Introduction: The Making of a Hip Hop GlobePedro Alberto Martínez Conde, otherwise known as Perucho Conde, was probably the first rapper to compose a hit song outside the United States. A poet and comedian from the inner-city Caracas barrio of San Agustín, Conde was perplexed by the strange but catchy lyrics of the Sugar Hill Gang's 1979 hit "Rapper's Delight." In 1980 he came up with a Spanish version that went to the top of the charts in Latin America and Spain.Far from the outdoor jams and battles of the Bronx scene where hip hop originated, "Rapper's Delight" was packaged and designed for travel. But that didn't mean global audiences got it. Conde baptized his imitation "La Cotorra," the term...>>
Close to the Edge
As the interlinked crises of contemporary capitalist culture deepen around the globe, it's clear that today more than ever we need strong forms of internationalist thinking and organizing. One of the most compelling theoretical frameworks offered in this regard by intellectuals over the last few decades has been that of diaspora. For writers such as Paul Gilroy and Hazel Carby, the diasporic world of the Black Atlantic communicates through circuits of culture that challenge narrow nationalism and help cohere powerful international networks of solidarity.
Hip hop is probably the primary vehicle for such cosmopolitan cultural exchanges that we have today. It is also, of course, a commodity form that sometimes flaunts and trades in reactionary stereotypes. To what extent are hip hop cultures around the world today in communication with one another? Do they offer us concrete examples of the kind of internationalism evoked by writers such as Gilroy and Carby? Is a commodified cultural form such as hip hop commensurate with the massive challenges facing us today?
In her recent book Close to the Edge, Social Text collective member Sujatha Fernandes explores these and many other questions through the lens of global hip hop. This Periscope presents readers with a selection from her book as well as a series of engagements with her work and with the culture(s) of global hip hop by interlocutors of hers from various parts of the world.
As plenty of proud nostalgic discourses locate the residues of hip-hop culture circling the drains of sample exhaustion, scene fatigue, patched-in cameos, or the same old cushy R'n'B, people world over just keep going about inventing new worlds of musical talk in deep conversation with the hip-hop movement. Call it what they will; the global rap styles that saturate youth culture show no signs of grounding. In Africa, hip-hop traces a host of genealogies that bounce back through, tangle with, and circumnavigate narratives of a New York genesis. Africans were B-Boying and B-Girling right along with us in the '70s and '80s; they shaved asymmetrical fades in the baggy '90s; they doubled styles into backpack-introspection and true crunk at the...>>
Kabu verdi / Nu bai / Gosi nu sta na Portugei / Nu bai / Es ta ben y sai / Chullage"Cape Verde / Let's go / Now, we're in Portugal / Let's go / They [my people] come and go / Chullage" With these apparently innocuous opening words in kriolu to his 2001 song "Nu bai", Lisbon rapper Chullage captured the energy of urban youth and helped popularize a current problem of identity and belonging. This is significant given the fact that kriolu, a hybrid language of Portuguese, Temne and Wolof, has no official status as a language in Portugal or in the archipelago homeland of Cape Verde. Nevertheless, the ubiquitous kriolu phrase "nu bai" became a call for...>>
Sujatha Fernandes's Close to the Edge explores a variety of contexts in which hip-hop is practiced around the world, and draws them together with the thread of Fernandes's personal experiences. My own work has been based on the ethnographic study of communities associated with specific hip-hop practices in the United States, particularly those engaged in sample-based hip-hop production and b-boying/b-girling. In thinking about ways that our respective inquiries could comment on each other, I was initially struck by something that we hold in common: unlike many hip-hop scholars, we tend to study hip-hop more as a process than as a product. This is not to say that we have no interest at all in hip hop as a form of...>>
One of my earliest recollections of the contradictions inherent in hip hop's global spread happened in July 1995 when I, rather suddenly, noticed my friend Marwan's younger brother Samir pointing at me and singing "I said Hello Everybody" from across a crowded open-air dance club in Kumasi, Ghana. Samir's universal salutation, delivered in chorus with Naughty by Nature protégés the Rottin Razkals, was followed by a distinctly more locally specific line: "I'm from Ill-to-the-town to-the-town to-the-town." It was a Saturday night and I had ventured out to the Adum district of Kumasi with my friends Kwadwo and Frank (a.k.a. "Nasty") to attend some relatively minor celebration of the Asantehene's (the King of Ashanti) Silver Jubilee. That summer, in addition to the...>>
Copyright 2007-2010 Social Text
