Ever since hip hop became one of the most outstanding global popular culture forms, there have been plenty of researches concerning how hip hop can be
successfully disseminated and then prosper globally. First of all, hip hop is associated with African-American culture and also African and global diaspora. Paul Gilroy interprets his idea of the “fundamental dislocation” toward hip hop’s distribution in his remarkable work The Black Atlantic (1993), asserting this is what makes “modern western civilisation possible, now dominate its popular cultures” (Gilroy 80).
Consequently, black music is detached from the racial slavery and now has the power to turn the pristine Africanity into a different meaning and transcend into a new phase.
To use Gilroy’s words, that “it is possible to approach the music as a changing rather than an unchanging same” and “[new] traditions have been invented in the jaws of modern experience and new conceptions of modernity produced in the long shadow of our enduring traditions: the African ones and the ones forged from the slave,
experience which the black vernacular so powerfully and actively remembers” (101).
Gilroy thus considers that traditional black music has been changed to provide another channel for imagination. Later, Andy Bennett points out that “hip hop is culturally mobile” and “the definition of hip hop culture and its attendant notions of authenticity are constantly being ‘re-made’ as hip hop is appropriated by different groups of young people in cities and regions around the world” (Bennet 133). Furthermore, music scholar George Lipsitz states that
Hip hop expresses a form of politics perfectly suited to the post-colonial era. It brings a community into being through performance, and it maps out real and imagined relations between people that speak to the realities of displacement, disillusion, and despair created by the austerity of post-industrial capitalism. (36)
The performing style of hip hop generated from the very urbanized life and also the very marginalized part of “ghetto”; through constant struggles and challenges, as Tricia Rose analyzes, “[it] is the tension between the cultural fractures produced by postindustrial oppression and the binding ties of black cultural expressivity that sets the critical frame for the development of hip hop” (Rose 425). Besides, hip hop has changed and challenged the way people see Western music and therefore provided a new form of arranging rhythms and rhymes, channeling the politics of Nationalism and Afrocentrism (Bennett 91). Hip hop, as a genre of global music cross-culturally, by J. Macgregor Wise’s analyses, becomes “a means of expressing issues of politics, place, and identity…[m]usicians can also speak to the experience of displacement, living in foreign lands, longing for real or imagined homelands” ( Wise 89).
There are also many other studies in the globalization and localization of hip hop by different methodologies. Tony Mitchell adopts Deleuze’s notion of the “rhizome”
in Global Noise: Rap and Hip-hop outside USA (2001) to explain the globalization
and transplantation of hip hop and rap culture; Mitchell also asserts that the use of vernaculars can be seen as a form of resistance to preserve local culture. This idea can aptly be applied to the use of Taiwanese or Hakka rap in Taiwan for exalting the Taiwanese consciousness to some extent. Bennett studies the development of hip hop culture in Frankfurt am Main, Germany and New Castle, England by ethnography to attempt to elucidate how hip hop can be a resistant form in the local contexts to fight against the global hip hop. He finds that the youths there attempt to “rework hip hop into a medium for the expression of local themes and issues came as a number of local rap groups began incorporating German lyrics into their music” (Bennet 140), so that the cultural significance can be focused and sung.
As to the Asian hip hop study, Angel Lin seeks to follow Eric Ma’s project (2002) on the local alternative Hong Kong hip hop/rock band, LMF (also known as Lazy Mother Fucka 大懶堂) to discover how indie hip hop music artists dig their niche space and alternative ways for survival instead of only legitimating the
identities among teenagers (Lin 2007). Secondly, ethnographer Ian Condry also does projects on the study of local Japanese hip hop culture in his Hip-Hop Japan (2006).
By closely observing the local live performances and interviewing the rappers, Condry draws special attention to how Japanese rappers both show their enthusiasm and disillusion toward American nostalgia and how they turn hip hop into Japanese (Condry 210). In addition, Condry clarifies the idea that “localization of cultural forms, can, and at all times does, proceed simultaneously with an increasing global sharedness, thus showing that opposition between local and global can be a false dichotomy that hides more than it reveals” (2). Condry’s assertion discloses that in the age of globalization, the boundaries of dichotomous symmetry would eventually become mutual existence and construction.
Certainly, it may be a credible stance to see most of the so-called “glocalized”
cultural features that can merge all together and live vigorously. In the case of South Korea, Suh-Kyung Yoon points out “K-pop (as Korean music is known in Asia) is
localized hip hop that tones down the harsh beats of the American genre and deals
with issues more resonant with the Asian youth” and “it has been the dominant genrein Korean pop music (Yoon 92, my tatlics). This demonstrates that Korean pop music
has intertwined with hip hop music culture, and even has taken it as an indispensable element in their music industry. It is not likely to separate the relation between Korean pop music and hip hop culture as Korean government has liberated the policy regarding travel and media in the 1980s, so foreign television networks and music could be introduced.Yet, according to Sarah Morelli, Korean popular music industry has incorporated rap and hip hop as a style of vocalization but not taken it as a category of popular music or music genre in Korea. Likewise, black style is widely popular among Korean youngsters, and even many young Korean students see hip hop dance and music as “their means to success5” (Morelli 248). This conspicuous cultural phenomenon later has a huge impact on other East Asian countries by the “Korean Wave” strategies. Among which, K-pop (or Korean hip hop music in a way) strikes the Asian music industry to cause turbulence. The social phenomenon has also affected the culture of hip hop music in Taiwan for the past ten years and has not yet seemed to die away. It is an important issue that I will have to take a further
discussion in my thesis on how Korean Wave and Korean hip hop have invaded (or intermingled) into our music industry to alter the look of Taiwanese hip hop music.
As mentioned above, we can see that the globalization and localization of hip hop ___________________
5. Morelli describes teens in Korea today spend time practicing hip hop dance and believe it will be their most remarkable skill in pursuing stardom. See Mitchell, Tony. Global Noise: Rap and Hip-hop outside the USA, 2001, 248-58.
have been widely studied, providing essential resources for reference and further research. In Taiwan, there are a few studies regarding Taiwanese hip hop culture in different aspects, yet not so many have paid enough attention to the music itself since street and hip hop dance acquire much more popularity and attention. Jing-yi Li is the first one who studies the development of Taiwanese hip hop culture as a site of sub-cultural practice for youngsters to identify with. Her research investigates Taiwanese hip hop culture from deejay, street dance, graffiti, and rap music, seeking to discover what the influence of hip hop culture brings to youngsters in Taiwan. Furthermore, Mike Chuang asserts that there must be “authenticity” existing in Taiwanese rap and hip hop music that he finds it survives mostly in the spirits of underground hip hop community and activities. His ethnographic study offers a very truthful and clear picture of the underground hip hop scene and sites in Taiwan, which helps understand the politics of local Taiwanese rap and hip hop music. Although both Li and Chuang have discussed the formation and the influence of Taiwanese hip hop music, they do not deal with the issue of the trans-Asian collaborations in hip hop music and the cultural routes, which I argue that it has drastically changed the look of Taiwanese hip hop music. Since Taiwanese hip hop music now follows neither its local tone nor the pursuit of its original African-American root; instead, it tends to be clustered with the East-Asian flow to strive for a survival. The newly formed “East-Asian hip hop”
brings Taiwanese hip hop music a possibility to go trans-Asia. For this reason, the relation between hip hop music in Taiwan and other East Asian countries can be intriguing and yet discrepant and also a field worthy to probe.
Those academic studies of hip hop and black dispora cultures mentioned above provide me weighty research resources in understanding globalized hip hop and the culture behind it. Those researches enter hip hop culture by different approaches, from historical perspectives to ethnographic field studies, so I can frame a panorama of the
past and the present in the development of global hip hop culture. Still, studies of Asian hip hop are relatively scant than that of American or European; for this reason, I believe a primary research of transnational Taiwanese hip hop music is needed as a contribution for future study since the development of hip hop music in East Asia is somehow intertwined to each other.