The Body and Soul of Club Culture

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This paper theorizes that hip-hop has become a key factor in the subcultural negotiation and construction of hybridized, black-inflected identities among South Asian young men in the U.K. Indians, Pakistanis, and Bangladeshis are examples of ethnic minority groups living in the Desi Diaspora (i.e., South Asian émigrés and their descendants who are physically detached from their ancestral homelands). “British Asian” rappers and their relatively youthful diasporic fans appear to be involved in a complex process of reconfiguring and synthesizing relevant idioms and vernaculars found not only in global hip-hop and their ancestral homeland, but also their “host” country’s local environment. Because of hip-hop’s primary ties to African-American culture, British Asian teens and young adults have been exposed vicariously to “black” concerns, argot, and values – including respect, coolness, and authenticity (“keeping it real”). This paper reveals that hip-hop and related identity markers of “blackness” and “masculinity” are especially appealing to British Asian young men, many of whom are enamored by the cultural positioning of African-American rappers as rebellious, powerful spokesmen for a beleaguered minority underclass. This paper analyzes a wide variety of qualitative sources, including the transcripts of previously published interviews with British Desi hip-hop artists and the lyrical content of selected rap songs recorded by Muslims, Hindus, and Sikhs in the U.K.

Swahili Forum, 2007

This article examines Bongo Flavour music (also known as 'muziki wa kizazi kipya', the ‘music of the new generation’), a Swahili blend of hip-hop and other foreign-derived genres that emerged in post-socialist Tanzania in the early 2000s. By focusing on the extent to which this genre reflects and affects urban youth cultures -- along with the youths' shifting identities, aspirations, constraints and language choices -- this paper advances scholarship on the central yet ambiguous position taken by African youths (by no means a fixed and homogeneous category). It is based on personal interviews and informal conversations conducted in 2004-2006 with 16 Bongo Flavour artists, 13 fans, four radio DJ’s, and three Tanzanian music journalists and producers; performance attendance in Dar es Salaam, Mwanza, Songea and Mbinga; as well as on letters and text messages published in Swahili tabloids and magazines, in which Bongo Flavour fans praise and criticise Bongo Flavour songs, video-clips, and artists’ lifestyles. In particular, from May 2004 to November 2005 I collected and collated material from the following publications: Alasiri, Amani, Baab Kubwa, Bang, Dimba, Championi, Deiwaka, Femina, Ijumaa, Kasheshe, Kitangoma, Kiu, Komesha, Lete Raha, Maisha, Majira, Risasi, Sani, Tausi, Uwazi and Zeze. This article stems from my overall interest in the social, cultural and political meanings of past and present popular music in Tanzania, as well as on African print cultures.

This was my PhD thesis, completed in 1996 under the supervision of Georgina Born, in the Department of Media and Communication at what was then called Goldsmiths College, at the University of London (now rebranded as Goldsmiths University of London). The original abstract now follows: The thesis is an investigation of the following question: to what extent have the independent record companies associated with the two most important 'movements' in British popular music culture during the last twenty years (punldpost-punk and dance music culture) succeeded in democratising the British music business? Part One introduces the key terms in the question. It provides a definition of democratisation with regard to media production, and outlines some of the factors which might constrain producers who wish to bring about such democratisation in the contemporary cultural industries. It examines the particular, but recently diminished, importance attached to independent cultural production as a means of democratisation in studies of 'post-Fordism', and in popular music history. Part Two focuses on punk and post-punk as long-term institutional and aesthetic challenges to the music industry. The emphasis on access and decentralisation in punk politics is analysed, along with its ambivalence towards mass culture. Contrasting case studies are provided of firms which sought to set up alternative networks of distribution, and those who came to work more closely with major corporations. Their respective aims and achievements are assessed. Part Three analyses the role of small dance music labels in the British music industry since the late 1980s 'acid house' explosion. The cultural politics of dance music are examined, stressing the relatively limited attention paid to issues of production. A general survey of the British dance music industry in the late 1980s and early 1990s is provided, which pays special attention to the repercussions of partnerships between independents and corporations. There follows an analysis of how a particular dance music label acts as a forum for debates about issues such as digital sampling, multiculturalism and anti-racism, and black identity. Part Four provides a comparison of the democratising achievements of the two movements, and draws out some of the implications of the thesis for work in media studies, cultural studies and the sociology of youth subcultures.

This book edited by Sharma, Hutnyk and Sharma writes back the presence of South Asian youth into a rapidly expanding and exuberant music scene; and celebrates this as a dynamic expression of the experience of diaspora with an urgent political consciousness. One of the first attempts to situate such production within the study of race and ethnicity, it uncovers the crucial role that South Asian dance musics - from Hip-hop, Qawwali, and Bhangra throughSoul, Indie and Jungle - have played in a new urban cultural politics. The chapter by Kaur and Kalra, 'New Paths for South Asian Identity and Musical Creativity', attempts to broaden the language to describe diasporic Asian identities and transnational flows and connections through music.

2004

This dissertation examines electronic dance music: its transnational production and dissemination, its techno-universalist rhetoric, its racial and sexual politics, its Eurocentric mythologies and liberal humanist ideologies. To grasp the possibilities and problematics of digitally-created pop music, I will draw upon a multiplicity of discourses generated by electronic musicians, disc jockeys (DJs), remixers, producers, club/rave promoters, techno/house fans, club-goers, ravers, popular music historians, cultural critics, music industry insiders, dance press, multinational major labels, independent imprints, and regional retailers. By tuning into the contentious dialogues between the makers, shapers, and buyers of computerized dance music, I hope to illustrate the multifarious cultural functions a mass-produced sonic commodity can have. In addition to considering the positive aspects of digitally-crafted music, this project demystifies the utopian rhetoric emanating from dance music aficionados/promoters/producers. My work explores how electronic dance music employs “postmodern” technologies in the service of Enlightenment discourses (such as its tendency to cast itself as the universal language of the Information Age or its Cartesian delineation of the music listening audience into those that ‘feed the head’ and those that serve the hedonist flesh). I also examine how electronic dance music reflects and reinforces imperialist desires (the white male producer’s use of orgasmic loops regenerated from the vocals of black/Latina female divas and racialized queers in ‘sexy’ dance tracks), Romantic notions (the widespread assumption that electronic music producers are divinely-inspired auteurs; the techno/house fan’s elitist admiration of musicians that remain true to their “art” by remaining in unprofitable underground markets; and the music critic’s celebration of sampling and remixing as high art), and modernist concerns (the DJ’s obsession with mastery, the intensely-policed borders between high/low genres, the producer’s preoccupation with technological progress).

Cambridge Companion to Hip-Hop, 2015

Since the mid-2000s, the focus of the Japanese hip-hop scene has shifted from pop-friendly groups like Rip Slyme to harder-edged rappers like Anarchy, Seeda, MSC, Shingo Nishinari, and Dengaryu. While this hardness has always existed in Japanese hip-hop, the severe contraction in the Japanese economy since the mid-2000s has provided an authenticity to hard-edged tales and made them more sympathetic to a larger swath of youth. This chapter introduces some of the expressions of marginalization that have intensified during this period - a shift to hardcore rap, focus on the local, involvement in social movements, neo-nationalism, and moral panics. The chapter begins with a brief discussion of the scene's history and its aesthetic considerations, which are part of the localization process.

Africa, 2012

The Muslim-dominated "Swahili Coast"has always served as a conceptual as well as physical periphery for post-colonial Kenya. This article takes Kenyan youth music under the influence of global hip-hop as an ethnographic entry into the dynamics of identity and citizenship in this region. Kenyan youth music borrows from global hip-hop culture the idea that an artist must "represent the real." The ways in which these regional artists construct their public personae thus provide rich data on "cultural citizenship," in Aihwa Ong’s (1996) sense of citizenship as subjectification. I focus here on youth music production in the Kenyan coastal city of Mombasa between 2004 and 2007. During this time, some local artists adopted a representational strategy that subtly reinscribed the symbolic violence to which members of the coast’s Muslim-Swahili society have long been subjected. I examine the representational strategies that were adopted during this period by Mombasan artists who happened to be members of the Muslim- Swahili society ("subjects of the Swahili coast," as I name them), with an ethnographic eye and ear trained on what they say about the ways in which young subjects of the Swahili coast are objectified and subjectified as "Kenyan youth" in the twenty-first century.