cities speak, and that, if we are to listen to them attentively, we may have to learn to rhyme with them. Rap, as a peripheral cultural product, reminds us that the margins do not simply resist; they create. In beats and verses, urban cosmologies, social diagnoses, and possible futures reverberate. Listening to them attentively, anthropology shifts away from the centre, and opens itself up to other ways of knowing, resisting, and narrating the world.

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• 1
  This article is based on research carried out for the author’s doctoral thesis, titled “Empresários de si ou vidas entregues? — Uma etnografia sobre a (des)regulação do trabalho por aplicativos no Brasil e na França” (Entrepreneurs of the self or lives surrendered? An ethnography of the (de)regulation of labour by apps in Brazil and France), defended at the Graduate Programme in Anthropology of the Universidade Federal Fluminense (Viana, 2024).
• Data Availability Statement
  The author confirms that all data generated or analyzed during this study are included in this published article.

Edited by

• Dossier Editors
  Adriana Facina
  Programa de Pós-graduação em Antropologia Social, Museu Nacional, Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro
  http://[e-mail] | https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9381-5134
  Silvia Capanema
  Université Sorbonne Paris Nord, pesquisadora de Pléaide/Campus Condorcet, pesquisadora bolsista CNRS CREDA-IHEAL (2024-2025)
  [e-mail] | https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1607-2055

Data availability

The author confirms that all data generated or analyzed during this study are included in this published article.

Publication Dates

• Publication in this collection
  20 July 2026
• Date of issue
  2026

History

• Received
  31 July 2025
• Accepted
  10 Feb 2026