Rap Scene Research Articles

“His Life is Like a Folklore Legend”

This article utilizes Christopher Partridge’s concept of “occulture” from his work The Re-Enchantment of the West to analyse the phenomenon of hip-hop, focusing specifically on the late rapper known as MF DOOM (b. Daniel Dumile). Partridge posits that while “disenchantment” is concurrent with a “secular” modernity, it often gives way to a process of “reenchantment” (Partridge 2004, 64). Hip-hop, inasmuch as it often draws from reenchanting, new religious movements, and is in itself a fundamentally eclectic, syncretic genre, presents ample opportunity for reenchantment narratives. I argue that MF DOOM is an exemplar of occultural reenchantment in hip-hop, being both a producer of it as well as a consumer. Acting as the genre’s “supervillain,” MF DOOM’s revolt against the “routinized” rap scene of the mid to late nineties sees him drawing on a variety of cultural materials, including his experiences in new religious movements, to create a bricolage that is reenchanting. MF DOOM’s reenchanting capacity is revealed in an analysis of three of his albums, Operation: Doomsday, Madvillainy and Born Like This. Similarly, an exploration of MF DOOM’s use of personae, and his dedication to embodying them in a kind of “performance artistry,” will be examined to understand their contribution to the occultural mystique associated with the rapper.

‘The Tunisian rap scene: an intersectional analysis of women rappers’

ABSTRACT This article focuses on Tunisian women rappers and shows how these artists have carved a space for themselves in the masculine musical genre of rap. This paper highlights the complexity of the issues depicted in female rappers’ songs. The article sheds light on the rappers: Medusa, Sabrina, Tuny Girl and Queen Nesrine. These female rappers defend women’s rights in their songs, while also stressing the multi-layeredness of Tunisian women’s lives and struggles. Their songs target multiple forms of marginalisation relating to sexism, poverty, corruption, classism, security, employment and law and justice. Despite their awareness of and resistance to male dominance, these rappers do not reduce Tunisian women’s problems to patriarchy. Rather, they emphasise the impact of the intersection between geopolitical and socio-economic issues on women and girls. This paper demonstrates that Tunisian women rappers use their art in order to expose women’s intersectional realities and the various challenges they face.

“Out in the Streets”

Abstract This article provides a socio-anthropological portrayal of the hip-hop narrational mosaics in Greece through the intertemporal exploration of two hip-hop scenes: the rap scene and the hip-hop dance scene. It explores the gray and contested zones of a local hip-hop culture—which reflect on global hip-hop imageries, norms, and antinomies–through permutations and manifestations of difference, hybridization and subcultural capital, and their subversive intersections with race, class, gender, and affective states in contemporary Greece in landscapes of crisis. Drawing on content analysis of rap lyrics and ethnographic fieldwork on rap and hip-hop dance performativities, resonating contemporary Greek society’s precarities, traumas, and ethics, this article explains why hip-hop and street cultures are so popular today in Greece. Furthermore, it highlights their global dynamics and their present and future potential as an empowering and emancipatory space for young generations.

“Representing this Ossi-thing”

In this article, we argue that German rap music can open up insights into current social negotiation processes surrounding the topic of post-migration. By emphasizing “ost” (literally “East”) in “p-ost-migration”, we propose adding a regional perspective to current debates on the concept of post-migration. Such a perspective considers the specific lifeworlds that characterize the living-together in diversity in Eastern Germany. Based on an exploratory study, we put our empirical focus on the growing Eastern German rap scene and show that “Eastern Germany” is playing an increasing role for rappers as identity-forming spatial category, especially since the migration summer of 2015. Our analysis will propose that a reference to “the East” can be used both as a means to take a stand against racism and as a means to feed into current right-wing populist discourses and excluding definitions of “Heimat” (“one’s home turf ”).

Lyrical (re)citation: Remembering, recycling and revoicing bars from the rap canon

Rap music has been the soundtrack to global rebellions against the hegemonic status quo. For this reason, it has often been construed as the antithesis of tradition, breaking old systems to make space for the novel and the original. Along these lines, the hip hop community has deeply valued originality as an essential feature of the emcee’s authorial voice. Copying the rhymes and styles of fellow rappers has often been condemned as ‘biting’. While these practices of ingenuity are plenty within the rap scene, it is integral that hip hop studies also account for practices that directly contradict this ethos of ingenuity: practices of re-citation, re-cycling, re-membering and re-voicing. This study examines the lyrics and the testimonies of rappers for evidence of these practices. The record shows that many emcees are constantly engaged in memorizing the language forms of other rappers and faithfully replicating those forms in their own artistic creations. These practices of re-cycling are contextualized within social theories of voice that posit authorial voice as fundamentally co-constructed by an author’s social scene. The study seeks to complicate the caricature of the self-made–self-taught rapper, which has often led to stereotypical depictions of rappers as unstudied, off-the-cuff and extemporary.

Australia

In this contribution, we provide a brief overview of the development of Hip Hop culture in Australia, looking specifically at rap and breaking (breakdancing). We show how Australian rap has for a long time been dominated by white Australian artists attempting to solidify an Aussie Hip Hop identity distinct from the United States. Because rap from Indigenous and Culturally and Linguistically Diverse (CaLD) communities did not fit the tropes of dominant (white) Australian culture, and were instead disregarded as simple mimicry of African American rap, the gatekeepers of Aussie Hip Hop for a long time locked out these minority artists. This created a divide in the rap scene that reflected broader Australian racial politics. In contrast, the breaking community has historically been more inclusive and reflective of a multicultural Australia, and has been more connected with the breakers of North America, Europe and Asia. In this contribution, we demonstrate how Australian Hip Hop has evolved over the past two decades to be more culturally inclusive, supported by key Australian artists, community radio, social media and finally validated by the Australian music industry as a distinct musical genre worth celebrating.

Full of rage and references: Understanding Coronel’s Frenesi (Frenzy) (2022) in the Brazilian rap scene – An interview/review

Coronel is an underground Brazilian rapper and music producer who has a psychologizing and post-gangsta musical work. In his album Frenesi (2022), Coronel shows his rage against fake gangsterism in the Brazilian rap scene utilizing references from a diverse setting of cultural productions ranging from Hitchcock movies to Egyptian gods. This article examines the uniqueness of Coronel’s musical work in the Brazilian rap scene considering his initial maromba rap phase as well. Maromba rap is a subgenre of rap music made for working out comprising motivating but also dissing lyrics against other bodybuilders. As a product of Brazilian rap scene on the internet, maromba rap is an interesting phenomenon that had its apex in early 2010s. However, Coronel’s career moved beyond such a specific subgenre achieving deeper lyrics and more intricate music productions. In other words, this article examines not only Coronel’s Frenesi but also its career as a whole and how the content of his album relates to the different phases he went through as an artist. Coronel comes back with an aggressive album replete with references from cinema to Egyptian gods and videogames.

Multimodality as civic participation

Abstract In October 2018, a collaboration between young rap artists in Thailand’s Indy rap scene, Rap Against Dictatorship (RAD), launched a video criticizing the ruling Junta that went viral within days of publication. The Junta soon after released its own video as a response to RAD. The production and publication of both videos are what Scollon (2001) calls social actions mediated by a distinct cultural toolkit. This study analyzed how modes such as music, text, color, camera angle, gestures, voice, image and iconicity emerged in both videos to realize scalar differences in civic participation. The Junta’s video represents a high sociolinguistic scale, whereas RAD realizes a lower scale. In a time of political unrest in Thailand, sociolinguistic scale and the semiotic resources that people employ to realize scales are a lens to analyze how different stakeholders address various perspectives of the political situation and appeal to different levels of civic participation.

Yeraltı (Underground) – Ana Akım (Mainstream) Etkileşimi Bağlamında İzmir Rap Scene

Hip hop kültürünün bir bileşeni olan Rap, günümüzde Amerikan müzik endüstrisinde ana akım (mainstream) bir türdür. 1970’li yıllarda New York’un Bronx bölgesinde ortaya çıktığı kabul edilen bu müziksel pratik, zamanla farklı ülkelerde de yerel dinamiklerle etkileşime girerek yeni ve yeniden üretilen, tüketilen bir emtia (meta) haline gelmiştir. Türkçe Rap müzik de bu bağlamda değerlendirilebilir. Ancak, Türkçe Rap müziğin tarihsel arka planı 1980’li yıllarda Almanya’da yaşayan Türk diasporasına dayanır. Bununla birlikte Türkiye’de 1990’lı yılların ortalarından itibaren yeraltı (underground) bir pratik olarak görünürlük kazanmaya başlayan Türkçe Rap’in, 2010’lu yılların ortalarından itibaren mainstream etkileşimi dikkat çekicidir. Bir müzik türünün eş zamanlı olarak hem mainstream hem de underground bir yaşam sürmesi de mümkündür. Mainstream ve underground karşıt konumları işaret etse de, bir müzik pratiği söz konusu karşıtlığa rağmen simbiyotik etkileşime her zaman açıktır. Günümüz medya teknolojilerinin sunduğu imkanlar, yerel ölçekte üretilen müzik metinlerini hem yereller arası hem de küresel ölçekte anında etkileşime açık hale getirdi. Buradan hareketle bu makale, alan araştırması yöntemini benimseyen etnomüzikoloji disiplinine uygun bir yaklaşımla İzmir merkezinde Rap atmosferi (scene) ve dinamiklerine odaklanır. Rap özelinde popüler müzik incelemesi olan bu çalışmada scene kavramsal inşayı işaret ederken, etnografi malumat toplama yöntemine vurgu yapar.

Fenomeno Speranza: la voce dura della banlieue casertana

Speranza, an Italian-French rapper, in recent years has made a name for himself within the newItalian dialectal rap scene. His music portrays life in the Campania province of Caserta with a style that is reminiscent of gangsta rap reworked to be both ironic and irreverent. This article analyzes a corpus of six songs released by the campanian artist on YouTube between 2017 and 2019. The description of a harsh reality, implemented through a particular verbal violence, is the main feature of his rap music, interesting both on a textual and musical level.

‘We [mostly] carry guns for the internet’: Visibility labour, social hacking and chasing digital clout by Black male youth in Chicago’s drill rap scene

Much negative attention has been given to the ‘drill’ music genre, a subgenre of gangsta rap that was born in Chicago’s underground hip hop scene in early 2010s. Previous scholarship has highlighted how social media has shifted how gang-affiliated youth in Chicago carefully manage their street reputations, communicate with peers and fuel gang rivalries through platformed creation. Yet still, in the context of drill, I argue that social media self-branding practices also provide these youth a way out of containment and sequestration to gain visibility in the music industry and empower their neighbourhoods. Based on interviews with drill recording artists and their support workers, I explore the content and character of their work, the centrality of work ethic to their racial identity construction and the way they use social media work to build and maintain status, authenticity and cultivate connections with fans, friends and other cultural producers. Bridging traditional theories of urban sociology with emerging new media scholarship, I suggest this group of artists is a representative case of how the digital practices of disadvantaged Black youth have typically gone mischaracterized in the literature. This study offers new insights into ‘capping’ as an important tenet to hip hop’s visibility labour on social media and how the ‘always on’ nature of digital labour adds another dimension to the typical utilization of street authenticity in narratives of hip hop music. This article concludes by illuminating the many deep contradictions and misconceptions about technological ingenuity, Black youth agency, hip hop culture and street credibility in urban communities.

Gendering Dance

Originating as a Punjabi male dance, bhangra, reinvented as a genre of music in the 1980s, reiterated religious, gender, and caste hierarchies at the discursive as well as the performative level. Although the strong feminine presence of trailblazing female DJs like Rani Kaur alias Radical Sista in bhangra parties in the 1990s challenged the gender division in Punjabi cultural production, it was the appearance of Taran Kaur Dhillon alias Hard Kaur on the bhangra rap scene nearly a decade and a half later that constituted the first serious questioning of male monopolist control over the production of Punjabi music. Although a number of talented female Punjabi musicians have made a mark on the bhangra and popular music sphere in the last decade or so, Punjabi sonic production continues to be dominated by male, Jat, Sikh singers and music producers. This paper will examine female bhangra producers’ invasion of the hegemonic male, Sikh, Jat space of bhangra music to argue that these female musicians interrogate bhangra’s generic sexism as well as the gendered segregation of Punjabi dance to appropriate dance as a means of female empowerment by focusing on the music videos of bhangra rapper Hard Kaur.

Holding onto Your Roots: Tatar-Language Rap in Post-Soviet Kazan

ABSTRACT In this article, we analyze the independent Tatar rap scene in two relevant contexts: the globalization of this musical culture and the post-Soviet nation-building efforts in the Republic of Tatarstan (Russian Federation). Having analyzed 29 in-depth biographical interviews with young rap scene participants and diary entries obtained in the course of a month-long participant observation, we conclude that the Tatar rap scene is a special case in Tatar urban youth culture, shaped by the younger generation of the Tatar-speaking intelligentsia (humanities graduates and creative professionals), and in opposition to both the cultural policy of Russification of the imperial center (i.e., Moscow) and the folklorized version of Soviet Tatar culture.

Orígenes de la práctica del rap y el Hip Hop en el conurbano bonaerense (1982-1992)

The present work is part of a research project carried out at the Universidad Nacional Arturo Jauretche of the Republica Argentina during the 2018/2020 period, it is proposed to reflect on the origins of Argentine rap music, mainly that which occurred in the western area of Gran Buenos Aires, and that marked the emergence of composers and singers of the rap genre that shaped the so-called national rap scene and that culminated in 2001 with the group from Moron and La Matanza, the Argentine Hip Hop Sindicato, winning the Latin Grammy Award for Best Hip Hop / Rap Band. The absence of archives and scarcity of documentary funds in which material that would serve as input to our research implied the collection of sources from various non-traditional areas: mainly the use of oral history as a method of data collection and personal files. In this sense, the testimonies of the first rappers, DJs and organizers of local parties are recovered, from which a set of independent initiatives from the 1980s and 1990s are reviewed. The interviews were conducted with references from the music scene. rap whose trajectory is linked to the origins of rap in the Argentina.

COMPARING TURKISH-SPEAKING RAP SCENES IN GERMANY AND THE NETHERLANDS

The main purpose of this article is to explore to which degree socio-political differences between Germany and the Netherlands particularly from early 1980s to late 90’s, where the Turkish population has a high density, affect developments of the Turkish-speaking rap music scenes in early 2000s. Here, the basic question is why Germany generally comes to mind when many people think of Turkish-rap music, but the Netherlands does not. To answer this question, I basically examined to what extent political (particularly as regards migration policies) and social conditions in the two countries have influenced the development of Turkish-language rap music. Cultural and political differences between these two countries and also the attitudes of the host society towards foreigners have led the Turkish rap scene in the Netherlands to remain less “developed” than that of Germany.

Urban Women Week: Promoting Women on the Senegalese Rap Scene

The growing interest in gender equality at festivals contrasts with the relative lack of scholarly attention given to festivals as sites of gender politics. Organized by a Senegalese association which promotes urban cultures, the example of Urban Women Week – a Senegalese festival which aims to promote women in hip hop, including rap music – leads me to revisit a gendered perspective on festivals while tackling the neglected issue of women’s presence in a rap music scene dominated by the “patriarchal impulses of the Senegalese hip hop establishment” (Neff 2015: 460). How are we to understand the adoption of a focus on women by the organizers of the festival in Senegal? Is rap music a specific place where women are empowered in the Senegalese context? Based on fieldwork carried out on the rap music scene in Senegal, I situate the establishment and evolution of the festival as a way for the association to respond to local claims for the inclusion of women in rap music while benefiting from a global agenda of gender mainstreaming, thereby exploring the glocal intricacies of gender politics in music.

Significados y prácticas en la escena del rap en los Valles de Jalisco, México

The semiotic analysis of music video clips and the characterization of identity practices served to document continuous and multiple aesthetic, social and cultural manifestations that (re)present hip-hop culture. This culture means ‛alternative’ way of life, religion, criticism and territory. The practices are self-management, collective work and dramatization of identity. The discourses about local rap, cultural icons and social criticism, and identifications in concert are studied in Cocula, San Martin Hidalgo, Ameca and Tala, Jalisco, Mexico, during the last five years. The data are provided to problematize multiculturalism and transversal sociocultural movements to modernity and rurality. In this region, rap scene is alive as the product of empowered actors who expose their version of hip-hop culture by hybridizing traditional identities with those of the global movement.

Yugospotting u regionalnom hip-hopu

Through the concept of 'Yugospotting' this article explores how some established post-YU rappers, armed with the rap language and the strong generational knowledge, have constructed common identities in the new supranational social context before their shared rap audiences. What kind of transnational post-Yugoslav rap scene has been constructed by employing inherited ex-Yugo-knowledge and rappers 'hiphopographies'? Could this (mis)sampling of Yugoness and Balkanness be a significant identification base for the future rap generations of the "region"?

Broadcasting Badness: Violence, Identity, and Performance in the Online Gang Rap Scene

This study contributes to an emerging literature both detailing Internet usage among street gangs and gang members and exploring how street life is presented in underground rap music. We present a content and cultural analysis of 78 rap videos posted on YouTube by gang members in Buffalo, New York, between 2009 and the first few months of 2015. Violence was the most dominant and consistent theme in the videos. We find that online space operates like a virtual street corner enabling individuals and groups to perform social and collective gang identities that emphasize and exaggerate their capacities for lethal violence. Online gang rap videos use violent imagery, revisit violent events, and reference gang conflicts to enhance both gang myth-making and social or collective identity development.

“Young Soldiers, One Day We Will Change Taiwan”: Masculinity Politics in the Taiwan Rap Scene

Abstract This article explores the gender practices of Taiwan’s male-dominated rap scene, with particular attention to the sonic, textual, and ritual reverberations of Confucian ideologies. In the context of shifting gender roles driven by dramatic sociopolitical and economic change over the course of the past two and a half decades, I argue that artists reimagine and refashion Confucian gender regimes and notions of intra-group hierarchy to create critical new spaces for male sociality, avenues for male self-empowerment, and opportunities for the articulation of masculine identities not otherwise audible in Taiwan’s popular music.