My final post will be more theory based as I narrow down my research topic in the Hip Hop subculture. I want to discuss the globalisation and appropriation of Hip Hop music. I will apply James Lull’s cultural territory framework to plot the journey of Hip Hop culture.
Some people may site breakthrough artist like Azdad (Germany), Rhymester (Japan), Lil Rob (Mexico) and Scribe (New Zealand) as evidence of the globalisation of Hip Hop. However, the spread of Hip Hop culture goes well beyond a group of commercially successful performers. What started on the streets of New York in the 1970s is today a worldwide youth culture. Over the past twenty-five years the Hip Hop movement has spread far and wide, becoming a truly global phenomenon. As a result, local Hip Hop music, performed in native dialect, can be found in most countries around the world. The global adoption of Hip Hop music has led to it being used in new social and linguistic environments.
The appropriation of rap music occurs when a community of people not only listen and support imported work, but begin performing the genre themselves. In a more general sense, it is the productive use of an originally imported cultural pattern. The spread of Hip Hop in Europe and Asia was mostly a phenomenon of the 1990s. Aspects of the original Hip Hop culture in the USA were combined with local musical idioms and vernaculars to produce new and distinctive styles of Hip Hop music. Similar to the US, Hip Hop scenes were mainly set in urban settings, such as Berlin in Germany, Paris in France, Tokyo in Japan and Auckland in New Zealand. In many of these cases, Hip Hop culture has become a vehicle for youth protest. It has been used in different local contexts to voice the causes of ethnic minorities and to make statements about local political, racial, sexual and class issues.
As it gains audiences around the world, the risk is that Hip Hop culture will be appropriated in such a way that its original purpose and message will be lost. However, a key to the success of the global spread of Hip Hop music is that it is “firmly rooted in the local and the temporal”. The music is about “where I’M from” and as such proposes a new kind of universality (Mitchell 5).
The appropriation of Hip Hop culture can be viewed as an emergence of a new cultural territory. By applying James Lull’s framework for cultural territory, the adoption of Hip Hop culture can be broken into three distinct stages.
Deterritorialization: the extraction of a cultural pattern from its original social context
Cultural melding and mediation: transculturation, hybridisation and indigenisation
Reterritorialization: the integration of this cultural pattern into a new society
(Lull 145-64)
It is the middle phase of cultural melding and mediation that is critical to the appropriation of Hip Hop culture worldwide. Transculturation occurred in the early 1990s in Europe, when the public was flooded with records, films, video clips, magazines and all other types of media that delivered the Hip Hop formula. Popular American artists like Public Enemy and N.W.A were the catalyst for the spread of Hip Hop through Europe. Soon, artefacts of Hip Hop culture such as clothing and speech infiltrated youth culture. The second phase, hybridisation, is the mixture of new and familiar cultural forms. This included the blending of traditional rap music with local sounds and native vernaculars, as well as references to local geography, people and social problems. The final phase is the indigenisation of imported cultural patterns. Although similar to hybridisation, indigenisation is about creating your own cultural territory. The indigenised cultural pattern no longer feels alien and is engrained into local culture.
Using Lull’s framework, the interplay between global and local Hip Hop culture becomes evident. Hip Hop culture can no longer be seen as an expression for just African American people. It has become a voice for youth protest and a tool for reworking local identity all over the world.
References
Lull, James. Media, Communications, Culture. A Global Approach. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1995.
Mitchell, Tony. Global noise: rap and hip-hop outside the USA. Wesleyan University Press, 2001
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