Close to the Edge (2 page)

By the mid-1980s graffiti and b-boying were in decline, and rap emerged as the central means by which hip hop culture was packaged for global consumption.
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Run-DMC demonstrated the cross-over pop success of rap music with its cover of the rock band Aerosmith's “Walk This Way.” The group earned a $1.6 million endorsement deal with Adidas, marketing the brand as part of a global hip hop lifestyle and culture. A year later Salt-N-Pepa's hit song “Push It” catapulted the female trio to worldwide fame; the song even made it to the Dutch Top 40 charts.

Cable and satellite television also played a role in disseminating rap music. In 1988 the show
Yo! MTV Raps
aired daily in the United States and soon became one of the network's first globally televised programs. It aired on MTV Europe and then MTV Asia and MTV Latino.
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As a relatively new technology outside the United States, cable television was available mostly to privileged youth. Also, those with more disposable income were the first to consume rap music, because of their access to cassettes and videos through travel or relatives who lived abroad. It was not always true that the oppositional ideas of rap spread automatically from one marginalized segment of youth to another.

The MTV-mediated rap of the mid-to late 1980s surfaced during an era of cost-cutting deindustrialization and privatization of social services that diverted resources from America's urban centers, resulting in growing crime, gang activity, and police violence. The agitating and energetic militant rap crew Public Enemy gained tremendous popularity during this time. With berets, camouflage fatigues, and military drills reminiscent of the Black Panthers, Public Enemy revived an Afrocentric and black nationalist language that resonated with fans around the globe, from Australian Aboriginals to Samoans to black youth in South Africa, Brazil, and Tanzania. Public Enemy, a group from the black suburbs of Long Island, followed in the footsteps of Bambaataa. The group sought to take its vision of a black planet worldwide through constant touring, MTV, and multiplatinum albums.

The other trend to emerge in this era was West Coast “gangsta” rap, announcing its arrival with the defiance of NWA's “Straight Outta Compton.” But, where Public Enemy was out to fight the power, gangsta rappers were concerned with survival. Where Chuck D's sense of community drew from a tradition of black protest, the community of the gangsta rapper was the ‘hood. As these two currents appeared on the global stage in the era of MTV, they recalled the tension between the universal vision of Bambaataa and the ghettocentric storytelling of “The Message.” How these currents would be received and riffed on at the local level remained to be seen.

B
y the 1990s global audiences had had access to hip hop culture for over ten years; the decade marked a period of emergence for local hip hop scenes. Rather than simply consuming American rap, global hip hoppers began to create their own versions. Like their Bronx counterparts, who developed a sound system from abandoned car radios and made turntable mixers from microphone mixers, global hip hoppers adapted materials from their local environment. They made background tracks by manually looping break beats on tape recorders. They improvised turntables with Walkmans as decks. And they relied on that most basic of technologies, the human beatbox.

The visual language of graffiti and the bodily expressions of b-boying had transcended cultural differences. But black American-accented rap in English was not so easily adapted to local contexts. Japanese rappers initially found it difficult to produce catchy rhymes because of the arrhythmic nature of their language and its positioning of the verb at the end of a sentence.
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Early rap outside the United States tended to imitate American rap, with performers either mimicking American rap songs or coming up with raps in English. In Tanzania, for instance, the Yo! Rap Bonanza competition, held at the New African Hotel in Dar Es Salaam in 1991, featured rappers performing in English and copying American raps. Repeating the English lyrics and copying the rhyme patterns of their favorite groups was often a way for amateur rappers to understand the flow and dissect the construction of verses.

Part of the problem was the lack of models for non-English, non-American rap. The development of bilingual rap by Latino artists in the late 1980s helped to erode the hegemony of the English language in global hip hop. In 1989 the single “Menti-rosa” by the Cuban American artist Mellow Man Ace went multiplatinum. A year later the Chicano artist Kid Frost released
Hispanic Causing Panic.
Chicano rap gained popularity among youth in Latin America, particularly Colombia and Mexico. Around this time the Puerto Rican rapper Vico C, who hailed from the barrio Puerta de Tierra of San Juan, began to achieve fame with his Spanish-language rapping, and his two singles “Saborealo” and “Maria” went gold and platinum, respectively.

The biggest market for non-English rap in the early 1990s was in the Francophone world—covering the territories of France, West Africa, and Quebec. In 1991 the Senegalese-born French rapper MC Solaar released his debut album,
Qui Semé le Vent Récolte le Tempo
(Who Sows the Wind Reaps the Rhythm). This record went platinum, and his second album went double platinum.

The success of these French and Latino rap superstars encouraged the development of home-grown underground hip hop scenes. Local movements also began to flourish through their involvement with grassroots cultural exchanges. As a mature rap movement in the States struggled with issues of its own commodification, some rappers began to look outward to the African diaspora as a source of renewed energy.

Outside the circuit of label-organized tours, artists like Fab 5 Freddy and Paris went behind the scenes to meet with local producers, rappers, and fans. They brought their ideas, shared their techniques, donated equipment, and reported on these scenes upon their return. These cultural exchanges are situated within long histories of diasporic engagement. Global Pan-African-ism in Ghana was linked to the country's first president, Kwame Nkrumah, and visits by black intellectuals such as W. E. B. Du Bois.
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After Bob Marley's Survival Tour of Australia and New Zealand in 1979, Australian Aboriginals began to see themselves as part of a global black movement. The Cuban revolutionary government had identified itself strongly with the black power movement in the United States and the anticolonial struggle in Africa. American civil rights and black power leaders from Stokely Carmichael to Eldridge Cleaver and Angela Davis had visited the island. But the black nationalism of contemporary hip hop artists was received with greater enthusiasm by young people feeling the effects of racism and exclusion in a new global order.

Another, more unlikely, source of support for local under-ground artists was the state. For a variety of reasons politicians were realizing the benefits of associating with the increasingly popular rap movements. In Cuba the revolutionary government harnessed the energy of rappers to bolster the image of Cuba as a mixed-race nation with African roots.
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In France and Brazil municipal governments organized hip hop workshops in community centers. The Casa do Hip Hop in the
periferia
of São Paulo sponsored weekly classes in b-boying, DJ-ing, graf-fiti art, and rapping for neighborhood youth. The minister of culture in France under François Mitterrand brought Afrika Bambaataa over to hold hip hop seminars for young people.
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As problems of crime and poverty spread throughout the urban peripheries in a moment of growing inequalities, culture was seen as a resource that could help divert the energies of youth to more creative pursuits while leaving the power structure intact.
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But hip hop turned out to be a double-edged sword. It took young people off the streets while also arming them with new kinds of oppositional knowledge and the means for self-organization.

While black nationalist rap took hold in some parts of the African diaspora, in other parts gangsta rap gained momentum. Like the neighborhoods of Compton and South Central Los Angeles where gangsta originated, the barrios of Caracas, Cali, and Medellin and the townships outside Cape Town were marked by vicious cycles of poverty, incarceration, and violence. Rappers in the diaspora drew from vernacular models of masculine rebellion such as the
malandro
in Venezuela or the
tsotsi
in South Africa, in the same way that gangsta rappers in the US situated themselves within the badman tradition in African American folk culture.

Like its American counterpart, gangsta rap across the globe often consisted of first-person chronicles of ghetto life. Rappers recounted stories of being abandoned by their fathers, dis-appearing job prospects, and resorting to drug dealing as a means of survival. The music was also replete with references to the ghetto as a war zone, quite literally in the case of Colombia, which suffered from a long-term internal armed conflict. Gangsta rap gained immense popularity in prisons, on the streets, in the barrios. For gangsta rappers the music—like the drug trade—offered the promise of a way out of poverty.

One global icon of American gangsta rap was Tupac Shakur, whose appeal lay partly in his blending of a revolutionary ethos and “thug life.” Tupacistas could be found in the favelas of Rio. Tupac murals adorned the walls of barrios in Caracas. And youth in Cape Town donned his signature bandanna.
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Politically concious gangsta rap was common outside the United States. The French group Supreme NTM featured a Colt. 45 handgun on its album cover and used explicit language, but members of the group also denounced racial and economic exploitation.
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Instead of using the term
gangsta
, they referred to themselves as
hard core
, a label that captured their unique melding of different genres.

Hip hop had also gained momentum outside the African diaspora during the 1990s. Hip hop culture took off in Asia. This was not surprising, as the sweatshops of hip hop fashion were in Korea, Taiwan, and China, where labels such as Ecko, Fubu, Nike, and Adidas were produced. MTV Mandarin was launched in China in 1995 and helped popularize the lifestyles and brand names of hip hop culture. At the Europe-based b-boy competition known as B-Boy Summit, crews from Japan and Korea were frequent winners, adding greater dexterity and athleticism to the form.
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The biggest hip hop scene in Asia was in Japan, which had a long engagement with hip hop culture and black music in general. As the anthropologist Ian Condry describes, the focus of hip hop culture in Tokyo was the club scene, and the first club devoted to hip hop appeared in 1986. A combination of company-sponsored DJ and rap competitions and tours by American artists in the late 1980s and early 1990s helped to spur the nascent rap scene.
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Although Japanese record labels were reluctant to release rap music at this time, it had a growing following among youth. Japanese hip hop fans have been criticized for consuming black culture as a fad with little knowledge of black history.
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While the picture is more complex than this— some Japanese artists and fans do make an attempt to learn about black culture and history—the debate does point to the uneasy place of Asians within the Global Hip Hop Nation.
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Hip hop has been highly popular not just in Asia but also among Asian immigrant youth in Western nations such as Canada, Australia, Britain, and the United States. But Asians are not a homogeneous group. The forebears of long-standing communities of working-class Asians in the Caribbean, Pacific Islands, northeastern Australia, and East Africa arrived as indentured laborers during the colonial period. In Britain, working-class South Asians, along with Caribbean immigrants, have historically identified as black Britons because of a shared history of racist exclusion. This has led to the idea of an “Afro-Asian Atlantic” that recognizes the diasporic engagements between blacks, Asians, and Arabs.
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British South Asian rap groups such as Fundamental that identify as black are therefore locating themselves within this specific history.

In contrast, Asians emigrating to the United States since 1965 have tended to be upper middle class. The dominant image of Asian Americans as upwardly mobile or “model minorities” has placed them at odds with blacks and Latinos. One notable exception is Filipino Americans, who often share the circumstances of urban blacks and Latinos in places like the West Coast. They have been prominent as b-boys and DJs in West Coast hip hop.
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But the majority of middle-class Asian American consumers of rap tend to inhabit a position similar to affluent whites in the suburbs and have little contact with racialized poverty.

By the mid- to late 1990s the market for global hip hop was being recognized by the music industry, and many local acts had achieved commercial success. The first rap hit in Japan came in 1994, when Scha Dara Parr's single “Boogie Back Tonight” went platinum. Following two more platinum singles in 1995, by the rap group East End X Yuri, the industry coined the term
J-rap.
The Cuban rap group Orishas sold 400,000 copies of its debut album in 1998 after signing to EMI and went on to win two Grammys. These successes, echoed in other contexts as well, created a greater visibility for global hip hop. But such popularity also led to a growing divide, between groups that called themselves underground—rejecting fusion with other genres and maintaining a political stance—and commercial groups that geared their music toward mass audiences to gain industry acceptance. The divide between underground and commercial was not always clearly drawn. But it did reflect real contests over access to resources as multinational corporations entered the field and sought to exploit the industry potential of local scenes.

T
he year 1996 was a watershed for rap. On February 8, 1996, President Bill Clinton signed the Telecommunications Act, which relaxed media ownership rules. The legislation accompanied broader neoliberal policies of privatization and deregulation. Before passage of the measure a company could not own more than two radio stations in a single market. But as a result of the removal of ownership caps, companies were allowed to own up to seven or eight stations.