Risk or Rescue? Moral Panic and the Discursive Construction of Hip-Hop in Swedish Documentary Media

Abstract

In Sweden, debates surrounding hip-hop, rappers, and criminality have become increasingly prominent in media and public discourse in recent years. Following this debate, multiple documentaries have been produced, attempting to establish the nature of the link between hip-hop and criminality. Documentary media can be understood both as a source of information, but also as discursive sites where meanings are constructed and negotiated. This thesis therefore examines how Swedish documentaries construct the relationship between hip-hop and criminality, and how these constructions can be understood from a perspective of moral panic. The study is based on Norman Fairclough’s (2010) Critical Discourse Analysis in combination with Stanley Cohen’s (2002) moral panic theory. The empirical material consists of three Swedish documentaries: Uppdrag granskning: Topplistans 100-gubbar (SVT), Einár 2002-2021 (SVT), and Kalla fakta: Älskad hatad hiphop (TV4). Through a qualitative analysis of the documentaries as discursive texts, the thesis examines recurring linguistic patterns, the distribution of voices, and broader processes of meaning-making. The results reveal how the documentaries construct hip-hop through four recurring discursive themes: Authenticity and responsibility in the depiction of hip-hop, Hip-hop as a risk and a rescue, The criminalization of hip-hop as a tool for communication, and Hip-hop as testimony and emotional processing. Institutional voices are frequently given interpretative precedence, contributing to generalized connections between hip-hop and criminality. At the same time, artists’ voices often describe hip-hop as a way of processing lived experiences and as a possible way out of criminal environments. The study argues that the documentaries participate in broader processes of moral panic by contributing to the construction of hip-hop as a societal threat and symbolic marker of deviance, while simultaneously containing competing and ambivalent understandings of the genre.