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Coming to America : race, class, nationality and mobility in “African” Hip Hop
2013
Coming to America: Race, Class, Nationality and Mobility in "African" Hip Hop This report examines Hip Hop performance in Africa-with a focus on Nigeria-and analyzes how questions of race, racial identity, class and nationality feature in the works of African artists. The Nigerian/African artists themselves label their works "African Hip Hop" and they employ the aesthetics of the US and those of their local communities in their performances. Lately however, a couple of Nigerian artists-D'Banj and P Square-troubled the "African" in "African Hip Hop" by performing with popular African American Hip Hop artists, Snoop Dogg and Akon. It was a transnationalistic move that among other issues reflects the fluidity of identity. The performances in the videos of "Mr Endowed Remix" and "Chop My Money" also reflect identity (re)negotiation in postcolonial performances like Hip Hop. African Hip Hop, already, borrows the spectacles of US Hip Hop to express itself to African audiences. However, its collaboration with the US brings it in contact with various sociological issues-such as the conflation of race, class, gender and social mobility-that surround US Hip Hop. This report attempts a close reading of the meeting of "African Hip Hop" and "US Hip Hop" to understand how race, identity, and agency are negotiated in "African Hip Hop" vii Table of Contents Chapter One: Literature Review……………………………………………………...1 Chapter Two: Coming to America……………………………………………………43 References…………………………………………………………………………….80 Vita…………………………………………………………………………………….87 Chapter One: This dearth of scholarship is surprising considering the vibrancy of Hip Hop on the African continent. In fact, the paucity of scholarship on Nigerian Hip Hop, arguably the most vocal form on the African continent, partly fuels my interest in this work. Second, Hip Hop is dominated by a younger generation and the genre thus provides a useful discursive site for examining emerging patterns of intra-racial issues between Africans and African Americans. Third, Hip Hop, as we shall see in the pages ahead, is a genre of music that was created largely as a response to the challenges of living in a racist society. It is thus interesting how this music has travelled into Black Africa and appealed to other Black men. This study seeks to understand what has helped the circular motion of this culture and what plays out in Hip Hop collaborative videos. I will be analyzing videos of Hip Hop tracks jointly performed by both African and African Americans to understand how race, racial formation, racial access and some other aspects of intra-racial relationships are complicated by citizenship. This literature review is divided into four categories. The first section looks at scholarship on the Self-Other dialectic from different fields of study. It takes this multidisciplinary approach to contextualize the work within a broad frame of reference. The second category features a historical overview of the relationships between Africans and African Americans. It looks at select activities between Black America and Africa and how those have shaped Black identity on both sides. The third aspect examines the history, formation, progression and potentials of Hip Hop; while the fourth offers an extension of three in its examination of issues, trends and elements of Hip Hop performance in both America and Africa. I have chosen not to lump the third and fourth categories so they can benefit from cross-ventilation of narrowed-down ideas.
American Music, 2011
Academic work on hip hop published in the mid-1990s by Tricia Rose, William Eric Perkins, Kyra D. Gaunt and others tended to consider sampling as a historically significant practice, one through which producers memorialized and continued the traditions of earlier African American musical styles. More recently this view has been challenged: in his Making Beats (2004) Joseph Schloss contends that musical pragmatics have always been more important to producers than such cultural-historical projects. This article seeks to explore these issues by way of an examination of hip hop in the early-1990s, and specifically the uses that many groups – most notably Gang Starr and A Tribe Called Quest – began to utilize jazz samples around that time. Making extensive reference to contemporary interview material not previously examined in the scholarly literature, this article aims to establish the ways that, between the traditionary/pragmatic binarism, hip hop artists variously, and often simultaneously, described and enacted both continuations of and wariness towards an African American musical heritage.
Has Black Music ‘Souled’ Out? : Capitalism, Commodification, Colonialism
This study is focusing on race and 'urban' music. It is exploring whether black music is akin to Atlantic slavery in terms of representation, political economy and consumption. By comparing and semiotically analysing images of Lil' Kim and 50 Cent with blacks during slavery, longitudinal stereotypical themes were found. Foucault power/knowledge constructs and Said's Orientalism were applied as frameworks within discourse analysis methodologies. The findings suggest that construction of blackness in music, contributes towards systematic exclusion by denying black people equality in everyday life.
Ethnomusicology Journal, 2024
Black music research foreparent Samuel A. Floyd Jr.’s The Transformation of Black Music: The Rhythms, the Songs, and the Ships of The African Diaspora, coauthored with Melanie L. Zeck and Guthrie P. Ramsey Jr., demonstrates the transformative dynamics of intellectual transmission and transition in the life of the Black mind. This study is informed by Floyd's prolific contribution to the institutionalization of Black music research as the founder of the Center for Black Music Research, a writer of book-length projects, editor of journals and volumes, collaborator, and mentor. The Transformation of Black Music is an end-of-career response to the call sounded in his seminal The Power of Black Music: Interpreting Its History from Africa to the United States (1995), inspired by the aesthetics and performance theory proposed in Sterling Stuckey's conceptualization of the ring shout and the musical semiotics that complement Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s construction of signifyin(g) in the West African folklore symbolism of the signifying monkey. This review illuminates the instructive significance of The Transformation of Black Music in its context, contributors, structure, and intervention...