Hip-Hop Music's Global Reach

A verbal explosion from two young Asian-American women opened this week's "Hip-Hop Global Flows" festival.

"You, expert on me with your fake Asian tattoo!" the two spoken-word performers of "Yellow Rage" shouted rhythmically in a video. "So what you read the Joy Luck Club too! That makes you an expert on how I should look?!"

When the video stopped, enthnomusicologist Deborah Wong had made her first point: Asian hip-hop artists do exist.

Wong and other scholars and performers are visiting Duke this week to examine the music, culture and politics of hip hop, which has become a global phenomenon. The weeklong event continues today with a panel discussion and show by nationally known hip-hop band Dilated Peoples at Cat's Cradle in Carrboro. Saturday's events include break dancing, a panel discussion, house party and deejay battle. (See www.globalflows.info for complete schedule, times and locations.)

The conference is a joint project of its three sponsors: the Center for Asian and Asian-American Studies, the Department of Music and the Program in African and African-American Studies. It is aimed not only at scholars in those areas, but also at students and local residents with a general interest in hip-hop.

Academics are exploring the various aspects of what's called hip hop -- rap music, deejaying, graffiti, break dancing -- and the culture surrounding these forms of expression.

"To me, it's not only a perfectly valid place to look for clues to how the world is changing," explained Ian Condry, an assistant professor of foreign language and literature at MIT and one of tonight's speakers, "but maybe one of the more important ones because it includes politics, economics, psychology and especially a subtle understanding of what can move people in any given culture."

The evidence for hip-hop's diffusion from its birth in the Bronx in the '70s was seated in Wong's audience on Tuesday. The crowd comprised a mix of ages, races and occupations (including a local deejay).

Asians-Americans hip-hop artists can speak just as loudly, angrily and politically as black rapper -- but in their own style, said Wong, a professor at the University of California, Riverside.

One example: Japanese-American rapper Key Kool, who plays a shamisen, a traditional Japanese string instrument.

In his song "Reconcentrated," he begins: "The concentration camps in America were labeled with euphemistic terminology to try to twist the psychology of the public to think that it was OK to put people of Japanese descent away in what they called 'the camps of relocation.'"

Hip hop is also popular in Asia, and Condry sees a goldmine of cultural anthropological material in the establishment of hip-hop music in Japan. As late as the early '90's Japanese record-industry executives ignored it, assuming that Japanese rappers would not be able to overcome the obstacles presented by a native language with no stress syllables and no tradition of rhymed poetry (think Haiku).

"That turned out to be very wrong," Condry said of the Japanese rappers' success in integrating their music into the Japanese mainstream.

For others studying the hip-hop phenomenon, inspiration came closer to home. Duke's Bianca Robinson, class of '02 and a first year cultural anthropology graduate student, did her senior honors thesis on hip hop.

"One night I was waiting to take the bus," she said. "And five SUV's with loud amps were like listening to Tupac and all this hip-hop and when they rolled down the window it was a whole bunch of white fraternity guys. And I was like, 'What's going on?'"

Robinson is now working on a dissertation that examines how the identity and politics of white suburban youths are shaped by rap music.

Duke is not alone in turning an academic eye toward hip hop. Two years ago the Hiphop Archive was established under Harvard's W.E.B. DuBois Institute to collect artifacts of hip-hop culture.

According Hiphop Archive Director Marcyliena Morgan, the study of hip hop in particular (as opposed to popular culture or contemporary music in general) began in the early- to mid-'90's, when the politically charged lyrics of rap group Public Enemy appeared as graffiti in places like Italy and Lithuania.

"Hip hop breaks frames all the time," she said of the movement's propensity to cross national and disciplinary boundaries. For evidence she pointed to the archive's list of more than 50 hip-hop-related courses offered at colleges and universities around the country, including "Women, Rap, and Hip-Hop Feminism" at the University of Minnesota and "The Rhetoric of Graffiti" at DePaul University.

A recent New York Times story chronicled the efforts of Berklee College of Music professor Stephen Webber to introduce a course on "turntablism," the techniques, such as mixing and scratching records, used by deejays. According to the article, Berklee scholars are "arranging a series of master classes and discussions to familiarize faculty members with the specifics of the debate."

Duke music professor Anthony Kelley, who teaches contemporary music courses, also sees the need to dig into the practice of hip-hop. During discussions leading up to the Global Flows conference he said he realized that while he and his music department colleagues were neglecting the enormously popular genre of music.

"That's a bit academically irresponsible to ignore something that is that huge," he said. "It's time for us to look at a different phase of musical history."

This article was written by James Todd.