So Contagious: Hybridity and Subcultural Exchange in Hip-Hop's Use of Indian Samples

Abstract

This is part of a larger cultural trend within hip-hop of finding the next beat. It's widening the palate, looking for something different. It's part of the rise of Bollywood globally.... There has been a long fascination within black culture with the Orient. It's easy to say culture is being stolen, but actually this is part of a larger dialogue. --DJ Rekha (2008) Every hip-hop record got an Indian sample / Do your research. --Wyclef Jean (2007) Gimmie some new shit. --Missy Elliott (2001) In the spring of 2001, producer Timbaland and hip-hop artist Missy Elliott released Get Ur Freak On, which featured tabla, tumbi, and two male vocal snippets in Panjabi. This chart-topping release represented a turning point in an east-west sampling experiment that began in the 1990s with hip-hop artists such as Jay-Z and A Tribe Called Quest, and its success opened the floodgates to sonic possibilities previously unrealized by hip-hop's producers and performers. The music of South Asia, especially Bhangra and Bollywood, has become a familiar sound in American hip-hop? In 2008, hip-hop, pop, rap, and rhythm and blues (RB in this light, their creative production is distinct from that of a hegemonic Western popular culture or, in Edward Said's words, from an accepted grid for filtering through the Orient into Western consciousness (1978, 6, emphasis mine). This complicates any reading of Indian samples in hip-hop as a neo-Orientalist fad or trend in the mold of, for example, Madonna's use of Bollywood-inspired dance moves in concert or mehndi and bindis on sale at Urban Outfitters. In this essay, I argue that hip-hop's use of Indian samples, rather than exemplifying appropriative action by one culture upon another, is better understood as part of a subcultural exchange of commodities, one result of which is the creation of hybridity as a means to negotiate a relationship between both parties, as well as to a dominant culture. …