A Brief History of Hip Hop in Athens, Greece." Pp
Athena Elafros. 2013. "Mapping the Hip Hop Transnation: A Brief History of Hip Hop in Athens, Greece." Pp. 55-69 in Hip Hop in Europe: Cultural Identities and Transnational Flows, edited by Sina A. Nitzsche and Walter Grünzweig. Berlin/Münster: LIT Verlag. -Preprint- “[...] Hip hop is a world language and it’s not only in the borders of our country or in our continent.” Eversor, MC and producer in Athens Since the early 1990s, hip hop culture has become a transnational global art form (Potter 10) which has not only spread “from the margins to the mainstream” (Stapleton 219), but across the globe, with hip hop cultures in Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Greece, Japan, Australia, Brazil, Chile, Cuba, Algeria, Lebanon, Nigeria, and South Africa, to name a few examples. Hip hop began as a predominantly African American, Puerto Rican, and Latin American youth culture in the South Bronx and consisted of the four elements of graffiti, break dancing, turntablism and MCing. Hip Hop’s cultural influences may be traced back to numerous African diasporic traditions such as the African bardic traditions, storytelling, and toast traditions, ritualized games, blues, soul and funk music, especially the music of James Brown, North American black churches, the Black Arts Movement, and Jamaican Sound System culture. Hip hop spread to other countries predominantly through flows of popular media such as records, movies, and television as well as flows of people who brought these popular media around the globe. As a result of these transnational flows of media and people, hip hop culture, both in its formation and dissemination, is a “diasporic cultural form” (Gilroy 70).
[Show full text]