Build: The Power of Hip Hop Diplomacy in a Divided World, Mark Katz (2019)

Review of: Build: The Power of Hip Hop Diplomacy in a Divide World, Mark Katz (2019)New York: Oxford University Press, 256 pp.,ISBN 978-0-19005-611-7, h/bk, USD 24.95

Shop talk: The influence of hip hop on Filipino‐American barbers in San Diego

Barber culture frequently intersects with hip hop. Barbershops often incorporate rap music, street wear apparel and popular culture into their daily environment. In tandem, an important part of hip hop culture is the haircuts and designs that people choose to get. Many Filipino-Americans across the United States utilize barber and hip hop culture to help create their own unique sense of identity ‐ a sense of identity forged in the fires of diaspora and postcolonial oppression. In this first instalment of the GHHS ‘Show and Prove’ section ‐ short essays on hip hop visual culture, arts and images ‐ I illustrate the ways in which Filipino-Americans in San Diego use barber shops both as a means of entrepreneurialism and as a conduit to create a cultural identity that incorporates hip hop with their own histories of migration and marginalization. I interview Filipino-American entrepreneur Marc Canonizado, who opened his first San Diego-based business, Goodfellas Barbershop Shave Parlor, in 2014. We explore the complex linkages between barbershops, Filipino-Americans and hip hop culture, as well as discuss his life story and plans for the future.

Rap on Trial: Race, Lyrics, and Guilt in America, Erik Nielson and Andrea L. Dennis (2019)

Review of: Rap on Trial: Race, Lyrics, and Guilt in America, Erik Nielson and Andrea L. Dennis (2019)New York: The New Press, 204 pp.,ISBN 978-1-62097-340-0, h/bk, USD 24.99

Routledge Handbook of Graffiti and Street Art, Jeffrey Ian Ross (ed.) (2016)

Review of: Routledge Handbook of Graffiti and Street Art, Jeffrey Ian Ross (ed.) (2016)New York City: Routledge International HandbooksISBN 978-1-13879-293-7, h/bk, £160.00, p/bk, £31.99, ebook, £25.99

The impossibility of being Drake: Or, what it means to be a successful (Black) Canadian rapper

This article takes Canadian hip hop artist Drake, his celebrity and his body of work as a point of departure for an examination of discursive constructions of race, hip hop and Canada in intersection. Canada’s role in the global hip hop movement has always been contested; circumscribed from abroad by its proximity to the United States and at home by its ideological positioning of Black citizens and Black cultural production vis-à-vis the imagined nation. Framed by broader questions of the role of hip hop in the Canadian public sphere, this discursive analysis analyses the work and utterances of Drake as well as discourses produced about Drake through music criticism and by other hip hop artists. Drake’s public performance of Blackness via hip hop is framed by overlapping and competing ideologies. Drake ‐ whose public persona seems to embody a number of seemingly competing identities ‐ is ‘impossible’ in so far as he is the product of intersecting, circulating conceptualizations of Blackness that render only some performances of Blackness both commercially viable and authentically hip hop, while others remain impossible, unacceptable, unutterable or unimaginable both inside and outside the nation state.

Growing up in hip hop: The expression of self in hypermasculine cultures

Recently, rappers Talib Kweli and Evidence discussed the conflict between rapper identity and individual identity as a person ages, with Kweli describing how a rapper’s persona ‘becomes like an armour’ and Evidence observing that ‘after a while that stops getting rewarding’ (People’s Party with Talib Kweli 2019: 54). These observations highlight the difficulties for artists to be able to express their own growth and development as their artist personas become ‘fixed’. This fixing or flattening of persona, combined with a hypermasculine culture that reflects a society where even the phrase ‘to catch feelings’ is a derogatory term, creates an environment in which opportunities for expression of personal growth, change and emotional responses have become limited. Taking an autoethnographic, multi-method approach, this article looks at examples in my own work with hip hop group Stanley Odd, which focus on personal, reflexive commentary as opposed to cultural or social commentary. Through the analysis of three songs released between 2012 and 2014, this article describes creative tactics and responses designed to navigate the boundaries of hip hop culture, Scottish culture and global culture, circumventing restrictions on emotive responses.

City Girls, hot girls and the re-imagining of Black women in hip hop and digital spaces

Through a hip hop feminist lens, how are we to interpret black girls’ and women’s self-identification in digital spaces that visibly resonate with new/remixed images? And more importantly, what happens when black female rap artists and their fan base disrupt, subvert or challenge dominant gender scripts in hip hop in order to navigate broader discourses on black female sexuality? Drawing on the work of Joan Morgan and hip hop feminist scholarship in general, this essay aims to offer a critical reading of ‘hot girl summer’. Inspired by Houston rapper Megan Thee Stallion’s lyrics on ‘Cash Shit’, where she raps about ‘real hot girl shit’, the phrase has morphed into a larger-than-life persona not only for Megan’s rap superstar profile, but also for a number of black girls. According to Megan, a hot girl summer is ‘about women and men being unapologetically them[selves] […] having a good-ass time, hyping up their friends, doing [them]’. What does ‘hot girl summer’ tell us about significant changes in the ways that black women cultivate community in digital spaces, how they construct their identities within systems of controlling images and grapple with respectability politics? In order to address these questions with a critical lens, using an interdisciplinary approach grounded in black feminism and hip hop feminism, this essay offers a theoretical approach to a digital hip hop feminist sensibility (DHHFS). Too little has been said about black women’s representation in digital spaces where they imagine alternative gender performance, disrupt hegemonic tropes and engage in participatory culture.

Ciphers, ‘hoods and digital DIY studios in India: Negotiating aspirational individuality and hip hop collectivity

This article argues for an attention to the DIY digital studio as a key site where aspiring hip hop MCs in the contemporary moment negotiate between their desire for individual success and their commitments to various forms of local belonging, not least which includes staying true to a hip hop ethos of collectivity. We follow Sonal, a b-boy and MC we worked with in a studio that we set up in Delhi, India in 2013 to work with aspiring MCs in the city’s scene. We trace his subsequent rise to fame in India to argue for an attention to the DIY studio as the material and metaphoric realization of the digital infrastructures of global capitalism. The studio manifests economic and social opportunities for young men like Sonal in Delhi, and, we suspect, for young people across the world who now have access to social media and inexpensive production hardware and software. Yet, in creating opportunities for individual economic and social uplift, the studio poses a threat to the ideal of a hip hop community that undergirds its possibility even as it opens up opportunities to enunciate commitments to other forms of belonging.

A love interrupted: A Tribe Called Quest’s resilient path of rhythm

In 2016, the rap group A Tribe Called Quest returned with their long-awaited sixth and final album, We Got It From Here... Thank You 4 Your Service. Behind it was a long and turbulent story without which the record’s full significance cannot be properly understood. In this longform critical essay, hip hop scholar and critic James McNally examines that history, drawing on an extensive archive of historic interviews and visual material to illuminate the impact this pivotal group made on hip hop’s golden age. It maps the disruption in music and values created by the freewheeling collective they belonged to, the Native Tongues; in particular the new, looser, more expressive modes of Blackness and everyteen vitality they injected into hip hop’s late-1980s moral and stylistic universe. Unpacking the tropes of familiality the Native Tongues promoted, the essay is drawn in particular to the de facto sibling relationship between Tribe’s two core MCs ‐ Malik ‘Phife’ Taylor and Kamaal ‘Q-Tip’ Fareed (born Jonathan Davis). It argues their friendship ‐ as ultimately embodied in the sound of Tribe’s music, but also, increasingly, as public biographical knowledge ‐ was central to the group’s appeal. Engaging with their fraternal ambivalence as well as their love, and with the group’s drawn-out implosion after 1998’s The Love Movement, the essay explores themes around masculine friendship and platonic male love, around estrangement, reconciliation and resilience, and, ultimately ‐ following the interruption of We Got It From Here… by Taylor’s untimely death ‐ the personal tragedy of loss. Bringing these themes together, ‘A Love Interrupted’ provides a critical reading of A Tribe Called Quest’s poignant final album.