Bombing, Breakin', and Gettin' down: The Folk and Popular Culture of Hip-Hop

AbstractTanzania has in the last decade seen a vibrant form of hip-hop emerge that is gaining wide public exposure thanks to its political tenor. First, this article illustrates how rap lyrics reflect Tanzanian political history and in part determine it. Bongo Flava, as the local hip-hop genre is called, has gained credibility by reinterpreting Nyerere's normative legacy and by expanding freedom of expression in the country, while unhampered by factors that normally mitigate the social impact of popular culture. Second, the article explores the global relevance of their social critique. Bongo Flava attempts to outwit the sophisticated indifference and neoliberalism of postcolonial rulers and ruled. Partly inspired by African American popular culture, many songs expose the postcolonial strategy of survival, which is to immunize oneself against the threat of commodification by fully embracing it, the contamination yielding extra power. The lyrics, in their irony and pessimism, exhibit the same immunizing tendency. However, this tendency is curbed by two principles that safeguard streetwise status: the rapper's willingness to ‘duel’ and the Kiswahili credo of activating bongo, ‘the brains’.

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Afro-Samurai: techno-Orientalism and contemporary hip hop

Popular Music ◽

10.1017/s0261143013000056 ◽

2013 ◽

Vol 32 (2) ◽

pp. 259-275 ◽

Cited By ~ 9

Author(s):

Ken McLeod

Keyword(s):

African American ◽

Popular Culture ◽

21St Century ◽

Hip Hop ◽

Media Coverage ◽

Racial Formation ◽

American Identity ◽

High Tech ◽

African American Identity

AbstractThis article examines the practice and recent rise in the use of various aspects of Japanese popular culture in hip hop, particularly as manifest in the work of RZA, Kanye West and Nicki Minaj. Often these references highlight the high-tech, futuristic aesthetic of much Japanese popular culture and thus resonate with concepts and practices surrounding Afro-futurism. Drawing on various theories of hybridity, this article analyses how Japanese popular culture has informed constructions of African American identity. In contrast to the often sensational media coverage of racial tensions between African American and Asian communities, the nexus of Japanese popular culture and African American hip hop evinces a sympathetic connection based on shared notions of Afro-Asian liberation and empowerment achieved, in part, through a common aesthetic of technological mastery and appropriation. The synthesis of Asian popular culture and African American hip hop represents a globally hybridised experience of identity and racial formation in the 21st century.

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The Heroic Journey in Popular Culture

Tribhuvan University Journal ◽

10.3126/tuj.v29i1.25668 ◽

2016 ◽

Vol 29 (1) ◽

pp. 25-40

Author(s):

Dhruba Karki

Keyword(s):

New York ◽

Popular Culture ◽

Hip Hop ◽

Modern World ◽

Popular Appeal ◽

Saturated Media ◽

Transformation Of Consciousness ◽

Celestial Sphere ◽

East West ◽

Business Trip

Popular culture integrates people in diverse settings. Individuals share ideas through materials they use, including food, dresses, movies, magazines, and holiday spots. In the past, people set for pilgrimage to holy sites; these days, they go on trekking through hills. Pilgrimages to consecrated sites have been replaced by people's journey to discotheque, fashion center and shopping complex in the modern time corporate world. What binds them together is the transformation of consciousness in line with the journey from the terrestrial to the celestial sphere. Specific human activities, including pilgrimage and business trip become popular culture when people make them significant parts of their lives. Sound and images of disco, jazz, hip-hop, and pop-rock have entered the streets and hotels equally in cities of the industrial world, from Lhasa to London, Karachi to Kathmandu, and Tokyo to New York, irrespective of their cultures and ethnic backgrounds. In today’s world of saturated media presence, images and icons of heroes and legends, motivated by commercial and popular appeal, are circulated with a greater speed, becoming simultaneously a shared mythic currency and continuity, the modern world embodiment of silk road business, and thus, crossing the East-West divide.

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HIP HOP AS A REFLECTION OF AMERICAN VALUES: A SEMIOTICS ANALYSIS ON SAVE THE LAST DANCE AND STEP UP MOVIES

Rubikon : Journal of Transnational American Studies ◽

10.22146/rubikon.v3i2.34268 ◽

2019 ◽

Vol 3 (2) ◽

pp. 29

Author(s):

Naris Eka Setyawati

Keyword(s):

United States ◽

Popular Culture ◽

Juvenile Delinquency ◽

United States Of America ◽

Hip Hop ◽

American Studies ◽

Hard Work ◽

First Order ◽

American Values ◽

Library Research

This study examines seven movies that are based on characters created by Duane Adler. They are two Save the Last Dance and five Step Up movies. This discussion is a library research which is conducted within the framework of American Studies approach under the scope of history, social, and culture. This research uses Barthes’ semiotics theory on myth to analyze the depiction of American phenomena in the movies.The objectives of this study are to examine the portrayal of Hip Hop in United States of America and to analyze the reflection of American values through movies. The discussions on the topic reveal that Hip Hop becomes the source for movies’ narratives. It is manifested in hip hop related scenes of the movies. They portray signs of rebellion and juvenile delinquency in the first order-semiological system. These portrayals reflect American values of rebellion and freedom. Moreover, life struggle and American belief in the land of opportunity play the signs in Barthes’ second order-semiological system. The American values reflected through the discussions are competitiveness, hard work, determined, optimism, and materialism.Keywords: Hip Hop, hip hop, popular culture, semiotics, American values

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“Vai viņa daļa dzīvo manī?” Smokija Mo dziesmas “Kas ir radītājs” interpretācija popkultūras un reliģijas studiju kontekstā

Ceļš ◽

10.22364/cl.71.01 ◽

2020 ◽

Vol 71 ◽

pp. 6-19

Author(s):

Ņikita Andrejevs ◽

Keyword(s):

Popular Culture ◽

Popular Music ◽

Mass Culture ◽

Hip Hop ◽

Religious Traditions ◽

Everyday Lives ◽

Definition Of Religion ◽

Definition Of ◽

The Individual ◽

Individual Self

The Russian hip hop artist Smoki Mo has frequently referenced religious and spiritual topics in his lyrics. The composition “Who is the creator” discusses the positive and negative replies to this question. The lyrics are interpreted as a popular culture text with the aim to discover how popular culture texts can function as religious ones and how popular culture can function as religion. The article employs a functional definition of religion to explore how the studied text discusses existential questions and struggle with identity that religion also is concerned with. The popular culture itself is understood in the article as the meaning and value that people ascribe to mass culture products, such as popular music, in their everyday lives. The article also summarizes the possible issues with reading popular culture texts as religious ones to avoid misinterpretation due to researcher’s indebtedness to traditional religious definitions or to scholarly traditions of interpretation. The article also employs the notion of spirituality to connect the ideas expressed in Smoki Mo’s lyrics to a relevant ideological framework. The understanding of the “creator”, “God” and other theological notions in the lyrics is closely related to the broad features of modern spirituality that include the focus on the individual self and universal statements rather than particular religious traditions. In this way, the studied composition in itself is an expression of modern spirituality dealing with existential questions.

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Religion, Race, and Popular Culture

10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190221171.013.1 ◽

2018 ◽

Author(s):

Lerone A. Martin ◽

J. Kameron Carter

Keyword(s):

Popular Culture ◽

Social Construction ◽

Hip Hop ◽

Religious History ◽

American Religious History ◽

People Of Color ◽

Racial Identities ◽

The Social

This chapter discusses the intersection of race, religion, and popular culture. Race is posited here not as synonymous with people of color, but rather as an analytic category that examines the social construction and very real reality of racialization: the process of becoming and identifying whiteness, blackness, and so on. Two broad approaches to the study of race, religion, and popular culture are examined: Popular Culture in Religion, and Religion as or in Popular Culture. The chapter then offers a brief overview of how these two approaches have both broadened standard narratives of American religious history as well as illuminated scholarly understandings of how religio-racial identities are constructed, perpetuated, challenged, and queered through the use of popular culture forms such as print, phonograph, radio, televangelism, celebrity, and hip-hop.

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From Kung Fu to Hip Hop: Globalization, Revolution and Popular Culture (review)

symplokē ◽

10.1353/sym.0.0059 ◽

2009 ◽

Vol 16 (1-2) ◽

pp. 371-372

Author(s):

Brian A. Smith

Keyword(s):

Popular Culture ◽

Hip Hop ◽

Kung Fu

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From Jim Crow to Jay-Z

10.5406/illinois/9780252036620.001.0001 ◽

2011 ◽

Cited By ~ 40

Author(s):

Miles White

Keyword(s):

Popular Culture ◽

Black Male ◽

Hip Hop ◽

Young Male ◽

Black Masculinity ◽

The United States ◽

The Body ◽

Hip Hop Culture ◽

Action Films ◽

Jay Z

This multilayered study of the representation of black masculinity in musical and cultural performance takes aim at the reduction of African American male culture to stereotypes of deviance, misogyny, and excess. Broadening the significance of hip-hop culture by linking it to other expressive forms within popular culture, the book examines how these representations have both encouraged the demonization of young black males in the United States and abroad and contributed to the construction of their identities. The book traces black male representations to chattel slavery and American minstrelsy as early examples of fetishization and commodification of black male subjectivity. Continuing with diverse discussions including black action films, heavyweight prizefighting, Elvis Presley's performance of blackness, and white rappers such as Vanilla Ice and Eminem, the book establishes a sophisticated framework for interpreting and critiquing black masculinity in hip-hop music and culture. Arguing that black music has undeniably shaped American popular culture and that hip-hop tropes have exerted a defining influence on young male aspirations and behavior, the book draws a critical link between the body, musical sound, and the construction of identity.

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