This Bridge Called Hiphop: Samples of Percussion, Piracy, and Politics from Brazil and Colombia

Abstract

This article examines the political implications of two musical projects that were organized and facilitated through an international Hiphop network in Brazil and Colombia. These projects present fundamental Hiphop aesthetics that cut across time, technology, and geography. That is, these projects remix, sample, and create music and visual art that is rooted in and yet spans beyond the parameters of the global culture known to the world as Hiphop.1 Hiphop culture has a specifying scope, and these projects exceed that scope. The outcomes of these projects are two final cultural products—the films Brasilintime and Tradition in Transition—which re-present rare hybrids that are simultaneously autochthonous and transnational. These artistic creations introduce elements and layers of local cultures from specific regions in Brazil and Colombia, and join them with elements from cultures as close as other Caribbean and U.S. locations, as well as distant interlocutors from Europe and Africa. Each project involved m...