Global Hip Hop Research Articles

A discursive construction of self in selected songs by Azeez Fashola (aka Naira Marley)

Studies on Azeez Fashola (aka Naira Marley) have only made passing comments on his personality. Most of the comments present negative perceptions about the personality of Naira Marley (NM). Such negative commentaries, this study contends, are insufficient in describing the construction of identities in NM’s lyrics. This study investigates the construction of self in selected songs of NM with a view to describing what the construction of self reveals about his music. Twenty-five songs by NM constitute the study population. However, data were drawn from eight purposively selected singles of NM. Using a fusion of social constructionist theory and literary stylistics, the study situates NM’s lyrics in global hip hop culture to show the meeting and departure points between NM’s tropes and those of other artistes. The study reveals that contextual variables are deployed in the construction of identities in NM’s songs. Against the submission of scholars that the contents of NM’s lyrics are replete with negative realities, he articulates the prevalence of alcohol addiction and cyber fraud among Nigerian youths. He equally assumes the role of a social reformer. Apart from the danceable beats that garnish his lyrics, NM also articulates burning societal issues.

The Shift

Gonza is a highly regarded bboy in Thailand and across the globe. Belonging to one of Thailand’s most prominent crews, 99Flava, he has established a legacy across the Asia-Pacific. He is also a tattoo artist by trade and has recently stepped into a coaching role for breakers who will compete at the upcoming South East Asian (SEA) Games. In this short reflection, Gonza decodes his artwork The Shift (featured on the cover of this special issue of Global Hip Hop Studies: ‘Breaking and the Olympics 2’), by bringing breaking's past, present and future as an art-form and sport into question.

Networking Global Hip Hop Knowledges: The CIPHER Method

Abstract CIPHER: Hip Hop Interpellation is a global hip hop knowledge mapping project using ethnographic, digital, and arts practice research methods to better understand the emergences and flows of the culture's deeply local yet immanently global intertextualities. In this collaborative article, we network and develop ideas from six of CIPHER's global hip hop researchers, elaborating the project in method as well as theory. In so doing, we model our community-engaged CIPHER method of tracking thematic, conceptual, and archetypal relationships, presenting preliminary findings in four interrelated case studies: examples of hip hop knowledge transfer that evidence hip hop's generative glocal dialogue.

The overlooked contributions of African American women hip hop dancers to breaking and hip hop culture

In the late 1980s through 1990s shifts within the aesthetic of hip hop culture helped the sustainability of breaking. When the discussion of hip hop and its major contributors are mentioned, seldom is there any acknowledgement of African American women. Like many art forms, hip hop is male-dominated, which can eclipse narratives about African American women in early hip hop dance circles. African American women practitioners are rarely called upon to moderate panels, write or are acknowledged as true pioneers of the field. Many times, throughout hip hop, African American women kept the dance alive with their resiliency, becoming the catalyst from the streets that help preserve and continue its legacy. The question I ask is: How have these African American women impacted global hip hop culture and why are they unknown to us? The article will examine performance qualities within interdisciplinary practices that forged ahead hip hop culture with these under-represented New York hip hop female dancers. Insights about the experience of these African American female pioneers bring into light historical concerns of exploitation and representation right in time for the introduction of breaking in the 2024 Olympics.

In pursuit of gold: Breaking’s debut at the Paris Olympics

The announcement that breaking will be featured in the 2024 Paris Olympics has produced a wide variety of responses, both from within and without hip hop culture. This first of two Special Issues of Global Hip Hop Studies (GHHS) seeks not only to explore contemporary debates about breaking in the Olympics, but also to develop critical discourses that can offer insight to practitioners, cultural organizations and the International Olympics Committee (IOC) as we approach this landmark confluence. In this double issue, members of the global community of breaking scholars and practitioners have come together to present research and artist statements that engage local, regional and national perspectives. We intend for the first of these Special Issues, in particular, to serve as an intervention from hip hop stakeholders around the world, providing useful insights for those involved in this milestone moment, whether at a cultural community level or those working with intermediary institutions such as World Dance Sport Federation (WDSF) and the IOC.

Mapping the global hip hop nation at 50: Introducing the ‘Hip Hop Atlas’ Special Issue

In 2023, hip hop culture celebrates its 50th anniversary since its founding in The Bronx borough of New York City. The journal Global Hip Hop Studies (GHHS) takes this historic date as an occasion to explore the culture’s complex histories, narratives and meanings around the world in its Special ‘Hip Hop Atlas’ Double Issue. Initiated by American hip hop producer Greg Schick and co-edited with German hip hop scholar Sina A. Nitzsche, the double issue, for the first time in the journal’s history, presents sixteen concise histories from all continents of the world including Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Canada, Chile, Czech Republic, Germany, Ghana, India, Ireland, Japan, the Netherlands, Senegal, South Africa, Thailand and Ukraine. The articles explain to larger audiences interested in global hip hop culture when and how hip hop first arrived in a given country and how is has developed since its arrival. How does it combine global with local cultural, linguistic and musical forms to create unique style(s) and modes of expression? What role does it play today in its respective contexts? Providing an analytic overview of the articles written by artists, scholars and educators, the editors argue that after more than 50 years hip hop’s global evolution continues to be a powerful, fascinating and dynamic process which ranges from its existence as an established art form, popular culture and research subject in some world regions to moving towards such a status in others.

Japan (日本)

Many people assume that Japanese language and culture make the country an unlikely place for a robust hip hop scene, but in fact, Japanese emcees, DJs, breakers and visual artists have a long and varied history of contributing to global hip hop. From small nightclubs to giant arenas, Japan’s hip hop artists run the gamut of underground to pop, with a wide range of approaches and styles.

“Taxpayers’ Money”: Subverting Anti-Welfare Sentiment through Irish Rap Lyrics

Since the 1990s, working-class Irish hip hop MCs have criticised the Irish social welfare system through their rap lyrics. Like most global hip hop, Irish rap uses oppositional politics to offset the stigmatising ideas of class that are propagated by the dominant classes in society, especially negative stereotypes surrounding social welfare recipients. Although not recognised within literary Irish Studies, these lyricists are producing working-class counter-narratives to classist anti-welfare sentiment in Irish society through their poetic lyrics. This article draws from Irish and international Hip Hop Studies scholarship to argue that Irish rap should be regarded as working-class Irish poetry that contains intrinsic literary and cultural value. Focusing on the work of a Louth-based hip hop group, TPM (Taxpayers’ Money), this article reads Irish rap as poetry. Using close textual analysis, I examine how TPM’s rap-poems use adversarial messages and working-class aesthetics to protest and critique anti-welfare hegemony in Ireland.

‘In Between’ Ethnic Heritage and Italian Identity: The Global Hip-Hop of Mahmood and Ghali

ABSTRACT This article contributes to broader debates about transcultural practices of social acceptance in contemporary Italy. Second-generation musicians Mahmood and Ghali utilise elements of global hip-hop to construct ‘in between’ identities that are representative of Italy’s increasingly diverse youth generation. Both young men hail from immigrant parents, absentee fathers, and urban poverty. Rather than attempt to minimise these purportedly unsavoury qualities, Mahmood and Ghali accentuate their multiethnic heritages in their music and artistic philosophies. By sharing their experiences of navigating ethnic heritage and Italian identity, these musicians not only invalidate xenophobic policies of belonging and national homogeneity, but also cultivate an image of authenticity that resonates with the diverse youth that mirror, and will ultimately shape, the future of Italy.

Industrial Hip Hop Against Hip Hop Industry

Industrial Hip Hop Against Hip Hop Industry

Breaking the limits? Exploring the breaking scene in Havana, Cuba and belonging in a global (imagined) breaking community

This article discusses the findings from my initial foray into the Havana breaking scene in February 2020. Inspired by ethnomusicologist and hip hop scholar Joseph ethnographic study of the New York breaking scene, I deploy three central aspects from his work: community as social entanglement, music as a creator of belonging, and movement as the connecting elements between dancers. I explore how these aspects are visible in Havana and suggest that there are various aspects, for example, heterogeneity, internet access and possibilities to travel, connect and exchange within a global dance community, that define the local breaking scene in Havana, which add to the three pillars Schloss develops from breaking itself. In addition, I question breaking’s ‘normed narratives’ – for example, the assumption that b-boys and b-girls always draw inspiration from the United States, breaking’s country of origin – to interrogate US and Eurocentric/western-nation perspectives. I also explore how I was able to dive in and conduct qualitative research with relative ease in a short period of time as a white European b-girl, hip hop, and dance scholar as well as a foreigner to Cuba’s breaking scene. I reflect on the importance of travelling as a means of knowledge acquisition, the idea of belonging to a ‘Global Hip Hop Nation’, an ‘imagined community’ and ‘connective marginalities’ as concepts to help untangle the forms of belonging within the global breaking community as they play out in Cuba. This research is based on a practice-of-theory approach that places the body at the centre of investigation enhanced with the idea of meaningful movement. Data is collected through participant field observation, qualitative interviews as well as my embodied and cultural knowledge as a b-girl, which informs my role as ‘hybrid expert’ in, and between, Havana’s breaking scene.

Hip hop’s third space: Imagined community and the global hip hop nation

Hip hop’s third space: Imagined community and the global hip hop nation

Review: Build: The Power of Hip Hop Diplomacy in a Divided World, by Mark Katz

Review: <i>Build: The Power of Hip Hop Diplomacy in a Divided World</i>, by Mark Katz

The impossibility of being Drake: Or, what it means to be a successful (Black) Canadian rapper

This article takes Canadian hip hop artist Drake, his celebrity and his body of work as a point of departure for an examination of discursive constructions of race, hip hop and Canada in intersection. Canada’s role in the global hip hop movement has always been contested; circumscribed from abroad by its proximity to the United States and at home by its ideological positioning of Black citizens and Black cultural production vis-à-vis the imagined nation. Framed by broader questions of the role of hip hop in the Canadian public sphere, this discursive analysis analyses the work and utterances of Drake as well as discourses produced about Drake through music criticism and by other hip hop artists. Drake’s public performance of Blackness via hip hop is framed by overlapping and competing ideologies. Drake – whose public persona seems to embody a number of seemingly competing identities – is ‘impossible’ in so far as he is the product of intersecting, circulating conceptualizations of Blackness that render only some performances of Blackness both commercially viable and authentically hip hop, while others remain impossible, unacceptable, unutterable or unimaginable both inside and outside the nation state.

Glocalisation of Nigerian contemporary hip hop music

This paper discusses the glocal trends in Nigerian hip hop music production in the age of digital communication technology. The concept of music glocalisation explains the local consciousness in music production, dissemination and consumption amid the forces of globalisation. Following the adoption of American hip hop in Nigeria in the 1990s, a renegotiation of hip hop’s cultural authenticity led to the production of localised hip hop with features of preceding popular music genres, especially highlife music. Although highlife was the most favoured popular music in Nigeria before the 1990s, it did not receive immediate global distribution and appreciation as localised hip hop did during the internet era from around 2004 to date. Increased internet access in Nigeria largely strengthened the access to global hip hop production and consumption. By focusing on the music of two Nigerian hip hop artists, 2face and Flavour, this discussion explores the production and transnational projection of transcultural hip hop identities amid global hip hop music flows. The paper contends that hip hop glocalisation promotes blending of hip hop practices of diverse locales, transcultural communication and global appreciation of Nigerian hip hop culture.

“I feel English as fuck”: translocality and the performance of alternative identities through rap

ABSTRACTThis article deploys the concept of translocality, in order to move beyond the transnational framework that underpins global hip hop studies. Over the last forty years rap music has become a vibrant and distinctive part of mainstream British life. Through rap young people construct identities that draw upon their local experiences while also connecting them with young people from other localities. These translocal identities affirm a multi-ethnic, urban experience of England in mainstream popular culture. Based on a year of ethnographic research in London and Bristol, we argue that a distinctive rap culture is produced through the performance, production, circulation, and reproduction of rap in and between English cities.

MC Solaar and the Influence of Globalization on Local Hip-Hop Aesthetics

As a transnational phenomenon, rap music has inspired both critiques of globalization and celebrations of locality within the Global Hip Hop Nation. This article contributes to this discussion by incorporating the work of Murray Forman and Doreen Massey on space, place and time as it relates to French rap in general and the work of French rapper MC Solaar in particular. The writing of André J. M. Prévos, Tricia Rose, and others, and analyses of MC Solaar's songs 'Lève-toi et rap' and 'Nouveau Western' illustrate how linguistic and musical vocabularies depict personal, cultural and economic issues within the confines of late capitalism.

Hip Hop Activism

From its inception in the late 1980s to the present day, hip hop culture in Mozambique underwent several stages in which the process of “keeping it real” was in constant negotiation with the association of the Global Hip Hop Nation (GHHN), and its local cultural and linguistic elements. This article, using tropes of temporality as the main framework, discusses how relocalization of the GHHN is constructed in Mozambican hip hop. There is a progressive connection between the past, present and future which is highlighted by local rappers. The article argues that Mozambican hip hop activism is built through acts of engagement in political tropes, in which local rappers are acting as spokesmen of the marginalized population through lyrics that claim citizenship. The political discourses produced during the Frelimo’s socialist governance era are rescued to challenge the liberal politics developed in the present democratic period, which, in large part, is contested by the population at the margin of the development. Therefore, local rappers’ lyrics address popular complaints related to some political decisions that negatively affect the population at the margins and lead to general societal malfunction. The local African languages that were ideologically marginalized since the colonial regime are now being rescued by local rappers as a way to contextualize them into contemporary, metropolitan and transnational languages. This linguistic relocalization indexes a new present and an aspiration for a different future, where these languages will be inserted together with Portuguese to allow communication in urban spaces. This engagement by rappers can be perceived as acts of linguistic citizenship.

Love, Struggle, and Compromises: The Political Seriousness of Nairobi Underground Hip Hop

Abstract:This article explores the characteristics of Nairobi underground hip hop that fit under a common theme of what I term as the music’s “political seriousness,” which is the common notion that the music must be substantive, thought-provoking, socially critical, and never vacuous. This political seriousness is composed of four characteristics: Mau Mau gendered legacies, political love, a reliance on neoliberalism, and a critique of the state. Hip hop’s goal is to make a political space that both proves its worth and remedies Kenya’s flawed polity. This is an imperfect endeavor, as its dependence on late capitalism, normative gender constructions, and conventional understandings of the Mau Mau war contribute to rap’s troubling tendencies. Nonetheless, these artists regard hip hop as authentic or real music because it advocates for the economically disenfranchised, contributes to Kenyan social commentary, and participates in an imagined global hip hop culture.

A mystical cosmopolitanism: Sufi Hip Hop and the aesthetics of Islam in Dakar

For many, any alliance between ‘Islam’ and ‘Hip Hop’ is an unholy one, whether for bringing Hip Hop into Islam or vice versa. Yet many of Senegal’s prominent rappers today are committed adherents of the Fayḍa Tijāniyya Sufi (mystical Islamic) movement who rap about religious knowledge. Even the Fayḍa’s senior, classically trained authorities tend to accept Hip Hop as an effective tool to promulgate religious principles and recruit new disciples. The line between rapper and Islamic preacher has become blurred, and several rappers are even formally appointed spiritual guides with their own disciples. This article attributes the success of Sufi Hip Hop to aesthetic resonances between global Hip Hop culture and the Fayḍa’s self-imagination as an increasingly urban and global esoteric movement. I illustrate with the persona and art of Daddy Bibson, the first and most influential Fayḍa rapper to rap about Sufi knowledge.