Beat Streets in the Global Hood: Connective Marginalities of the Hip Hop Globe

Abstract

Public Enemy showed us that Rap music is not afraid of subjects connected with national and race issues. We started to see how powerful Rap could be if it were used in expressing our attitudes. The kind of lyrics and consciousness that reveals whole process of civilization, which is story of dominance. -Benjamin, Croatian fan of rap group Public Enemy1 At beginning of twenty-first century and third millennium term village has become a cliche. The telecommunications revolution has situated us in an Information Age that is proliferated with various high-technology media: cellular telephones, web television, over fifty national cable television channels including interactive ZDTV, computer-mediated communication through Internet with chat rooms of fictitiously-constructed identities, speech technologies that allow for computing between different languages, and instantaneous satellite-- projected news stories throughout planet, just to name a few. The concept of global virtual reality is no longer a vision of a few computer hackers, but is fast-becoming a household phenomenon. A concomitant global pop culture, based in music and dance videos, simulcasts of rock concerts throughout major metropoles, and an intensely-marketed modern lifestyle through all manner of brand names and symbols of consumer goods, clothes, athletic shoes, and head gear are materiality of a global youth-oriented culture. Young people throughout planet, in their formative stages of puberty and beyond, are particularly affected by this fast-paced-MTV-soundbyte-information-glutted age that is at center of increasingly homogenized post-modernization process. African American music, dance, and style, at epicenter of American culture, are not only part of this technology-mediated global youth culture, but are absolutely essential to it. Black music and dances that depict changing afro-sonic styles are bought and sold in exigencies of a global supply-and-demand capitalist marketplace on a daily basis. Music legend Quincy Jones remembers that When tenor saxophonist Coleman Hawkins recorded Body and Soul it took from 1939 to 1953 to get word around world that song was out. Today, you have instantaneous releases by satellite. (10E) In today's world neosoul artist D'Angelo can be marketed to new touring sites in South East Asia, just as rapper Hammer was in Russia in early nineties, and just as Barry Gordy's Motown recording artists were to Western European market thirty years before either of them. The steadily increasing extension of black music's influence is part of United States becoming world power. However, black music's global influence is also due to it being the most unique cultural product... as Cornel West recognizes, created by Americans of any hue (Kruger and Mariani 94). Along with global marketing strategies of American music industry, for better or worse, American values and lifestyles in all of their diversity have followed. Black popular culture today is even more snared in larger economic vicissitudes-it is what sells to more people than ever before-while simultaneously being at nucleus of a postmodern web of control over global social narratives of identity. The most invading of black music in last twenty years has been rap. Global hip hop youth culture has become a phenomenon in truest sense of word and has affected nearly every country on map. William Eric Perkins, editor of seminal scholarly anthology Droppin' Science: Critical Essays on Rap and Hip Hop Culture (1996), explains that hip hop revolution is just that, an uprooting of old way in style and culture, and introduction of a taste of black and Latino urban authenticity to every corner of globe. (257) Nelson George, in his new Hip Hop America, extols persuasiveness of hip hop culture: From Vancouver and Toronto in Canada, to Dakar in Senegal, to Holland, to Cuba's Havana, to every place satellites beam music videos and CDs are sold (or bootlegged or counterfeited), hip hop has made an impression. …