The Cashtro Hop Project: Hip Hop music and the construction of artistic self-identity (original) (raw)
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Over the past 40 years, minoritized and marginalized youth from around the globe have utilized Hip Hop culture as a potential means of revolutionary artistic, aesthetic and theoretical practice. Emerging from the aesthetics of Black arts, Hip Hop re-instantiates sounds and aesthetics disavowed from the mainstream neo-liberal institutions as a collective cultural tool recontextualized according to global space, and personal identity. Currently, youth are living in an increasingly polycultural society where competing and often contradictory value systems are negotiated in order to develop a unique sense of personhood. What are at stake are notions of authenticity, well-being and critical engagement with society. This paper compares urban minoritized youth in two different locations within the United States through two different mediums of Hip Hop culture: rap and Hip Hop dance. We seek to understand how youth navigate development of self vis a vie community across different genres of Hip Hop.
RAP MUSIC, AN ARENA FOR SOCIO-CULTURAL DISTINCTION
Rap music is one of the cultural goods that have been developed especially among teenagers and youths in the present decade. This rapid development takes the attention of academic researchers and institutions. The present research is trying to understand the place of Rap music among teenagers and youths who are playing Rap music in Rasht city: Iran, Guilan province. There are two important questions in this research. The first is: whether Rap songs in the studied time/place have resistance aspects? And, the second is: where is the position of distinctive strategies in these songs? For investigating this research, 24 rappers in Rasht (Guilan province) were interviewed by qualitative approach, and three texts of the songs also were analyzed based on qualitative content method. The results showed that Rap music can include resistance and subcultural approach; and more important, it can create arena for discrimination and personification of social/cultural identity among teenagers and youths. Individuals who are attempting to construct their identity based on specific reading of their generation about society, politics, culture, and art. This type of identity in today's pluralistic cultures has collage- like nature.
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In a field like hip-hop, where written and verbal communication are the two primary forms of work production, the mind or intellect of the artist should be viewed as the very thing responsible for success. However, unlike other writing-intense fields, the mind of hip-hop artists is often the least valued and least lauded trait. Hip-hop artists, whether they realize it or not, have more to offer. They are more than the things that they possess. They are writers. They are thinkers. This article examines intellectualism in hip-hop music—its presence, shortcomings, and ultimate value.
Tracking the narrative: the poetics of identity in rap music and hip-hop culture in Cape Town
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Around the globe hip-hop articulates perceptions of place. The common thread running through these disparate localities is that hip-hoppers use the music, break-dancing, painting, and control over technology, as a source of strength in their struggle against exclusion from the domains of power. The power derived from participation in hip-hop represents a concrete denial of the powerlessness experienced outside the hip-hop community. Their actions symbolise affirmation and through symbolic behaviour (performance) hip-hoppers transform themselves from victims to victors. The process in which agency is displayed so profoundly is cyclical. Barthes' reading of poetics is pertinent to die experiences of hiphoppers in Cape Town. For him, die "poetic" is die "form's symbolic capacity; and this capacity has value only if it permits the form to depart in many directions and thereby potentially to manifest the infinite advance of the symbol, which one can never make into a final signified and which is, in short, always the signifier of another signifier" (1986:124) In this dissertation I propose that Cape Town's hip-hoppers, the progeny of coloured people displaced under apartheid, use the performance of rap music and break-dance, as the primary means of recovering and maintaining a form of power in a space of subordination. I maintain, moreover, mat the process of transformation is enacted within a context shaped by different associations and different strategies. The socio-political environment hip-hoppers inhabit informs the strategies they adopt and conditions in it are further challenged by the power developed through participation in hip-hop. The space in hip-hop is maintained by constant dialogue with the outside. This dialogue is cyclical and uneven. In view of the above, I will examine how knowledge wielded by hip-hoppers is discursively constituted, controlled and established as a basis for die construction of Cape Town's hip-hop community (Middleton 1990:7). My hypothesis is supported by Fabian, who regards performance as action that flows from a number of actors working togeuier to give form to experiences, ideas, feelings, and projects (1990:13). Hip-hop's unifying potential is one of its strongest sources of appeal among marginalised youths. In Cape Town, however, not only does it unify, but it rein forces boundaries, even among marginalised youths. Hip-hoppers interpret social conditions in dieir immediate 9 environment as mediated through die experiences of apartheid and racial hegemony. Responses to diis situation are marred by ideological discord. I therefore regard die study of hip-hop and rap music performance as the investigation of die tension generated by hiphoppers who associate and disassociate with one another. By asserting different identities and by following diverse strategies hip-hoppers inevitably transform their space into a place widi multiple boundaries. Widiin hip-hop itself diese boundaries create places in which differences exist face to face. Thus hip-hop is a cultural space in which differences are heightened, produced side by side and in competition widi each odier (Bhabha 1995:15). The struggle of identification and strategic movement in Cape Town's hip-hop community adds to its complexity. This is manifested in die political orientations of hip-hoppers, and in die relationship between hip-hop and Soudi African society at large. Music, dancing, painting, and technology are used to construct a landscape in which power is constandy negotiated, contested, mediated, and appropriated. The tension tiiat flows from here is revealed in the interplay of the political, social and racial textualities that prevail within die rap music scene in Cape Town. The main contention in hip-hop revolves around colour consciousness. Since its inception in the 1970s hip-hop in the USA has been associated with black nationalism and die black diaspora. Similarly, the presence of hip-hop in Cape Town can be explained, to a large extent, by die discourse of ethnicity. By identifying and mobilising diemselves as coloured or black, Cape Town's hip-hoppers have embedded ethnicity in a class struggle of global proportions. People in Africa, and in otiier parts of the developing wodd, are increasingly marginalised by the intensification of global capitalism. This situation has given rise to new social and cultural movements, such as hip-hop: LW: How do you explain the presence of hip-hop in Cape Town? Deon: The whole movement basically enlightens people, so there's a lot of people in western countries and especially white people that are coming to terms with themselves because we're living in the age of truth now, where a lot of things are being exposed, so people, or white kids can see how their parents have and forefathers have fucked them over mentally as well Basically what the world demands is that the people should be fair 10 with one another on a global scale. White people should come to terms with the evil that they and their foreparents have done, and if they truly want to compensate or come to some sort oj racial harmony...it's much more than a simple verbal apology. Because you can pay people also on an economical scale because there is not much you can do with I'm sorry and your black arse is still in the gutter. It's also a visual and vibrant adture, and people like the vibe, they like rhythm. Especially white people, a lot of them don't have natural rljythm and they struggle to dance and get into the beat. They're fascinated and they want to be a part of it.