Rap and Hip-Hop Outside the Usa Edited by Tony Mitchell

RAP AND HIP-HOP OUTSIDE THE USA EDITED BY TONY MITCHELL TY PRESS Middletown, Connecticut Published by Wesleyan University Press, Acknowledgments be Middletown, CT 06549 Introduction © 2001 by Wesleyan University Press Another Root—Hip-Hop outside the USA 1 All rights reserved Tony Mitchell ISBN 0-8195-6501-6 cloth ISBN 0-8195-6502-4 paper 1 Postcolonial Popular Music in France Rap Music and Hip-Hop Culture in the 1980s and 1990s 39 Printed in the United States of America Andre J. M. Prevos 2 Islamic Hip-Hop vs. Islamophobia Designed by Richard Hendel Aki Nawaz, Natacha Atlas, Akhenaton 57 Set in Charter, Smack, and Meta types Ted Swedenburg by B. Williams and Associates 3 Urban Breakbeat Culture 5 4 3 2 1 Repercussions of Hip-Hop in the United Kingdom 86 David Hesmondhalgh & Caspar Melville CiP data appear at the back of the book 4 Rap in Germany The Birth of a Genre in MarkPennay 5 Rap in Bulgaria Between Fashion and Reality 134 Claire Levy 6 Rap in the Low Countries Global Dichotomies on a National Scale 149 Mir Wermuth 7 "We Are All Malcolm X!" Negu Gorriak, Hip-Hop, and the Basque Political Imaginary 171 Jacqueline Urla 8 Fightin'daFaida The Italian Posses and Hip-Hop in Italy 194 Tony Mitchell 9 A History of Japanese Hip-Hop Street Dance, Club Scene, Pop Market 222 Ian Condry 10 "Who Is a Dancing Hero?" Rap, Hip-Hop, and Dance in Korean Popular Culture 248 The idea for this book was germinated at the Eighth Inter- Sarah Morelli national Conference of IASPM (the International Associa- 11 Sydney Stylee tion for the Study of Popular Music) at the University of Strath- Hip-Hop Down Under Comin' Up 259 clyde, Glasgow, in July 1995 after a session on rap music that Ian Maxwell included contributions from myself and Ian Maxwell on rap and hip-hop in Italy and Australia. This led to discussions with 12 KiaKaha! (Be Strong!) Mir Wermuth, who was writing about hip-hop in Holland and Maori and Pacific Islander Hip-Hop in the UK, and Masahiro Yasuda, who was doing research in the Aotearoa-New Zealand 280 United Kingdom on hip-hop in France and Japan. Unfortu- Tony Mitchell nately none of Masa's work made it into this volume, but I am 13 Rap in Canada grateful for his input and correspondence. I would also like Bilingual and Multicultural 306 to acknowledge the global network of popular-music schol- Roger Chamberland ars provided by IASPM, of which I was the chairperson from 1997 to 1999, and of which all of the contributors to this book Notes on Contributors 327 have been members. Phil Hayward, editor oiPerfect Beat, who Index 329 first published my work on hip-hop in Aotearoa-New Zealand and Maxwell's work on Australian hip-hop, was an important influence, and I am grateful to Rob Walser for his initial inter- est and encouragement. Ian Condry's initiative in setting up sessions on global rap music at the American Anthropological Association's Meetings in Washington, D.C., in 1997 and Phila- delphia in 1998, in which Jacqueline Urla, Ted Swedenburg, Andre Prevos, Ian and myself participated, also provided an important fulcrum for this book. A much earlier version of my chapter on Italian rap was published in Popular Music 14, no. 3 (1995), while a version of Prevos's chapter on French rap previously appeared in the European Studies Journal 15, no. 2 (1998). Dave Hesmondhalgh and Caspar Melville presented a version of their chapter at the Tenth International Associa- tion for the Study of Popular Music (IASPM) conference at the University of Technology, Sydney (UTS) in July 1999, which I convened, and versions of Claire Levy's and Sarah Morelli's chapters were presented at the Ninth IASPM Conference in Kanazawa, Japan, in July 1997. Tony Mitchell Another Root-Hip-Hop outside the USA TONY MITCHELL GLOBALIZING RAP A new era... a more prosperous one... for me and my brothers I'm intoxicated because I can break into this new era where the fears that held me back don't exist any more the style has evolved from TUNIS to HONOLULU and it's coming out from the sector where it was devolved. —Menelik, "Another Root," on Nobukazu Takemura, Child's View n his track "Another Root," the African French rapper Mene- lik marks out a new era of confident, emergent global hip-hop that has evolved from Tunis to Honolulu. He illustrates it by rapping in French on a 1994 album by the Japanese jazz mu- sician Nobukazu Takemura, which was recorded in London, Paris, Osaka, and Tokyo. In the pages that follow, we will en- counter Japanese b-boys struggling with the hyperconsumer- ism of Tokyo youth culture, Italian posses promoting hard- core Marxist politics and alternative youth culture circuits, and Basque rappers using a punk rock-hip-hopjyncretic to es- pouse their nationalist cause and promote the rights of ethnic minorities globally. Rappers in war-torn Bosnia declare their allegiance with the violent lives of gangsta rappers in South Central Los Angeles, and a rap group in Greenland protests that country's domination by the Danish language. Rap and hip-hop culture's incorporation into dance music culture in Korea and Bulgaria is examined, as are its Islamic and African manifestations in France and the United Kingdom, and its indigenization in Australia and Aotearoa-New Zealand. Its adap- tations in both Francophone and Anglophone Canada con- trast with its growth as a commercial force in Holland's music scene. Hip-hop and rap cannot be viewed simply as an expression of African American culture; it has become a vehicle for global youth affiliations and a tool for reworking local iden- u tity all over the world. Even as a universally recognized popular musical id- arena, and even mainstream whitg singers such as Mariah Carey have begun iom, rap continues to provoke attention to local specificities. Rap and hip- to incorporate hip-hop influences^ Nonetheless, it is difficult to disagree with hop outside the USA reveal the workings of popular music as a culture in- the British music writer Edwin Pouncey, reviewing 1999 releases by RZ A (of dustry driven as much by local artists and their fans as by the demands of the Wu-Tang Clan and Gravediggaz) and Cypress Hill, in the European avant- global capitalism and U.S. cultural domination. But the flow of consumption garde style bible The Wire: "With the assassination of Tupac Shakur and Big- of rap music within the popular music industry continues to proceed hege- gie (Notorious BIG) Smalls, gangsta rap itself suffered a near fatal blow monically, from the USA to the rest of the world, with little or no flow in the from which it has still to recover. Today it sounds in bad shape as it limps opposite direction. This book documents and analyzes for the first time some towards the new millennium. It'll take a rapper with superpowers to drag of the other roots hip-hop has developed outside the US4, filling a vacuum the genre back from the brink of its self-inflicted disaster, with their creative in academic writing on the subject, in which the expression of local identi- muscle hooked up to something more substantial than a bad mouth and a ties globally through the vernaculars of rap and hip-hop in foreign contexts handful of 70s samples" (1999: 57). has rarely been acknowledged. For a sense of innovation, surprise, and musical substance in hip-hop cul- The global and local manifestations of hip-hop culture in the mid-1990s ture and rap music, it is becoming increasingly necessary to look outside the coincide with what Russell A. Potter, in his book Spectacular Vernaculars, USA to countries such as France, England, Germany, Italy, and Japan, where diagnosed as "a vulnerable time" for hip-hop in the USA, "reminiscent of rock strong local currents of hip-hop indigenization have taken place. Models and roll during its late-seventies lull" (1995: I47-) Despite the burgeoning and idioms derived from the peak period of hip-hop in the USA in the mid- commercial popularity and success of mainstream R&B-oriented and gang- to late 1980S have been combined in these countries with local musical id- sta rap in the USA (in December 1998 Billboard noted "the genre's increas- ioms and vernaculars to produce excitingly distinctive syncretic manifesta- ing and steady presence on the Billboard 200 charts" [Smith 1998: 27]) and tions of African American influences and local indigenous elements. But the increasing number of women rappers gaining mainstream success in the these foreign developments have rarely, if ever, been acknowledged in the USA (Oumano 1999: 25, 28, 32, 38) hip-hop's rhetorical conventions and growing body of academic commentary on hip-hop in the USA, nor are re- tropes have become increasingly atrophied, cliched, and repetitive. While cordings that feature them released in the parochial U.S. market, where lo- the often brutalizing features of gangsta rap, with its apparent espousal of cally produced recordings still accounted for 91 percent of the market in urban ugliness, greed, misogyny, capitalism, crime, homophobia, joyless sex, 1998, despite non-U.S. domestic music product reaching an all-time high of male physicality, and violence, appear to be declining, the bland R&B styles 64.6 percent in the rest of the world (Boehm 1999). This U.S. insularity is of Puff Daddy and others have risen to prominence. In 1996 Greg Tate, a con- owed only in part to language barriers, as is evidenced by the increasing sistent chronicler of what he refers to as the "golden age" of U.S.

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