Tag Archives: rap

Ruben Enrique Campos III takes the page 99 test

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Destiny again. It had to be El Legendario Bombay. It had to be page 99.

Upon entering, I immediately saw why the place was called legendary. It oozed underground Hip Hop. Graffiti covered every wall. In the past, there had been a waist-high mural that wrapped around the bar featuring skeletons in fluffy rat costumes. Now most of it was covered over in aerosol paint, paint pen, postal stickers, and permanent ink throwies. The above-waist, mirrored walls were now covered over in tattered black plastic tarp, which was itself covered over in white mop paint pen tags. The tile floor was thick with dried beer and tracked-in road grime. Google Maps had not been wrong. The place had been permanently closed; but it was still quite active that night. A crew of two dozen men and a few women sat drinking beer, listening to the Chicano music of my youth. Most of the audience seemed to be in their late 30s. Their clothes were baggier than Heticko’s which was a sign of his relative youth at 25 and the changing trends of a scene. Most wore tan Dickies pants and either a plain white cotton tee-shirt, a tan khaki shirt, or a black one with La Sociedad Café printed in Old-English style font. Most wore thick löc-style sunglasses. The darkly lit scene could have passed as a sepia-toned photograph save for the glints of the deep red and thickly lined lipsticks of the women, and then there was the pop and lock dancer wearing the royal blue tracksuit and white gloves. Two beautifully maintained, chrome laden lowrider bicycles sat on the stage. Tomás, the owner of TT Caps arrived after me. He sat at the bar to chat with El Bombay’s owner. Both were in their late 50s and had invested in Hip Hop as more than a fad years prior. They had both given the youth culture space to flourish, but now had to watch as their business dried up.

My dissertation explores life in desmadre, or the overwhelming, noisy chaos that continually changes underfoot in the streets of the metropolitan valley surrounding Mexico City, the largest urban landscape within North America. I chronicle the experiences of contemporary rap artists as they move through the city, creating a Hip Hop scene in looped interconnectedness. And while my work is attuned to the Voice of these artists, it’s always grounded by my relationship to the streets and by that feeling of destiny I feel when I’m in the wrong place and the right time, when I encounter everything I need to be Hip Hop, to be ethnography. After weeks of futile attempts to find a Hip Hop scene by safe and traditional means, I found Bombay in a moment wondering aimlessly and dangerously down a dark alley in Tepito, a barrio born into its bad reputation. Following that moment, dedication and destiny launched me across the entire valley from La Paz, Iztapalapa and La Ciudad Nezahualcóyotl to Tacubaya, Colina Del Sur, and el Reclusorio Norte, all to find Hip Hop.

Ultimately, I find that by practicing their poetry and their breath control rappers learn to render the aural sensorium and echo the city itself through their bodies—from the noises of its mass transit to the acoustic registers of its ambulant vendors; from the sounds of familiar language games, poetics, and popular culture to appropriated Nahuatl vocabulary and place names. By learning to navigate through the city, flowing against its conservative logic for their own artistic and cultural purposes, rappers come to embody a difficult to explain yet deeply felt awareness of desmadre. Rather than seeing chaos as a source of frustration (to state control), as inefficient (to capitalist profit), or as unnecessary imperilment (to fearful citizens of the general public), rappers find direction and purpose in creativity and community. By engaging with others in desmadre they recognize their place, authenticate their experience, and overcome anonymity through the choral voice, hearing their own subjectivity echoed back and affirmed by others who have travelled a different route. …And so do anthropologists.

It had to be page 99. It had to be El Legendario Bombay. Desmadre again.

Ruben Enrique Campos III.  2020. Word To Desmadre: Hip Hop, Voice, and the Rhythm Of Chaos In México. University of Hawai’i, Phd.

 

Owen Kohl’s “Were the Balkans Made for Rap?”

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My dissertation, Were the Balkans Made for Rap? was based on 20 months of fieldwork in Croatia, Serbia, and Bosnia-Herzegovina. Artists in post-Yugoslav spaces (henceforth ex-YU) have different strategies for actively domesticating rap, DJ, and video compositions in a post-war, post-socialist context of new boundaries. The term “domestic” or “homemade” (domaće) shifts its meaning depending on how artists evaluate the politics of home and the present ­— from organic foods to urban musics, from Yugoslav history to EU rhetoric. The term carries affective and ideological weight given an ongoing contestation of identities that has accompanied a post-Cold War proliferation of borders, dominant values, and class distinctions.

On Page 99, I revisit insights of linguistic anthropologists and scholars of post-socialism in an effort to theorize what I call “brand acts.” One of the ways in which domestic hip hop artists assume ethical positions on post-socialist entertainments including music is through performances laden in references to brands.

Here’s an excerpt: “Drawing…on Briggs and Bauman (1992; see also Živković 2011), I am particularly interested in exploring the narrative techniques through which these artists lyrically craft social connections or, alternatively, distinctions through minimizing/maximizing intertextual gaps between narrations of their biographies, music distribution, and brands. Artists across the domestic scene(s) exhibit a range of convictions, motivations, and stances toward branding and historical shift. Pragmatism within the [music] industry often came up against different economies of value. The ethical tensions over how to navigate one’s relation to capital, commodities, and brands is one of many shared elements across homemade hip hop.”

Artists thus craft creative presentations of self through their play with brands. Material signs of present-day political economy often emerge in their performances alongside references to the records, automobiles, postcards, and other commodities from the Socialist Federal Republic (1945-1991).

Within the broader dissertation, I argue first that hip hop production reflects a “semiosis of shifting domestic selves.” Hip hop allows artists to conjure multiple voices and alter egos, often aligned with charismatic, commodified images and sounds of Otherness. The significations of rap lyrics, mixtapes, and beats implicate new states and transnational flows, but also a wide range of seemingly mundane matters of the kitchen table, bed, and bathroom. Self-distancing and parody prove useful in critiquing spectacular and everyday political transformations, including the rise of a new oligarchy. I also contend domestic hip hop artists’ creative products draw their local significance within a larger post-socialist entertainment landscape. Discourses about EU integration and even celebrities reveal artists’ “alternative” ethical positions. Finally, I claim that, given dramatic changes in political economy, the politics of mobility become key to understanding the hip hop scene(s). Many cultural commentators argue that Yugoslav-era travel and the extensive, but not yet overwhelming, circulation of Western technologies had advantages relative to the present. This enabled a certain relationship to Cold War modernity that, for many, contrasts with the era since the 1990s, a time artists often portray as both full of stagnation and intolerable flow.

Kohl, Owen. 2018. “Were the Balkans Made for Rap? – Semiosis in the Homemade Hip Hop Imaginary.” Ph.D. diss. University of Chicago.

Cited References

Briggs, Charles L., and Richard Bauman. 1992. “Genre, Intertextuality, and Social Power.” Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 2 (2):131–72.

Živković, Marko. 2011. Serbian Dreambook: National Imaginary in the Time of Milošević. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press

Owen Kohl explores the relationship between media-making and the reimagining of home after socialist Yugoslavia’s dismemberment. Before completing a Ph.D. in anthropology at the University of Chicago, Kohl began preliminary field research on global manifestations of hip hop social practices in France, Senegal, Croatia, Russia, and Mongolia. Since 2013, he has taught at different universities in Chicago, designing courses that are fruitfully interwoven with his research methods, associated multimedia production, and his manuscript, Were the Balkans Made for Rap? Semiosis in the Homemade Hip Hop Imaginary. You can contact Owen at owenkohl@uchicago.edu.

 

Quentin Williams on his new book, Remix Multilingualism

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Remix Multilingualism

https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/remix-multilingualism-9781472591135/

Interview by Msia Clark

Msia Clark:  In your book Remix Multilingualism, you state that you are a Hip Hop Sociolinguist. What is a Hip Hop Sociolinguist?

Quentin Williams: It´s something that I think quite accurately represents what I do in terms of my documentation of language, and its intimate link to and use in the Hip Hop community. So, the first aspect of the Hip Hop Sociolinguist is the Sociolinguistic part. A Sociolinguist is interested in the intimate use of language in society, from the perspective of linguistics. So, you use the tools of linguistics to understand how people who are formed by social structures and cultural practices use language. And you report on their practices and performances. In this case, a Hip Hop Sociolinguist is interested in how Hip Hop artists, and those who are interested in the Hip Hop culture, but also fans of the Hip Hop culture, use language, and also perform and practice multilingualism within and outside Hip Hop culture.

Msia Clark: In the book, you focus a lot on freestyle battles and freestyle rap battle space, which is kind of a very sacred space in Hip Hop. Why focus specifically so much on freestyle rap?

Quentin Williams: The way I became interested in it was when I started to document the freestyle rap battles during my fieldwork. In Club Stones, one of my fieldwork sites, there was a distinct difference made between freestyle rap battles on the street, when you´re on the corner, than it being staged in the club. And I´ve always loved freestyle rap battles because you can see the difference between emcees biting rhymes and an emcee rhyming off the top of his head. So, when I started doing the research with Suburban Menace and MobCoW (my main participants), I realized the emcees had a particular format which they´ve taken from somewhere else and my assumption was from the States. So, where you would usually freestyle on the corner in an equidistant circle and two emcees go at each other, mediated by a cipha mediator, or managed by a cipha mediator, in the club they would have a coin toss, the audience would be in front of the stage, and the cipha mediator would toss the coin in the air, and two emcees would go at each other and then at the end there would be a decision by the audience, by virtue of who would shout the loudest, for the emcee to win.

I found it quite interesting how the freestyle rap battles were organized and how different it was, but more significantly for me was the language and genre aspect. So, my question was at the beginning of the research: would the freestyle rap battles be the same as in the States, with the same American accents, with the same genre styles of introducing your rhymes and your lyrics, and with the same verbal cues as you perform, “Yoh/Yoh/Check it out/Check it out”?

I remember the first time I recorded a freestyle battle in the field, in the Club, I was stunned, because it was not like that in the States, it was completely in the local variety Kaaps (a variety of Afrikaans), and with a mixture of the prison register, Sabela, and the local movements were completely different. So, for example, an American emcee would introduce her or his freestyle rap battle through verbal cueing, “Yoh, Yoh, Yoh”, but the local emcee here in Cape Town, in the club, I found, would introduce his cipha in Kaaps like, “Yes, is ja/Is ja/Check it out/Check dit uit”. There would be code-switching between English, a version of South African English, and I found that to be just absolutely amazing.

Msia Clark:  You do a lot of self-reflection in the book. I want to talk about that. In one part of the book, you say “as an ethnographer and an outsider, my sociolinguistic class and racial background either validated me or pushed me to the margins of just observing social and linguistic interaction”. So, what does that mean?

Quentin Williams: I met my participants in the following way: I saw a poster of the show and I asked my participants could I meet you, I´d like to do research and document what you are doing. When I got to meet them, they just started doing the show, so I was at the beginning of something, I think, quite significant in terms of localizing the Hip Hop culture and then giving it a new twist. So, I was from the university and I came with some sort of symbolic resources for these emcees, but also with symbolic power because they realized I come from the university and that I could add weight to what they are doing. But at the same time, I also realized every time I would record a freestyle rap battle or a rap session or a dance competition, that usually would involve females, I would go back to watch the tape, listen to the recordings, start transcribing and then realize as a male I´m also enjoying the Hip Hop show like the other male participants in the club. More so, I also realized I´m Coloured, I share the same fraught racial history with my participants, and so, that is what I mean. I realized during my field research that I have to reflect on my own position with the Hip Hop space, and I also have to reflect on what I experience and so that´s why I thought it was necessary.

Msia Clark: One of the things you say when you first met members of the group Suburban Menace, and you introduced yourself, did you also thought it was important to talk about your taste in rap music?

Quentin Williams: Yeah. It was a test. Let me set the scene for you. I get to meet my participants. I met them at the house that they rented out. And they called the house, the Menace Mansion, which is a play on Hugh Heffner´s Playboy Mansion. I thought it was quite funny. So, we sit around the table in the kitchen and I start introducing my project and these guys are listening intensely to my pitch, and they start asking all the right questions, and then it turns to the test: “So, what kind of Hip Hop music, rap music, do you listen to? What did you grow up with?” And because we are more or less the same age, the moment I said that one of my biggest rap music influence was Tupac Shakur, and it just took off from there because we all shared a similar taste in rap music.

Msia Clark: You say that the book speaks to Black and Coloured multilingual speakers in township spaces. For those outside South Africa it is difficult to grasp identity in this country and how identity becomes raced – I want you to talk about the relationship within Hip Hop culture between Blacks and Coloureds?

Quentin Williams: Eight months into my fieldwork a rap show was staged at the University of the Western Cape. I invited a few Coloured emcees, my participants basically, to come to the show and perform. When they came through, members of Driemanskap were also there. And as you know Driemanskap is a famous Spaza rap group. We get to the event and they ask my participants if they would stage a freestyle rap battle with Driemanskap. There´s no incentive for it, and we find it strange for emcees to freestyle rap battle because they have no beef to settle nor are they getting paid to win a trophy. But the interesting comment that one of the Coloured emcees made was, “I don´t speak their language, so, I don´t think we can freestyle rap battle”. My reaction was one of curiosity because in other cases the Black emcee can freestyle in English, perhaps code-switch to isiXhosa or isiZulu and if you don´t have those African languages in your linguistic repertoires, that´s cool, you do your thing in Kaaps. But what struck me was the emcee was reflecting, if only temporarily, on a much more deeper problem that stems from the ultimate racial success of apartheid: the Groups Area Act of 1954 and monolingual socialization. You live in Gugulethu (a black township) and that other emcee grows up in a Coloured township. Both emcees are socialized differently linguistically, through different language, through different racial experiences. But they share racial experiences in relation to Whites and Whiteness, that´s quite clear.

It´s easy to describe white on Coloured and Black relations, but much, much more challenging to do so when it concerns Black on Black relations, and Coloured on Coloured relations. I started to critically think about the distinct differences linguistically that emcees make but also how they link it to space and also place, and of course their socialization. But these emcees make a cultural distinction that they link to race: there´s a Coloured culture, then there´s a Black culture which can be traced to ancestors and mobility, stereotypically. I´m trying to think about it more deeply and acquiring more examples and data, and so far I find that this is not only a reflection of what happens outside the Hip Hop culture and South Africa as a whole, but also inside the Hip Hop culture: that there are divisions that some Hip Hop artists make across language, say the use of a Tsotsitaal (spoken mainly by black males in the township) with English in a freestyle rap battle in Gugulethu, compared to the exclusive use of Kaaps in a Coloured township. You do get few instances of a true collaboration across these raciolinguistic barriers in a real sense.

Msia Clark: You talk about Braggadocio and in trying to play devil´s advocate, what about those that may dismiss braggadocio as just simply about materialism or promoting conflict among artists? 

Quentin Williams: That´s the prevailing idea of Braggadocio. Yes, I would completely agree that I think in early Hip Hop scholarship, what we have come to know Braggadocio to be is, yes, this idea that emcees celebrate money, make it rain in the club and brag about styles. But that I think is a particular, very unique take that USA Hip Hop has given the world. Now, if you´re saying that Braggadocio is still only about that outside USA Hip Hop, you´ve not looked at it very closely. The question we should ask, what types of Braggadocio will female emcee have or an emcee like Dope Saint Jude (a queer Hip Hop artist)? Braggadocio is gendered because it celebrating a male centred Hip Hop lifestyle. I think I´m quite clear about Braggadocio in the book, and I update the literature.

Msia Clark: It is easy to make assumptions about what Braggadocio looks like in the States and even what masculinity looks like in the States. So, one of the things you also talk about is “body rap”. You describe it as a sub-genre of local Hip Hop where the overarching theme of the lyrics is the sexualization and often denigration of women’s bodies performed for the pleasure of men. Could you talk about that a little bit?

Quentin Williams: After the event I describe in Chapter 8 about how the Hip Hop club ambience was transformed into a stripper Club ambience, I began to reread the scholarship on Hip Hop and Hip Hop sociolinguistics, feminist Hip Hop scholars to try and understand what was clear to me: the pornification of Hip Hop culture. That chapter gets into the experiences of Black and Coloured women, and expectations put on their bodies, about the sexualization of their bodies, and I thought this notion, idea and performance genre, body rap, accurately describes what was going on. I asked what does body rap do in the South African context, in the postcolonial context to the debate about female agency and voice: does it continue the sexual myth that too often frame interaction with females in Hip Hop culture or does it actually open up discussions about female agency and voice?

Note: This is a significantly shortened interview,  edited for publication, following the more than one hour audio recording published by Prof Msia Clark on her Hip Hop Africa blog, which can be found here: https://hiphopafrican.com/2018/01/01/hhap-episode-18-quentin-williams-on-multilingualism-hip-hop-in-south-africa/.

Laura Bunting-Hudson’s The Art of the Hustle

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While traditionally the neoliberal economic system has been characterized as one which militates against poor people and those that are oppressed, my research analyzes how ordinary people are using the political economy combined with resistance politics for their own advantages. This dissertation explores the political economy of rap music in Bogota, Colombia and how groups use diverse transnational business strategies in order to develop a new entertainment industry there. My work explores the social organizational strategies of multi-national rap polities, based in Bogota, as they utilize new forms of digital technology, and their street smart entrepreneurial skills to distribute popular music as well as to start horizontal business firms, in order to challenge the status quo within their communities.

On page 99, my dissertation is describing the ideology of many of the most successful rap groups in Bogota, Colombia. It illustrates the rappers counter-cultural system of values that comes from street codes one often finds in international street gangs. The rappers use these ideas in order to form a group of resistance artistic poets (rap) who believe in using the capitalistic system, forming a strong transnational network of Spanish rap elites and establishing businesses based on the groups ideology, in order to try to create societal change. In this section, I use FG Bailey’s concepts from political anthropology and Bruno Latour’s actor-network theory. Combining these theoretical frameworks allows for the ethnographic data to reveal the way that games are played by the rap polities, to demonstrate how the groups are organized, form networks, maintain those orders and the threats that rap polities encounter, in their aims at garnering fame, money and societal power. The stated goals of many of the rap polities are to challenge the current political and economic elites in Colombia whom they believe are an oligarchical regime, that unjustly take advantage of the people and resources of Colombia. The rap artists believe that by forming their own businesses, being able to create social and political solidarity around the dissemination of their messages contained within their music through mass communications networks and working hard for progressive change, Colombia can become a more equal and just nation. This dissertation showcases the rap artists quest for this kind of greater equity and justice in Bogota, Colombia.
Bunting-Hudson, Laura. 2017. The Art of the Hustle: A Study of the Rap Music Industry in Bogota, Colombia. Ph.d. diss. Teachers College, Columbia University.