Hip-Hop in the UK - EPMOW Vol 11

Sociological Review, 1999

This article offers an ethnographic account of the significance of rap music and hip hop culture for white youth in the city of Newcastle upon Tyne in north-east England. Although white appropriations of black music in Britain have been well documented in sociological work, there is currently very little research on white responses to rap and hip hop. During the course of this article I identify two distinct responses on the part of white Newcastle youth to rap and hip hop. I then go on to argue that, despite their differing nature, each of these responses can be seen as bound up with issues of locality and local experience.

2015

Popular Music, 2020

This article draws on ethnographic fieldwork conducted over the course of one year in London and Bristol to examine the performance of rap in English youth centres. Youth centres play a significant role in supporting and shaping rap culture. However, historically dominant narratives within hip-hop studies and hip-hop culture depict rap as a vernacular cultural form that emerges from ‘the street’, and which derives its authenticity through its relation to ‘the street’. We seek to move beyond such discourses and towards a recognition of the institutional processes, structures and networks that shape and sustain rap culture. Our focus on the institutional life of rap leads to an analysis of the various possibilities, limitations and tensions that arise in the coming together of public funding, and social policy priorities, local organisations and black vernacular culture.

1996

The copyright of this thesis rests with the author. No quotation from it should be published without the written consent of the author and information derived from it should be acknowledged. 4 Bhangra in Newcastle: Music, ethnic identity and 101 the role of local knowledge. 5 Hip hop am Main, rappin' on the Tyne: Hip hop 136 authenticity as a local construct-a comparative analysis. 6 Local live music, sociality and the politics of 171 musical taste: The case of a young North East tribute band and its audience. Conclusion: Towards a new interpretation of the relationship between youth culture and popular music.

AlterNative, 2016

This article explicitly focuses upon the relationship Aboriginal Australia has with hip-hop culture. Hip-hop has become not only a tool for larger identity formation for Aboriginal Australians, but also a way to preserve traditional styles that historically wilt from outside mainstream influences. After conducting a brief analysis of historical, political, and cultural similarities and differences between the African American and Aboriginal Australian experience, four mini-profiles of Aboriginal Australian hip-hop artists help explore what American and Canadian cultural critic and scholar Henry Giroux (1999) terms "public pedagogy" for direct political action and influence among those marginalized from mainstream culture. The article concludes after teasing out the tension of how hip-hop asserts itself as a liberating force when created and communicated within constrained political environs that potentially dictate its true force and impact.

2018

Based on fieldwork with breakers living in New York, Osaka, and Perth, as well from prior experiences within my field of study, this thesis builds on a growing body of scholarship which examines the productions, expressions and consumptions of hip hop culture. This study looks at how breakers-hip hop dance practitioners-work to produce, sustain and transform hip hop culture in ways that are local and unique. It is not, however, my intention to set out a definitive list of good or bad, authentic or unauthentic, notions of hip hop, or to suggest that there is one true or correct way in which to participate and identify as a member of. What is emphasised are the ways in which breakers, through their embodied dance practices, negotiate, express, understand and conceptualise hip hop. The title of this thesis, "Our Lives are Lived in Freestyle", is a line from a spoken word poem, by a breaker from Texas named Marlon. In breaking, to "freestyle" means to improvise in the moment; to use the tools one has at their disposal to perform and create. Hence, this term "freestyle" is an apt metaphor for this thesis as it illustrates the dynamic and improvisational modalities by which hip hop is reflexively constituted, pushed and pulled in a variety of different directions, by a diverse and ever-changing aggregate of different peoples from around the world. Throughout the chapters of this thesis I demonstrate how hip hop is a globalising and diverse social field, governed not by any institutions, offices or titles, but rather by individual hip hop persons, within and across different local settings. This study contributes to contemporary anthropological writings on culture, process, agency and social action. Additionally, this research also contributes to a growing body of hip hop scholarship, which consider hip hop and its many practices as a living, transformative, global phenomenon.

American Behavioral Scientist, 2011

Hip-hop permeates modern global society, and yet, there remains remain various divisions within it. Following up on an interdisciplinary academic conference, the Lehman Conference on Hip-Hop, this special issue highlights a number of aspects in hip-hop's development, and looks toward an ever increasing globalization of what was, initially, a neighborhood based cultural practice. The authors assembled here examine hip-hop within such contexts as social protest, entertainment, and identity formation, and also as a response to dominant structures, such as race, gender inequality, and capitalism. Their investigations consider hip-hop's roots and branches, and its connections to politics, culture and consumption. This special issue also focuses, in detail, at some of hip-hop's many practices, raising questions about its use for expressing the thorny topics of race, class, national identity, gender and sexuality. But the overall theme is one, which was expressed in the conference's initial theme: from local to global practice. It is this process, in particular, which we are attempting to better understand. We are also particularly concerned to explore ways marginal groups within hip-hop and the larger society, like LGBTQ communities (especially of color) and women of color also use hip-hop as a form of protest to critique social ills.

2017