Academic literature on the topic 'Hip-hop – Political aspects – Algeria'

In an article discussing hip-hop in Germany, one would expect an outline of how hip-hop emerged in the two German states or an analysis of the differences and similarities of the hip-hop scene in the two parts of the country or a report on how this youth culture has been affected by the process of political unification. However, an immediate analysis of the situation shows that although the hip-hop scene was organised in similar ways in both German states, and had similar role models, all the better known acts came from the west.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the aspects of desire and resistance inherent in Korean hip-hop. And to understand the current socio-cultural function and position of Korean hip-hop. For this purpose, <Show Me the Money> was selected as a sample of Korean hip-hop. And all the songs released from season 3 to season 10 were analyzed. Through this, I tried to understand the desire and resistance inherent in today's Korean hip-hop. And compared with the past from the point of view of 'inheritance and change', and examined what it means. As a result, today's Korean hip-hop has the following socio-cultural meaning. First, underground hip-hop in Korea has been handed down as an ‘attitude’, claiming an independent identity and pursuing self-realization. Second, Korean hip-hop has changed from a means for public discourse to a means for personal discourse. Third, capitalism and materialism have shifted from the object of resistance to the object of pursuit. I hope that this thesis can contribute to the formation of a progressive discourse related to Korean hip-hop.

In his article ‘Rock music and politics in Italy’, Umberto Fiori deploys the example of an open-air concert by Genesis in Tirrenia in the province of Pisa, promoted in the summer of 1982 by the Italian Communist Party (PCI) as part of its annual Feste dell'Unita, as a summary example of de-politicisation of the consumption and production of rock music in Italy, and the institutionalisation of the oppositional, dissenting aspects of rock music that had previously been so potent there throughout the 1970s. To Fiori, the Genesis concert representedan unmistakeable step forward in the slow process of the ‘normalisation’ of the relationship between rock and politics in Italy. Explosive material until a few years before, rock music in the 1980s seems to have returned to being a commodity like any other, even in Italy. The songs are once again simply songs, the public is the public. The musicians are only interested in their work, and the organisers make their expected profits. If they happen to be a political party, so much the better: they can also profit in terms of public image and perhaps even votes. … Italy now learnt how to institutionalise deviation and transgression. An ‘acceptable’ gap was re-established between fiction and reality, desire and action, and music and political practice. (Fiori 1984, pp. 261–2)

The prevailing accounts of voice within cultural studies often centre on issues of political representation and authority, bypassing the material aspects of voice and ensuing political effects thereof. By analysing a violent incident during a hip hop concert in Poland, this paper attempts to provide a post-hegemonic account of the politics of voice. It traces the circulation of sonic intensities comprising the event – including the sonority of voice, its electric amplification and the rhythmic organisation of verbal interactions – arguing that they directly modulated the behaviour patterns of the audience via affective transmission. Furthermore, the concept of habit memory is employed to indicate the limits of contagion. The paper thus rereads the outbreak of violence in terms of resonances that occur beneath the level of discourse, immanently restructuring the encounters between bodies.

AbstractThis article examines how voicelessth-stopping (e.g.tingforthing) is used by a group of adolescents in Manchester, UK. The data come from an ethnographic project into the speech of fourteen to sixteen year olds who have been excluded from mainstream education. Althoughth-stopping is often strongly associated with black varieties of English, multiple regression analysis finds ethnicity not to be a statistically significant factor in its production. Instead, conversational context and involvement in aspects of particular social practices—grime (rap) and dancehall music—emerge as potentially more relevant. Subsequent interactional analysis adds support to this interpretation, illustrating how the feature is being used more or less strategically (and more or less successfully) by individuals in this context in order to adopt particular stances, thereby enacting particular identities that are only tangentially related to ethnicity. I argue that use ofth-stopping in this context indexes a particular street identity that is made more available through participation in grime especially. (th-stopping, youth language, identity, ethnography, grime, hip hop)*

Against the general opinion the history of graffiti goes back to the beginnings of civilization. There are numerous examples of graffiti, for instance the inscriptions hollowed with a chisel found on the ancient household artifacts or on the walls. The inscriptions had an informative function but they were also magical. The phenomenon of spray art was widespread in the 1960s and the beginning of the Polish taggers subculture was in the 1980s, although one can find street art during the Second World War. But it is usually neglected or disregarded in the Polish literature. The Anchor – the sign of “Fighting Poland”, was placed on pavements, walls, notice boards or train stops of the occupied country. It was the sign of the fight for freedom and independence. As the years passed, the Polish reality was changing and the role of graffiti also changed. Now, it expresses itself in slogans, appeals, messages, drawings, portraits or murals. The aim of the work is to show the role of the Polish graffiti between 1942 and 2011. The author analyses graffiti in a number of aspects and throughout many years. The author identifies Polish spray art with teenage rebellion, sense of humor, political engagement, commentary or the negation of reality. Moreover, the article focuses on social, psychological or urban aspects of the examined phenomenon and identifies it with widespread modern hip-hop culture.

This study explored 19 themes embedded in the lyrics of 1,040 U.S. top-40 songs from 1960 through 2010, using R strucchange software to identify trends and breaks in trends. Findings reveal both continuity and change. As in 1960, the predominant topic of pop music remains romantic and sexual relationships. However, whereas the proportion of lyrics referring to relationships in romantic terms remained stable, the proportion including reference to sex-related aspects of relationships increased sharply. References to lifestyle issues such as dancing, alcohol and drugs, and status/wealth increased substantially, particularly in the 2000s. Other themes were far less frequent: Social/political issues, religion/God, race/ethnicity, personal identity, family, friends showed a modest occurrence in top-40 music throughout the studied period and showed no dramatic changes. Violence and death occurred in a small number of songs, and both increased, particularly since the 1990s. References to hate/hostility, suicide, and occult matters were very rare. Results are examined in the context of cultural changes in the social position of adolescents, and more specifically in light of the increased popularity of rap/hip-hop music, which may explain the increases in references to sex, partying, dancing, drug use, and wealth.

The recent rubs and resistances within the various flows of religious thought and practice in American culture and politics have become near clichés. The impact of right-wing religions on government and cultural policies has been well noted, as have the concomitant attempts to keep religion of all kinds out of politics entirely. Meanwhile, the problematic status of Islam both locally and globally has become a continuous topic of debate, as have the debates over creationism and so-called intelligent design in American schools. These high-profile debates have in turn eclipsed the suspicions of academic leftist thought regarding religious questions of any sort, and this has in turn resulted in an entrenchment of theory—especially political theory—into a kind of religiosity of its own, while various forms of revivalism have signaled the mutation of faith into dogma, most recently the dogma of moderation. Each of these issues, apart from its intrinsic importance and currency, speaks to the practice of religion as a fundamentally philosophical problem of appearances that continues to emerge as a first cause of politics and of culture. The status of religion as a uniquely performative issue will, I think, occupy theorists over the coming years. Indeed, I suggest here that the thinking through of religion and spirituality will necessarily take place along the ontologic fault lines not just of performance but of theatre itself, and will come to delineate the important differences between performance and theatre. Finally, the reappraisal of religion as an ontologically charged theatricality will move into areas far afield from normative spirituality: cyberreligions and technoshamanism, chaos magic and the new alchemies, rave culture and other varieties of hyperinduced trance states.1 Although the focus in these newer forms of performance is almost exclusively on music, sound, and movement, the ultimate goal is the created intensity of a shared performative experience framed by theatrical perception: Artaud is the genius cited by nearly all of the authors of these phenomena. One larger suggestion here, in fact, is the moribund state of current theory, which sees dance culture (techno, hip-hop, electronica, rave), when it sees it at all, almost exclusively in cultural and political terms, ignoring the ecstatic, trance, and transformative aspects of DJ culture at large.2

Abstract Since emerging in the early 1990s, Estonian hip-hop has developed in line with other cultural and artistic projects in the country, reflecting attempts to foster a homogeneous society, yet ultimately cultivating one where diversity and multiculturalism prevail. As a genre where minority groups are frequently presented as “authentic,” hip-hop and its visual and performative manifestations provide a valuable platform to examine expressions of identity. To this end, several Estonian hip-hop musicians have explored aspects of being “post-Soviet” in contradistinction to official hegemonic discourses, which outright reject the Soviet past and emphasize titular ethnicity as a cornerstone of national identity. This article uses Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) and Multi-Modal Discourse Analysis (MMDA) to examine the lyrics and accompanying video of popular hip-hop song “für Oksana” by “Nublu featuring Gameboy Tetris.” Doing so highlights how the song’s basic narrative acts as a metaphor for experiences of integration processes between ethnic Estonians and Russophones since Estonian independence. I argue that through a combination of linguistic and cultural codeswitching, “für Oksana” constitutes an expression, performance, and negotiation of Russophone Estonian identity from both insider and outsider perspectives, emphasizing the need to understand Russophone Estonians as more than simply “Russians who live in Estonia.”

Rap music, a sub-genre of Hip-Hop music, that evolved out of the African American community in The United States of America during the late 1970s, is a musical genre that has spread its influence across the globe, including India and specifically in the State of Kerala. But how does such a complex and youthfully vigorous art form fit into the specific socio-political and cultural contexts of Kerala? This dissertation attempts to trace the comparatively short but bustling history of the rise of Malayalam Rap, in order establish the place it occupies today, with regards to both the wider context of Hip-Hop culture, as well as the narrower but equally important contexts of its birthplace, Kerala. Essentially, going against the grain of conventional art, Malayalam rap and its practitioners have ushered in an independent art form, adopted from the West and reshaped to fit the needs of Kerala’s culture.The focus is on the literary, artistic and technical aspects of Malayalam rap, in an attempt to legitimize it as a modern, radical form of poetry and to refute certain misconceptions about rap and Hip-hop as a culture that has infamously garnered a bad reputation. The dissertation argues that Malayalam Rap music is a more accessible form of poetry, which has become apopular platform thatvoices the voiceless, the historically silenced classes, and flourishes as an independent counter-culture that opposes and does not fear the threats of commercialization.

Defence date: 14 June 2018
Examining Board: Professor Olivier Roy (EUI) ; Professor Donatella Della Porta ; (EUI) Professor Thomas Hippler (University of Normandie) ; Professor Yves Gonzalez-Quijano (University Lyon 2)
Cette thèse propose une analyse du rap algérien à travers une approche pluridisciplinaire mêlant ethnologie et anthropologie culturelle de l'espace social particulier que représentent aujourd'hui les mondes du Hip-Hop en Algérie. Depuis quelques années les études sur la Méditerranée comme entité géographique, sociale et politique, prennent plus d'ampleur, reflétant l’intérêt grandissant pour cette zone dont les peuples ne cessent de proclamer leurs droits et leur place dans le monde. L’Algérie y occupe une place particulière depuis sa guerre de libération nationale, ne cessant de s'affirmer comme une place forte à la frontière de l'Europe et de l'Afrique mais secouée depuis 1962 par des expériences politiques douloureuses et un statut international empreint de sa relation post-coloniale avec la France. C'est cette Méditerranée s'exprimant à plein dans le destin de l’Algérie que cette thèse se propose d'analyser en présentant certains des mondes sociaux les plus actifs au sein de la jeunesse algérienne : les mondes du Hip-Hop. En présentant les spécificités de cette culture urbaine mondiale, relocalisée et réinterprétée dans le contexte algérien, nous proposons une analyse des constructions identitaires et des expressions politiques propres à cette jeunesse. Nous montrons comment ces pratiques culturelles effectives sont le miroir d'une volonté d'agir dans un contexte matériel défavorable, propre au sud de la Méditerranée, tout autant que de ces passé et présent liés au fait colonial qui continuent de s’entremêler. Le Hip-Hop devient alors le parangon d'une mondialisation reprise en main, piratée, réappropriée pour mieux affirmer et construire des zones d'autonomie rejetant à la fois une globalisation injuste et un pouvoir autoritaire liberticide. L'autonomie se joue entre appropriation et détournement : là où la langue reflète avant tout des réalités matérielles de survie.

This dissertation offers an aesthetic and historical overview of crunk, a hip- hop subgenre that took form in Atlanta, Georgia during the late 1990s. Get Crunk! is an ethnography that draws heavily on methodologies from African-American studies, musicological analysis, and performance studies in order to discuss crunk as a performed response to the policing of black youth in public space in the 1990s. Crunk is a subgenre of hip-hop that emanated from party circuits in the American southeast during the 1990s, characterized by the prevalence of repeating chanted phrases, harmonically sparse beats, and moderate tempi. The music is often accompanied by images that convey psychic pain, i.e. contortions of the body and face, and a moshing dance style in which participants thrash against one another in spontaneously formed epicenters while chanting along with the music. Crunk’s ascension to prominence coincided with a moment in Atlanta’s history during which inhabitants worked diligently to redefine Atlanta for various political purposes. Some hoped to recast the city as a cosmopolitan tourist destination for the approaching new millennium, while others sought to recreate the city as a beacon of Southern gentility, an articulation of the city’s mythologized pre-Civil War existence; both of these positions impacted Atlanta’s growing hip-hop community, which had the twins goals of drawing in black youth tourism and creating and marketing an easily identifiable Southern style of hip-hop for mainstream consumption; the result was crunk. This dissertation investigates the formation and function of crunk methods of composition, performance, and listening in Southern recreational spaces, the ways in which artists and audiences negotiate identities based on notions of race, gender, and region through crunk, and various manifestations of aesthetic evaluation and moral panic surrounding crunk. The argument here is that the dynamic rituals of listening and emergent performance among crunk audiences constitute a kind of catharsis and social commentary for its primarily black youth listenership; one that lies beyond the scope of lyrical analysis and, accordingly requires analysis that incorporates a conceptualization of listening as an embodied, participatory experience expressed through gesture. The first chapter begins with a historical overview of race, segregation, and the allocation of public space in Atlanta, Georgia in order to establish the social topography upon which Atlanta hip-hop was built; it ends with a social and historical overview of yeeking, Atlanta’s first distinct hip-hop party dance style and marked precursor to crunk. The second chapter delves into essentialist constructions of Southern identity and hip-hop authenticity, from which Atlanta hip- hoppers constructed novel expressions of Southern hip-hop identity through a process akin to Dick Hebdige’s theory of bricolage. Chapter three discusses the history and sociopolitical significance of Freaknik, a large Atlanta spring break event that catered specifically to students of Historically Black Colleges and Universities. At its peak, Freaknik became the focus of a moral panic, which led to increased policing of black youth in public space and ultimately the dismantling of the event due in large part to harassment; it is this moment in Atlanta’s history which gives context to the performative abandon of crunk. The fourth chapter discusses the aesthetics of crunk music and imagery, focusing on the subgenre’s embrace of Southern gangsta archetypes, timbral dissonance in compositional methodology, and crunk’s corporeal and vocal catharses illustrated by performative violent embodiment (i.e. moshing) and the centrality of screams and chants. The fifth chapter focuses on gender performativity in Southern hip-hop party spaces. The chapter begins with a discussion of gender normativity in yeeking and how insincere non-normative performances of gender are incorporated as a means of reinforcing the gender normativity; this is framed by analyses of a yeek dance move called “the sissy” and the trap era dance, the nae nae. As is argued in the latter half of this chapter, women performers in crunk engaged in the same kind of bricolage outlined in chapter two in order to transform traditionally male-centric crunk music into something specifically and performatively woman centered. Ultimately, these discussions of gender indicate a kind of performative fluidity that echoes the kind of performance-based subversion that this dissertation argues crunk represented for black youth laying claim to public space in the years following the decline of Freaknik. The conclusion holds that, while the era of the crunk subgenre has passed, many of the underlying performative political subtexts persisted in subsequent subgenres of Southern hip-hop (e.g. snap, trap, etc.), which lays the foundation for discourse on methodologies of performative resistance in other hip-hop formats.

Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI)
Opposing the culture of différance created through American cultural media, this thesis argues, Arab hip-hop artists revive the politically conscious sub-genre of hip-hop with the purpose of normalising their Arab existence. Appropriating hip-hop for a cultural protest, Arab artists create for themselves a sub-genre of conscious hip-hop – Arab-conscious hip-hop and function as Gramsci’s organic intellectuals, involved in better representation of Arabs in the mainstream. Critiquing power dynamics, Arab hip-hop artists are counter-hegemonic in challenging popular identity constructions of Arabs and revealing to audiences biases in media production and opportunities for progress towards social justice. Their identity (re)constructions maintain difference while avoiding Otherness. The intersection of Arab-consciousness through hip-hop and politics of identity necessitates a needed cultural protest, which in the case of Arabs has been severely limited. This thesis progresses by reviewing literature on politics of identity, Arabs in American cultural media, Gramsci’s organic intellectuals and conscious hip-hop. Employing criticism, this thesis presents an argument for Arab hip-hop group, The Arab Summit, as organic intellectuals involved in mainstream representation of the Arab community.