Hip Hop Nation Research Articles

‘Mic Power’: ‘Public’ connections through the hip hop nation in Kampala

Hip hop culture has been celebrated in the media and scholarship as a universal youth language, part of a global hip hop nation, and a type of counter-public. This article examines the everyday meanings and practices of hip hop among hip hop activists in Kampala, Uganda, specifically within the Batuuze rap group. Rather than portraying hip hop as a counter-public of the disempowered, I argue that the Batuuze engagement is based on what I call moral economy that enables the negotiation of connections in social and cultural networks towards what is considered a good life. Here, the hip hop nation is less of an alternative public sphere and more a way of articulating and contextualizing the world in a specific locality, which produces connections and opportunities in the young rappers’ lives.

Affect, Black Rage, and False Alternatives in the Hip-Hop Nation

This essay looks to the work of iconic rap artist Tupac Shakur to illuminate the role of Black rage as a common denominator between rap’s most conscious and gangsta iterations. Specifically, by theorizing Black rage as the founding affective impulse of the hip-hop nation, critics can identify common affective threads across the genre and spy emancipatory potential in hip-hop’s most jarring excesses, as surely as its more lucidly political iterations. I argue that theorizing Black rage through the lens of affect avoids many of the essentialist entanglements associated with earlier scholarship on the concept. The essay also challenges communication scholars to emphasize the emancipatory potential that underlies affective investments through the sociohistorical contextualization thereof.

Intra- and Interlingual Translation in Blackamerican Muslim Hip Hop

This article examines three main aspects of translation in the hip hop of Blackamerican Muslim hip-hop artists Mos Def and Lupe Fiasco: first, translation between Hip Hop Nation Language (HHNL) and a high register of White Mainstream English (WME) termed “academic English”; second, translation between HHNL and WME more broadly; and third, translation between HHNL and Arabic. These artists’ approach to translation provides an alternative to the hegemonically normative ideas of language and translation that traditionally operate within a Christian frame, thereby also demonstrating the relevance of Sunni Islam to the broader Blackamerican community’s ability to resist the pressures of the white mainstream.

Black Women Queering the Mic: Missy Elliott Disturbing the Boundaries of Racialized Sexuality and Gender

Though there were and always have been djs, dancers, graffiti artists, and rappers who were Black women, they are placed on the periphery of hip-hop culture; their voices, along with “gay rappers” and “white rappers” devalued and their contribution to the global rise of hip-hop either forgotten or eschewed. This article is an attempt to articulate the existence of Black women who work outside of the paradigms of the “silence, secrecy, and a partially self-chosen invisibility” that Evelynn Hammonds describes. At the center of this article lies an attempt to locate a new configuration and expression of desire and sexuality, opening a door, wide open, to gain a different view of Black women, their sexuality, their expression of it, and the complexities that arise when they attempt to express it in hip hop nation language.

Hip-Hop & the Global Imprint of a Black Cultural Form

Hip-hop, created by black and Latino youth in the mid-1970s on the East Coast of the United States, is now represented throughout the world. The form's core elements – rapping, deejaying, breaking (dance), and graffiti art – now join an ever-growing and diversifying range of artistic, cultural, intellectual, political, and social practices, products, and performances. The artistic achievements of hip-hop represent a remarkable contribution to world culture; however, the “hip-hop nation” has created not just art and entertainment, but art with the vision and message of changing the world – locally, nationally, and globally. International representations of hip-hop capture and reinterpret hip-hop's history by incorporating local as well as African American aesthetic, cultural, social, and political models. This essay examines the global movement of the hip-hop nation and its artistic incorporation into global youth culture. It considers how that movement is both a social and political process that integrates symbols of African American culture and political struggle.

“SAMO© as an Escape Clause”: Jean-Michel Basquiat's Engagement with a Commodified American Africanism

Heir to the racist configuration of the American art exchange and the delimiting appraisals of blackness in the American mainstream media, Jean-Michel Basquiat appeared on the late 1970s New York City street art scene – then he called himself “SAMO.” Not long thereafter, Basquiat grew into one of the most influential artists of an international movement that began around 1980, marked by a return to figurative painting. Given its rough, seemingly untrained and extreme, conceptual nature, Basquiat's high-art oeuvre might not look so sophisticated to the uninformed viewer. However, Basquiat's work reveals a powerful poetic and visual gift, “heady enough to confound academics and hip enough to capture the attention span of the hip hop nation,” as Greg Tate has remarked. As noted by Richard Marshall, Basquiat's aesthetic strength actually comes from his striving “to achieve a balance between the visual and intellectual attributes” of his artwork. Like Marshall, Tate, and others, I will connect with Basquiat's unique, self-reflexively experimental visual practices of signifying and examine anew Basquiat's active contribution to his self-alienation, as Hebdige has called it. Basquiat's aesthetic makes of his paintings economies of accumulation, building a productive play of contingency from the mainstream's constructions of race. This aesthetic move speaks to a need for escape from the perceived epistemic necessities of blackness. Through these economies of accumulation we see, as Tate has pointed out, Basquiat's “intellectual obsession” with issues such as ancestry/modernity, personhood/property and originality/origins of knowledge, driven by his tireless need to problematize mainstream media's discourses surrounding race – in other words, a commodified American Africanism.

Rap on ‘l’Avenue’; Islam, aesthetics, authenticity and masculinities in the Tunisian rap scene

This paper presents research findings from fieldwork in the rap scene of Tunis. Although the scene is relatively small, especially when compared to its Algerian counterpart, the number of young men involved in rap is expanding rapidly, particularly with the internet as a networking and promoting tool. Throughout the discussion I explore some of the ways that (Sunni) Islam intersects with rap in the artists’ lives, lyrics and identities, and the ways that their particular locatedness informs their position within what has been termed the ‘transglobal hip hop nation’. Whilst interpreting religion has long been a contested area in Tunisia, it seems that rap here functions as a route to articulating alternative interpretations of Islam, ones which not only unite the artists but offer potential for pan-umma and transglobal connectivities. These potentialities resonate with the idea of a ‘transglobal hip hop ummah’ and provide the artists with arenas for personal, political, collective and spiritual expression.

Coloring Between the Lines of Punk and Hardcore: From Absence to Black Punk Power

For three decades, African Americans have often been depicted in the popular press and in independent media as embodying the legacy of a hip hop nation, which the media would signify as an urban, misogynist, and materialistic musical genre and lifestyle. Such representation diminishes or negates, through absence or scant coverage, African American participation in punk and rock'n'roll. In doing so, the media perpetuates hegemonic notions of African Americans as a homogeneous community without nuance and individuation. This essay interrogates the misconception that punk is essentially a white (or Anglo) Do-it-Yourself participatory subculture, and argues that the neglect of a mixed, diverse, and inclusive punk history demonstrates that African American punk cultural productions are undervalued, absent, or deleted. Such interrogation leads to what Stuart Hall has termed "making stereotypes uninhabitable" in his lecture, "Representation and Media" (1997). The essay reclaims the roles of people of color in punk, thus undermining fixed, normative assumptions about race in American pop culture, rendering them unstable and arbitrary. Rewriting punk music as a transhistorical, crosscultural, and synergistic negotiation between African American and Anglo music cultures creates new potentials for meaning and a mode of empowerment for a generation previously unaware of punk's truly democratic ethos.

Thug Life: Hip Hop’s Curious Relationship with Criminal Justice

I argue that hip hop music and culture profoundly influences attitudes toward and perceptions about criminal justice in the United States. At base, hip hop lyrics and their cultural accoutrements turns U.S. punishment philosophy upon its head, effectively defeating the foundational purposes of American crime and punishment. Prison and punishment philosophy in the U.S. is based on clear principles of retribution and incapacitation, where prison time for crime should serve to deter individuals from engaging in criminal behavior. In addition, the stigma that attaches to imprisonment should dissuade criminals from recidivism. Hip hop culture denounces crime and punishment in the United States in a way that essentially defies the underlying crime and punishment philosophy adopted and championed by U.S. legislators for decades. Hip hop artists, since the inception of hip hop as a musical genre, have rhymed in a narrative format that starkly informs all listeners and fans that the entire foundational regime of prison for crime in the United States is suspect, illegitimate and profane. As U.S. criminal law and punishment is profane and illegitimate to many, as hip hop artists fiercely argue, then the primary foundational underpinnings of U.S. criminal justice is lost on the hip hop generation, that of deterrence and stigma. Because, as hip hop aggressively describes, crime and punishment in the U.S. is fundamentally unfair, inequitable and biased against people of color and the poor, then punishment for committing certain crimes in America is viewed by the hip hop nation as illegitimate and imprisonment for committing suspect crimes is unaffecting. Hip hop culture has engendered in the global hip hop generation a tradition of exposing racial inequality and social injustice throughout the world, but particularly within the United States. To that end, this Essay argues that much like Critical Race Theory espouses a tradition of 'looking to the bottom,' that American purveyors of crime and punishment law consider the viewpoint of the hip hop nation, which espouses a better, more equitable theory of punishment and justice in the United States.

Translocal style communities

This article addresses issues that lie at the intersection of debates about language, Hip Hop Culture, and globalization. Critically synthesizing a wide range of recent work on Hip Hop and foregrounding issues of youth agency as evidenced by Hip Hop youth’s metalinguistic theorizing, the article presents an empirical account of youth as cultural theorists. Hip Hop youth are both participants and theorists of their participation in the many translocal style communities that constitute the Global Hip Hop Nation. Highlighting youth agency, the article demonstrates that youth are engaging in the agentive act of theorizing the changes in the contemporary world as they attempt to locate themselves at the intersection of the local and the global. The article concludes by calling for a linguistic anthropology of globalization characterized by ethnographic explorations of and a theoretical focus on popular culture, music, and mass-mediated language as central to an anthropological understanding of linguistic processes in a global era.

A Transnational Hip Hop Nation: praCh, Cambodia, and Memorialising the Killing Fields

Through a close reading of Cambodian American rapper praCh's Dalama: The End'n Is Just the Beginnin’, I argue that his work embodies musical traditions, histories, and experiences from both the country of origin and the country of settlement. In analysing the story of its reception in Cambodia, I place his work within a larger schema of Cambodian American youth cultural production, which is marked by attempts to negotiate complicated US racial politics and mediate refugee subjectivities. Most important, praCh and other Cambodian American Hip Hop artists (which include graffiti artists, b-boys, and DJs) memorialise in their work the Killing Fields, and this memorialisation is geographically and culturally located in the United States and Cambodia. Thus, domestically produced and globally consumed, praCh's work creates a transnationally inflected space in which to simultaneously consider questions of selfhood, notions of belonging, and conceptualisations of nationhood. Circumscribed by both Cold War US foreign policy and domestic refugee initiatives, Cambodian American citizenship prompts the question not only of what it means to be American, but also what it means to be Cambodian and Cambodian American in light of a genocidal history.

Rap Music and Street Consciousness (review)

Reviewed by: Rap Music and Street Consciousness Dawn M. Norfleet Rap Music and Street Consciousness. By Cheryl L. Keyes. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2002. Pp. 304, bibliography, photographs, transcriptions, index, glossary.) Rap Music and Street Consciousness is a comprehensive history of hip-hop from its inception in the 1970s as a local "youth arts mass movement" (p. 1) to its current status as a worldwide phenomenon. The book focuses on rap music and the musical aspect of hip-hop, summarizing major developments and issues relevant to rap music in the larger context of hip-hop culture and popular entertainment. Seeking to balance the perspectives of scholarly researcher with that of cultural insiders, Keyes places hip-hop in its broad context, without which the history would be a rather unwieldy combination of facts, legends, and rumors. The book is divided into two parts, beginning with "The Sociocultural History and Aesthetics of Rap Music." This section discusses the cultural forces from outside the United States that influenced hip-hop's immigrant founders, from West African bardic retentions to the traditions of Jamaican public dances before the 1970s. The study also cites the rapping radio personalities in the United States and the musical poets of the 1960s and 1970s as key influences on the birth of hip-hop. This section discusses the recorded contributions of acknowledged forefathers of hip-hop culture (Kool DJ Herc, Afrika Bambaataa, and Grandmaster Flash) and ends with developments at the turn of the century. The bulk of the historical discussion focuses on the period between the mid-1970s and 1990. The second part, "The Critical Perspectives of Rap Music and the Hip-Hop Nation," analyzes major controversies and discussions within the hip-hop community, including conspiracy theories believed by hip-hoppers and the impact of commercialization. Topics include the role of women in a field that celebrates male perspectives and the stories surrounding the deaths of icons Tupac Shakur and The Notorious B.I.G. in the mid-1990s. One of the many strengths of the book is its coherent discussions of potentially confusing stories in hip-hop, such as the much-publicized friction between the "East Coast" and "West Coast" hip-hop communities (pp. 167–71). Keyes carefully separates facts from rumors but insightfully acknowledges the importance of both in constructing hip-hop history. A weakness of the book concerns its definition of the "Hip-Hop Nation." Keyes states, "The Hip-Hop Nation comprises a community of artists and adherents who espouse street performance aesthetics as expressed through the four elements of hip-hop. At the hem [sic] of the nation's ideology is Afrika Bambaataa, the organizer and founder of the Zulu Nation" (p. 157). This loose definition gives hip-hop a quasi-organizational status and makes it difficult for readers unfamiliar with the culture to draw distinctions between the Hip-Hop Nation, the Zulu Nation (a specific organization where a membership form is required), and the hip-hop community, which most commonly refers to the informal association of people whose aesthetics are primarily shaped by hip-hop. Is the Hip-Hop Nation (capitalized in the text) different from the hip-hop community (not capitalized)? Furthermore, not all those who consider themselves members of the hip-hop community necessarily acknowledge—or are [End Page 113] even aware of—the contributions of the pioneers of rap. Are these individuals, then, not a part of the Nation? There may be a subtle difference between "Nation" and "community," but Keyes does not explicitly make the case for this distinction in the text. I found it difficult to determine whether Keyes's use of "Hip-Hop Nation" was emic (defined by the community) or etic (defined by the author herself). Nevertheless, the strengths of Rap Music and Street Consciousness far outweigh any weaknesses. The strengths largely lie in Keyes's reliance on a people-centered approach, rather than on pure cultural theory. Much of the research data was obtained over a period of two decades through personal interviews with people in various positions in the culture, from rap musicians to video directors. Rich in detail and analysis, this book is perhaps one of the most comprehensive in rap music...

Re-inventing Islam with Unique Modern Tones: Muslim Hip Hop Artists as Verbal Mujahidin

This article explores the complex relationship between Hip Hop Culture and the Islamic Faith, which have both been constructed by dominating discourses as “threats to American civilization.” Like the Muslim umma, the Global Hip Hop Nation functions as a worldwide network of “believers” who have created “nationhood” through cultural, ideological, and imaginary means. I view Hip Hop artists as “verbal mujahidin,” with their speech activities serving as alternative media sources narrating the experiences of a “nation.”

"The Natti Ain't No Punk City": Emic Views of Hip Hop Cultures

Writing in Twisted Tales in the Hip Hop Streets of Philly, James G. Spady claimed: the '95, Hip Hop scholarship continues to go unchecked. More than a decade later, as we celebrate thirty-plus years of Hip Hop, Hip Hop scholarship has entered a new phase of expansion and maturation (see Forman and Neal's That's the Joint! The Hip Hop Studies Reader). Hip Hop culture, now a billion-dollar industry, is receiving an extraordinary amount of attention from scholars in anthropology, linguistics, sociology, literature, drama, and other disciplines. In addition to the dozens of new courses on Hip Hop culture in academia, Harvard University established the first national Hiphop Archive, holding its inaugural meeting on September 28, 2002 (the archive is now at Stanford University). A brief anecdote from that meeting illustrates the potential tensions between the rise of Hip Hop scholarship and the Hip Hop Nation. At Harvard's Hiphop Community Activism and Education Roundtable—a historic conference that brought together pioneering and progressive Hip Hop artists, scholars, and community activists—Cashus D, a member of the Universal Zulu Nation, took control of the mic and said, in what was arguably the climax of the conference, All of you are talking about 'Hip Hop is this, Hip Hop is that,' and the man who coined the phrase is sittin' right here in the room, pointing to Afrika Bambaataa. He concluded his impromptu speech and, later in the meeting, Afrika Bam- baataa received a heartwarming standing ovation. Finally, it seemed, respect was given where it was due. A standing ovation is a nice symbol of respect, but, ultimately, respect is shown through our level of engagement with the members of the Hip Hop Nation, with the culture creators of this art form known as Hip Hop. In Nation Conscious Rap, this notion of engagement is at the core of what Spady termed hiphopography. Hiphopography can be described as an approach to the study of Hip Hop culture that combines the methods of ethnography, biography, and social and oral history. Importantly, hiphopography is not traditional ethnography. Hierarchical divisions between the researcher and the researched are purposely kept to a minimum, even as they are interrogated. This requires the hiphopographer to engage the community on its own terms. Knowledge of the aesthetics, values, and history as well as the use of the language, culture, and means and modes of interaction of the Hip Hop Nation Speech Community are essential to the study of Hip Hop culture.

Remarx

This essay is a criticism of the prevailing theory of multiculturalism. It focuses on the absence in the discourse of multiculturalism of the “white identity,” in particular the history of white racial oppression in U.S. society and how this system of social control continues to block a class-struggle approach to diversity and difference. An alternative theory of multiculturalism is proposed through the “hip-hop nation.” The argument is that an authentic form of multiculturalism, embodied by hip-hop music and culure, has existed for more than twenty years, yet the official discourse of multiculturalism has ignored its possibilities for expanding multiculturalism and deepening its base. A “white blindspot” in multiculturalism appears to be responsible for this omission.

Rise up hip hop nation: From deconstructing racial politics to building positive solutions

(2004). Rise up hip hop nation: From deconstructing racial politics to building positive solutions. Socialism and Democracy: Vol. 18, Hip Hop, Race, and Cultural Politics, pp. 9-20.

Where in the world is the hip hop nation?

Where in the world is the hip hop nation?

Where in the world is the hip hop nation?

The ‘Hood Comes First: Race, Space and Place in Rap and Hip-Hop. By Murray Forman. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 2002. 400 pp.Global Noise: Rap and Hip-Hop Outside the USA. Edited by Tony Mitchell. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 2001. 352 pp.

Rap music and street consciousness

In this first musicological history of rap, Cheryl L. Keyes traces the genre from its roots in West African bardic traditions, the Jamaican dance-hall tradition, and African American vernacular expressions to its permeation of the cultural mainstream as a major tenet of hip-hop lifestyle and culture.Rap music, according to Keyes, is a forum that addresses the political and economic disfranchisement of black youths and other groups, fosters ethnic pride, and displays culture values and aesthetics. Blending popular culture with folklore and ethnomusicology, Keyes offers a nuanced portrait of the artists, themes, and varying styles reflective of urban life and street consciousness. Drawing on the music, lives, politics, and interests of figures including Afrika Bambaataa, the godfather of hip-hop, and his Zulu Nation, Grandmaster Flash, Kool DJ Herc, MC Lyte, LL Cool J, De La Soul, Public Enemy, and Last Poets, the book challenges outsider views of the genre. It also draws on ethnographic research done in New York, Los Angeles, Detroit, and London, as well as interviews with performers, producers, directors, fans, and managers. Keyes's vivid and wide-ranging analysis covers the emergence and personas of female rappers and white rappers, the advent of rap music videos, and the existence of gangsta rap, Southern rap, acid rap, and dance-centered rap subgenres. Also considered are rapper-turned-mogul phenomenons such as Queen Latifah; the multimedia empire of Sean P. Diddy Combs; the cataclysmic rise of Death Row Records; East Coast versus West Coast tensions; the deaths of Tupac Shakur and Christopher The Notorious B.I.G. Wallace; and the unification efforts of the Nationof Islam and the Hip-Hop Nation.

Image Makers: Advertising, Public Relations, and the Ethos of Advocacy • Weird Like Us: My Bohemian America • Fashion and Its Social Agendas: Class, Gender, and Identity in Clothing

Image Makers: Advertising, Public Relations, and the Ethos of Advocacy • Weird Like Us: My Bohemian America • Fashion and Its Social Agendas: Class, Gender, and Identity in Clothing