Hip-hop Style Research Articles

Little Syria, at the Brooklyn Academy of Music

Little Syria, at the Brooklyn Academy of Music Aya Nimer (bio) Omar Offendum's musical show Little Syria nods to the rich history of Brooklyn's Syrian community and is part of a vibrant tradition of Syrian performances at the Brooklyn Academy of Music.1 Offendum highlights this history by centering the rich visual language of shammi (Levantine) design, using mother-of-pearl chairs and gold decor to amplify the narrative style of the show and create a bridge between the audience and the historical titular neighborhood where the show is set. Little Syria, a collaboration with musicians Ronnie Malley, Thanks Joey, and Nano Raies, tells a story of Arabs in American life. By interweaving different narrative and musical techniques, Offendum shines a light on a historic Syrian neighborhood in Manhattan, New York and creates a space for communal healing. Offendum uses multiple cultural touchstones to encapsulate the broader and more intimate histories of Little Syria, creating continuity in the historical narrative of Arabs in the United States. Offendum builds this historical narrative through two concurrent processes. The first is by telling the broader history of Little Syria and Arab immigration in tandem with the intimate histories of people in Little Syria. The second is the use of hakawati, an Arab storytelling tradition that relies on motifs such as allegory, music, and spectacle to tell a story. Offendum uses hakawati as a storytelling practice to interweave our own daily emotional experiences with those of Offendum's historical figures, giving us a parallax view of racism, finding a job, and making money.2 The show begins with a track that outlines the experience of migrating to America through the lyrics "It's time for a new chapter/in this land of opportunity/the promises of rapture and happily ever after/lay behind these golden doors … allow me to explain before you butcher my name/label me unhireable or worse yet undesirable/I'm a man with a heart and a soul on a mission/here to build a better life …" Starting the show with a broad picture of the [End Page 90] Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. A snapshot of the stage and setup of Little Syria at the Brooklyn Academy of Music anxieties and emotions associated with immigration creates an aperture for Offendum to take us into the lived experience of a street salesman in Little Syria. The salesman sells his wares near an American soap factory that uses pig lard as a main ingredient. The owner of the factory often ridicules the Syrian salesman by calling him "dirty" and "unhygienic." The salesman thinks the ridicule is ironic considering Syrian soap's reputation as a valuable and potent cleansing agent. This segment animates the daily exchanges that comprised the lives of those living in Little Syria as they encountered racist institutions in their new neighborhood. This intimate history, which visualizes the emotional lives of historical figures, creates a space for us as viewers to reflect on our own experiences with racism. The interweaving of broad and intimate histories through hakawati shows how our emotional lives are intertwined with larger political histories. The musical structure is similarly comprised of two elements interwoven into a distinct style. Thanks Joey began the process of creating the musical soundscape of the show by sampling Arabic songs from the mid-twentieth century, which were then overlaid with Offendum's lyrics and complemented by Ronnie Malley's oud performance. Offendum's [End Page 91] Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 2. A backstage shot of Omar Offendum, Thanks Joey, and Ronnie Malley at the Brooklyn Academy of Music [End Page 92] lyrics, combined with Thanks Joey's beats, create a moment that fuses the historic Arab soundscape of the 1900s with Offendum's contemporary hip hop style. This is further developed in Ronnie's live oud performance. The oud is an instrument with strong cultural associations and memories for many Arab listeners. The nostalgic nature of the oud evokes a soundscape reminiscent of home, another way that Little Syria engages with intimate histories. This soundscape simultaneously feels historic and contemporary, transporting listeners into a liminal world that acknowledges and draws...

A Study on the Makeup Image in the Street Woman Fighter Dancer

This study studied the image and aesthetic characteristics of the dance crew of ‘Street Woman Fighter’, which leads the recent trend of fashion and beauty. The makeup of the street dance's crew is a strong-looking sister, strong character, and girl crush makeup that emphasizes the eyes, and is clearly outlined with eye lines, red lips, and nude lips. The characteristics of the makeup image were the sensuality of the sexy image, the femininity of the glam image, the chic and modern image, retro of the hiphop image, the androgynous of the boyish image, the exotic of the ethnic image, and the goth of the smoky image. First, sexy image is a makeup that is sensual and has sexual charm. Gold, silver, brown, coral pearls or glittering eye shadow on light brown and gray arched eyebrows, long black eyeliner on long eyelashes, and shiny eyes and thick oversized lips are expressed sexy using nude beige and nude coral lip products. Second, the feminine image of Glam showed femininity with angled eyebrows in black, gray, and brown, and long black eyeliner drawn with Katz Eye, and outline lips of red and nude coral. Third, chic modern makeup expresses an urban and intellectual image, draws straight dark brown eyebrows long, spreads the eye shadow widely on the eyehole line, and draws a black eyeliner to raise the ends of the eyes and express it with red lips. Fourth, ethnic's exotic image expresses the folk image of the West or the East, but the angled eyebrows, straight eyebrows, and eyes are drawn wide and long, and the lips are expressed in the same tone as coral, red lips, and blusher. Fifth, the retro image combines the contour contouring makeup and hip-hop style of the 1990s to express dark brown or black eyeline, burgundy, and orange outcurve lips with braided or reggae hair. Sixth, Boyce's image as a woman and boy shows an out-curved lip line without emphasizing the tail with a strong short-cut hairstyle of Red or Blue, straight eyebrows, and a thick line in Brown Corral's eye shadow. Seventh, Goss is a strong smoky makeup, showing black, dark blue, and dark brown eyeshadow, and eye line black and dark brown lips, showing a distinctive black color overall. As such, makeup expressed in Swoopa is a makeup that is differentiated from existing performances, stage makeup, and girl group makeup, and is somewhat strongly expressed by ordinary women with strong characters or strong sister makeup or girl crush makeup that express a strong image.

Marie Lund, An Argument on Rhetorical Style. Aarhus, Denmark: Aarhus University Press, 2017. 220 pp. $39.98 (paper). ISBN: 978-8771842203.

Marie Lund, <i>An Argument on Rhetorical Style</i>. Aarhus, Denmark: Aarhus University Press, 2017. 220 pp. $39.98 (paper). ISBN: 978-8771842203.

Između Prve i Druge Srbije - o političkoj i klasnoj dimenziji hip-hop supkulture u Srbiji

This paper tackles the phenomenon of hip-hop subculture in Serbia. The goal is to understand its development and to map out its class dimensions and political impulses. The analysis is grounded in cultural studies (cf. Hall, 1980). Hip-hop lyrics and symbolism of the hip-hop style are analyzed with a focus on political and class dimensions. The development of hip-hop subculture is divided into two phases. First, during the 1990s, the hip-hop subculture in the Serbian context was in the search for its local identity as a style that originated within the working-class but had its first representatives in Serbia among the middle-class youth. Hip-hop's dialogue with the dizel culture during this period is indicative of this quest for identity. In the second phase, after 2000, hip-hop finds its place in the Serbian society by grounding itself in the working-class and establishing itself as the heir of the dizel subculture of the nineties (Papović and Pejović 2016). It also undergoes internal divisions producing an elitist wing further subdivided into a liberal and conservative part, and an anti-elitist wing with a chaotic political character hosting both radically leftwing and extreme right sentiments.

Style and Flow: A Commentary on Duinker &amp; Martin

Duinker and Martin's excellent study presents a wealth of new data, findings, and analyses. It represents a welcome focus on the details of musical aspects of hip-hop, as well as an effort to combine those details with more global aspects of recordings in order to clarify what our notions of hip-hop 'style' or 'sound' are based on. The examination of instrumental backgrounds and production parameters is particularly novel. I would suggest, however, that the study could have benefitted from the use of details pertaining to flow, particularly in the examination of trends over time and stylistic sub-groupings. I show that several parameters pertaining to the complexity, rhythmic placement, and repetitiveness of rhymes help track changes in hip-hop style over time, distinguish between more and less similar songs, and capture effects of apparent time within the same actual time period.

Friendship, Love, and Hip Hop. An Ethnography of African American Men in Psychiatric Custody By Katie Rose Hejtmanek. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015 ISBN 978-1-137-54472-8, 267 pp, £65.00 (hb), £51.99 (eb)

Friendship, Love, and Hip Hop. An Ethnography of African American Men in Psychiatric Custody By Katie Rose Hejtmanek. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015 ISBN 978-1-137-54472-8, 267 pp, £65.00 (hb), £51.99 (eb)

The Bible in/and Popular Culture: A Creative Encounter ed. by Philip Culbertson and Elaine M. Wainwright

THE BIBLE IN/AND POPULAR CULTURE: A CREATIVE ENCOUNTER Edited by Philip Culbertson and Elaine M. Wainwright. Leiden: Brill, 2011. 210 pp.This collection of essays emerged out of an awareness that biblical scholars have moved beyond exploring the intersection of the Bible and art and film to considerations of a host of other media, including music, literature, graphic novels, comics, and television. The editors note that, despite the growing breadth of scholarship, there is as yet no systematic study of the theoretical engagement of the Bible and popular culture. To that end, the essays in this volume give attention not only to a wide range of media and to a plethora of places (United States, New Zealand, Britain, Jamaica), but also to the ways in which important theorists provide crucial analytical lenses (Michel de Certeau, Pierre Bourdieu, Mikhail Bakhtin, Judith Butler, and James Scott)-though the book does not attempt to establish a comprehensive theoretical framework for the nexus of the Bible and pop culture.Michael J. Gilmour's opening essay reads in an intertextual mode, drawing on Salman Rushdie's image of all the stories of the world being an ocean or sea of narratives swirling around in countless intersecting currents. He then dips into the waters by examining the way that the figure of Satan changes from Milton's Paradise Lost to Rushdie's The Satanic Verses. Mark McEntire draws parallels between the withdrawal of God as a character throughout the Hebrew Bible with the increasingly distant and absent God invoked by Emmylou Harris in her album Red Dirt Girl. Harris helps her audience learn to cope with God's silence and to embrace the loneliness of human existence. Dan W. Clanton explores a litany of depictions of Jesus in a variety of media, from Henry Ward Beecher through Cecil B. DeMille and Mel Gibson to graphic novels and the animated South Park. His reception history analysis concludes that Jesus functions as a malleable mythic figure in American culture, an empty container into which many different meanings can be poured. Philip Culbertson's essay ex- amines the image of Mary Magdalene as a whore across a broad range of song lyrics. Drawing on Freud and Jung, he suggests that students be steered away from dichotomous thinking-Mary as either sinner or saint-and to appreciate her as a complex figure.Jim Perkinson writes in a hip-hop style with a rhythm and beat to his prose that reflects the music he is analyzing. His refracting the Bible and the music into one another ultimately serves to express a revolt against racism and poverty. Likewise, Noel Leo Erskine shows how the biblical story can shape an alternative identity by studying Bob Marley's album Exodus. Rastafarians equate Jamaica with Babylon and Ethiopia with Zion. However, Marley's lyrics reflect the continued subjugation, rather than liberation, of women. Thus, Babylon is not left totally behind.Tex Sample considers the enduring popularity among working-class Americans of two country songs by Kris Kristofferson, Help Make It Through the Night and Me and Bobby McGee. …

현대패션에 나타난 스웨그(swag)룩

The purpose of this study is to delve into the identity of the swag style which has diversified into various forms by exploring the phenomenon, formative characteristics and the internal values of the swag style in modern fashioin. This study discusses the concept and the socio-cultural meanings of swag from the perspective of Jean Baudrillard's hyper-reality, and a form of existence. The classifies the swag fashion styles into parody, hip hop and collage-type mix-and-match. Expressive characteristics of the swag look in modern fashion are as follows. First, the swag look utilizes the parody technique. In the mid-2000s, the look parodied brand logos as a form of self-mocking and active self-derision toward cheap imitations. Second, the swag look borrows from the expressive factors of the hip-hop style. Born as a sub-culture based on music, hip-hop has become a way of life, as its nature became multi-cultural and trans-cultural while its fashion style gained popularity globally after the 1980s. Third, the swag look barrows from the pop-type collage form as it mixes-and-matches costume items based on the expressive characteristics of hip hop, and this can be seen through items being used in new, non-formative and free styles. Comic aesthetics is revealed in parodied expression, hip-hop factors and collage-style mix-and-match. Swag as a hyper-reality manifests itself in various natures: humorous nature, negative nature and deconstructive nature through reflection and re-enactment of reality, transmutation and distortion of reality, and absence of reality respectively. However, it does not have a binding nature, which is the norm for subcultures. This characteristic, in combination with it having internal lightness, strong meaning of communication, and a sharing of self-contentment, distinguishes itself from the general meanings of existing parody fashion, hip-hop fashion and collage fashion.

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

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.

“Who Gets to Tell the Story?”: Adaptation and Juxtaposition in Two Dance Versions of Othello

This essay explores the juxtaposition of three texts: Shakespeare’s Othello , Jose Limon’s The Moor’s Pavane (1949) and Doug Elkins’ Mo(or)town/Redux (2012). Limon’s piece, now considered a modern dance classic, reimagines Othello as a taut, twenty-minute formal dance set to the music of Henry Purcell, for Othello, Desdemona, Iago, and Emilia. Elkins’ piece responds to Limon’s by retaining the four-character format and some of the key movement motifs, but uses a postmodern aesthetic drawn from hip-hop and various other styles, and a Motown soundtrack. I argue that although these dance adaptations are derived from Othello, they are not derivative; they do not achieve meaning only in relation to Shakespeare’s play. Rather, they reveal that Othello is more of a process than a product: a text that, as Margaret Jane Kidnie suggests, “evolves over time in response to the needs and sensibilities of its users.” Yet Limon and Elkins adapt Shakespeare in diverse ways, particularly in their portrayals of race on the dance stage. Limon, a Mexican-American, created the role of Othello in The Moor’s Pavane and presented a striking physical contrast with Lucas Hoving, the Dutch-born dancer who created the role of Iago. Yet Limon attempted to efface a racially-inflected reading of the piece, claiming that it presented “the tragedy of Everyman.” Elkins, by contrast, insists on the visibility of racial issues within Mo(or)town/Redux , through the history of Motown music, through his uses of hip-hop and breaking, and through “color-sighted” casting practices.

Constructions of race: symbolic ethnic capital and the performance of youth identity in multicultural Australia

ABSTRACTThe relationship between ethnicity and cultural and social capital has been taken up by several scholars in terms of questions of disadvantage. This paper considers the performance of race and ethnicity as positive capital among a group of Sudanese young people with refugee backgrounds in Brisbane, Australia. Based on ethnographic fieldwork, I demonstrate young people's adaptation of cultural associations in their hybridized and essentialized self-representations. In particular, I explore my informants’ use of hip hop music and style as resources in performance. Much of young people's engagement with capital in performance enables their relatively overt and self-conscious process of clarifying who they are in relationship to one another, often with particular reference to race and ethnicity. Their engagement with globally relevant mediums is indicative of young people's agency in defining their own lives in the context of the political and moral framework of Australian multiculturalism.

Exploring the experiences, perceptions and reflections of popular electronic musicians at UK higher education institutions

Abstract Although formal educational institutions in the UK, and particularly in Higher Education (HE), have begun to include aspects of dance music and hip-hop styles of music in their curricula, there is still a notable lack of research into the relationship between popular electronic music-making practices, such as performance, and formal education. This study explores some of the experiences, perceptions and reflections of popular electronic musicians in formal educational institutions in the UK with a specific focus on the performance of popular electronic music. Our findings show that formal education has had some impact on the development of popular electronic musicians’ practice and, in some cases, acted as an introduction to popular electronic styles of music. However, the study’s findings also highlight the need to develop more comprehensive musical curricula that include popular electronic styles of music as well as the more established popular musical styles such as rock.

프리프합(Prep-hop) 패션의 디자인 특성

This research aims to analyze the prep-hop fashion, which is an original look created through the convergence of the hip-hop and preppy look, and identify the design characteristics of the prep-hop fashion. The style mixes the fashion of what was traditionally a lower-class look with the upper class. The design characteristics are as follows: First, the prep-hop fashion expresses slim, casual and sophisticated look with items and silhouettes. The items are categorized into jackets, shirts and pants. The prep-hop jackets provides a casual look to its wearer unlike the jackets of preppy or conservative looks. Slim suits show different meanings and features depending on the changes in the time and culture despite the continued use of the items. Second, the colors of the prep-hop fashion include overall basic colors used in the preppy look and hip-hop fashion. The aesthetic values of the colors express pleasant color images different from the conservative and resistant images expressed in the preppy and hip-hop style before the convergence, respectively. Third, the materials and patterns are expressed in a unique way to fulfill the emotional needs that are considered vital to contemporary fashion. The materials in the prep-hop fashion extend the ranges of usage by using the materials with unexpectedness broken out of general range of usage. While the use of the patterns is one of the methods to demonstrate that the prep-hop fashion is created by the convergence between hip-hop fashion and preppy look, the meaning concludes pleasantness and casualness different from the past. Fourth, the prep-hop fashion is mainly composed of hip-hop fashion accessories, which express the authenticity of the hip-hop fashion to protect the non-mainstream characteristics. The design characteristics of the prep-hop fashion pursue the individuality of the contemporary fashion, which lacks originality due to commercialization. The development of the prep-hop fashion, as a new form that combined contrasting genres and trends, is expected to develop more publicly.

A study on the meanings of soul fashion in American pop culture

The purpose of this study was to analyze the meaning of fashion in American pop culture. This study was conducted using a literature research method based on the prior theses, journals and relevant books. Soul as a concept, originated in African-American communities and evolved from the ideology of Black Power, which prompted Black Nationalism. Soul fashion, which took on two styles in African American culture began to embody black resistance and community pride in the late 20th century. One of these, hip-hop style represented the message of resistance and a sense of beauty outside the mainstream. The other, African-inspired fashion, which utilized a look inspired by African tradition, rejected white supremacy by expressing a proud dignity. As a result, the meaning of soul in fashion represented by American pop culture resulted in contrasting appearance due to different elements. First, one of its meanings is ironic and sarcastic, and it expressed historical trauma, cultural stereotypes, self-hatred, and self-degradation and, the self-mutilation of African-American by cynically distorting their silhouettes and, using modified materials and patterns, fantastic colors, and extraordinary accessories. Second, the other meanings is the pride and dignity of Black Power, which visualized the concentration of ideas implied by the tradition of African-American, through fashion by using fierce traditional of African costumes, unique patterns and accessories.

Using Music in Performing Roman Comedy

In the original performances of Roman comedy, actors sang to the accompaniment of the two-piped tibia. Although complete reconstruction of this practice on the modern stage is impractical, participants in the 2012 NEH Summer Institute on Roman Comedy in Performance demonstrated several ways of incorporating music into modern performances, including hip hop-style performance; spoken dialogue with incidental music; a cappella singing to rhythms suggested by Plautus' and Terence's meters; accompanied singing of stichic meters to a repeated melody; and accompanied singing of a polymetric scene. Each of these approaches can be reproduced in the classroom to great pedagogical benefit.

Jaunimo kultūrų įvairovė: gatvės meno projektai kaip nusikalstamo elgesio prevencija

The aim of the study is to reveal the street art projects as youth crime prevention measures options. Tasks: 1) to review the evolution of street art in social terms; 2) to analyze street art project expert experience in organizing and conducting social arts projects with disadvantaged youth in Lithuania. Qualitative study conducted in 2014 using a semi-structured interview method. Conclusions: In the twenty-fist century we are witnessing an evolving street art and it’s dynamic conquest of cities in the world. Hip-hop style and fashion is a massively popular among young people, so it is important to use street art activities in social work with young people and to help young people understand the difference between the aesthetic forms of street art, professional graffiti and vandalism, criminal activity, and how these different choices lead to different outcomes. Street art projects as a social art practice and prevention of delinquent behavior practice helps young people to distract from unacceptable behavior and to positive socialization. Lack of social workers professional approach to street art culture, lack of managerial skills of the street art advocates and lack of dissemination interfere with projects’ optimal development and continuity. Study results imply an insight about the emerging need to train professional social art specialists. Keywords: youth, diversity, street art, art and social projects, prevention of criminality. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.15823/su.2014.06

Performing Post-Racial Asianness: K-Pop's Appropriation of Hip-Hop Culture

Drawing on theories from performance studies, dance studies, and critical race studies, this paper explores the ways in which Korean pop (K-pop)'s appropriation of hip-hop reveals a complex moment of global cultural flow. Western audience reception of K-pop is likely limited to framing K-pop either as a form of contemporary minstrelsy or a postcolonial mimicry, e.g., making fun of African American culture or a bad copy of American pop. This perspective, however, understands K-pop through the lens of American culture and only considers external signs of the performances. It fails to capture the local context in Korea, such as how and why the performers appropriate hip-hop, such as the process of embodiment and training process to learn hip-hop movement, rhythm, and styles, etc. By analyzing K-pop singer G-Dragon's (GD) music videos, this paper argues that Koreans' appropriation of American culture is neither minstrelsy nor postcolonial mimicry. K-pop's chameleonic racial and gender hybridity reveals incommensurability of contemporary Asian-ness, which I have called post-racial Asian-ness as non-racialization.

The New Masters of Eloquence: Southernness, Senegal, and Transatlantic Hip-Hop Mobilities

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] I get it in 'til sun rise, Goin' 90 in a 65, Windows rolled down screamin' out: Hey-ey-ey, so paid. --Akon, I'm so paid, 2008 (1) With a heavy diamond stud anchoring each earlobe, hip-hop hustler Akon disembarks from his helicopter, spreads his arms to sky, and sings about his solvency from bow of a high-seas luxury yacht. For all its exuberance, gesture is a stereotypical one for any Atlanta rapper. Here, fantasy surrounding hip-hop's southern Third (2)--one represented by Akon's formidable pop presence--is crisscrossed by classic cars, fast motorcycles, and sprawling liners. With Akon and his peers at its helm, last decade has witnessed dominance of southern hip-hop in international commercial markets and neighborhood undergrounds alike. As Miami, Houston, Memphis, New Orleans, and Virginia Beach center themselves in global pop scene, this travels in unlikely vehicles, including body of this Senegalese-American singer, whose voice both represents American South's most marketable presence in global industry and Africa's most audible presence in American hip-hop. Commercial television is so saturated with trope of southern rap star on a boat that comedian Andy Samberg's hip-hop video send-up of genre--I'm on a Boat!--has come to define mainstream critical engagement with southern rap. (3) Akon's smooth, blues-keyed cadence, though, is definitive for body of genre, which infuses posture of coastal gangsta hip-hop styles with cool sung tones of Deep-South gospel and a particular attention to scenic narratives and sharp wordplay. Even as these popular forms patch together a legacy of regional sounds and styles, they are contoured by growing African and diasporic communities that line contemporary American South. In wake of economic collapse over past decade, new communities of Senegalese flea-market traders (who often have special relationships with Chinese manufacturers), IT specialists, and taxi drivers have come to thicken suburbs of Atlanta, Raleigh, Houston, Memphis, Virginia Beach, and Miami. They join a host of migrants from throughout a transnational Afrodiasporic circuit, which Black aesthetic theorist Paul Gilroy calls the Black Atlantic. (4) The new Global South incorporates populations of Caribbean immigrants from Jamaica, Haiti, and Cuba; Africans from Ivory Coast, Nigeria, and Uganda; Brazilians and East Coast African American families. These immigrants connect with established southern communities that are already textured by global genealogies and cross-cultural conversations. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Akon represents latest chapter in both southern social life and southern that upends notion that southernness must wear its history on its sleeve--that it must cast itself in frayed aesthetic of handmade and moor its imagination in farm and country. Instead, Akon and his contemporaries, poised in present tense, represent a nation they call a loose family of artists associated with urban centers and creative communities of American South and Southern diaspora, who rose to popular prominence in last decade on a wave of novel productions and dancehall hits. With its digitized production techniques and attention to high-end trend, is unapologetically super-modern; its dirt emerges in its bassy car sound systems and club speakers alike, badness in its hustler's lyricism, and depiction of Scarface-inflected imagery in its videos. The is time-stamped with unmistakable low-end rocking beats, tinny synthesizer flourishes, heavily processed vocals (often slowed down to sound vaguely sinister), and heavy lyrics with call-and-response choruses ready for instant memorization. This is of Global Dirty South: a zone based in a messy aesthetic of here-and-now that Mississippi rapper/producer David Banner describes as horror music (5) and Akon calls Konvikt Muzik. …

Breaking expectations: Imagined affinities in mediated youth cultures

This article examines the mediated encounters experienced by participants in hip hop and funk dance styles especially breaking or b-boying/b-girling. It introduces the concept of imagined affinities to describe the spectrum of these encounters, which are enacted through mediated texts, or by travels through new places. Using interviews with dancers as a guide, I argue that artefacts made, distributed and circulated by dancers help to produce perceptions of commonalities between them. The nature of the process of rapid mediatisation, which has taken place during the past few decades, and its subsequent impact on breaking or b-boying/b-girling, are considered here through a concerted effort to historicize shifts in practice and experience. I examine the historical moment when homemade videotapes began to proliferate in the cultural practices of breaking, providing a source for the values and codes of hip hop culture. At that time, dancers on tour, who created the videos, celebrated the local contexts of other dancers from around the world while simultaneously showing a determination to appreciate breaking through its own practices and formats, even as these practices were becoming rapidly transformed and expanded through international networks.

Linguistic techniques of the self: The intertextual language of racial empowerment in politically conscious Brazilian hip hop

This article describes the bodily aesthetics, patterns of consumption, and daily linguistic practices undertaken by hip-hop affiliated youth in Rio de Janeiro in the late 1990s. I argue that through their participation in politically conscious hip hop, poor male Brazilian youth attempt to racially transform their bodies into a form of ‘modern blackness.’ I focus, in particular, on the quoting of rap lyrics in daily conversation, a linguistic practice that offers audible evidence of one’s consumption of hip hop style. I suggest that linguistic strategies of racial empowerment constitute forms of ‘techniques of the self’ that allow speakers to manage the racial appearance of the body through an avoidance of the traits that are negatively associated with blackness in Brazil.