The globalization of hip hop culture could be discussed in several phases and aspects as cultural mobility takes great part in its worldwide development. First of all, Paul Gilroy addresses the Black Diaspora in The Black Atlantic (1993) to explain that hip hop is not only associated with African-American culture but also African and global
diaspora. Gilroy asserts that the process of hip hop’s distribution could be interpreted as the “fundamental dislocation” since black music is detached from the mobility of race and turns the pristine Africanity into a different phase which can mutate elsewhere (The
Black Atlantic 101). Traditional black music henceforth varies and provides another
channel for imagination. Andy Bennett also points out that “hip hop is culturally mobile”(Bennett 133). One important reason lies in its resistant nature, in terms of the easy-to-be-appealing provocativeness of rap, is that rap “can be used as a means of engaging with and expressing dissatisfaction at the more restrictive features of everyday life in globally diffuse social settings” (Bennett 89).
Yet, what facilitates hip hop culture to spread globally does not merely conclude with one dimension. According to Appadurai’s accounts, the disjunctures of cultural flows can be classified into five scapes, which are enthnoscapes, mediascapes, technoscapes, financescapes, and ideoscapes. Among them, the ethnosapes and mediascapes are fairly related and commonly adopted to elucidate the globalization of hip hop. Ethnoscapes refer to the landscape of persons that move from place to place, including “tourists, immigrants, refugees, exiles, guest workers and other moving groups and individuals constitute an essential feature of the world and appear to affect the politics of (and between) nations to a hitherto unprecedented degree” (Appadurai 33). Therefore, Wise addresses both ethnoscapes and mediascapes in global music to elaborate that “the movement of diasporic peoples changes not only their music but the music of places they move to and through….[T]hese immigrant populations represent potential audiences for these music” (Wise 87). In this sense, global musicians can carry the experience of displacement and also “speak to trans-Atlantic, and transnational movement of people and music” (Wise 89-90). Thus, hip hop culture’s dissemination relies largely on people’s diaspora with the unceasing movement and cultural practices of exchange around the world. Obvious transnational samples given as South Korean
rap groups Drunken Tiger, the group members are mostly Korean ethnicity with American nationality, rap in English and Korean and sample local Korean music into their songs and sign to Korean record label (Wise 101). Similar to Drunken Tiger, Taiwanese hip hop group Machi rap in Taiwanese, Mandarin and English, and they record and produce their music in both America and Taiwan, releasing their albums on international record label. The cases above present how human movements can affect the spread of music in such a global form and thus alter the content of music from its original look. Mediascapes, as Appadurai defines, are related to the “landscapes of images” and are also “disjunctures” that cannot be formed as simple or mechanical infrastructures:
Mediascapes refer both to the distribution of the electronic capabilities
to produce and disseminate information (newspapers, magazines, television stations, and film-productions studios), which are now available to agrowing number of private and public interests throughout the world, and to the images of the world created by these media. These images involve many complicated infections, depending on their mode (documentary or
entertainment), their hardware (electronic or preelectronic), their audience (local, national, or transnational), and the interests of those who own and control them. (Appadurai 35, original italics)
Hence, the mediascapes offer audiences large contents of different sorts of texts, from television to audio products, to which “the world of commodities and the world of news and politics are profoundly mixed” (Appadurai 35). The technical and media agencies both render the so-called “black” music with public attention and propel hip hop culture onto global stage. Nelson George takes Michael Jackson’s music videos as a pioneering model when his music videos first changed people’s appreciation of music, the images of his music videos not only “extend the conceptual reach and
upgrade filmmaking style and budgets for acts of all colors” (George 99) but also pioneer for other crossover stars (e.g. Whitney Houston, Prince and Lionel Richie) to gain much more visibility. While rap group Run-D.M.C. playes an essential role in hip hop’s first music video, MTV Channel’s daily show Yo, MTV Raps! helps promote hip hop culture to a larger stage. As George says, the show “didn’t just pull in viewers—it sent seismic waves through the whole music industry. By giving hip hop music, dances, and gear a regularly scheduled national platform, the broadcast was integral to inculcating hip hop’s distinctly urban culture into the rest of the country” (George 101). Moreover, as George continues, videos can “project images of these ever-changing styles and the artists who wore them across the globe, as no other African American music style had been before” (102). Appadurai pretty much draws the account that mediascapes “tend to be image-centered, narrative-based accounts of strips of reality, and what they offer to those who experience and transform them is a series of elements” (Appadurai 35). Hip hop’s attitude and the obsessions of urban America have been transmitted to the world through the images of music videos;
while “black music was shown only briefly and often in a very culturally hostile environment” (George 103), the constantly repeated images from music videos engage young kids everywhere around the world for hip hop’s larger than life
personas has been visualized since then and therefore make the culture “mythic”
(George 98).
Yet, the globalization of hip hop culture manifests itself in various aspects because of hip hop’s innate mutability when it appears in different countries. Scholars and cultural observers deduce that “mutability” enables hip hop culture (including its music, dance, and costumes, or ideologies such as Afrocentrism or political inclination) to be embraced diversely by the young people and popular culture worldwide. The mutability of hip hop can be detected from different fashions. Tony
Mitchell adopts Deleuze’s notion of the “rhizome” to interpret the quick application of hip hop culture and rap music into different cultures. He uses Silent Majority, a
Switzerland rap group that raps in a mixture of English, Jamaican patois, French, Spanish, and Swahili to exemplify how. The multilingual use of the languages can be seen as “a ‘plant’ neatly corresponds to Deleuze’s ‘rhizome’ and serves to emphasize the ‘glocalization’ of rap” (Mitchell 3) and he also asserts that the use of vernaculars presents as a form of resistance to preserve local culture. This idea applies to the use of Taiwanese or Hakka rap in Taiwan for exalting the local Taiwanese consciousness to a certain extent. Moreover, based on Bennett’s ethnographic study of hip hop culture of Frankfurt am Main, Germany and New Castle, England, he attempts to elucidate that hip hop tends to be a resistant form in the local contexts. The youths there attempt to “rework hip hop into a medium for the expression of local themes”
(Bennett 140). Bennett also finds that “local rap groups began incorporating German lyrics into their music” (Bennett 140), so that the cultural significance in the lyrics can be portrayed and performed through such artistic creation.
In France and Italy, hip hoppers are likely to express the political and socially conscious side of hip hop music for rap is taken as a means to articulate the political or critical appeals for them and to vent the anger toward the government (George 206). The radical nature has been transplanted into foreign culture. As Lipsitz views the phenomenon, “the radical nature of hip hop comes less from its origins than from its uses” (Dangerous Crossroads 37). In Hong Kong, the local alternative Hong Kong hip hop/rock band, LMF (also known as Lazy Mother Fucka 大懶堂) seeks the identity from teenagers with their local consciousness and blue collar image. They create the “emotional space” for their fans to feel they are an integral whole to the group which brings “the band and its audience together to express something likewise unintelligible, a rage or frustration or something else which expresses their daily
affective experience of life in Hong Kong” (Wise 105). Eric Ma argues that LMP presents a local identity that Hong Kong has been longing for since its diasporic history lacks strong “nationalist imperatives” and it always “involves a triangular
articulation of Chinese nationalism, British colonialism, and globalization” (Ma 187).
Japan and South Korea adopt different manners in carrying the high popularity of hip hop culture. In Ian Condry’s Hip-Hop Japan (2006), he closely observes the local Japanese live performances and interviews the rappers. Condry draws special attention to how Japanese rappers both show their enthusiasm and disillusionment about
American nostalgia and how they turn hip hop into Japanese (Condry 210). They embrace the grassroots of the African-American hip hop culture, which they call “new blackism” while at the same time they also seek the latest fashion of hip hop trends, or go as far extreme as to tan their skin dark (George 204). However, Japanese hip hop still has created its specialty by the language use and different performing styles that gives the culture a local tone. Moreover, 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” (Condry 2). Condry’s assertion more or less discloses that under the age of globalization, the boundaries of dichotomous symmetry would eventually become mutual existence and construction.
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 genre in Korean pop music” (Yoon 92, my italics). Nevertheless, according to Sarah Morelli, rap has been well-incorporated into Korean popular music industry and hip hop music has been taken as a style of vocalization but not been seriously deemed as a category of popular music or music genre in South Korea, which
seems to generate the rupture from what hip hop culture is usually defined and realized.
Similarly, black style is widely popular among Korean youngsters, and even many young Korean students see hip hop dance and music as “their means to success” in pursuing the stardom.
From New York to Paris, or Tokyo to Hong Kong, hip hop has emitted its light to shine the global culture. In this chapter, I have discussed the history of hip hop culture, from its origin in America to the later national dissemination and “the hip hop generation”, which refers to the people committed the contribution to the development American hip hop. I also have addressed the language use of rap, pointing out the original African roots and its linguistic features that credit it a distinct modern black verbal communication. Yet, I focus on the globalization of hip hop culture, discussing its dissemination and how its socio-political consciousness has affected different cultures to be resonated since “hip hop demonstrates the various and particular flows of people, music, and politics […] as crucial to understanding cultural globalization” (Wise 101). In the next chapter, I will continue to focus on the development of hip hop music in the context of East Asia countries. I will pay attention to the proximity to Taiwan, Japan and South Korea to closely analyze the cultural flows and transnationalism among each other and how they intermingle with different issues of Asian hip hop music that turn out to influence the experience of hip hop music in Taiwan.
Chapter Two:
The Transnational Development of Hip Hop Music in the East Asian Context
During the past decades, hip hop culture has arrived and been embraced by the
youths and the popular culture around the world. As I have mentioned in the previous chapter, after hip hop appears to be the global shared culture by cross-culturalexchange, people’s diasporic movement and the circulation of international capital commodities and technology, its impact has thus been expanded for the culture’s strong features of “remixing” and “sampling” to inscribe different cultures into the category from local identity, politics to the development of society to decenter or innovate hip hop’s global look. The routes of the disseminations of hip hop do not occur to only one itinerary after hip hop departed from America, in which different societies and cultures around the world can breed diverse hip hop cultures that now emerge to be connected to turn into one of the significant global cultures. Ever since hip hop has been widely spread and been inscribed and familiarized with the East Asian regions (mainly indicating Taiwan, Japan, China, Hong Kong and South Korea), it has also become one of the most intriguing and also influential popular cultural forms over East Asia. The East Asian context of hip hop culture, in a sense, could result from the geographical proximity and cultural affinity for East Asian countries share some of the historical backgrounds and cultural affinities other than the Euro-American ones, which Koichi Iwabuchi asserts “East Asia as a region”
(Iwabuchi 403) to have more commercial and cultural exchanges to a certain extent.
In this chapter, I shall discuss the influences of cultural flows and routes regarding the development of hip hop music and the issues around its transnational development in the context of East Asia, focusing on the mainstream fad of Korean Wave (i.e., K-pop), J-R&B and then the hip hop trend and the transnational mass media culture in Taiwan to thus indicate how the interrelationship of hip hop’s
cross-cultural and regional experiences in East Asia affects Taiwanese hip hop music.