scholarly journals PIPELINES AND TIGHT RHYMES: VIRTUAL MEDIA AND HIP-HOP IN JAPAN & NEW ZEALAND

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Andrew William Peter Witty

<p>This thesis looks at hip-hop as a contemporary pop cultural phenomena and its relationship with media in the construction of underground hip-hop communities in Japanese and New Zealand settings. My work on hip-hop in Japan illustrates how global networks influence a traditionally mono-cultural society reckoning with a style connected to African-American experience. A New Zealand setting illustrates how virtual networks allow connections to wider hip-hop culture from a geographically isolated setting and legitimises the local scene. In looking at both settings side-by-side, this thesis underscores the various ways that virtual networks and their increased visibility are used contemporaneously in the construction of local hip-hop scenes as a tool to understand and promote hip-hop music. Based on a mix of virtual fieldwork, fieldwork in New Zealand, as well as fieldwork in Japan, this thesis shows that questions of authenticity in hip-hop have become more complex through different manifestations of hip-hop culture that challenge traditional understandings of the genre’s meaning. This is a result of the varying levels of user-agency in virtual networks. In a Japanese setting, we see an increased importance placed on virtual networks, allowing hip-hop fans and musicians alike to be part of the immediate conversation. Language barriers to hip-hop’s dominant English vernacular mean that this conversation is generally filtered through the most dominant networks and ‘mainstream’ culture. These impressions of hip-hop are the driving forces of style for the Japanese scene, leading to a collapse of the dichotic underground/mainstream divide seen in the earlier generations of Japanese hip-hop. In a New Zealand setting, virtual networks are used to connect with English speaking hip-hop musicians overseas, allowing musicians to operate in ‘underground’ virtual communities that are not physically manifested in New Zealand. By drawing attention to the ways that hip-hop culture is formed, legitimized, and understood in these two geographic and cultural settings, this thesis demonstrates that hip-hop culture exists in an integral relationship with virtual media and explores questions of appropriation, imitation, and authenticity.</p>

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Andrew William Peter Witty

<p>This thesis looks at hip-hop as a contemporary pop cultural phenomena and its relationship with media in the construction of underground hip-hop communities in Japanese and New Zealand settings. My work on hip-hop in Japan illustrates how global networks influence a traditionally mono-cultural society reckoning with a style connected to African-American experience. A New Zealand setting illustrates how virtual networks allow connections to wider hip-hop culture from a geographically isolated setting and legitimises the local scene. In looking at both settings side-by-side, this thesis underscores the various ways that virtual networks and their increased visibility are used contemporaneously in the construction of local hip-hop scenes as a tool to understand and promote hip-hop music. Based on a mix of virtual fieldwork, fieldwork in New Zealand, as well as fieldwork in Japan, this thesis shows that questions of authenticity in hip-hop have become more complex through different manifestations of hip-hop culture that challenge traditional understandings of the genre’s meaning. This is a result of the varying levels of user-agency in virtual networks. In a Japanese setting, we see an increased importance placed on virtual networks, allowing hip-hop fans and musicians alike to be part of the immediate conversation. Language barriers to hip-hop’s dominant English vernacular mean that this conversation is generally filtered through the most dominant networks and ‘mainstream’ culture. These impressions of hip-hop are the driving forces of style for the Japanese scene, leading to a collapse of the dichotic underground/mainstream divide seen in the earlier generations of Japanese hip-hop. In a New Zealand setting, virtual networks are used to connect with English speaking hip-hop musicians overseas, allowing musicians to operate in ‘underground’ virtual communities that are not physically manifested in New Zealand. By drawing attention to the ways that hip-hop culture is formed, legitimized, and understood in these two geographic and cultural settings, this thesis demonstrates that hip-hop culture exists in an integral relationship with virtual media and explores questions of appropriation, imitation, and authenticity.</p>


Author(s):  
Yehan Wang

In 2017, an online reality show single-handedly ignited China's passion for hip hop, garnering more than 2.5 billion views and ensuring stardom for its contestants. Prior to this, Chinese hip-hop culture was only an “underground culture”; a small number of people sang in subway stations, not in mainstream media or culture. Based on research into the concept of “post-subculture” and the Birmingham school's theory of youth subcultures, this research takes the TV music show The Rap of China as an exemplary case study and explores how media companies make use of power emerging from fandom to “break the rules” of the traditions of mainstream culture in China. Through online observations of hip-hop songs and artists as well as interviews of hip-hop fans, this research explores the identities constructed in the age of consumerism and how new hip-hop generation fans perceive hip-hop culture.


2018 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 205-222 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alkisti Efthymiou ◽  
Haris Stavrakakis

Hip hop culture in Greece – and especially rap music – seems to be going through a period of bloom. Since 2010, a new generation of Greek-based non-commercial rap artists has surged in popularity, making rhymes and tunes about their everyday experiences (drugs, sex, nightlife, violence, poverty), while self-producing their records and maintaining a critical stance towards mainstream culture and media. In the lyrics of most artists of the genre, misogynist and homophobic assumptions are frequently reproduced, despite the rappers’ expressed militancy against all forms of authority. The article examines this dissonance – created when sexist language is employed in critiques against power – and traces the intersections of gender, sexuality and political resistance within contemporary non-commercial rap in Greece. The authors focus on the produced masculinities and femininities, on the political subjects interpellated by the lyrics and on points of destabilizing regulatory gender norms. More specifically, they highlight the ways in which heteronormative masculinity is reinforced (even) in ‘politically conscious’ Greek-speaking rap and, within the same music genre, we look for its undoing.


2011 ◽  
Vol 40 (3) ◽  
pp. 1-3
Author(s):  
Christopher Driscoll

At the 2010 annual meeting of the American Academy of Religion held in Atlanta, GA, a group of young scholars organized a wildcard session titled “What’s This ‘Religious’ in Hip Hop Culture?” The central questions under investigation by the panel were 1) what about hip hop culture is religious? and 2) how are issues of theory and method within African American religious studies challenged and/or rethought because of the recent turn to hip hop as both subject of study and cultural hermeneutic. Though some panelists challenged this “religious” in hip hop, all agreed that hip hop is of theoretical and methodological import for African American religious studies and religious studies in general. This collection of essays brings together in print many findings from that session and points out the implications of hip hop's influence on religious scholars' theoretical and methodological concerns.


2020 ◽  
Vol 1 (3) ◽  
pp. 1283-1297
Author(s):  
Mike Thelwall ◽  
Pardeep Sud

Ongoing problems attracting women into many Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) subjects have many potential explanations. This article investigates whether the possible undercitation of women associates with lower proportions of, or increases in, women in a subject. It uses six million articles published in 1996–2012 across up to 331 fields in six mainly English-speaking countries: Australia, Canada, Ireland, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the United States. The proportion of female first- and last-authored articles in each year was calculated and 4,968 regressions were run to detect first-author gender advantages in field normalized article citations. The proportion of female first authors in each field correlated highly between countries and the female first-author citation advantages derived from the regressions correlated moderately to strongly between countries, so both are relatively field specific. There was a weak tendency in the United States and New Zealand for female citation advantages to be stronger in fields with fewer women, after excluding small fields, but there was no other association evidence. There was no evidence of female citation advantages or disadvantages to be a cause or effect of changes in the proportions of women in a field for any country. Inappropriate uses of career-level citations are a likelier source of gender inequities.


2018 ◽  
Vol 15 (02) ◽  
pp. 353-385
Author(s):  
Lakeyta M. Bonnette-Bailey ◽  
Ray Block ◽  
Harwood K. McClerking

AbstractDespite a recent increase in research on its sociopolitical implications, many questions regarding rap music’s influence on mass-level participation remain unanswered. We consider the possibility that “imagining a better world” (measured here as the degree to which young African Americans are critical of the music’s negative messages) can correlate with a desire to “build a better world” (operationalized as an individual’s level of political participation). Evidence from the Black Youth Project (BYP)’s Youth Culture Survey (Cohen 2005) demonstrates that rap critique exerts a conditional impact on non-voting forms of activism. Rap critique enhances heavy consumers’ civic engagement, but this relationship does not occur among Blacks who consume the music infrequently. By demonstrating rap’s politicizing power and contradicting certain criticisms of Hip Hop culture, our research celebrates the possibilities of Black youth and Black music.


2002 ◽  
Vol 91 (6) ◽  
pp. 88 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ernest Morrell ◽  
Jeffrey M. R. Duncan-Andrade

2017 ◽  
Vol 34 (7) ◽  
pp. 1310-1338 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dean A. Dabney ◽  
Brent Teasdale ◽  
Glen A. Ishoy ◽  
Taylor Gann ◽  
Bonnie Berry

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