The circulation of hip hop music worldwide can be understood and analyzed by a sequence of key concepts which deal with globalized and transnational cultural flows.
My thesis plans to first address two significant ideas to explain this cultural mobility.
When placing hip hop music under the framework of a cultural form, in light of the contemporary popular cultural globalization theories, David Harvey’s idea of “time-space compression” creates a disjunction to place to thus cause sense of
postmodernity. While new modes of communication have altered the way hip hop was once toward, as Harvey claims it,
innovations dedicated to the removal of spatial barriers. . . have been of immense significance in the history of capitalism, turning that history into a very geographical affair—the railroad and the telegraph, the automobile, radio and telephone, the jet aircraft and television, and the recent
telecommunications revolution are cases in point. (Harvey 232)
To be precise, as spatial barriers are to be reduced through particular modernizations, the world has thus turned to be a rather smaller place, and connect producers and consumers with a global market. Secondly, since cultural flow comes largely from people’s mobility, in this regard, I will also address the distributions of hip hop music to the ethnoscape based on Arjun Appadurai’s five influential “scape6” theories in
Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (1996). Appadurai
proposes a framework that disjunctures of cultural flow can be termed by five dimensions: (a) ethnoscapes, (b) mediascapes, (c) technoscapes, (d) fianacescapes, (e) ideoscapes (Appadurai 33). Among five of which, ethnoscape are deemed to be the landscape of persons, tourists, immigrants, refugees or exiles. Thus, as Wise addresses the idea in music, “[t]he movement of diasporic people changes not only their music but the music of the places they move to and through” (Wise 87). The African-American diaspora brings hip hop music to the world, with its Africanity changed, appropriated or even eliminated into diverse phases. It is therefore no longer associated only to the blacks. However, hip hop’s spirit has been kept through the music form, rap, hip hop’s best weapon, along with immigrants from all over the world, as Tony Mitchell says, “has become a vehicle for global youth affiliations and tool for reworking local identity” (Mitchell 1-2). Thirdly, to discuss the global features of “re-mixing” and “sampling” presented in hip hop music, as Dominic Strinati’s view on communication arts, can be marked as “a trend towards the open and extensive mixing of styles and genres of music in very direct and self-conscious ways”, and this trend “has ranged from straightforward remixing of already recorded songs from the same or different eras on the same record, to the quoting and ‘tasting’ of distinct music, sounds, and instruments in order to create new sub- and pan-cultural identities”(Strinati 215). Since hip hop music has entered the territory of globalization for over twenty years, other than merely adopting the technology in music production, the feature of “re- mixing” and “sampling” can be easily found in the inscription of society, culture, and even politics. Accordingly, during the unceasing cultural practices of exchange, re-mixing and sampling, hip hop music will be unavoidably _________________
6. Appadurai uses the suffix –scape to address different shapes of landscapes regard the characterization of cultural capital, in which these landscapes provide diverse perspective as factors of globalization.
facing various challenges and changes to fit in with the foreign cultures and therefore develop a local one outside America.
Then, to have a better understanding of the cross-regional cultural resonances and the flow of collaborations on hip hop music in East Asia, I attempt to borrow Koichi Iwabuchi’s idea, which focuses on how the “Asian value and identity”
presented and built under Japan’s extensive cultural interactions with other East-Asian countries to demonstrate that “the transnational flow of popular culture has
significantly rearticulated Japan’s historically constituted relation with ‘Asia’ in a time-space context in which cultural similarity, developmental temporality, and different modes of negotiating with Western cultural influences are disjunctively intermingled with each other” (Iwabuchi 6). Also, from Iwabuchi’s view, the forms of youth culture in Asia has departed from its previous traditions because of its
embodiment of heterogeneous origins and cultural bricolage. In this regard, the image of youths can be defined as “consuming hybrid”, and instead of caring about the origins of those cultural products, their preferred cultural products have thus become more “East Asian flavor”; so “[t]hose popular cultural forms made in East Asia are neither ‘Asian’ in any essentialist meaning nor second-rate copies of ‘American originals’” (Iwabuchi 200). From this respect, youths in East Asia experience and receive things similar and yet heterogeneous through rapid local and global cultural exchanges at the same time.
By focusing on the studies that Iwabuchi illustrates on Japanese popular culture, I can apply his viewpoint to hip hop music in Taiwan as to narrow down the scope to examine the cultural flows among Taiwanese hip hop music and its counterparts or collaborations in other East Asian countries. I would like to examine if the
intermingled cultural interactions of global homogenization and heteregenization of hip hop music under the East Asian context can be reflected or represented through
such discourse.
Moreover, to precisely discuss the transnational collaborations of hip hop music in Taiwan, I will draw Shin Hyunjoon’s concept of “transbordering”, which has been transformed and revised from Appadurai’s “ethnoscape” and Eun-young Jung’s notion of “transnational cultural traffic7,” in which Jung uses to analyze the interaction between Japanese and Korean popular music. Transbordering refers to the “particular interactions that have taken place between migrant musicians who have crossed borders literally and figuratively and this phenomenon is “at once global and local”
(Shin 103). Shin asserts that the idea can be carried and actualized through
international collaborations in music industry, especially in the category of popular music. In the final analysis, I will take three different transnational hip hop
artists/groups (Da Mouth, Aziatix and Soft Lipa) in Taiwan as my case study; by analyzing their “transborering” experiences, diaspora image and most of all, their music works, I intend to prove that “trans-Asian” hip hop music in Taiwan has created its own niche.