Nanna Schneidermann & Ibrahim Abraham Guest Editors’ Introduction: Constellations

s guest editors we welcome you to this of globalization and localization was making its special issue of Suomen Antropologi, presence felt. There was a quiet tension within Adedicated to presenting new anthropological the presentations and discussions. In analyzing and ethnographic approaches to the study of the everyday concerns, negotiations, and hip hop. We organize these emerging ideas practices of hip hop’s protagonists, the papers around the notion of ‘hip hop constellations’, suggested that the most ubiquitous discussion as a way to analyze popular music as significant in international hip hop studies over the last but contingent social practice. Exploring the fifteen years, variations on a political analysis diverse ways in which hip hop is part of the of globalization, might not be the most salient formation of ties of belonging and action, the issue. following articles converge around indigenous In November 2015 the research network, notions of value, temporality, and relationality Hip Hop in Finland: Genres and Generations, with vantage points in the everyday lives of invited scholars to a larger, interdisciplinary, hip hop’s protagonists. As such, the articles international conference in Helsinki, Hip Hop collected here show a renewed dedication to the Studies: North and South. Here the desire to empirical study of popular music as embedded look beyond the ‘glocalization’ of hip hop was social practice, and to the particularities of the manifested in keynote lectures on topics such conceptual worlds these practices produce. as aging and education, panels on themes This special issue has grown out of a new including media technology and genre crossing, kind of consolidation of hip hop studies in the ethnographic film screenings, and during Nordic countries. We began to conceive the lively discussions in intermissions and over project at the interdisciplinary symposium, Hip dinner. Pursuing these tensions and discussions, Hop Studies: Global and Local, organized by the thinking through our understandings of the University of Helsinki’s discipline of Social questions confronting the practitioners in our and Cultural Anthropology and the Finnish various research projects, and what is at stake Youth Research Society, hosted by a unique for them, resulted in this special issue. institution called Music Archive Finland In it, we expand on an ever-increasing (formerly Music Archive JAPA), in Helsinki in body of literature on hip hop around September 2014. Here, a group of established the globe, demonstrating the value of and emerging scholars came together to discuss anthropological approaches in this field. Hip the relationship between the globalization of hop is traditionally conceived of as having four hip hop and its many diverse manifestations in constitutive elements: DJing, /emceeing, localities around the world. The papers presented , and , with conscious at the symposium offered rich material from rappers adding a fifth, knowledge. Scholarly across the globe, but as the day progressed it studies have predominantly focused on musical became clear that something beyond processes aspects of hip hop, as the consumption of

suomen antropologi | volume 42 issue 2 summer 2017 3 Nanna Schneidermann & Ibrahim Abraham

music has been the most manifest feature of its The collection presented studies of hip hop spread across the globe (Negus 1999; Condry through the analytical frame of ‘glocalisation’ 2006; Saucier and Silva 2012). Further, public which ‘takes place as local activities interact discourses around have often with the global form of rap and particular focused on lyrical content, as well as lyrical histories of different geographical scenes are style and structure, making language a common constructed’ (Mitchell 2001b: 32). Hierarchies concern for research on the subject (e.g. Alim, of place and the legitimate movement and use Ibrahim and Pennycook 2009; Terkourafi 2010, of concepts, styles, objects, or practices between Potter 1995). Coplan’s (2005) comment on the them became the central focus of analysis in hip study of popular music in South Africa reminds hop outside of the USA. Research questions cultural scholars not to be too literal minded therefore focused on how hip hop is spread, when they embrace the verbosity of rap music, and how the global American form is mediated, and this surely applies elsewhere as well. translated, or adapted in settings where non- In the study of hip hop in the everyday Americans embrace it. lives of practitioners and fans, the non-lyrical As evident in the events that gave rise to elements tend to be overlooked, although work this special issue, the theories of globalization has been done on graffiti (Kimvall 2014), DJing that emerged in the late 1990s remain relevant (Schloss 2004; Smith 2013), and breakdancing to the academic study of hip hop. The notion (Schloss 2009; Koutsougera 2011; 2015). Alex of glocalisation contributed new insights into Perullo’s (2011) study of the hybrid how popular culture and processes of social rap crossover genre from Tanzania stands out change are interrelated. This paradigm has in this regard for its inclusive analysis of the been particularly important in cultural studies forms of dance, fashion, lyrics, and musical methodologies, in interpreting how objects, production that collectively constitute that ideas, sounds, and styles travel over distance particular music scene. Studies that place hip and time, and how these movements appear as hop in relation to everyday lives and wider political and cultural phenomena. Yet within processes of change have recently moved readers’ this focus on geography there is a tendency gaze beyond ‘elements’ and into complex to reproduce presupposed ideas about what processes of economy, aspirations, pain, and is significant for people who make, use, and hope (Weiss 2009; Newell 2011; Shipley 2013). enjoy hip hop, and the effects of hip hop as While the contributions in the present special it is glocalised. There is a risk in the tendency issue also focus mainly on producers of hip hop to consider particular American forms of hip music, they present music-making practices as hop as ‘global,’ and other forms of hip hop everyday constellations; realms of action that ‘local’, to reproduce hierarchies of space and conjure categories and are intersected by the taste. American hip hop remains the unmarked economy, time, and forms of belonging that category against which ‘Other’ forms of hip hop seem to define hip hop practitioners’ lives. are understood. Soon after its release, Tony Mitchell’s However framed, the ‘origin myths’ of a hip (2001a) edited collection Global Noise quickly hop that is American, a vehicle for the voices of became the canonical point of reference and marginalized ethnic minorities, and distinctly inspiration for studies on ‘Rap and Hip Hop a ‘culture of resistance’, lingers in social scientific Outside the USA’, as the book was subtitled. studies of hip hop (Appert 2016). But these

suomen antropologi | volume 42 issue 2 summer 2017 4 Nanna Schneidermann & Ibrahim Abraham

analytical frameworks of place, class, and ethnic volume on francophone hip hop from 2002, empowerment in hip hop studies can serve to Adam Krimms aptly characterizes francophone obscure the actual music-making practices of hip hop as a totality unto itself, made up of hip hoppers. By prescribing normative values, particularities of great difference in the centers certain actions and statements can be labeled and fringes of a post-colonial francophone ‘authentic’ expressions of hip hop, as opposed world. Exploring at once the totalities and to illegitimate innovations. Scholarly and fan particularities, ‘[n]either the rhetorical sinkhole discourses often overlap at this point, blaming of hybridity’, nor the free market slogan of these developments on the sometimes occult ‘globalization’ captures this dynamic’ (Krimms politics of the culture industry. 2002: viii). In this special issue, we present analyses Taking seriously the voices and experiences of everyday lives with hip hop that move of hip hop’s protagonists as ‘totalities’ and between Sweden and Chile, and in Denmark, ‘particularities’, contributions to this collection Mexico, South Africa, Tanzania, and Uganda. demonstrate how meanings and worlds are In conventional hip hop scholarship, and in created through hip hop, by hip hoppers. the minds of some readers, perhaps, such The articles collected here show a renewed a collection would still warrant the subtitle ‘Rap dedication to the empirical study of popular and Hip Hop Outside the USA,’ sixteen years music as a form of embedded social practice, later. Here this subtitle is absent, and so too are and thus to the particularities of the conceptual some familiar theoretical devices: globalization, worlds to which these practices give rise among glocalization, Westernization, transculturation, hip hoppers across the globe. In this special issue transnationalism, translocalism (see for instance we attempt to resist the temptation to prescribe Pennycook 2007; Krogh and Pedersen 2008; what is important about cultural phenomena Alim 2009; Lee 2010; Nitzsche 2013). We do as a result of their geographical location. This not mean to deny the fact that many hip hop re-frames and re-examines debates about the practitioners, fans, and haters across the world organization and mobilization of hip hop as a see America as the birthplace of hip hop. Nor do ‘constellation’ of world-spanning creative activity. we deny that many hip hop fans are committed We take the notion of the ‘constellation’ to tracing the emergence and spread of hip hop from Walter Benjamin, and hope that by across the world or that geography and forces invoking the work of one of the patron saints of beyond the immediate present are relevant to the study of popular culture we can encourage the articles collected here. It is rather that we the rethinking of approaches to contemporary wish to frame the lives and expressions of hip popular cultural studies in general and hip hop hoppers around the world as something other in particular. More concretely, when pondering than merely ‘not American’. the emergence of the ‘peculiar’ or ‘ironic Although questions of place feature in hip constellation’ that became the art of photography, hoppers’ lives and their cultural products, the Benjamin (2008 [1936]: 303, 309) notes that it articles in this special issue suggest that it is was precisely those early innovators pursuing analytically productive to move beyond emic the practice in relative obscurity for explicitly myths and examine what is at stake, and how commercial ends, ‘without artistic pretensions’, central concepts come about in practice. In who ultimately gave birth to the new artistic the foreword of a perhaps overlooked edited form. Similarities with the ‘Black neighborhood

suomen antropologi | volume 42 issue 2 summer 2017 5 Nanna Schneidermann & Ibrahim Abraham

party music’ of New York City in the late 1970s, both a situated process of negotiating meanings, which spawned worldwide hip hop culture outcomes, and hopes, and the result of these (Banfield 2010: 173), seem to us quite obvious. processes around which our interlocutors live As we read Benjamin, constellations appear as and create hip hop. tension-fraught and sometimes ambiguous We see the central contribution of the arrangements of ideas, objects, images, and ethnographic approaches taken in this special practices, situated in time and space. ‘[I]deas issue as shifting the analytical focus in studies are to objects as constellations are to stars’, of hip hop from textual or semiotic analysis of writes Benjamin (2009 [1928]: 34), in one lyrics and performances to hip hop as social of the few passages in his scholarship that practice. The task is to make the lived realities of explicitly describes how he understands this our interlocutors the basis for theorizing about concept. Picking up the constellation as an hip hop rather than simply illustrating the approach to understanding the complexity and ‘glocal’ processes of globalisation. By asking what playfulness of hip hop practice, Winters (2015: is at stake for the people with whom we work, 169) explains that, ‘like a constellation, an idea we can investigate what hip hop is, and how it brings to light the multiple ways that objects becomes meaningful in very different situations can relate to each other; an idea can illuminate and for very different people, as opposed to and express the affinities, connections, and explaining why it is meaningful—or why it differences among various objects and concepts’. ought to be meaningful—for academics. In this Or, as Adorno (1997 [1966]: 163) elegantly way, we might see the dichotomies or binaries phrased it, emphasizing an almost Latourian in hip hop and popular music studies—‘local’ historical materialism, ‘cognition of the object and ‘global’, ‘real’ and ‘fake’, ‘underground’ and in its constellation is cognition of the process ‘mainstream’, ‘conscious’ and ‘commercial’—as stored in the object’. tensions which are the engine of hip hop itself, In the Arcades Project, Benjamin (1999) rather than as analytical or political problems represents his world, and his theories about for scholars to solve, or normative scales upon this world, as constellations or fragments. Even which we attempt to place specific empirical if unintended as a final product, it underlines examples. the work of the aesthetic engineer, the author, In offering the idea of ‘hip hop constel­ of stitching together form and content. But it lations’ we have collected articles that make also shows us that the author is but one element explicit and implicit arguments about common in constellations of cultural production, and that topics within the study of popular music in processes of use, reception, re-inscription, and general, and hip hop in particular. It is obvious invention bring about effects and consequences that however hip hop is characterized—genre, in multiple ways. This foregrounds the work subculture, movement, family, or nation—it is of relating disparate entities, of capturing the at once something that engages social orderings processes of life in momentary constellations. of institutions and space, histories, mythologies, Thinking with ‘hip hop constellations’ here helps beliefs and philosophies, technologies of us to analyze the contingencies, ambiguities, production and reception, and traditions of and open-endedness of musical practices. The performance, sounds, music, and movements. notion of hip hop constellation takes shape as We endeavour to bring forth the multi-facetted both a verb and a noun; the constellation is nature of hip hop as it takes on the shape of

suomen antropologi | volume 42 issue 2 summer 2017 6 Nanna Schneidermann & Ibrahim Abraham

everyday life in disparate global locations. In Two contributions to this special issue showing a bias towards anthropology, however, engage hip hop constellations as forms of we are foregrounding a people-centred approach temporality and part of how hip hop shapes to hip hop that privileges the everyday practices experiences of the past. Andrew Green makes and horizons of hip hop’s protagonists in productive use of Michael Herzfeld’s (2005) different parts of the world. The comparative notion of ‘structural nostalgia’ to examine edge here lies not in a foregone conclusion— the social practices and cultural meanings that hip hop is global and therefore these embedded in Mexican home-recorded hip hop, sites and lives are connected—but rather in especially through the foundational hip hop exploring how hip hop artists, fans, and activists process of sampling which, Green argues, ‘allows experience and practice themselves as elements hip hop creativity to be understood as a means in and purveyors of larger hip hop constellations. of reviving or reconstructing the musical past’. Discussions about the value of hip hop A somewhat different approach to the past is often center on the question of authenticity and invoked by Chilean-Swedish hip hoppers in ‘realness’ of expressions. In two of the papers Susan Lindholm’s article. She illustrates how collected here, hip hop is discussed as value in what she refers to as ‘memory work’ invokes a wider sense, as complex assemblages through histories of international solidarity, migration, which rappers seek to fashion themselves as and social marginalization, sometimes in the legitimate members of society. Tanzania’s first very same song or music video. Centrally, the president, Julius Nyerere, and the hip hop Chilean political folk song tradition, nueva legend Tupac Shakur were both gangsters. Or canción, continues to reappear as a way of so goes the argument among Tanzanian rappers remembering the entanglement of the histories in David Kerr’s article about the concept of of Chile and Sweden, coming to form the basis gangster and value production in Dar Es Salaam. of contemporary production of both Chilean- The strategies of invoking socialist ujaama ideals Swedish and Swedish hip hoppers. and symbols in hip hop powerfully demonstrates Lastly, the articles by Kristine Ringsager how African, urban youth—‘gangsters’—are and Nanna Schneidermann trace how hip not only marginal or oppositional in relation hop activists seek to negotiate difficult issues to mainstream society but actively seek to of relatedness and power and how these become valuable persons who are part of, and negotiations flesh out hip hop worlds and complicit with, conventional forms of sociality. livelihoods. In Kampala, Uganda, tension- The article by Tuulikki Pietilä describes hip hop fraught ideas of consanguine kinship are at the as conceivable as a form or source of capital. By center of hip hop constellations for hip hop teasing out the tensions between conscious hip activists. The idea of hip hop as ‘family’ allows hop and other genres, such as house music, the otherwise socially and geographically distant article reveals that what is termed ‘subcultural people to collaborate and foster intimate ties. capital’ not only produces distinctions in the However these relations need intense work and way Pierre Bourdieu (1984 [1979]) uses the place hip hop practitioners in often ambiguous term, but also places music practitioners in and difficult situations of unequal power. The a landscape of different political and moral important notion of cultural relatedness offers positions towards life in contemporary South a way of thinking about hip hop constellations Africa. as scalable theories addressing global connec-­­

suomen antropologi | volume 42 issue 2 summer 2017 7 Nanna Schneidermann & Ibrahim Abraham

tions, by way of hip hop’s own patterns of Benjamin, Walter 2009 [1928]. The Origin of kinship. A different form of relationship is German Tragic Drama. London: Verso. examined in Kristine Ringsager’s analysis of ‘the Bourdieu, Pierre 1984 [1979]. Distinction: A Social feature’, describing the uneasy alliances between Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Cambridge, MA: hip hop artists and the Danish welfare state. Harvard University Press. Hip hop artists are employed in after-school Coplan, David B. 2005. God Rock Africa: Thoughts projects that seek to ‘integrate’ male immigrant on Politics in Popular Black Performance in South youth perceived as in danger of becoming Africa. African Studies 64 (1): 9–27. marginalized, radicalized, or institutionalized. Condry, Ian 2006. Hip-Hop Japan: Rap and the These negotiations constellate hip hop as a social Paths of Cultural Globalization. Durham, NC: Duke technology that, on the one hand, creates jobs University Press. for hip hop artists, but also risks naturalizing Herzfeld, Michael 2005 Cultural Intimacy: Social nd processes of othering between the state and Poetics in the Nation-State. 2 edn. Abingdon: ‘problematic visible minority youths’. Routledge. This collection of papers invites you to Kimvall, Jacob 2014. The G-Word: Virtuosity and explore the unruly and fragmented constellation Violation, Negotiating and Transforming Graffiti. PhD Thesis. Stockholm University. of hip hop, to engage with the empirical richness of the analysis of everyday lives lived Koutsougera, Natalia (director) 2011. Born to Break. with hip hop, and to emphasize understandings Greece. of musical practices as always dynamic and Koutsougera, Natalia (director) 2015. The Girls are contextual. Here. Greece. Krimms, Adam 2002. Forward: Francophone Hip- Hop as a Colonial Urban Geography. In Alain- References Philippe Durand (ed.). Black, Blanc, Beur: Rap Alim, H. Samy, Awad Ibrahim, and Alastair Music and Hip-Hop Culture in the Francophone World. Pennycook (eds.) 2009. Global Linguistic Flows. Lanham: Scarecrow Press. Hip Hop Cultures, Youth Identities, and the Politics of Krogh, Mads and Birgitte Stougaard Pedersen Language. New York: Routledge. (eds.) 2008. Hiphop i Skandinavien. Aarhus: Aarhus Adorno, Theodor 1997 [1966]. Negative Dialectics. Universitetsforlag. London: Continuum. Lee, Jamie Shinhee 2010. Glocalizing keepin’ it real: Appert, Catherine M. 2016. Locating Hip Hop South Korean hip-hop playas. In Marina Terkourafi, Origins: Popular Music and Tradition in Senegal. eds, The Languages of Global Hip Hop. London: Africa 86 (2): 237–62. Continuum.

Banfield, William C. 2010. Cultural Codes: Makings Mitchell, Tony (ed.) 2001a. Global Noise: Rap and of a Black Music Philosophy. Lanham: Scarecrow Press. Hip Hop Outside the USA. Middetown: Wesleyan University Press. Benjamin, Walter 1999. The Arcades Project. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press. Mitchell, Tony 2001b. Another Root: Hip Hop Outside the USA. In Tony Mitchell (ed.). Global Benjamin, Walter 2008 [1936]. Letter from Paris Noise: Rap and Hip Hop Outside the USA. Middetown: (2): Painting and Photography. In Michael W. Wesleyan University Press. Jennings, Brigid Doherty and Thomas Y. Levin (eds.). The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Negus, Keith 1999. The Music Business and Rap: Reproducibility, and Other Writings on Media. Between the Street and the Executive Suite. Cultural Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press. Studies 13 (3): 488–508.

suomen antropologi | volume 42 issue 2 summer 2017 8 Nanna Schneidermann & Ibrahim Abraham

Newell, Sasha 2012. The Modernity Bluff: Crime, Shipley, Jesse Weaver 2013. Living the : Consumption, and Citizenship in Côte d’Ivoire. Celebrity and Entrepreneurship in Ghanaian Popular Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Music. Durham: Duke University Press.

Nitzsche, Sina 2013 Hip Hop in Europe as a Smith, Sophy 2013. Hip-Hop : Creativity Transnational Phenomenon: An Introduction. In and Collaboration. Farnham: Ashgate. Sina Nitzsche and Walter Grünzweig (eds.). Hip Hop in Europe: Cultural Identities and Transnational Terkourafi, Marina (eds.) 2010. The Languages of Flows. Munster: LIT Verlag. Global Hip Hop. London: Continuum.

Pennycook, Alistair 2007. Language, Localization, Weiss, Brad 2009. Street Dreams and Hip Hop and the Real: Hip Hop and the Global Spread of Barbershops: Global Fantasy in Urban Tanzania. Authenticity. Journal of Language, Identity, and Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Education 6 (2): 101–15. Winters, Joseph 2015. Constructing Constellations: Perullo, Alex 2011. Live from Dar es Salaam: Popular Frankfurt School, Lupe Fiasco, and the Promise of Music and Tanzania’s Music Economy. Bloomington: Weak Redemption. In Monica R. Miller, Anthony Indiana University Press. B. Pinn and Bernard Freeman (eds.). Religion in Hip Hop: Mapping the New Terrain in the US. London: Potter, Russell A. 1995. Introduction. In Russell A. Bloomsbury Academic. Potter (ed.). Spectacular Vernaculars: Hip-Hop and the Politics of Postmodernism. Albany: SUNY Press. Nanna Schneidermann, Department of International Saucier, P. Khalil and Kumarini Silva 2014. Keeping Studies and Interpreting, It Real in the Global South: Hip-Hop Comes to Sri Oslo and Akershus University Lanka. Critical Sociology 40 (2): 295–300. College [email protected] Schloss, Joseph 2004. Making Beats: The Art of Sample-based Hip-Hop. Middletown: Wesleyan Ibrahim Abraham, University Press. Social and Cultural Schloss, Joseph 2009. Foundation: B-boys, B-girls Anthropology, and Hip-Hop Culture in New York. New York: Oxford University of Helsinki University Press. [email protected]

suomen antropologi | volume 42 issue 2 summer 2017 9