Close to the Edge (3 page)

The Future of Music Coalition estimated that by 2001 ten companies controlled about two-thirds of the airwaves as a result of the Telecommunications Act. The biggest media conglomerate to emerge from this process was Clear Channel Communications. It owned twelve hundred commercial stations in 2002.
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By the start of the new millennium, 80 percent of the music industry was controlled by five companies—Vivendi Universal, Sony, AOL Time Warner, Bertelsmann, and EMI.
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The post-1996 period after the Telecommunications Act was passed came to be seen as the era of corporate rap. The airwaves were dominated by a catchy pop formula coming from a handful of producers.

This trend toward big radio has been followed across the globe. While local scenes had matured and developed, many radio stations were playing mostly American rap. In Kenya the radio stations Capital FM and KISS FM program American artists like 50 Cent because, they argue, it helps corporations sell their products.
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It is clear that corporate rap on the radio is designed to exploit a lucrative youth market. This American-dominated radio programming contrasts somewhat with television's practices—about half the programming on MTV Base Africa is African, and about 70 percent of MTV Mandarin's videos are Chinese. At the same time television has been an important medium for promoting hip hop lifestyles and commodities. In Beijing, McDonald's has produced a commercial using Mandarin rap. Likewise, Pepsi, Sprite, and China Mobile have all used rap in their China ads.
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But rap does not just advertise products. The content of rap songs is so heavily brand identified—from cars to clothing and alcohol—that the music becomes fused with the product. Hip hop has raised the sales of Hennessy cognac by so much that the French company sponsored a contest and offered as the prize a visit to its plant with a famous rapper.
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It is clear that the innovation and creativity that gave rise to hip hop culture were not to be found in the realm of corporate rap.

The global spread of corporate rap, combined with its popularity among white suburban consumers in the United States, produced troubling racial contradictions for the genre. S. Craig Watkins suggests that corporate rap was designed with young white consumers in mind and that the fascination of white and suburban youth with rap music was just a more complex expression of racism.
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This was particularly notable in the global arena. American rap acts on tour frequently encountered all-white audiences. The Aboriginal rapper Wire MC recounts the chilling experience of being at a 50 Cent concert in Sydney and seeing the packed white male audience chanting, “Put another cap in a nigga.”
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In some cases local rap artists misappropriated rap's oppositional language to openly reassert racial hierarchies. The commercially popular Israeli rappers Subliminal and The Shadow used their music to advance a right-wing Zionist agenda. The rappers identified with the Israeli army, justifying the occupation of Palestine and presenting themselves as the underdogs.
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One response to the dominance of corporate rap on the airwaves was the development of an underground rap movement in the United States between 1995 and 1999. As independent and underground emcees found themselves with less access to major labels, radio airtime, and venues, they began to find alternative means to build a fan base. The Internet became an important resource as a digital distribution network in challenging the power of the traditional record labels. College and community radio stations offered more varied playlists than the corporate radio stations.
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And the DIY (do-it-yourself) model—selling tapes out of the trunk as a way to move to a regional label and then a major label—began to be used by underground artists.

The genre of underground rap allowed for a greater variety of narratives than the highly commodified and one-dimensional corporate rap. But, with American underground rap, the locus of hip hop moved away from urban, black, and working-class sectors as artists and audiences became increasingly middle class, white, and multiracial.
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Underground rap in the US paralleled the rise of underground rap abroad, and underground artists in diverse contexts often shared a suspicion of fusing rap and other musical forms, although the artists didn't always have a common political stance.

Local place-based hip hop genres also began to emerge in cities across the US, from the San Francisco Bay Area's “hyphy” culture to southern “crunk” and New Orleans “bounce” music, the latter influenced by brass band sound and Mardi Gras Indian chants. Greater regionalization of rap began to take place in other countries, too. In France, for instance, unique rap movements emerged in Marseilles and Strasbourg.
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Regionalization was matched by the growing diversity of sounds and styles in global hip hop. These included the rap-reggae-traditional blend of kwaito in South Africa, the popular highlife rap mix of hiplife music in Ghana, and the drum ‘n' bass-, garage-influenced Brit-hop in Britain. Local scenes also diversified, incorporating reggae rap, gangsta rap, spoken-word rap, hard-core rap, rock rap, and R&B-influenced rap under the broader umbrella of hip hop culture. By 2000 hip hop had become a global tour de force, marking out terrain in both mass culture—where its dominant appeal lay—and on the level of the subcultures—where its real dynamism resided.

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ike Afrika Bambaataa in the 1980s and Public Enemy in the 1990s, the Black August Hip Hop Project emerged to spread its message of a united hip hop globe in the new millennium. Black August was a network established during the 1970s in the California prison system as a way of linking up movements for resistance in the Americas. The hip hop collective sought to draw connections between radical black activism and hip hop culture. In its statement of purpose, the collective defined its goals as “support[ing] 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 affect these youth communities.”
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The collective arranged for the American emcees Paris, Common, dead prez, Tony Touch, Mos Def, and Talib Kweli to perform at the annual Cuban hip hop festivals in Alamar during the late 1990s. In 2001 it organized a concert at the World Conference against Racism in Durban and proposed a tour of South Africa that again would include Kweli and dead prez, as well as Black Thought, Boots Riley, and Jeru the Damaja.

Just like the hip hop ambassadors who preceded them, the Black August rappers were met abroad with a sense of great expectation and enthusiasm. Their language of black nationalism resonated with Cuban and South African youths feeling the effects of racial discrimination as their once-radical leaders pursued policies of austerity. The Cuban emcee Sekou Umoja, from the group Anónimo Consejo, told me, “We had the same vision as rappers such as Paris, who was one of the first to come to Cuba. His music drew my attention, because here is something from the barrio, something black. Of blacks, and made principally by blacks, which in a short time became something very much our own, related to our lives here in Cuba.” The rapper Common organized a meeting with local rappers at which they exchanged ideas and stories. The Black August network brought equipment and records for the Cuban rappers. But, as occurred with the electrifying performances of Bambaataa and Chuck D, it was in the concerts that Black August's vision of transnational solidarity was realized. The chants of “I'm an African,” led by dead prez in Alamar, thundered through the stadium as Afro-Cuban youth defiantly claimed their black roots.

The pain of racism may have been the bridge that connected the American rappers with those in the diaspora. But that racism took different forms in each context. On stage in Alamar dead prez burned a dollar bill as a symbol of American capitalism, horrifying local audiences, who saw it as a week's worth of bread. In South Africa the American artists came to protest the racism of their own government, which withdrew from the Durban conference along with Israel. Yet when the American artists left the concert stage to return to their fancy hotels, the affinities broke down. The American artists' treatment of leading local artists as hired drivers left a sense that racism looked different for the privileged Americans.
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Frustrated with this disrespect, the local promoters canceled the tour. Not the least of the problems was the American artists' clichéd notions of African-ness. The cover of dead prez's album
lets get free
featured militant black women raising guns to the sky. While dead prez claimed that the image was from the Soweto Uprising in 1976, South African hip hoppers knew that it was from the war of independence.
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The attempt to foster cultural exchange and understanding instead drew claims of cultural imperialism from local emcees. Global hip hop scenes were now about twenty years old, and they had their own stars and styles. All that local rappers wanted was to be treated as equals by the visiting American rappers. But, clearly, there were hierarchies within global hip hop. And while Black August saw its mission as promoting social consciousness, some South African rappers saw it as Americans conquering Africa with their rhymes and coming to save the Africans.
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Other local rappers saw a gap between the politically committed lyrics of the Black August rappers and their actions. As the Cuban rapper Soandry, then of the duo Hermanos de Causa, told the documentary filmmakers Vanessa and Larissa Díaz, “It's not saying it, it's not singing it, it's showing it. To me—none of these people, not dead prez, not Common Sense,
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not Mos Def have shown me anything. They just say what they say in their songs, but they don't represent that.”
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Soandry was also bitter about the various rap collaborations between visiting American rappers and Cuban rappers. The resulting productions tended to make money for the American artists but not the Cubans. Cuban rappers, South African rappers, and others were getting tired of the one-way stream of Westerners who were treating local scenes in Cuba, South Africa, and elsewhere as exotic cultures to be packaged for the consumption of Western audiences.

In 1999 the Venezuelan producer Juan Carlos Echeandía decided to make a documentary film that looked at American hip hop. It was the first time a producer from the South—albeit a relatively privileged one—had traveled to the States to interview American artists, producers, and fans. Echeandia returned to Venezuela and documented the growing underground hip hop scene there as well. The result was
Venezuela subterránea: cuatro elementos, una música
(Underground Venezuela: Four Elements, One Music). The film was low budget. The dissemination was not large. But the idea that a hip hopper from the global south might have something to say about American hip hop destabilized the idea that Americans were the ultimate authority on all hip hop, including their own.

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y the new millennium, the divide between American and non-American rappers was becoming somewhat irrelevant as diasporic rappers came on the scene. As global hip hop began to come of age, hip hoppers found themselves increasingly torn between the need to make a living and the desire to pursue their art. With record labels picking off a scant few to sign and promote, the rest were left to wonder where their lives were headed. For many, pursuing a career in music meant leaving the comfort of their local scene and heading to international cities. Local superstars in Brazil or Kenya became busboys in New York or taxi drivers in London in order to pursue their dreams. The other source of diasporic hip hop was second generation immigrants from Haiti, Somalia, and Egypt, among other places; these young people were beginning to find a political voice through hip hop. As artists and fans, they generated new circuits of performance, activism, and solidarity that brought into question the fixed national boundaries that had defined hip hop scenes.

In some ways hip hop has been both global and diasporic since its beginnings. Hip hop's lineage includes the West African griots, or professional singers. It has strong roots in Jamaican dance hall music, itself a mélange of different musical influences. Several founders of hip hop culture were Caribbean immigrants: DJ Kool Herc was Jamaican and Grandmaster Flash was from Barbados. B-boying draws on influences as varied as Brazilian capoeira and East Asian karate films. Even today American rap songs incorporate global cultural forms, from Bollywood film songs and Rastafarian religions to Tahitian dance styles. The global is at the heart of hip hop culture, which from the start has borrowed and appropriated and sampled from cultures around the world.

But the diasporic rap of the new millennium emerged in a unique context—that of the post 9/11 world. The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, drastically reshaped the contours of race, politics, and global war. The world became embroiled in a “war against terrorism,” in which those perceived as “against us” were often Muslims and people of color. Arab and South Asian immigrant communities were seen as the internal enemy. The children of immigrants born and raised their whole lives in the United States, Australia, France, England, or elsewhere were made to feel like outsiders.

Diasporic hip hop has forged a new global politics of solidarity that connects racism against African Americans to anti-Arab profiling in urban areas and links these issues to the occupation in Palestine and the war in Iraq. Palestinian American emcees such as the Michigan-based Iron Sheik challenge the erasure and denial of Palestinian histories in American public discourse. As the anthropologist Sunana Maira recounts, diasporic rappers have come together in cross-national collaborations such as the 2007 Arab Summit, a project that includes the Palestinian American rapper Excentrik, Ragtop from the Filipino-Palestinian-American group the Philistines, the Syrian American rapper Omar Offendum from the NOMADS, and the Iraqi-Canadian rapper Narcicyst from the trio Euphrates. These kinds of collaboration are rooted in cross-ethnic activist alliances of black activists from hurricane-stricken New Orleans, Palestinian activists demanding a right to return, and people opposed to the militarization of the US-Mexico border and the apartheid wall in Palestine.
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For British rappers, such as the South Asian Muslim groups Kaliphz and Fundamental, criticisms of local racism and the global war on terror are couched in the language of militant Islam.
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At a time when Islam has replaced black power as the enemy within, it's not surprising that it has reemerged as a possible axis for solidarity in the hip hop globe.