Beat Streets in the Global Hood: Connective Marginalities of the Hip Hop Globe

Public Enemy showed us that Rap music is not afraid of subjects connected with national and race issues. We started to see how powerful Rap could be if it were used in expressing our attitudes. The kind of lyrics and consciousness that reveals the whole process of civilization, which is the story of dominance. -Benjamin, Croatian fan of rap group Public Enemy1 At the beginning of the twenty-first century and the third millennium the term "global village" has become a cliche. The telecommunications revolution has situated us in an Information Age that is proliferated with various high-technology media: cellular telephones, web television, over fifty national cable television channels including interactive ZDTV, computer-mediated communication through the Internet with chat rooms of fictitiously-constructed identities, speech technologies that allow for computing between different languages, and instantaneous satellite-- projected news stories throughout the planet, just to name a few. The concept of global virtual reality is no longer a vision of a few computer hackers, but is fast-becoming a household phenomenon. A concomitant global pop culture, based in music and dance videos, simulcasts of rock concerts throughout the major metropoles, and an intensely-marketed "modern" lifestyle through all manner of brand names and symbols of consumer goods, clothes, athletic shoes, and head gear are the materiality of a global youth-oriented culture. Young people throughout the planet, in their formative stages of puberty and beyond, are particularly affected by this fast-paced-MTV-soundbyte-information-glutted age that is at the center of the increasingly homogenized post-modernization process. African American music, dance, and style, at the epicenter of American culture, are not only part of this technology-mediated global youth culture, but are absolutely essential to it. Black music and the dances that depict the changing "afro-sonic" styles are bought and sold in the exigencies of a global supply-and-demand capitalist marketplace on a daily basis. Music legend Quincy Jones remembers that When the tenor saxophonist Coleman Hawkins recorded "Body and Soul" it took from 1939 to 1953 to get the word around the world that the song was out. Today, you have instantaneous releases by satellite. (10E) In today's world "neosoul" artist D'Angelo can be marketed to new touring sites in South East Asia, just as rapper Hammer was in Russia in the early nineties, and just as Barry Gordy's Motown recording artists were to the Western European market thirty years before either of them. The steadily increasing extension of black music's influence is part of the United States becoming the world power. However, black music's global influence is also due to it being "the most unique cultural product..." as Cornel West recognizes, "created by Americans of any hue" (Kruger and Mariani 94). Along with global marketing strategies of the American music industry, for better or worse, American values and lifestyles in all of their diversity have followed. Black popular culture today is even more snared in larger economic vicissitudes-it is what sells to more people than ever before-while simultaneously being at the nucleus of a postmodern web of control over global social narratives of identity. The most invading of black music in the last twenty years has been rap. Global hip hop youth culture has become a phenomenon in the truest sense of the word and has affected nearly every country on the map. William Eric Perkins, editor of the seminal scholarly anthology Droppin' Science: Critical Essays on Rap and Hip Hop Culture (1996), explains that the hip hop revolution is just that, an uprooting of the old way in style and culture, and the introduction of a taste of black and Latino urban authenticity to every corner of the globe. (257) Nelson George, in his new Hip Hop America, extols the persuasiveness of hip hop culture: From Vancouver and Toronto in Canada, to Dakar in Senegal, to Holland, to Cuba's Havana, to every place satellites beam music videos and CDs are sold (or bootlegged or counterfeited), hip hop has made an impression. …