Musical (African) Americanization in the New Europe (On File at the University of Wisconsin-Madison)
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A dissertation entitled MUSICAL (AFRICAN) AMERICANIZATION IN THE NEW EUROPE: HIP HOP, RACE, AND THE CULTURAL POLITICS OF POSTCOLONIALITY IN CONTEMPORARY PARIS, BERLIN, AND LONDON -~ .; bl) A."' ·.,"' submitted to the Graduate School of the University of Wisconsin-Madison ·I in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the u0 degree of Doctor of Philosophy by J. GRIFFITH ROLLEFSON Date of Final Oral Examination: Month & Year Degree to be awarded: December May August 2009 ************************************************************************************************** Signature, Dean of Graduate School Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. MUSICAL (AFRICAN) AMERICANIZATION IN TilE NEW EUROPE: HIP HOP, RACE, AND THE CULTURAL POLITICS OF POSTCOLONIALITY IN CONTEMPORARY PARIS, BERLIN, AND LONDON by J. Griffith Rollefson A dissertation submitted in partial fulfilhnent of the requirements for the degree of Doctor ofPhilosophy (Musicology) at the UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN-MADISON 2009 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. UMI Number: 3384554 Copyright 2009 by Rollefson, J. Griffith INFORMATION TO USERS The quality of this reproduction is dependent upon the quality of the copy submitted. Broken or indistinct print, colored or poor quality illustrations and photographs, print bleed-through, substandard margins, and improper alignment can adversely affect reproduction. In the unlikely event that the author did not send a complete manuscript and there are missing pages, these will be noted. Also, if unauthorized copyright material had to be removed, a note will indicate the deletion. UMI® UMI Microform 3384554 Copyright 2009 by ProQuest LLC All rights reserved. This microform edition is protected against unauthorized copying under Title 17, United States Code. ProQuest LLC 789 East Eisenhower Parkway P.O. Box 1346 Ann Arbor, Ml48106-1346 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. © Copyright by J. Griffith Rollefson 2009 All Rights Reserved Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. For Augie Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 11 Table of Contents Acknowledgements iii Abstract iv Prologue 1 Occupations and Preoccupations with American Culture Introduction 30 Hip Hop, Black Music, and (African) Americanization in the New Europe Chapter One 72 Sounds from the Underground I Le Cauchemar de la France: Race, Americanization, and Cultural Politics in Paris Chapter Two 120 "Is This Really Liberty, Equality, Fraternity?": Parisian Hip Hop from "L 'Affaire NTM' to "La FranSSe" (1995 - 2005) Chapter Three 149 "Wei/ ich ein Turke bin": The Orientation ofBerliner Rappers to German Leitkultur Chapter Four 182 Sounds from the Underground II "Das ist (Jangsta": Battle Rap and Social Consciousness in "Aggro" Berlin Chapter Five 229 Sounds from the Underground III "Wherever We Go": Black Music, The Changing Same, and The Deformation of Mastery in London Chapter Six 284 M.I.A. 's "Terrorist Chic": Black Atlantic Music and South Asian Postcolonial Politics in London Conclusion 367 Heifle Waren: Hot Commodities, "Der Neger Bonus," and the Commercial Authentic Bibliography 382 Discography and Videography 395 Interview List 397 Appendix: CD Track Listing 399 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. lll Acknowledgements I would first like to thank all of the MCs and DJs who made this study possible. There are too many to note here, but I would like to single out a few, without whose help the present study would be sorely lacking. Among those who were especially instrumental are: User 1, Shu, ~evket, Amewu, P Yeah, Alexi, Tarik, and ATM in Berlin, Pizko, Xiao, Mani, DJ Dirty Swift, Boramy, Tarik, Sidi-0, and Khosa in Paris, and DJ Kwake, Confucius, Parma G, Dekay, Sonja, Supar Novar, Big Ben, and Juice Aleem in London. I hope to see you all again soon, and thank you all for your music and for your insights. Peace. Secondly, I would like to thank my committee at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, who guided me through both their support and challenges. Foremost among those I would like to thank my adviser Ron Radano for helping me craft the tools necessary to undertake such a project and for relentlessly saying "no" until the study was truly worthy of its subject and subjects. Thanks to Susan Cook for her help in the early stages of the research, to Pam Potter for her help with the Berlin chapters, to Andy Sutton for his fieldwork advice, and to Teju Olaniyan for starting me on the path to understanding this music in its postcolonial contexts. Third, I would like to thank the institutions that made the research possible including UW Madison's Center for European Studies and the FLAS Fellowship, Susanne Wofford and the Humanities Exposed program at UW's Center for the Humanities, Karin Goihl and my fellow cohort of researchers at the Berlin Program for Advanced German and European Studies which provided funding for the research, The Berlin Freie Universitat, The Harvard Center for European Studies in Berlin, and the "Changing Demographics" program of the Deutscher Akademischer Austauch Dienst. Finally, I would like to thank all of my family, friends, and colleagues for their steadfast support throughout the project~foremost among them Mary J. King. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. iv Abstract This study demonstrates how minority youth across Europe are adopting the musical politics of American hip hop and aligning themselves with African Americans in their struggle for equality. It focuses specifically on the ways in which European hip hop gives voice to the ideal of equality through a non-assimilative expression of minority difference, a creative strategy that also exposes problematic national conflations of race and citizenship. By using racialized discourses hip hop youth are challenging the conventional distinctions between sameness and difference as a way of bringing into form the antinomies of inclusion and exclusion that structure national identities. For while hip hop tends to be read as a "resistance vernacular," it is also a form of assimilation into both national discourses and national economies. The example ofhip hop in Europe is thus instructive as a cultural form that is ostensibly about militant opposition and resistance, but which functions in structures oflinguistic and cultural inclusion, is widely commercially available, and circulates publicly through the national body politic. To analyze the seeming paradox of a commercialized resistance music, the study employs the heuristic device "(African) Americanization." In short, this critical apparatus keeps us mindful of the complicated relationship between African American expressive culture and American consumer culture. By drawing out the oft-occluded blackness of American culture we can unpack the racial contradictions inherent in that set of commercially available cultural forms known collectively as "black music," and come to a new understanding of hip hop's global resonance. Drawing on recorded music and media as well as interviews and observations from fieldwork in Paris, Berlin, and London from 2006 through 2008, the study demonstrates how the children and grandchildren of immigrants from the former colonies and peripheries of Europe are employing the African American musical protest strategies of hip hop both to differentiate themselves from and to relate themselves to their respective majority societies. The study thus situates musical analyses in the Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. v postcolonial and globalizing contexts of the three cities, demonstrating how black music structures local concerns creating syncretic expressions that are at once wholly local and definitively global. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 1 Prologue: Occupations and Preoccupations with American Culture On January 27, 2007, four months into a yearlong fieldwork project examining the racial politics of hip hop in Berlin, Paris, and London, I attended a concert presented by the hip hop label Aggro Berlin in the city's Columbiaclub (Fig. 1). A large crowd of mostly ethnic German and Turkish young men waited patiently in the cold outside of the hall while truly effective looking bouncers took their time frisking the down-jacketed, hoodied, and "slaggy"-panted youth and rifling through the purses carried by the handful of young women in attendance. 1 From the knee up, the gathered crowd was indistinguishable from one you might find outside a hip hop show in the US. At the feet of the crowd, however, classic Nike Air Force One basketball sneakers were interspersed with new models of Adidas indoor soccer trainers, and many wore their pant legs bunched at the hem-a style particularly popular among Turkish German hip hop youth. Of course, there was one other notable difference from an American perspective: a near total absence of black people. Fig. 1-Columbiaclub (once the Columbia Cinema) in Berlin's Kreuzberg district. 1 One