Abstract
Remixing the Hip-Hop Narrative aims to do as the title suggests—reshape and diversify the narratives in hip hop scholarship and popular culture with a special focus on the hip hop origin story and through the conceptual and theoretical lens of transculturation. The book blends academic and popular references with empirically rich accounts that engage complex themes in hip hop scholarship. Illuminating cultural influences from outside of the US and beyond the foundational African American community, this volume features 10 insightful chapters to weigh in on the existing debate about ethnic diversity in the early history of hip hop but also in its global spread.
Introducing the volume, the editors outline remixing boundaries within already familiar questions of cultural exchange, global-local dynamics, cultural appropriation, hegemonic academic discourses, and researchers’ positionality. However, centering the volume around the ideas of transculturation introduced by Cuban scholar and anthropologist Fernando Ortiz is an effort to decolonize the western epistemologies.
In the first chapter, Terrence Kumpf spotlights Fernando Ortiz's ideas on transculturation by introducing binary oppositions often tied to imperial ideologies, as Gilroy proposed. Cutting across binaries in the process of transculturation may be where the decoloniality of Ortiz's approach and reasoning lie. By exploring hip hop aesthetics and cultural production as re-purposing the old into the new, and highlighting migratory biographies of some hip hop pioneers, Kumpf argues for hip hop as a transcultural and synergizing phenomenon at its core. While he brings Ortiz, a non-Western thinker, to the forefront, Kumpf's discussion somewhat implies that transcultural must not be new, or at least not new enough. He, of course, recognizes the novelty of hip hop music and production strategies, but queries if his transcultural argument might clash with Black cultural politics. This raises a question about whether Kumpf inadvertently subscribes to Western notions of novelty.
The next three chapters by Coddington, Mausfeld, and Green examine complex ethnic and racialized identities, related cultural signifiers, and their roles in hip hop. Amy Coddington offers an intricate analysis of how the 1980s–1990s Miami commercial radio incorporated Black music genres, including hip hop, within racially (and racist) and financially driven business models. Mausfeld critically examines the discourse of pan-Latinidad present around Latino/a and Chicano/a Hip Hop artists in the US, revealing the multitude of identities operating under, negotiating, and resisting the pan-discourse. In Chapter 4, Kevin P Green looks at external developments, coming first from live broadcasting and popular music and then online streaming, which have reshaped hip hop's valued cultural form of real-time rhyming and live performance entangled with the development of MCing and rapping.
Kevin C Holt's contribution to volume's remix is particularly appreciated. He centers his historical narration around how embodied practices of Atlanta's Black youth in the 1980s–1990s shaped the dance style known as yeeking. Particular value of his study lies in challenging the logocentrism present in hip hop and Western scholarship. Holt does not circumvent talking about rap, but he shows how Atlanta's hip hop sound and culture were patterned on dance, and embodied the sonic and vocal experience of yeeking. Subsequent chapters by Bratić, Jacob, Lüthe, and Low and Laniel-Tremblay engage with the spectrum of resistance—Bratić and Lüthe discuss dominant gender and authenticity (counter)narratives, while Jacob exposes urban cosmopolitanism among Brazilian rappers as a strategy for cultural resistance. Low and Laniel-Tremblay invoke notions of resistance more subtly through analysis of Quebec rap language models. And, significantly, but perhaps unintentionally, bring attention to the often-overlooked role of emotions in hip hop, in the context of well-being.
Holt implicitly underscores the importance of documenting and chronicling various hip hop histories, a theme James Barber sweepingly expands upon in the final chapter (also addressed by Campbell and Forman, 2023). Rich biographical accounts and ethnographic explorations present an argument for the “socio-sonic” circularity between Jamaican and African American music cultures, sound systems, and practices. While Barber highlights shared histories of hip hop and reggae, a commendable strength of his work lies in carefully crafted narratives of individuals and grassroots media, whose chronicling efforts preserve moments of historical significance that might otherwise be forgotten.
The volume makes a solid transcultural argument based on the accounts from the US, but the global case studies, though valuable and with considerable merit, somewhat compromise the coherence of the book. Discussion on positionality, featured in the introduction, remains within the existing narrative. Nonetheless, the authors’ commitment to theoretical and conceptual considerations, and ethnographic practices in hip hop (see Harrison, 2015), intriguing primary sources, intersectional and layered analyses, featuring performance, oral history, and (historical) research of embodied practices make remixing the hip hop narratives a significant contribution.
