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By globalistgirl, on June 5th, 2008

Hip-Hop and Global Identity Politics

Latoya Peterson at Racialicious has written a post about American hip-hop politics. The post and the comments revolve around weighing the poor quality of music on American radio channels in general (there are few non-commercial channels that focus on bringing quality or novelty to American radio, meaning that radio channels mostly cater to mass markets whose tastes are neither sophisticated nor change quickly), racial implications of criticising hip-hop, and the lack of awareness among white Americans that more sophisticated hip-hop rarely gets radio play.

My perspective, as a white third culture kid living in the US, is that there is a clear split in identity politics implications between saying anything at all about hip-hop depending on whether it is American or not. Perhaps because I am an outsider, I do not particularly feel like country music, which is apparently music that white people listen to, has anything to do with my identity. I am neither a connoisseur of American hip-hop nor country music, but I feel included in neither.

I know I don’t know anything from personal experience of what the more sophisticated hip-hop talks about. I’m a business brat who grew up on three continents because of my parents’ socioeconomic status. I’ve encountered cultural marginalization and repatriation difficulties, not racism or economic disadvantage. For me to pretend that I can personally relate to what hip-hop artists sing about would be ridiculous. (Also, my behavior and mannerisms attest to that.) That doesn’t mean that I don’t like it and don’t want to hear it. I like learning about others’ experiences, and hip-hop voices such experiences through one of my favorite mediums – music. Hearing about other people’s pain and oppression isn’t threatening, it’s an opportunity for connecting to others. On the other hand, the racial climate here makes me a little nervous about expressing that opinion, because I don’t know how Americans might interpret it in terms of identity politics. I have no idea if the message will be understood as meant.

Country music, however, makes me slightly uncomfortable. I’m certainly not included – although I’ve hiked, canoed, and spent a lot of time in the outdoors, far away from big cities, it has little relationship to what the American countryside is portrayed as. Also, it doesn’t help that people from small places make me a little nervous, simply because people from small places were mainly responsible for my reptriation problems. The image of country music is all about American nationalism, localism, and parochialism. Obviously, they explicitly exclude me.

However, like I’ve written about before, hip-hop from other countries than the US makes the message less enveloped in identity politics of the sort that I’m not confident I understand. I can listen to French hip-hop or Chilean hip-hop without any concern over what kind of an racial identity or politics statement I’m making to Americans. I don’t necessarily understand any better what growing up in the banlieue is like either, but listening to French-Algerian rappers doesn’t make identity statements on my own behalf like listening to American rap or hiphop seems to.

Moreover, these identity statements stay put in the US. Listening to hiphop or rap only seems to have something to do with race inside the US. As I’ve also mentioned before, those music types are stripped of racial overtones almost completely outside the US, in my experience. It seems like a good example of Arjun Appadurai’s indigenization to me. The music style means one thing in a US American context, but when others use it, it ends up meaning something else. Something else I can enjoy without having to wade through the implications of US history on race relations here.

I played 你快樂我隨意, the S.H.E. song that an American didn’t think sounded American at all, to another guinea pig American. This time, the results were different: my friend could hear the American influence, but pointed out that there was a ‘foreign’ element in the synthesizer. I had to listen to it again, thinking about the synthesizer. I realized I never thought about it, I took it for granted. So perhaps it is really indigenized music that makes me comfortable after all. No need to understand any one country’s identity politics. I’ve got enough going on in that department on my own already. It’s nice to get a break.

June 5th, 2008 | Tags: , , | Category: Identity, Outsider, US | 807 comments

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