“Hip-Hop, Asia, and Global Culture: Anti-War Japanese Rap and ...
Source: asia.kyushu-u.ac.jp
Topic: Hip Hop
Sort Desciption: What is hip-hop? It is generally thought of as five elements, namely, ... Hip-hop originated among the largely African-American communities of the South ...
Content Inside: “Hip-Hop, Asia, and Global Culture: Anti-War Japanese Rap and Young People” Ian Condry MIT Throughout Asia, indeed throughout the world, there are now numerous styles of rap music, from Seo Taiji and the Boys in South Korea to LMF from Hong Kong. In this paper, I focus on the diverse styles of Japanese rap as an example of the ways the global culture of hip-hop gets transformed in Japan. One of the interesting aspects of rap music is the fact that it was largely ignored by big media companies early on, and only later was picked up by commercial interests. In this sense, hip-hop symbolizes globalization from below. What is hip-hop? It is generally thought of as five elements, namely, the four artistic styles of breakdance, DJ, rap, and graffiti, as well as an intellectual orientation referred to as knowledge or “overstanding.” Hip-hop originated among the largely African-American communities of the South Bronx in New York City in the 1970s and has grown to become a global culture. In this talk, I focus on what rap music can tell us about the debate over how culture is changing under the influence of global media. In general, the debate divides between those who emphasize a kind of “global homogenization” and those who emphasize forms of “localization.” I take a different approach by focusing on the ways culture is made and remade through performance in nightclubs or, in what Japanese hip-hoppers call, the genba. Through a comparison of music of artists such as Zeebra, Kohei Japan, and Hime, we can see how the Japanese language is transformed to include rhyming and rhythmic accents, which are generally not a part of Japanese poetics. Yet we can also see how rap music is made Japanese by speaking to Japanese history, using Japanese poetic forms such as tanka, and through the parody of ideas of essential Japaneseness. Perhaps the most striking examples of rap music’s role in youth culture involves those songs that question wartime aggressi ...
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