UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA RIVERSIDE From the Bronx to the Banlieues: The Cross-Cultural Commodification of Hip-Hop A Dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Comparative Literature by Susannah Copi August 2016 Dissertation Committee: Dr. Mariam Lam, Chairperson Dr. Vorris Nunley Dr. Michelle Bloom Dr. Sabine Doran Dr. Joseph Diémé Copyright by Susannah Copi 2016 The Dissertation of Susannah Copi is approved: ___________________________________________________________ ___________________________________________________________ Committee Chairperson University of California, Riverside Acknowledgments I would like to thank Drs. Mariam Lam, Joseph Diémé, Vorris Nunley, Sabine Doran, and Michelle Bloom for all their guidance and support in the writing process. This work would not have been possible without them. iv Dedication This work is dedicated to Barbara, David, Jamie, Joshua and Sam Copi as well as Alex Pandjiris for their unflagging support over the years. v ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION From the Bronx to the Banlieues: The Cross-Cultural Commodification of Hip-Hop by Susannah Copi Doctor of Philosophy, Graduate Program in Comparative Literature University of California, Riverside, August 2016 Dr. Mariam Lam, Chairperson This dissertation explores the commodification of rap in the United States and France. Specifically, this project examines the devolution of hip-hop into a neoliberal practice in which original messages become drowned out by sales pitches, or a neocolonial self-fulfilling prophecy. Specifically, I situate French and American rap historically to highlight the how the commodification of hip-hop reflects complicated and entwined relationships between social constructions of gender, race, and nationality. Especially central to this historical situation of hip-hop’s commodification is how creative expression is raced and gendered in different cultural contexts. This project finds productive sites of cultural and expressive dislocation through which French and American identity constructions are deconstructed through hip-hop. vi Table of Contents Introduction: Hip-Hop as a Minor Literature 1 Chapter 1: The Transnational Nature of Hip-Hop 20 Chapter 2: Features Films, Television, and the Commodification of 57 Blackness and Hip-Hop Chapter 3: Feminism and Sexism in French and American Hip-Hop 82 Chapter 4: Queer Hip-Hop Speaks Out 116 Conclusion 134 Works Cited 142 vii Introduction Hip-Hop as a Minor Literature Hip-hop studies is strongest at the locus of hip-hop’s beginnings: New York City. While the field of hip-hop studies in the United States is still a nascent one, it is impossible to find hip-hop studies within the French academy. There have been discussions recently at NYU about offering a minor in Hip-Hop Studies, and NYU has begun hosting hip-hop studies conferences. Slowly but surely hip-hop studies is building and growing in France just as it is in the United States. The interventions made in this dissertation are breaking new ground in an inventive fashion, as the debates in transnational hip-hop studies are just beginning. Cultural critics such as Tricia Rose in Hip-Hop Wars (2008) help complicate the arguments that circulate around hip-hop in the United States. She believes that both hip-hop fans and those critical of hip-hop have got it wrong, if they refuse to inflect their arguments with the more complicated questions within American culture. It is obvious that American hip-hop has had a tremendous influence on the birth and growth of hip-hop in France. This dissertation interrogates those moments of symbiosis in which cultural exchange occurs both in French and American hip-hop. To what extent, if any, does American hip-hop borrow from the French? Writer Saul Williams relocated to France, in the tradition of many of the United States’ most talented African American writers and artists. CNN called Williams “hip-hop’s poet laureate.” What is interesting in this statement is the implicit recognition of hip-hop as a nation. 1 One cannot be a poet laureate without one’s nation. The hip-hop nation is, like individual identity, always in the process of creation, growth and renegotiation in terms of its borders. Individual and collective identity is always already in flux, recreated daily in accordance with the experience and ideas of the individual or collective. Awad Ibrahim recently began using the term “global hip-hop nation.” This is a beautiful idea, and a laudable one, but we are far from that at this point in time. To be sure, hip-hop’s origins and many hip-hop fans remain political and would seek to glocalize—to remain local and grassroots within the community while acknowledging the globalizing influence of—hip-hop, as opposed to continuing to allow the unfettered globalization of hip-hop, in which many artists are sold down the river by the multinational corporations who are more interested in the bottom line than the lines of the lyrics. In Kjeldgaard and Askegaard’s “The Glocalization of Youth Culture: The Global Youth Segment as Structures of Common Difference” (2006), they state: We treat youth culture as a market ideology by tracing the emergence of youth culture in relation to marketing and how the ideology has glocalized. This transnational market ideology is manifested in the glocalization of three structures of common difference that organize our data: identity, center-periphery, and reference to youth cultural consumption styles. [G]lobal homogenization and local appropriation [show] the glocal structural commonalities in diverse manifestations of youth culture. (231) It would seem that this can be looked at in terms of hip-hop as well, that there are these glocal commonalities in diverse manifestations of hip-hop culture throughout the world. Using Benedict Anderson’s analysis of imagined communities, this dissertation discusses the ways in which hip-hop has been and is beginning to be imagined and constructed in the 21st century as a nation. His idea of national consciousness is easily 2 applied to the hip-hop nation. I argue that the globalization of hip-hop operates within a neoliberal system, in which the only thing that matters is the market value, and I reveal the cross pollenization of hip-hop film, lyrics and music between France and the United States, in which cultural producers who want to intervene must contend with global forces of multinational corporations. The vast majority of the hip-hop music sold in the United States and France is sold by a handful of corporations: Universal, Sony, BMG, EMI and Warner Music Group. Over the last several decades, we have seen unprecedented consolidation of ownership of the means of cultural production. As is becoming more evident, the corporatization of rap is global. The 90’s were the most lucrative period for rap in France, but its influence and production does continue to proliferate there now, with great interest still being shown in hip-hop as a dance form, and to hip-hop film and video. Just as in the United States, there have been grumblings in France about the death of hip-hop, but clearly there is no real danger of that at this point in time, since France’s hip-hop market is the second-largest in the world. Corporate sponsorship of the arts is a necessary evil, but also ultimately corrupts the art made if the artists are not careful to negotiate their limits within corporatization. Corporatization of hip-hop can be seen as commercialism winning out. There is no substance left. In spite of this ever-increasing corporatization of hip-hop, there is an argument to be made that hip- hop can be seen as a minor literature. In order to include hip-hop lyrics as a minor literature, according to Rupa Huq in Beyond Subculture: Pop, Youth, and Identity in a Postcolonial World (2006), we must first argue its inclusion in the category of literature (127). The three characteristic 3 elements of a “minor literature” according to Deleuze and Guattari are the deterritorializations of a major language through a minor literature written from a marginalized or minoritarian position, a political nature, and its collective, enunciative value. The latter two are inseparable. I would argue that much of French hip-hop is actively engaged in deterritorialization of the French language. As Huq points out: “Rap has also been used in a learning context in teaching the French language, even though breaking with linguistic convention is one of the most noteworthy features of French rap” (127). Another example of this breaking with linguistic convention is the use of the English word “black(s)” to talk about Black experience within France, rather than using “noir” or “noirs.” According to the popular website Dailymotion, French people also use the American term “battle” to describe the faceoff between emcees, rather than using the French term “une bataille” (http://www. dailymotion. com/video/xhv003_aix-en- provence-le-hip-hop-a-l-honneur_creation). In the second edition of the Norton Anthology of African American Literature, Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five are included on the spoken word side (not the music side) of the audio companion CD included in sales of this volume. Hip-hop is written in the major (colonizer’s) language albeit with slang terms often only known to a particular social group or subculture. Even when it is not explicitly endeavoring to be political, its reception is always political. Hip- hop from its inception was political, as well as having collective enunciative value. By analyzing hip-hop as a minor literature, this project makes a theoretical intervention into the current discussion in hip-hop studies as a literature of the vernacular, in both English and French. For hip-hop to survive and thrive, hip-hop artists must embrace both 4 “becoming-minor” and “becoming-woman” in order to truly endeavor to achieve deterritorialization.