ancient cities

356 Hip Hop
hip hop is how bodies, technologies, and built
environments are continually remade to produce
locally relevant meanings in music, speech, dance,
and public art.
A Brief History
Hip hop includes at least four elements: MCing,
DJing, B-girling/B-boying, and graffiti. Additional
elements of hip hop include fashion, slang,
beatboxing—an improvisational exercise of the
mouth—and R&B music. Hip hop is a polyrhythmic
practice that merges the percussive instruments
and chant circles of West African traditional folk
music, the call and response of Black gospel sermons,
the improvisation of blues and jazz, and the
cadence of Black arts movement poetry.
The origin of hip hop is heavily contested as it
combines many aesthetics of West African and
West Indian cultural performance. Hip hop’s genesis
is largely accredited to Jamaican-born DJ Kool
Herc, who began throwing block parties in the
South Bronx in 1973. Jeff Chang writes that the
1970s was a time of social upheaval as the dreams
of the civil rights movement fell flat in the South
Bronx with the relocation of Yankee Stadium,
massive deindustrialization, White and Black middle
class flight to the suburbs as houses were razed
for an expressway, and the construction of urban
renewal public housing projects. The music
reflected these harsh social conditions as “good
times” disco died out. Known for his Hercules
sound system, Herc would loop and mix the bridge
between verses repeatedly (“the breaks”), switching
between two records. To keep the momentum,
MCs would chant over records in a style similar to
the toasting of Jamaican DJs.
Hip hop, in its earliest form, was a live improvisational
event inspired by the interaction
between performers and the crowd. Hip hop
sprouted from a culture of idleness due to rampant
unemployment, social program cuts, and
overcrowded housing. As Robin D. G. Kelley suggests,
the bodies of Black and Latino youth were
used as sites of competitive labor to advertise
their distinct, individualized work and create
financial and social networking opportunities.
Crews divided by neighborhoods would battle, on
benign and hostile terms, for bragging rights on
the dance floor.
“We on Award Tour!” Hip Hop
Across the Globe
Hip hop has always been a global process. Mixtape
cassettes, magazines, music videos, and hip hop
films have been circulating throughout parts of
Africa, Europe, and the Caribbean since the early
1980s. Historically, forms of popular culture are
exchanged along migration routes between the
United States and other countries as people travel
for work, military/government service, education,
health care, and leisure. Hip hop’s global presence
has intensified with advancement in technologies
of travel, communication, and immediate access to
worldwide information. Digital media have transformed
sound production and the recording process.
Consumers can now become producers and
manipulate sound into an infinite composition of
remixes. Hip hop aficionados identify, engage,
and collaborate with one another across geographical
distance through free profile sites, blogs,
chat rooms, and podcasts, along with Web sites
such as Nomadic Wax, AfricanHipHop.com,
okayplayer.com, flight808.com and cell phone
text messaging and ringtones. For instance, North
Carolina–based rapper Phonté, half of the group
Little Brother, recorded and released 2004’s The
Foreign Exchange: Connected album with Dutch
producer, Nicolay, entirely over instant messaging
and e-mail.
Although digital media access is not distributed
equally across place, youth cultural politics have
been critically reconfigured through hip hop in
many countries. Unfortunately, hip hop artists,
particularly in differently developed countries,
experience great difficulty securing record contracts
and confront issues like payola and a lack of
copyright protection for their work. Hip hop outside
the United States is not pure mimesis but
rather an intricate web of local and global dialects,
cultural histories, gestures, and capital. In Senegal,
Positive Black Soul revolutionized youth participation
in electoral politics with lyrics about government
corruption and AIDS. In Ghana, rappers
Reggie Rockstone and Talking Drum created hiplife,
a mix of U.S. hip hop and Ghanaian high life
music. Hiplife combines the beats of hip hop, soukous,
and dancehall with traditional folk instruments
and rapping/singing in the local dialects of
Twi, Ga, Ewe, Fante, pidgin, and English. In fact,