Global Hip Hop Studies - Volume 1, Issue 2, 2020

Popular culture texts not only entertain us, they shape our understanding of the world and our place in it. This article explores the contradictions and effects of the use of imagined and real Korean settings and traditional iconography in recent videos from Korean hip hop artists with a particularly close reading of the rapper Beenzino’s mid-2016 offering ‘January’, additionally informed by Drunken Tiger’s ‘Mantra’, MC Mong’s ‘Fame’ and Agust D’s ‘Daechwita’. The videos each utilize settings that signify Koreanness and feature significant symbols of Korea. I investigate what symbols and icons are used to take a foreign genre and imbue it with Koreanness within the music video frame. I find that these videos circulate and re-circulate a limited number of icons of Korea, because the images are meant not to portray pre-modern Korea in its complexity, but traditional Korea both as a symbol of national pride and as a (domestic and international) tourist destination wherein the palace is a backdrop and you wear a hanbok to create a visually striking Instagram post. Operating as the king of the music video’s world, the hip hop artist maintains his artistic independence through challenging tradition with juxtaposed elements of the present day.

The aim of this article is to contribute to our understanding of how local rap worlds evolve by describing the successive processes of the decline and revitalization of rap music in Gabon between 2009 and 2020, and by questioning the technologies and mediations employed for that purpose. This article considers how these transformations overlap with a history of complex relationships between music and politics, arguing that the revitalization of the rap world was related to a broader attempt at social healing and reconciliation after a violent political conflict. It stems from a long-term ethnography study conducted in Libreville and the Gabonese diaspora from 2008 to 2016 and on the analysis of two recent rap projects launched in Libreville: ‘Bwiti Gang Cypher’ and ‘Catalogue Challenge’. Through the analysis of these two performances, I highlight how the attempt at revitalization was relying on a complex mix of mediations and technologies, including original hip hop conventions and local healing rituals and how it has allowed for the transformation of divisive conflicts into a cathartic moment of collective listening. This article finally proves the double dimension of musical revitalization, one where music rebirth and social healing overlap, and it shows how the embeddedness of music and politics can be permanently transformed through the agency of social actors who develop a creative play between different technologies and mediations.

This article explores the connections between anti-fascism and hip hop in Italy between the 1990s and today. In the first part, I look at how several bands affiliated with the posse movement of the early 1990s relied on the network of students and of young people hanging out in the centri sociali (squatted centres) to spread their political messages. Picking up the baton from the militant singer-songwriters of the 1970s, Italian posses often mixed rap with other foreign musical influences such as reggae and punk, frequently rapping about the lack of anti-fascist activism among the youth and denouncing the gradual abandonment of anti-fascist ideals by members of the parliamentary Left. In the second part of the article, I discuss how, in the late 2000s, a new generation of anti-fascist hip hop artists emerged, with rappers such as Kento and Murubutu being among the most influential representatives of a subgenre known as ‘letteraturap’ (literature-rap). Kento and Murubutu’s narrative skills show their opposition to Fascism through the use of fictional characters, using short stories that are rich of metaphors to illustrate the importance of resisting to contemporary forms of fascism. Lastly, this article explores the gradual appropriation of hip hop culture by neo-fascist groups such as CasaPound. Understanding hip hop’s potentialities to recruit large numbers of young people, CasaPound organized street art conventions on graffiti, and promoted the emergence of hip hop crews like Rome’s Drittarcore. I conclude the article by analysing the efficacy of anti-fascist rap in earlier decades and considering CasaPound’s attempt to appropriate some of hip hop culture’s disciplines, ultimately showing not only a general crisis in political ideologies and cultural values, but also the power of neo-fascist movements to manipulate and reinvent subcultural formations to influence the youth.

Review of: Hip-Hop in Africa: Prophets of the City and Dustyfoot Philosophers, Msia Kibona Clark (2018)

New York: New York University Press, xxi, 266 pp.,

ISBN 978-0-89680-319-0, p/bk, $32.95

Review of: Hip Hop Versus Rap: The Politics of Droppin’ Knowledge, Patrick Turner (2019)

London: Routledge, 176 pp.,

ISBN 978-0-36737-112-8, p/bk, £36.99