Global Hip-Hop & The African Diaspora

Global Hip-Hop and the African Diaspora Halifu Osumare, Ph.D. University of California, Davis, USA In Black Cultural Traffic: Crossroads in Global Performance and Popular Culture. Harry Elam and Kennell Jackson, Eds., University of Michigan Press (2005) Global hip-hop youth culture is the most recent manifestation in the story of the exportation of black American cultural production, starting with 19th century minstrelsy and continuing through the 1950s cross-over rock and roll era to the 60s soul music and Black Power revolution to hip-hop culture of the 80s until today. What has changed is the speed at which black music and dance are marketed and the global reach that they now command. Through Facebook, YouTube, and international cell phone technology, black popular culture is exchanged within minutes. The result is that U.S. black American culture continues to be mired in social narratives of “blackness” that proliferate multi-dimensionally in the international arena, commingling with other country’s issues of social marginality. However, these narratives take on different meanings in Africa and its diaspora than in other areas of the world like Asia. Hip-hop aesthetics, steeped in polyrhythm, antiphony, an orality of social commentary, and a vital embodiment of all of the above, is repositioned by sub-Saharan black African, Caribbean, and Brazilian youths because of their cultural connections and contributions to the transiting black aesthetic itself. African diasporic cultural connections, situated within particular issues of social marginality of each site by hip-hop youths, are the subject of this essay. In proving these social resonances through hip-hop, I argue that continuing social critiques through the arts of extant social inequities from Brazilian favelas to poor Afro-Cuban barrios to U.S. ghettos has been a significant part of the history of the African diaspora. By investigating the international diffusion of a culture, one is essentially inquiring into an interactive, dialogic process that links discrete local sites and real people. Popular music scholar Tony Mitchell, using Roland Robertson’s (1995) term “glocal” to capture the relationships between global and local, contends that, “ . . . each is in many ways defined by the other and . . . they frequently intersect, rather than being polarized opposites.” Tony Mitchell, “Another Root: Hip-Hop Outside the USA,” in Tony Mitchell, ed. Global Noise: Rap and Hip-Hop Outside the USA (Middletown, CN: Wesleyan University Press), 11. At one end of the global-local paradigm is international political economy, with the contrived mechanisms of multinational corporations as purveyors of pop culture. For example, in the United States there is Time-Warner, Microsoft, Viacom, BMG, EMI, and in Brazil there is MTV Brasil (now owned by Grupo Abril), Nickelodeon Brazil, BH1 Brazil, and others. No matter what country these multinational corporations of popular culture create virtualized desires that we define as global postmodern culture. At the other end, exist discrete loci of exchanges of information, aesthetics, pleasure, and perspectives on age-old issues of human hierarchies in various local manifestations. The global-local interchange is indeed complex and is continually metamorphosing. Hip-hop culture has become a binding youth subculture that has enabled young people in disparate local communities to share a sense of a common cultural connection. Yet, the fact that the global hip-hop generation is being reared on MTV and music videos does not completely explain the intricacies of various international sites’ identification with hip-hop and its adaptation to local issues and aesthetics. I turn now to a brief investigation of other locally-based historical implications of this global youth phenomenon. Connective Marginalities of the Hip-hop Globe While most adults over forty years of age get their impressions of hip-hop from the hyper-sexed, spoon-fed, commercialized music videos of MTV, BET, and VH-1, there exists a multifaceted and empowered hip-hop “underground” movement that generally tends to promote a more socially conscious rap music. This branch of hip-hop culture has evolved from the “political” and “conscious” rap era in the late 80s and early 90s. Groups and artists like Public Enemy, Brand Nubian, Poor Righteous Teachers, Queen Latifah, and the now defunct A Tribe Called Quest popularized quasi-Nation of Islam and Afrocentric probings, laced with street-wise allusions that spread social critiques of America globally. This era is not without its own contradictions. For an extensive exploration of those contradictions, from an African American, older generation perspective, see Ernest Allen, Jr.’s “Making the Strong Survive: The Contours and Contradictions of Message Rap,” William Eric Perkins, ed., Droppin’ Science: Critical Essays on Rap Music and Hip-Hop Culture (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1996), 158-191. For example, Queen Latifah’s “Ladies First” 1991 video combined her talents with black British rapper Monie Love to render a searing indictment of both sexism and black social marginalization in general and South African apartheid specifically. “Ladies First” was recorded on Latifah’s debut album, All Hail the Queen (Tommy Boy Music, 1989). The Louisiana State University English and Women’s Studies Departments have utilized the video on an anthology of female pop singers’ feminist statements. Today’s emcees who don’t get regular rotation on the music video channels or commercial radio’s Top Forty, like The Roots, Lauryn Hill, Dead Prez, The Coup, Bahamadiya, Talib Kweli, Common, and Mos Def, Drake, and others continue today’s socially-conscious and self-empowering thrust of hip-hop. Through expanding international tours, artists such as these motivate youths internationally to explore their own issues of marginalization through layered, nuanced metaphors and rhyming allusions. Exactly how do the youth of other nations, who often speak languages other than English, decode and reinvent African American and Latino hip-hop culture emanating from urban U.S.? The answer partly lies in what I call hip-hop’s connective marginalities. These are resonances acknowledged by youth internationally with black expressive culture first generated from the Bronx, Compton and South Central in Los Angeles, and East Oakland and Marin City in Northern California. Corresponding international sites where rap music, break dance, and graffiti art took on early strongholds were poorer working-class French housing projects in the banlieues (outer suburbs) of French cities like Paris and Marseilles, housing projects in Poznan, Poland, poor areas of war-torn Bosnia and Croatia, and the Roppongi club district of Tokyo where black service men congregate in night clubs owned by the Japanese wives of African expatriates. In Africa and the diaspora, South African shantytowns like Soweto, favelas of Brazilian cities like Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo, and the poor Afro-Cuban district of Cojimar in Havana. Yet class is only one of four major connective marginalities that, I argue, tend to bind the hip-hop generation internationally. Connections or resonances can take the form of culture (Jamaica and Cuba), class (North African Arabs living in France), historical oppression (Native Americans), or simply the discursive construction of youth as a peripheral social status (Japan). Joe Austin and Michael Nevin Williard, editors of Generation of Youth (1998), remind us that the term youth can become “a metaphor for perceived social change and its projected consequences; as such it is an enduring locus for displaced social anxieties.” Joe Austin and Michael Nevin Willard, “Introduction: Angels of History, Demons of Culture,” Joe Austin and Michael Nevin Willard, eds., Generations of Youth: Youth Cultures and History in Twentieth-Century America (New York: New York University Press, 1998), 1. Along these lines, rap music becomes an in-your-face rebellious youth style that does challenge the adult status quo wherever it expresses itself on the globe. The generational dynamic of hip-hop’s international subculture remains, even as hip-hoppers themselves grow older. However, rap and the entire expressive culture of hip-hop (deejaying, breaking, and aerosol art) resonate not only with the anxiety of youthful social rebellion, but extant global socio-political inequities as well. France’s rap group NTM is a prime example of a growing Arab underclass in France. They have been dubbed the Public Enemy of France for their toughness and the rage in the content of their rap lyrics. Historical oppression can be viewed in Sudden Rush, Hawaii’s most developed rap group. This Big Island-based group of emcees raps about Native Hawaiians’ historic bonds of oppression with African Americans and Native Americans through strong pro-Hawaiian sovereignty messages. Sudden Rush posits the political hegemony of the haole, or foreign white, plutocracy in the Pacific that eventually led to the overthrow of the Hawaiian monarchy as a part of the last five hundred years of general displacement of people of color. Figure 1 shows a diagram of how these various socio-historical realms overlap and inform the proliferation of global hip-hop. The generational connection of youth is the largest connection, but class, historical oppression and culture link many hip-hop communities, complicating the global phenomenon. Hip-hop culture, as an extension of African American and Latino popular culture, then, becomes a global signifier for several forms of marginalization. In each case “blackness” along with its perceived status is implicated as a global sign. Together with the aesthetics of the music’s low-register bass drum beats, whether digitized or played live, rapped messages of hip-hop have created a world wide cultural phenomenon that we are only beginning to fathom. Figure 1 Diagram of Connective Marginalities of Global Hip-hop © Halifu Osumare, 1999 Hip-hop on the African Continent In Africa and its diaspora, hip-hop is less of a sign to be appropriated and adapted for indigenous purposes than a sharing across a root aesthetic. From this viewpoint, hip-hop culture illuminates a connective marginality of culture in Africa and its diaspora. Academia has a growing embrace of hip-hop and has acknowledged this cultural link as a valid site of intellectual inquiry. To open the UCLA “Power Moves” Hip-hop conference on May 10, 1999, a Cuban music ensemble played sacred rhythms of the Yoruba orisha (deities) and secular rumba songs. After the powerful rhythms and songs had subsided, Richard Yarborough, Acting Director of UCLA’s Center for African American Studies, explained in his welcoming address that “we started with the drums because that’s where hip-hop comes from.” Hip-hop culture’s continuity with African diasporic practices is not only based in the orality of rap as a trajectory of the West African griot tradition or the toasting and boasting traditions of Jamaica, but the deeply-affecting rhythm through which oral text is transmitted. Today, rhythm is the component of Western popular music that universally defines the modern cool of pop culture. The pulse of the drum and the thump of the electric bass overlay one another to create the propelling drive in all contemporary pop music. Rhythm is the foundation of the emcee’s oral phrasing and metaphoric allusions, creating a dense, polyrhythmic bricolage, just as ancient West Africa Ewe or Mande cross-rhythms do for festivals and ceremonies in their respective cultures today. In this sense, the discussion of the African diaspora’s continued cultural links with Africa has little to do with Eric Hobsbawm’s paradigm of “invented traditions,” but rather has everything to do with modernity’s generalized irreverent process of secularization of often sacred traditions. Eric Hobsbawn and Terence Ranger, eds., The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983,1993). Certainly the musical forms that I mention do not fall under Hobsbawm’s criteria of “a process of formalization and ritualization, characterized by references to the past . . . .”(4). The continuing 21st century secularization of African aesthetics in U.S. and Caribbean forms is the historical legacy now bequeathed to the African homeland from its diaspora. To be sure, Africa has recognized these New World resonances as evidenced by the mid 20th century rhumba orchestras of Kinshasa, the jazz bands of Accra, and the popular dance styles in Dakar’s urban discos after the early 1970s Soul to Soul tour. The contemporary hip-hop movement has intensified this repatriation of black American music and dance, linking distant African sites such as Lagos, Dakar, Cape Town, Dar-Es-Salam, and Nairobi. The Internet has allowed African youths across nations and ethnic groups to connect through hip-hop culture. One can go online and read interviews with emcees such as PBS (Powerful Black Soul) and rapper Pee Froiss in Senegal, Prophets of Da City in South Africa, Pox Presha of Nairobi, Sos-Bi of Tanzania. African female rappers are also represented, such as Nubian Sister and Godessa of South Africa. These emcees list their artistic lineage to specific African American rappers, internationally-known African singers such as Yousou N’Dour and Miriam Makeba, as well as Caribbean pop stars. Cultural and aesthetic resonances across Africa and the diapsora through hip-hop abound. At the time of this writing, Africanhiphop.com had formed a partnership with a South African site called Afribeat.com to sponsor a series of web-based rap shows known as Hip-hoperation (June 15-July 6, 2002). With the assistance of new technology, African youth are linking the continent through hip-hop in ways that their parents could never have dreamt. People-to-people hip-hop connections between Africa and its diaspora do not, however, negate international pop culture industry and technological hierarchies. Hip-hop culture takes its place within the larger context of Africa’s neocolonialist umbilical cord, linking the continent to the western-dominated media for news and popular taste. Malian film scholar Manthia Diawara observes that the global media “wired Africa to the West, . . . to the extent that Africans are isolated from nation to nation, but united in looking toward Europe and America for the latest news, politics and culture.” Manthia Diawara, “Toward a Regional Imaginary in Africa,” Jameson and Miyoshi, eds., The Cultures of Globalization, 103. Although the World Wide Web has ameliorated this dynamic to a degree by linking people to people---community to community, aspiring African emcees are definitely in competition with the hegemony of American music promoted by the global pop culture media. African American rhythm and blues that influenced their parents and grandparents’ generations dominates the airwaves. Rap music is only beginning to get mainstream radio air play in Africa’s urban centers, and when it does American stars like Jay-Z and P-Diddy are more likely featured than their own indigenous rappers. Cultural resonances across Africa and its diaspora through hip-hop subculture manifest within continuing international hierarchies and exigencies of global capital. Hip-hop in the Diaspora African based music and dance aesthetics, globally diffused by the trans-Atlantic slave trade, are central to the forming of what Paul Gilroy (1993) calls the black Atlantic experience. They served as the foundation of what was eventually to be called popular, vernacular culture throughout the Americas. When deciphering the origins of contemporary hip-hop in the South Bronx, we discover that diasporic expressive practices were the bedrock of the inchoate youth subculture, rather than a monolithic African American one. Indeed, Robert Farris Thompson reminds us that contrary to the concept of a singular black culture in North America, the Bronx in the 1970s, as it does today, was truly representative of the black Atlantic. . . . hip-hop history is the appreciation that these creative people can be divided into at least five distinct African-influenced cultures: First, English-speaking blacks from Barbados . . .. Afrika Bambaataa’s mother and her two sisters were from Barbados, as was the family of that other prominent Bronx DJ, Grandmaster Flash. Second, black Jamaicans, . . . among them figures most famously DJ Kool Herc . . ., originally from Kingston . . . . Third, Thousands of blacks from Cuba. . . . It was only natural for Afro-Cuban conga drums to become one of the favored percussive springboards for early breakdance improvisation . . . . Fourth, there are thousands and thousands of boricuas---Puerto Ricans . . . . Fifth and finally, there are the North American blacks, whose music was jazz and soul and funk. Robert Farris Thompson, “Hip-Hop 101,”Droppin’ Science: Critical Essays on Rap Music and Hip-Hop Culture, ed. William Eric Perkins (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1996) 214-15. In reality, hip-hop culture comes from an amalgam of African diasporic cultures that reflect U.S. urban life in New York. Concomitantly, the creolization process in the Caribbean and parts of South America was and is a reflection of this cross-cultural fertilization expressed in music and dance. It is quite easy to construct hip-hop affiliations to English speaking Jamaica with its dancehall, sound system culture that specifically influenced hip-hop’s beginnings as a deejay’s culture. Jamaican-born Kool DJ Kerc is credited with bringing his culture to Bronx parks and clubs in the early 70s, switching from dub and reggae music to funk and soul tracks that were more familiar to his black North American audience. Twenty years later hip-hop’s full blown mass market era, the same cultural sensibilities appeared in the collaboration between Bronx emcee KRS-One and Jamaican dub artist Shabba Ranks on their seminal track “The Jam” (Shabba Ranks, As Raw as Ever, Epic Records, 1991). The two artists made explicit the close association between hip-hop’s rhythmic orality and Jamaican dub’s cadenced rhymes. For further exploration of Jamaica’s sound system culture in relation to hip-hop see S. H. Fernando, Jr.’s The New Beats: Exploring the Music, Culture, and Attitudes of Hip-Hop (New York: Doubleday, 1994), particularly his chapter called “Rap’s Raggamuffin Roots.” Similar associations exist with Trinidad, steeped in the often scathing calypsonian social commentary tradition. Trinidad and Tobago’s contemporary rapso movement, for example, facilely blends American rap with calypso rhythms. Similar hip-hop’s connections exist with the non-English speaking Caribbean and South America as well. Youths, whose first language is Spanish, French, or Portuguese, are also making multi-layered, metaphoric rhymed verse to a hip-hop beat box pulse mixed with Latin-flavored rhythms. Below, I summarize scholars and journalists who are doing extensive research on hip-hop in Spanish speaking Cuba and Portuguese speaking Brazil. Cuba’s Ambivalent Raperos In Cuba one of the few rap groups that has been able to transverse the tricky politics of Castro’s cultural revolution is indicative of the dynamics of hip-hop culture in that country. Cuban rap group Orishas debuted on the international pop music scene in 2000. As journalist Rodrigo Salazar explains about two of the rappers in Orishas, Yotuel and Ruzzo, they “dared to wax poetic about conditions in present-day Cuba,” first in Wu-Tang clan-like beats, and then eventually in Cuban rumba rhythms with a smooth rap flow. Rodrigo Salazar, “Cuba Libre,” The Source, March 2001, 203. Their moniker, the term for Yoruba deities or orishas who are at the cosmological center of the Afro-Cuban Santeria religion (as well as Brazilian Candomble, know as orixas), alludes to their privileging of indigenous Cuban culture through American rap. Yet they eventually found Cuba to be stifling for their artistic development. Although Orishas was granted permission by Cuban immigration to leave the country on occasional tours, continuing tensions with the government about the length of time it took to receive exit visas and resulting missed engagements abroad resulted in their move to Europe. Eventual exile creates another kind of struggle for Cuban artists. This is a situational peculiarity of the would-be Cuban hip-hop emcee trying to join the international music circuit. Salazar captures the dilemma poignantly when he states that, Unlike their North American contemporaries, whose meager economic background created the “bling bling” culture, Orishas’ struggle is exile. Every song is tinged with that sense of displacement. Songs like “A Lo Cubano” and “Madre,” a letter to a mother worried about her son living abroad, capture this sense of melancholy. Salazar, “Cuba Libre,” 203. Orishas’ melancholy because of their ex-patriot status echoes a theme throughout the African diaspora experience. The displacement due to political exile is reminiscent of forced exile as a result of slavery and the longing for Mother Africa in various metaphoric dimensions running throughout the history of the Americas. “A Lo Cubano” (To The Cuban) represents Orishas’ idealization of the best of what it means to be Cuban, to which they now must cling while forced to live outside of their beloved homeland for their artistic freedom. The tension that exists between the Cuban government and some of its exiled citizens reached a crescendo during the U.S.-Cuban crisis in 2000 in the form of the Elian Gonzalez family custody battle in Miami. An April San Francisco Chronicle newspaper cartoon represented the essential strain between Castro’s socialist revolution and the hegemony of American-generated world popular culture and commodification. Figure 2 shows little Elian returning to Cuba in a Nike T-shirt and with a protruding tongue, flippantly chanting “WHAAAAASUUUP.” A dismayed, hands-akimbo Castro reacts defiantly, responding “send him back.” Commodified U.S. Hip-hop culture’s rampant materialism that attracts so many poor black and Latino youth in America’s ghettos, now gone global, is in tension with the realities of poor countries in the Caribbean and South America. Figure 2 San Francisco Chronicle Cartoon In the cartoon, expensive athletic wear promoted by many black sport and rap stars and Budweiser beer’s then multi-million dollar campaign appropriating yet another black slang term, “What’s up,” became a global signifiers of American late capitalism and its entrenchment in pop culture in the postmodern era. Many governments, weary of the effects of pervasive U.S. popular culture on its youth and ultimately its national lifestyle, have taken steps to reject or slow down the intrusion of American music and dance media. They know all too well that popular culture goes hand in hand with the fetishization of consumer goods and superficial materialism. For example, both India and China successfully kept MTV out their countries until the early 21st century. Hip-hop scholar Tricia Rose explains part of particular state governments’ objection to American popular culture, and specifically hip-hop: Rap’s ability to draw the attention of the nation, to attract crowds around the world in places where English is rarely spoken is fascinating elements of rap’s social power. Unfortunately, some this power is linked to U.S.-based cultural imperialism, in that rappers benefit from the disproportionate exposure of U.S. artists around the world facilitated by music industry marketing muscle. Tricia Rose, Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America (Hanover, CN: Wesleyan University Press, 1994), 19. American popular music, promoted by the aforementioned major five U.S. transnational music conglomerates, has set the world standard. The U.S. music stars associated with R&B, reggae, salsa, and particularly rap, underpinned by the economic and distribution clout of these companies, leave little room for success by indigenous artists throughout the world, unless they are promoted by one of the regional subsidiaries of these companies. Although the hip-hop underground, with its stalwart local adherents, attempt to counteract this global U.S. music domination, American musicians, and particularly rap emcees, dominate the international popular music scene. Because of the Cuban government’s strident attempts to either stave off U.S. hip-hop’s commercial influence or to control it by bringing rap groups under the Ministry of Culture, a diversity of Cuban hip-hop has largely developed as an underground movement. Smuggled in CDs and tapes and roof-top rigged antennas that receive commercial Miami radio stations become the antidote to the two government-run radio stations that play only Latin music and speeches by Fidel Castro. Early Cuban hip-hop aficionados may very well have become influenced not only by black American rappers, but also by Cuban American rappers heard on Miami radio stations like DJ Laz (Lazaro Mendez) rapping in Spanish over merengue rhythms, long a musical staple throughout the Caribbean. In many ways the beginning scenario of Cuban hip-hop is reminiscent of the early Bronx days when poor youth would tap into the U.S. utility company Con Edison’s electrical poles to run their outdoor sound systems, as well as sell bootlegged hip-hop mixed tapes out of the trunks of cars as promotion through an underground economy. Viewed internationally, poverty, whether under democracy or socialism, promotes both creative contrivances by youth to find their pleasure in alternative popular culture forms, and similar social counter-narratives within attempted marginalization. Cuba’s government-controlled hip-hop movement consists of over 250 rap posses. These Cuban rappers or raperos often appear at Club Las Vegas in downtown Havana or in the funkier Club La Mona in the backyard of a cultural house in central Havana. According to journalism scholar Annelise Wunderlich, who did fieldwork in Cuba as a graduate student, one of the main Cuban rap producers is Pablo Herrera, original producer of Orishas. “He managed and produced Amenaza, who took the top prize in one of Havana’s four-year old Swing hip-hop festival . . . .” Herrera also works with female rap groups Instincto and Sexto Sentido who have appeared on the festival. Shawnee Smith, “Words and Deed,” Billboard, n. p. Online. Internet, HYPERLINK http://afrocubaweb.com http://afrocubaweb.com/ rap/pabloherrera.htm, p. 2. Herrera’s conception of the underground Havana hip-hop scene is that it is congruent with Cuba’s revolutionary ideals. Hired directly under the Ministry of Culture, Herrera obviously espouses direct party line when he positions Cuban hip-hop as “the empowerment of youth as a battle spear for a more conscious society . . ., [perceiving hip-hop as a revolutionary force that] is serving the country, not being an antagonistic tool.” Annelise Wunderlich, “Underground Revolution, ColorLines, Fall 2001, 37. Yet given the flagrant consumerism of rap in the U.S., Herrera’s representation of rap as promoting the revolution’s ideals is not without merit. After coming to New York and interfacing with the New York hip-hop community, he has realistic assessments of Cuban hip-hop vis-à-vis the commercial rap business. I don’t want to see Cuba go down the drain with consumerism and our hip-hop community bought out by major labels, like it has in the U.S. I want Cuba to be an important world voice for hip-hop, in the same way that Cuba now represents for progressive leftists, those who want a righteous, socially conscious, swarm life with real human development. Smith, “Words and Deed,” 3. Herrera makes critical points about the path that U.S. hip-hop has taken and its diluted socially progressive potential over time. One Cuban rap group produced by Herrera who has enjoyed a degree of government sanction is Anonimo Consejo, consisting of Afro-Cuban raperos Kokino and Yosmel. In an interview with Wunderlich they discuss their revolutionary role models that include Latin Americans, black Americans, and Africans. Along with Che Guevara and Jose Martí, Yosmel and Kokino admire Malcom X, Mumia Abu Jamal, Nelson Mandela and other black icons. They were among thousands of Cubans that went to hear Mumia’s son speak at an anti-imperialist rally last year. Wunderlich, “Underground Revolution, 37. World revolutionaries of all nationalities stand side by side with black Cuban emcees’ social vision. Black Cuban hip-hop aficionados report an increasing awareness of their African identity, as well as a perception of racial difference in Cuba that links them to black American rappers. Wunderlich reports that after Yosmel and Kokino performed a rap “about the police and racial profiling, they were arrested and thrown in jail. Like many international rappers, they allude to an allegiance founded in the aesthetics and culture of hip-hop that transcends nation states. The rap duo writes: ‘My country is my text, and my flag is the paper I write it on.’” Wunderlich, “Underground Revolution, 35. Anonimo Consejo recognizes that skin-color, despite the best efforts of the government, can still be a marker of class difference and perceived delinquency in Cuba. Yosmel poignantly reveals the difference between culture and perceived racial difference when he simply says, “When I feel African, I don’t feel black.” Wunderlich, “Underground Revolution, 37. Here “black” is associated with degradation and marginal social status that is part of the construction of race itself even in Cuba. On the other hand, Yosmel’s feeling of being “African” confers an empowering pre-slavery culture stream to which the aesthetics of hip-hop is tied. Cuban hip-hopper’s political consciousness, heightened by socialist Cuba, have always been attracted to the more politically-conscious U.S. hip-hop underground that focuses on racism, enslavement to capitalist materialism, and the promotion of black history and culture. This connection between Cuban hip-hop youth and the U.S. underground represents an important connective marginality within global hip-hop. Cuba’s connective resonance, hence, is not only black aesthetics or culture, but also based on the historical oppression of African descendants throughout the Americas. In post-revolution Cuba this translates as continued differential treatment of black Cubans, even as the current regime has sought to eliminate pre-revolution overt racism. Simultaneously, a generational resonance connects black hip-hoppers in Cuba and the U.S. In a sociological study conducted on race in contemporary Cuba, Fuente and Glasco discerned a distinct difference between young and old vis-a-vis the place of blacks in the post-revolution era. The sociologists posit that Afro-Cubans in general feel that they are better off since the 1959 Cuban Revolution; however, “. . . younger blacks do not equate the fall of the socialist regime with the end of racial equality as much as older blacks do. For younger blacks it is possible to maintain racial equality even if the revolution falls.” Alejandro de la Fuente and Laurence Glasco, “Are Blacks ‘Getting Out of Control’? Racial Attitudes, Revolution, and Political Transition in Cuba,” Miguel Angel Centeno and Mauricio Font, eds., Toward a New Cuba: Legacies of a Revolution (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 1997), 63. The generational divide between black Cubans was further demonstrated by a majority of younger black Cubans who participated in a 1994 riot in a Havana plaza. Those who rioted at Malecón were referred to as young blacks and mulattos, and our survey shows that, in fact, younger blacks share a more critical view of the revolution and its impact on racism than do older blacks . . . . What is at stake here is a generational rather than a racial issue. Fuente and Glasco, “Are Blacks ‘Getting Out of Control’?,” 69. Young Afro-Cubans, with their political awareness piqued by the socialist revolution, while simultaneously involving themselves in U.S. hip-hop’s race-conscious underground, walk a thin line with Cuban authorities. As Wunderlich points out, Cuban hip-hop heads grew up on CD’s like Public Enemy’s 1989 Fear of a Black Planet. In PE’s seminal track “Fight the Power,” lyrics like “Cause I’m black and I’m proud/ I’m ready and amped? Most of my heroes don’t appear on no stamps” help to promote a sense of their racial difference in an era of the island’s history that was trying to minimize race while elevating Afro-Cuban culture. Wunderlich records Yosmel’s sentiments about Public Enemy: “Their songs spoke to me in a new way. There was nothing in Cuba that sounded like it.” Wunderlich, “Underground Revolution,” 35. With the New York-based Black August Hip-Hop Collective and many community-based activist groups throughout the country, today’s socially conscious wing of hip-hop culture continues in a more activist stance. The Black August Hip-hop Collective constructed a defining direct link to Cuba, while attempting to promote consciousness-building hip-hop movements globally in other sites like South Africa. Key members of the collective are recognized rap artists such as Dead Prez and the former Black Star (emcees Mos Def and Talib Kweli), who have toured to Cuba since 1998. On their website, the Black August Hip-hop Collective states that they strive to support the global development of hip-hop culture by facilitating exchanges between international communities where hip-hop is a vital part of youth culture, and by promoting awareness about the social and political issues that effect these youth communities. Our goal is to bring culture and politics together and to allow them to naturally evolve into a unique hip-hop consciousness that informs our collective struggle for a more just, equitable and human world. “AfroCubaWeb: Black August 2000,” n. p. Online. Internet, http://afrocubaweb.com/ rap/blackaugust00. html. The organization traces its inception back to “the 1970s in California prison system by men and women of the Black New Afrikan Liberation Movement.” This political activist branch of U.S. hip-hop culture, never promoted by the major pop culture media, strives to continue the political tradition of the community-building aspects of the Black Panther Party through the arts. The result is a two-city August hip-hop event: The Annual Black August Hip-hop Benefit in New York City, the proceeds of which go to establish a hip-hop library in Havana, and the Festival Nacional de Rap Cubano in Havana. This contemporary hip-hop link between Cuba and the black revolutionary movement in the U.S. has a historical connection to a few black political activists of the late 60s and early 70s who fled the U.S. when accused of crimes against the state and received asylum in Cuba. Assata Shakur, the late U.S. rapper Tupac Shakur’s godmother, has been exiled in Cuba since 1986 when she escaped from prison while serving a life sentence imposed in a highly disputed 1973 trial. Nehanda Abiodun is another political exile from this period and has been particularly close to the hip-hop community in Cuba, mentoring Cuban hip-hop youth to think critically. Wunderlich has noted that Abiodun holds “informal sessions about African American history, poetry, and world politics” with them. Wunderlich, “Underground Revolution, 36. As a result, rapper Yosmel perceives Afro-Cuban connective marginality in the rhymes of Black Star: “It was amazing to hear rappers from another country worried about the same issues I was.” Wunderlich, “Underground Revolution, 36. Hence, aspiring Cuban emcees meeting and rapping on the same show with some of the top underground U.S. artists through the Black August Collective, validates their growing Pan-African consciousness. Cuban emcees are still often caught between conflicting allegiances. Having one’s socialization occur within a revolutionary society that teaches one to challenge the world’s status quo, and at the same time that de-emphasizes racial difference in a Caribbean region historically based on class and color, has resulted in ambivalent young Afro-Cuban raperos. They struggle to express their generational concerns through hip-hop’s less publicized counter-hegemonic movement. But their challenge to their own country’s continuing race and class problems can only have so much impact in a controlled society where freedom of political and artistic expression is not encouraged. However, Cuban hip-hoppers are not deterred, for they continue to make associations with their black and Latino counterparts in the U.S. aesthetically, culturally, and politically through the music. Brazilian Favelas and Connective Marginalities Influenced by the U.S. hip-hop movement of the late 70s, the emergence of hip-hop in Brazil dates back to the mid-80s. The first wave of global hip-hop culture was initiated by the recording of the Sugarhill Gang’s “Rapper’s Delight” in 1979 and continued with the early 80s Hollywood break dance films, as well as underground hip-hop films and documentaries like Wild Style (1982) and Style Wars (1983). Hip-hop culture, as the latest American pop culture export, came not coincidentally on the heels of the Civil Rights and Black Power movements in the U.S. Martin Luther King’s assassination in 1968 occurred right before the Poor People’s March was scheduled to converge on Washington, attempting to connect class with race in a blaze of American solidarity and contestation. The hip-hop generation inherited these persistent dual marginalities in New York’s poor South Bronx, a product of both poverty and racism that manifested as 70s postindustrial neglect, gentrification, and de-funding of social services in black and Latino neighborhoods. For a detailed description of postindustrial New York in relation to hip-hop see Rose, Black Noise, particularly pp. 27-34. The hip-hop generation in New York used their evolving new, vibrant street culture to elevate their marginalized voice in an era of disco clubs and the wealthy downtown “beautiful people.” Both political and the cultural revolutions in the U.S. since the Civil Rights movement inspired Brazil’s youths, and that inspiration spawned their own politico-cultural movements that affected the nation from the 70s through the current hip-hop generation. The hip-hop phenomenon in Brazil is essentially a social movement organized by the Afro-Brazilian youth as a response to social disaffection, poverty, and racism. Just as in Cuba, young Brazilians, particularly those of predominantly African descent, immediately perceived the connections of their socio-political plight with those of blacks in North America. Indeed, from Brazil to the Caribbean to the U.S., social commentary situated within vibrant polyrhythms and layered bricolage that emerged from poor communities have been at the heart of the distinct creation of cultures throughout the Americas. Brazil’s response to these North American connections spawned a new wave of consciousness culturally and politically in the country. Niyi Afolabi, a Nigerian scholar of Brazilian hip-hop, contends that [t]he emergence of hip-hop in Brazil dates back to the mid 80s, influenced by the North American Hip-hop movement of the seventies, and indeed a backlash of the Civil Rights movement of the sixties with such heroic figures as Martin Luther King, Malcolm X and even the Black Panthers. A parallel Civil Rights movement in Brazil is the Moviemento Negro Unificado (United Black Movement), which is responsible for various protest rallies, educational programs and from which some of the culturally and ideologically inclined carnivalesque groups such as Ile-Aye and Olodum evolved in the mid seventies. Niyi Afolabi, “Brazilian New Wave: Hip-Hop and the Politics of Intervention” (paper presented at the annual meeting of the Modern Language Association, Washington D.C., December 2000), 2. The confluence between the Movimento Negro Unificado and the emergence of Afrocentric Bloco Afros (neighborhood-based black performing groups) during carnival set the stage for the next generation to adopt hip-hop as an increasingly global popular culture. These threads running through several decades of political and artistic organizing in Brazil reflect the connective marginalities of race, class, and black culture. In the hip-hop movement, these resonances are particularly manifested through rap music and graffiti art. Brazilian rap artists clearly represent connective marginalities of class and culture with poor African American and Latino youths in the U.S. According to Afolabi, “major thematics of Brazilian Hip-hop artists range from police brutality, violence, poverty, life in the periphery, crime, self-esteem, revenge, transformation, survival, death, darkness and light, and the correction of negative images of Afro-Brazilians . . . . Brazilian rap must be seen as a national phenomenon that has come to stay and not a passing phase of juvenile delinquency.” Afolabi, “Brazilian New Wave,” 3 and 4. Here, Afolabi references to the plight of Brazil’s notorious crime, abandoned children, and street people separate it from socialist Cuba, where hip-hop youth may be poor, but have basic needs such as shelter, education, and health care guaranteed by the government. Brazilian rap, like its underground American and Cuban counterparts, as Afolabi notes, serves an important counter-hegemonic role, directly addressing local issues of crime, violence, continuing social inequalities, and negative portrayals of Afro-Brazilians. For example, according to Brazilian ethnographer Jennifer Roth Gordon, Brazilian rap artists give voice to hundreds of favelas [hillside slums] and suburbs that often remain unnamed on maps and in the Brazilian political agenda. MVBill (MV stands for Mesageiro de Verdade, ‘Messenger of Truth’) begins his song, “How to Survive in the Favela,” with a list of favelas in Rio . . . . . As MVBill likes to say, ‘We are marginalized, but we are not marginal’. Jennifer Roth Gordon, “Hip-Hop Brasileiro: Brazilian Youth and Alternative Black Consciousness Movements, Black Arts Quarterly 7, no. 1, 9. Brazilian youth use hip-hop to illuminate the class marginality that socio-economically disconnects them from country’s wealth, while simultaneously demonstrating their cultural marginality that serves as the heart of the nation’s identity. Yet, particularity, within the construct of connective marginalities serves to deepen our understanding of specific people’s struggle for equality and recognition. Murray Forman argues this exact point in his The Hood Comes First (2002): The “where” of experience has a powerful influence over the social meanings derived from the experiences themselves, for just as our actions and mobilities bring space into cultural relief, so, too, does socially produced space bring meaning to our actions. Murray Forman, The ‘Hood Comes First” Race, Space, and Pace in Rap and Hip-Hop (Middletown, CN: Wesleyan University Press, 2002), 23. Hence, the concept of particular spatial experience with attendant marginalities---my favela, barrio, ‘hood---is central to hip-hop globally. Local manifestations of marginality that resonate with other particularized evidence of social injustice in a completely different part of the world demonstrate patterns of global hierarchies that are often connected by world systems of political economy. Rap is poised to address these patterns of connective marginalities in different localities through the artistic elements of imaginative metaphor and pumping base rhythms. Pleasure, play, and politics find a poignant relationship in global rap, as they have in Trinidadian calypso and U.S. soul music, in the past. Yet, rap, situated alongside hip-hop culture’s other elements of break dance, graffiti art, and turntablism, becomes exceptionally dynamic in address continuing 21st century social inequities. Particularity is evident in some differences between U.S. and Brazilian hip-hop. Unlike the preponderance of near minstrel-like images of gangsters, thugs, and pimp-playas among commercial American rappers portrayed on MTV and BET, Brazilian emcees try to counter the “the negative images constantly projected on national television about Afro-Brazilians as drug-users, gangsters, and criminals, with such positive images as creative producers of culture, respectable business owners, and musical intellectuals . . . .” Afolabi, “Brazilian New Wave,” 4. Jennifer Roth Gordon emphasizes Brazilian rappers’ crucial delineation of commercial vs. underground or conscious rap. They identify the American rap group Public Enemy as their primary source of inspiration, but express strong sentiments against the current (what they think of as commercialized) state of rap in the Untied States. MVBill’s DJ, DJTR, criticizes not only American rap stars like 2Pac, Notorious B.I.G., and Coolio, but also Brazilian rappers who take their inspiration from these “misguided” role-models. Gordon, “Hip-Hop Brasileiro, 9. Since MTV-oriented commercial rap is hip-hop’s main U.S. export, as opposed to the more politically-conscious U.S. rap music production, indigenous hip-hop cultures globally may very well be the primary source of continuing counter-hegemonic activism in the subculture. Brazilian hip-hop street culture in the city of São Paulo has been documented in Francisco Cesar Filho’s short film, Hip-Hop SP (1990). São Paulo, west of Rio de Janeiro and south of the capital of Brazilia, has over eleven million people, making it the largest urban center of Brazil with several teeming favelas. The film demonstrates the city’s full-blown street culture with b-boys and b-girls who combine hip-hop dance oftentimes with Brazilian capoeira, a martial art originating in Angola, afoshe, a Brazilian Afrocentric dance style evolving from the bloco afro movement, and the signature Brazilian dance, samba. The connective marginality of culture is apparent in these performance forms. Many world famous rhythms and dances throughout the Americas, such as samba and capoeira, derived from the pervasive Africanist aesthetic, co-join contemporary manifestations of the same aesthetic in hip-hop. The athleticism of capoeira, for example, resonates with break dance’s acrobatic style, and many b-boy shows in the U.S. include traditional Brazilian capoeristas. U.S. b-boy club events that include local capoeira groups, for example, demonstrate their explicit understanding of these cultural connections across the diaspora that hip-hop has revitalized. The film simultaneously situates this vibrant youth culture within the context of São Paulo’s favela poverty, police brutality, and the youths’ articulate critique of these social inequities. Use quotes from film here______________________________ Yet along with obvious issues of class and historical oppression that hip-hop youth around the world address, South America’s and the Caribbean’s hip-hop cultures reflects a strong cultural connective marginality that resonates across time and space. Thus African-derived rhythms and dances inextricably connect the Americas aesthetically. Several Brazilian rap groups and solo emcees, such as Thaide, have risen to national prominence, and use their new found platform to articulate cultural connections with black American culture. Thaide, as one of the first Brazilian rappers and who appears in the Hip-Hop SP film, locates the historical development of Brazilian hip-hop within the cultural continuum from samba-rock and soul music of the seventies in that country, as well as the Afro-Brazilian religion candomblé in his rap “Senhor Tempo Bom” (Mr. Good Times): “In the past, Samba-Rock and Black Power is Soul. Just like Hip-hop, it was our music . . . I also know that I made many mistakes. But I never detached myself from my roots.” Afolabi, “Brazilian New Wave,” 7. Thaide’s invocation of the U.S. Black Power movement and attendant 60s soul music forms a cultural resonance between black American and Afro-Brazilian cultures. Later in the lyrics he also alludes to Afro-Brazilian religion, capoiera, and samba, representing the African legacy in Brazil. His blending of African American and Afro-Brazilian sacred and secular music and dance maps the history and cultural memory of the black Atlantic that signifies roots to his generation of young Brazilians. Even if he personally has not always followed this cultural legacy, he reveals that he was never fully separated from these roots. Thaide’s lyrics succinctly summarize the connective marginality of culture that proliferates throughout the African diaspora. Racionais MC’s (The Rationals), is one of the most popular of the current day rap crews in Brazil, having won the “prestigious Brazilian MTV awards in the summer of 1998.” Gordon, “Hip-Hop Brasileiro, 9 Their third CD Sobrevivendo no Inferno (“Surviving in Hell”) produced on their own Cosa Nostra label has sold over a half million copies, a great achievement by Brazilian standards. Each member comes from one of the ring of favelas around São Paulo called the periferia, and their themes focus on social justice with gangster imagery. They are considered by the Brazilian mainstream to be a renegade group that emphasizes race consciousness and racial inequality in a country that promotes an image of racial democracy. For a good example of the critique of Brazil’s national rhetoric of racial democracy see Elisa Larkin Nascimento, The Sorcery of Color: Identity, Race, and Gender in Brazil. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2007. Even with their commercial success in Brazil, according to Gordon, they continue to be a voice from the favelas, criticizing other black rappers for selling out to “white” culture and trying to fit into white middle class Brazilian lifestyles. Like in Cuba, where racial inter-mixing and the revolution’s ideals eschew social discourses of racial difference, similar issues around the rhetoric and reality exist in Brazil. Gordon notes that racial discourses by Brazilian rap artists such as Racionais MC’s are judged within a “ . . . context of ‘racial democracy’ where any discussion of race has historically been considered ‘un-Brazilian’, [and thus Brazilian] rappers disrupt the desired silence around the issues of race.” Gordon, “Hip-Hop Brasileiro, 9 Hip-hop culture in Brazil is indicative of all the connective marginalities, including class, race, historical oppression, culture, and youth that bind it to American hip-hop and the poor ghetto context out of which it first emerged. Conclusions Contrary to the typical American view of contemporary U.S. rap music as a commercial sell out to mass marketing, the “booty call,” and the “bling, bling” of the multi-billion dollar U.S. rap music industry, global hip-hop promotes the edge---the social margins that are rampant with poverty and inequalities for still too many people, in too many parts of the world. Hip-hop culture, particularly when viewed from a global perspective, is a potentially subversive epistemology, affirming cultural and racial connections across nation-states, as well as connective marginalities reflective of extant global social inequities. The language of the body politic of hip-hop is certainly part of what allows connections between African hip-hop advocates on the Africanhiphop.com website, the Brazilian hip-hop favela movement, inspired by black American historical forms, and the specific Cuban connection to the underground U.S. Black August Collective. Young hip-hoppers, as products of the racialized legacy throughout the Americas, battle articulately within this contested terrain. Hip-hop has benefited from systemic changes over time in various societies forming the African diaspora. But it also takes its place in the long history of social criticism through the arts that has created a critical difference in thinking for those changes to occur and take root. The kind of social critique possible today through rap could not have happened, for example, in the rhythm and blues era of the 1950s. There are now black voices who dare to enter the cacophony of identity representation in diaspora politics, and claim space for their particularized ‘hood. The centrality of ghettocentricity---focus on the culture and social perceptions created in poor neighborhoods---in hip-hop globally insures a shift in thinking about the world’s social hierarchy, creating possibilities of Ulf Hannerz’s concept of new “symbolic constellations” of postmodernity to be realized. Ulf Hannerz, Transnational Connections: Culture, People, Places (London: Routledge, 1996), 21. As old-school rapper Run (Joseph Simmons) of Run DMC has said, “It’s all about who’s got the soul, who got the flavor, who got the raw freedom, the rebellious attitude in them.” Quoted in Mandalit del Barco, “Rap’s Latino Sabor,” Perkins, ed., Droppin’ Science, 67. In hip-hop, this becomes the major criterion for participation in the communally oriented Africanist aesthetic that through hip-hop has become international. Hip-hop’s involvement in commodification, ironically enough, is simultaneously implicated in its potential as a globally democratizing pop subculture. Besides the connective marginality of historical oppression, young black hip-hop artists in the African diaspora have the added dimension of cultural connection aesthetically that allows them to celebrate the moment even as they critique their respective social conditions. Hip-hop in the African diaspora continues a powerful legacy of accessing the Africanist aesthetic through music and dance to reveal and critique the world’s extant social inequalities. In so doing, the youth in Brazil and the Caribbean form crucial cultural and class links with black U.S. youth, and hip-hop youth of all ethnicities. Even though these connections and their potentialities have been explored by previous generations, the hip-hop generation has inherited the 21st century with its global interdependence and technology like no other time in the past. Black cultural trafficking has existed since the Atlantic slave trade, but today’s youth inherit a fast-paced global consciousness that continues to invoke past black cultural practices, making the African diaspora potentially fertile ground for new solutions to old problems through hip-hop culture. ENDNOTES 28 PAGE 27 AFRICAN AMERICAN & LATINO CULTURES AFRICAN AMERICAN & LATINO CULTURES EMBED MS_ClipArt_Gallery.2