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

<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>

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

<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>

Women Hip-Hop Artists and Womanist Theology

Hip-Hop is a cultural phenomenon steeped in the conservative ideologies of individualism and capitalism. It sells a lifestyle and its most recent surge of rap music and popular culture spotlights Black women more than ever before. Although Black women have always been significant piece in Hip-Hop culture, their artistry has jolted its systemic capitalism and patriarchy to engage intersectionality through a discourse of classism, sexual orientation, and racism while upending White supremacy’s either:or binary. Applying the principles of Womanism, Black female Hip-Hop artists negotiate cultural identity politics as activists to innovatively expand thought on gender performance and produce a fusion of contemporary Blackness for the 21st century. Their artivism builds a safe environment of differences within society using conscious thought, language, and performative methods to defy the White American ethos of sexism, misogyny, and materialism. By garnering a better knowledge of their existence through Indigenous African spirituality, Black women reclaim ownership of their bodies from Western European standards, including race, and gender to challenge Christianity’s meaning of martyrdom. This act of reclamation provides a reformative tool of inclusion and being fluidity through Hip-Hop music and its culture.

“We Don’t Have Those American Problems”: Anti-Black Practices in Canada’s Rap Music Marketplace, 1985–2020

Beginning in the early to mid 1980s, Hip Hop culture appeared on Canadian stages and in homes, even as it was limited in supply on commercial radio and television. Unlike their American counterparts, mainstream Canadian emcees (many of whom were racialized as Black and identified with the city of Toronto) were notably dependent upon personal finances, under-resourced independent record labels, distribution deals, and state and not-for-profit grant monies to subsidize the conceptualization, production, and promotion of their art. Labelled “urban music” in an attempt to spatialize and covertly reference Blackness, Hip Hop in Canada, from the outset, was mapped against, in conflict with, and outside of the national imaginary. While building local scenes, an independent label system, and a cross-Canada college radio, television, and live music infrastructure and audience, Hip Hop artists developed spaces of resistance, circumvented industry-generated obstacles, and defined success on their own terms — all of which suggested that they were not solely at the will of the dominant white music industry. And yet artists simultaneously encountered anti-Black practices that constrained the creation and sustenance of a nationwide Hip Hop infrastructure and denoted an inequitable structuring of support for the arts in Canada. By examining the interface of Blackness, art, and the racial economy of Canada’s creative industries, this article will outline instances of Canada’s anti-Black racism as well as the challenges Hip Hop artists and industry professionals have faced in the areas of recording and label relations, music sales, broadcasting regulations, and the accolade system. These social relations — many of which are rooted in longer histories of race relations and anti-Blackness in Canada — resulted in industry-wide policies, practices, norms, and ideologies that unfairly disadvantaged Black artists and undermined the realization and marketplace potential of a Hip Hop infrastructure within and beyond Canada.

Dirty South Feminism: The Girlies Got Somethin’ to Say Too! Southern Hip-Hop Women, Fighting Respectability, Talking Mess, and Twerking Up the Dirty South

Within southern hip-hop, minimal credit has been given to the Black women who have curated sonic and performance narratives within the southern region. Many southern hip-hop scholars and journalists have centralized the accomplishments and masculinities of southern male rap performances. Here, dirty south feminism works to explore how agency, location, and Black women’s rap (lyrics and rhyme) and dance (twerking) performances in southern hip-hop are established under a contemporary hip-hop womanist framework. I critique the history of southern hip-hop culture by decentralizing male-dominated and hyper-masculine southern hip-hop identities. Second, I extend hip-hop feminist/womanist scholarship that includes tangible reflections of Black womanhood that emerge out of the South to see how these narratives reshape and re-inform representations of Black women and girls within southern hip-hop culture. I use dirty south feminism to include geographical understandings of southern Black women who have grown up in the South and been sexually shamed, objectified and pushed to the margins in southern hip-hop history. I seek to explore the following questions: How does the performance of Black women’s presence in hip-hop dance localize the South to help expand narratives within dirty south hip-hop? How can the “dirty south” as a geographical place within hip-hop be a guide to disrupt a conservative hip-hop South through a hip-hop womanist lens?

Transcultural Voices

This book presents the narratives and voices of young, mostly male practitioners of hip hop culture in Delhi, India. Through a combination of linguistic ethnography, sociolinguistics and discourse studies, the book addresses issues including gender and sexuality, identity construction and global culture.

Showing Out

In this essay, we center hip-hop culture and Black cultural legacies. We envision and offer a two-fold framework which illuminates the intersection between the two. We explore ways that the Black cultural experience (or better yet Black cultural praxis) has always brilliantly and organically demonstrated the shape and form of a scholarship of consequence. Black cultural praxis, or reflective action with a Black emancipatory influence, has always allowed freedom of movement, freedom of body, freedom of tongue, and freedom of voice. We translate what this cultural praxis teaches and urges regarding the transformation, unbinding, and freeing of both educators and educational spaces. We demonstrate how the intersection of hip-hop culture and Black cultural legacies can be instructive and transformative to educators. We invite educators to reimagine their classroom spaces by not only focusing on learning about hip hop but from it as well.

FASHION AND COMMODIFICATION: AN ANALYSIS ON THE GLOBAL PHENOMENON OF SUPREME

Globalization is the global information spread and people interconnectivity. It is driven by technological developments in transportation and communication, removing cultural boundaries among nations. Cultural differences are increasingly less tangible and visible in all cultural products, including in fashion. Due to globalization, fashion brands that originate in a certain country can open stores across multiple continents. The invention of the Internet further widens their accessibility by consumers in any part of the world. However, globalization also brings an affordability gap between the upper and the lower classes. Nonetheless, fashion brands can also take advantage of this economic difference in appealing to their consumers. One of those brands is Supreme. Founded in 1994, it became the most sought-after hypebeast brand among street-fashion enthusiasts worldwide. How do they do it in less than 30 years is interesting to analyze. To answer this objective, this article is conducted from the cultural studies standpoint and the case study method. There are three formulas of positioning it adopts in order to grow globally: (1) the commodification African-American community, (2) the use of celebrity endorsement, and (3) the hype of limited-edition releases. Supreme sells oversized streetwear, heavily influenced by Hip-hop culture, a music genre rooted in the lives of African Americans. The brand makes use of celebrities, especially rappers, to endorse its clothes and accessories. It also continually makes headlines by releasing limited-edition products as well as collaborating with well-known figures and brands.

Brotherhood and Hip-Hop: The Case of Chinese Hip-Hop Club Triple H

After hip-hop increased in popularity in Chinese entertainment programs, different perceptions of hip-hop in China reflected a clash of various thinking patterns among audiences, with hip-hop club Triple H on the cusp of controversy. Taking Triple H as a case study, this paper aims to explore how emotional attachments influence the development of Chinese hip-hop clubs in post-subculture. The findings indicated that the brotherhood rooted in hip-hop culture has been reshaped by the hybridity of Chinese hip-hop featuring fraternity mixed with sensitivity, loyalty filled with controversy, and heroism heightened by diversity. This paper argues that the recurring theme of “brotherhood” contributing to the charisma of Chinese hip-hop clubs cannot be partially interpreted as either gangster love or an underground bond, which gives rise to a new approach to the notion of authenticity, with hip-hop interpreted as a distinctive lifestyle.