“Cash or Body”: Lessons on Space and Language from Cape Verdean Rappers and Their Beefs

Abstract

The Cape Verdean rap scene is a site of convergence, yet for most it is the antithesis of “world music” and its accompanying creative hybridity. While Cape Verdean musical genres such as morna, koladera, and funana fit well into cosmopolitan tastes of Euro-African creolization and postcolonial dance parties, Cape Verdean rap reveals a side of globalization where the contradictions of territory, identity, and migration are not easily resolved by a lilting voice, a studio recorded string section, or a call simply to “move that body.” By 2007 the term kaçubodi, the Kriolu pronunciation of “cash or body,” had become a catch-all phrase to describe the rise of urban violence and the emerging youth aesthetic strongly associated with rap music and a hip-hop clothing style. In this article I sketch out the contextual factors of crime, deportation, and neoliberalism in order to focus on the multiple rivalries of territory as they play out in the city of Praia and throughout the Cape Verdean diaspora. I argue that Cape Verdean rappers’ “beefs,” or heated rivalries with other rappers, actually place Cape Verdean rap in the world and provide general insight into how the spatiality of popular culture practices influences what languages such as Kriolu, Portuguese, and English really mean.