Global Hip Hop Studies - Volume 2, Issue 1, 2021

This article examines remediation practices as forms of Black creativity in films associated with the ‘LA Rebellion’ and in hip hop from its first two decades. As used here, remediation has two meanings. It stands for the use of prior media in subsequent works, be it the file footage incorporated by the UCLA-based filmmakers of the ‘LA Rebellion’ (the name given to Black filmmakers who studied and produced films between the late 1960s and 1980s), or the use of sampling and turntable-manipulated breakbeats that defines early hip hop. However, remediation is also used here for its potential as a corrective. Although postmodernity’s pastiche is discernible in the remediated elements of texts associated with these separate but contemporaneous movements, there is something specifically Black in the freely appropriated and repurposed prior creative work towards transformative ends. Beyond any postmodern effect, these practices reflect specific ideas related to politics, revolution and counter-ideological impulses opposed to the dominant white culture that surrounded these artists, and to which their texts respond. This transformative reuse – visual or aural – expresses what Foucault termed ‘counter-history’ and ‘counter-memory’ – revealing subversive texts that complicate and challenge white cultural and historical hegemony.

In this article, I explore processes of identity formation among ethnic minorities in Norway. By performing a close reading of the lyrics of seven songs written by the rap duo Karpe, I show how the group use their music to make apparent the adverse consequences of absolutist understandings of national belonging on their own subjectivities. Through their lyrics, Karpe send a clear message to their audiences: the definition of what it means to be Norwegian needs to be extended, and new ways of belonging ought to be normalized, so that ethnic minorities can embrace their multicultural backgrounds without fearing this will compromise their perceived belonging to the national community. Karpe’s incredible success among the Norwegian public, as it enables them to carry ideas of political significance across groups, makes the analysis of their music of mainstream interest. By using rap lyrics as an object of analysis, I also highlight the function of cultural expression as a means to resist and rethink hegemonic discourses of fixed national identities – and even act as a vehicle for the development of post-national patterns of identification.

With peak numbers on Spotify and doing well on the charts, Dutch rap/hip hop music has captured the attention of Dutch audiences in recent years. Its current commercial success and immense popularity have sparked academic interest, resulting in studies that analyse Dutch Neerlandophone rap/hip hop music in the local context of the Netherlands – paying attention to its specific political and cultural characteristics. In this review article, the author outlines the current state of Dutch hip hop studies, identifying its prominent research themes. By uniting the research field on paper, the author aims to permanently put it on the map and encourage further hip hop research in the Dutch context in the future.

Kendrick Lamar’s lyrics and subject matter often require repeated listens that reveal perspectives ranging from his upbringing in Compton, his parents’ migration from Chicago to California and broader questions of identity, place, displacement, belonging and home. A self-described Southern California ‘80s baby’, Lamar’s music nevertheless imagines Black self-identification in a broader and global sense. His work reflects rootlessness among continental and diasporic Africans across time and space. Utilizing approaches of British Cultural Studies and African diaspora studies, this article analyses Lamar’s critically acclaimed album To Pimp aButterfly (2015). The pursuit of home as a response to the unbound nature of diasporic existence – connected to histories of transatlantic slavery, the Middle Passage and the plantation enterprise in the United States, the Caribbean and South America – reverberates for Lamar as an African American millennial yet also situate him within a continuum of Afro-Atlantic artistic innovators. In places as varied as Chicago, Compton, Jamaica, South Africa and London, Black people reckon with the meanings of home and Lamar offers his unique Afro-diasporic perspective. Lamar’s ruminations on intra-national migrations within the United States allow for a theorization of various iterations of home that include specific communities, families, cities, nations, gangs and the comforts of a bottle of vodka. Lamar’s lyrical confessions embrace identification as process, a brilliant and probing strategy that references histories of movement in the United States as well as ethnic tensions in South Africa, post-independence political economic realities in Jamaica and the history of migration from the Caribbean to metropolitan Britain. I suggest that Lamar introduces a particularized twenty-first-century Black racialized humanism where his own position vacillates between predator and victim. Who Lamar is and who he is said or seen to be recurs and reflects the specific conditions he and contemporary diasporans negotiate across the globe.

Review of: Poetic Resurrection: The Bronx in American Popular Culture, Sina A. Nitzsche (2020)

Bielefeld: Transcript, 217 pp.,

ISBN 978-3-83765-311-3, p/bk, USD 28.87