Global Hip Hop Studies - Current Issue

In this contribution, we provide a brief overview of the development of Hip Hop culture in Australia, looking specifically at rap and breaking (breakdancing). We show how Australian rap has for a long time been dominated by white Australian artists attempting to solidify an Aussie Hip Hop identity distinct from the United States. Because rap from Indigenous and Culturally and Linguistically Diverse (CaLD) communities did not fit the tropes of dominant (white) Australian culture, and were instead disregarded as simple mimicry of African American rap, the gatekeepers of Aussie Hip Hop for a long time locked out these minority artists. This created a divide in the rap scene that reflected broader Australian racial politics. In contrast, the breaking community has historically been more inclusive and reflective of a multicultural Australia, and has been more connected with the breakers of North America, Europe and Asia. In this contribution, we demonstrate how Australian Hip Hop has evolved over the past two decades to be more culturally inclusive, supported by key Australian artists, community radio, social media and finally validated by the Australian music industry as a distinct musical genre worth celebrating.

The story of hip hop in Brazil is one of empowerment among primarily disenfranchised youth of African and mixed racial heritage. Hip hop’s conquest is less a story of ghetto superstars and much more about overall recognition – hip hop as Brazilian culture. Over the years hip hop has grown to embrace ever-widening demographics and identities, mixing styles and (sub)urban geographies across the country. What is perhaps most impressive is the general pride among fans and artists that hip hop is a culture (and not just music) and thus a source of education, belonging and identity. Following legends, such as KRS-One, Afrika Bambaataa and local icons, Nelsão Triunfo and King Nino Brown, upstarts and veterans continue to shout ‘I am hip hop’ as their mantra. This article is a brief overview of historical and contemporary themes in Brazilian hip hop informed by over twenty-five years of anthropological fieldwork in the city of São Paulo, the indisputable centre of hip hop cultural production of Brazil.

In this country profile, Mark V. Campbell provides historical, cultural, socio-political and linguistic insights into the formation and existence of hip hop culture in Canada. Focusing on multiple elements within the culture and by exploring the climate of media imperialism that impacts the country’s cultural forms, the contribution provides wide ranging and multiple contexts in which hip hop culture is situated within this large but sparsely populated country.

The contribution shows how rap music in Chile is related to the changes in music production and the relationship between cultural industries and self-management processes due to technological advancements. Based on Howard Becker’s concept of art worlds, it analyses the collaborative networks in the rap music scene, including musicians, record labels and media. The contribution also examines the impact of technology, musical instruments, and spaces on music production, consumption and distribution. Lastly, it emphasizes the importance of different meeting points in Santiago, the capital city and the center of the country’s hip hop scene, from 1983 to the present day.

This article provides a brief overview of hip hop’s development in Germany. First, it explains how rap music and hip hop culture arrived in a divided Cold War Germany in the 1980s. It then traces the music genre’s evolution into one of Germany’s most popular and commercially successful music genres since the country’s reunification in 1990. The contribution affirms that rap music and hip hop culture in Germany continues to reflect, revise and respond to larger social justice issues in German society, such as struggles for racial, ethnic, gender and sexual equality. The author argues that hip hop culture in Germany is a rich, multi-faceted and diverse phenomenon which has been shaped by, responds to, and remains embedded in larger geopolitical and transnational dynamics in Europe and beyond.

Among African countries where hip hop has a strong presence, Ghana is an interesting case study in the relationship between hip hop and afrobeats. Ghana has benefitted from the popularity of afrobeats, with several Ghanaian artists releasing collaborations with international artists. Many Ghanaian hip hop artists have also been helped by the relationship between Ghana and the African diaspora and leveraged that relationship into a successful rap career. An examination of hip hop in Ghana requires a consideration of genre classification in a music scene where hip hop and afrobeats often intersect. It also requires a consideration of the historical relationship between Ghana and the African diaspora, which has been strengthened in the wake of the 2019 Year of Return. Ghana’s relationship to the African diaspora has influenced the development of music genres in the country. The arrival of hip hop in Ghana especially influenced the development of hiplife and then afrobeats. Ghanaian hip hop maintains its own identity, while at the same time sharing an identity with hiplife and afrobeats. Ghana is not the only country where hip hop and pop music share a close relationship, but one cannot study Ghanaian hip hop without also studying Ghanaian hiplife or afrobeats. Because of the close relationship between hip hop, hiplife and afrobeats, this contribution includes a discussion of the latter two, along with a discussion of the roles that genres play, both from a music standpoint and from a marketing standpoint.

This article provides a brief overview of Hip Hop’s evolution in India. The first of two parts in the article trace the trajectory of Hip Hop and rap in India over the last three decades. The part that follows picks up on Smokey’s interview with Cardozo from this journal’s inaugural issue to discuss how Hip Hop in India has grown from mere imitation to innovation, to eventually become an industry in its own right. In doing this, we reflect on a simple question: will Indian Hip Hop ever go from being a native industry to evolving into a lasting subgenre of its own?

An overview of hip hop’s historical emergence and contemporary performance cultures in Ireland with a focus on hip hop music and politics.

Many people assume that Japanese language and culture make the country an unlikely place for a robust hip hop scene, but in fact, Japanese emcees, DJs, breakers and visual artists have a long and varied history of contributing to global hip hop. From small nightclubs to giant arenas, Japan’s hip hop artists run the gamut of underground to pop, with a wide range of approaches and styles.

In 2018, Senegalese hip hop celebrated its thirtieth anniversary as one of Africa’s most vibrant hip hop scenes. Senegalese rap has asserted itself not only as an expedient form of urban art, but also as a socially, politically, and culturally powerful instrument of both persuasion and mobilization for the masses. From its privileged beginnings in Dakar’s posh nightclubs and Catholic high schools, the genre soon asserted itself as quite distinct from hip hop in other parts of the world, and its popularity increasingly grew to wide segments of the Senegalese public. From the mid-1990s, the underprivileged segments of the society (especially those from the poor peripheral neighbourhoods of Dakar) became progressively vocal, using hip hop as an instrument to give voice to the economic and political predicaments of the people, particularly the youth. The production of the music became increasingly local, and its primary language the Senegalese lingua franca Wolof. What has given Senegalese rap both its personality and power, while enabling it to keep an international aura, has been its political engagement: from early on, Senegalese hip hop has been strongly penetrated by politics and the denunciation of the living conditions of the population, of political abuse and social inequality. This article examines ‘hip hop galsen’ over three decades, detailing its development as a successful genre grounded in local realities that gives voice to the concerns and predicaments of the Senegalese public. It concludes through an examination of recent changes, as evidenced in new musical influences, the several important female voices that can now be heard within a historically male-dominated genre, and the greater support and acceptance hip hop has recently enjoyed, equipping the current generation of Senegalese rappers with the promise of bringing it to the international stage.

This article offers a snapshot of South African hip hop by focusing largely on the uptake of ‘conscious’ hip hop in the 1980s and 1990s. It argues that especially Cape Town activists made meaningful contributions to advancing Black multilingual expression and, thereby, validating negated Black identities as the country was beginning to make the transition from apartheid to a democratic, post-apartheid South Africa. Ultimately, it questions whether the binary opposition between ‘conscious’ and commercial hip hop or Cape Town vs. Joburg hip hop is helpful in understanding the nuances of South African hip hop by pointing to examples that complicate such binaries.

Thailand’s hip hop culture has developed at a very different pace to other prominent early adopters in the Asia-Pacific. Given its late adoption of hip hop in the 1990s through popular music labels (Kita Music, GMM Grammy, Bakery Music, RS Promotion), local DJs, MCs, aerosol artists and breakers negotiated hip hop in a relatively short period – pressurized under local market conditions and influenced by multidirectional flows of hip hop that extended across the region and beyond. Hip hop in Thailand now draws on local traditional cultural influences while also being inspired by an immense flow of expat workers, tourists and transient visitors annually. It is not surprising that immanently polycultural music cultures like hip hop manifest in a number of ways in the Thai context, stratified by degrees of appreciation of international aesthetics and reverence for local Thai cultural history and customs. While hip hop exists across the country, with prominent communities in Chiang Mai, Chon Buri and Udon Thani, it is most notably diverse and concentrated in Bangkok – the place it began and where many pioneers have created their legacy.

The contribution provides a brief overview of the development of Czech hip hop subculture. Focusing on the events and personalities of its formative years beginning with 1989, the article gives an insight into each of Czech hip hop’s elements. Looking at the forms of adoption and adaption of western influences via TV and radio broadcasts, the article explores the early years of rap, breaking and beatbox following the contributions of its main protagonists. Even though Czech Republic is considered racially homogeneous, the article also touches upon the contribution (or lack thereof) of the Roma artists. As is the case of many countries around the world, Czech rap music is perceived a masculine domain, which is reflected in the relative absence (or invisibility) of female hip hop artists.

This article outlines the history of hip hop in the Netherlands from the early 1980s onward. After discussing Dutch hip hop culture’s early days – during which breaking was hip hop’s driving force in major cities like Amsterdam and Rotterdam, and rap music from the Netherlands followed American trends and was strictly anglophone – it focuses especially on the emergence of and later developments in Nederhop (‘Netherhop’): Dutch-language rap music. In the 1990s, Dutch rap groups like Osdorp Posse and rappers like Extince were crucial in this regard, as their pursuit of authenticity eventually led them to rap in their native tongue, a practice which has since become the norm in the Dutch hip hop scene. The article touches on influential emcees from the country’s major urban areas (e.g. Brainpower), while also acknowledging the influence of Dutch artists from smaller cities on the outskirts of the Netherlands (e.g. Opgezwolle, Typhoon and Fresku). The article then proceeds to discuss how in the twenty-first century, artists like De Jeugd van Tegenwoordig, Ronnie Flex and Broederliefde managed to reach the mainstream, pushing Nederhop to become the most popular genre of music in the Netherlands, improving the genre’s reception by critics and the mainstream media in the process. Moreover, the article identifies recent developments in hip hop culture in a broader sense, for instance when it comes to the Dutch hip hop media landscape and academic hip hop scholarship in the Netherlands, concluding that Dutch hip hop appears to have a bright future ahead.

This article offers an overview of the role of Ukrainian-language hip hop in contemporary Ukrainian politics, namely the 2004 Orange Revolution, the 2014 Revolution of Dignity and Russia’s 2022 war in Ukraine. First, it analyses hip hop’s growth in popularity since Ukraine’s independence from the Soviet Union in 1991. Second, it argues that hip hop functions genre of resistance against political corruption. Third, it illustrates how hip hop creates spaces for women and ethnic minorities. Lastly, it contextualizes the growth in popularity of Ukrainian-language hip hop against a backdrop of Russian-language music that has dominated Ukraine’s music industries since the Soviet era.