In a discussion of na mele paleoleo (Hawaiian rap) developed by Sudden Rush, for example, Fay Akindes argues that by bridging elements of political self-determination with popular culture, this Hawaiian hip-hop has become ‘a liberatory discourse for Hawaiians seeking economic self-determination in the form of sovereignty. Sudden Rush … have borrowed hip hop as a counter-hegemonic transcript that challenges tourism and Western imperialism.’[1] Similarly, Tony Mitchell claims that if Sydney rappers of Fijian and Tongan background, such as Trey and Posse Koolism, combine with King Kapisi’s ‘Samoan hip-hop to the world’, and if Sudden Rush’s Ku’e (Resist) has been influenced by Aotearoa–New Zealand Upper Hutt Posse’s E Tu (Be Strong), then what we see is a ‘Pacific Island hip-hop diaspora’ and a ‘pan-Pacific hip-hop network that has bypassed the borders and restrictions of the popular music distribution industry’. (31) Clearly this happens elsewhere in the world, as is shown by Zuberi’s discussion of British, South Asian and Caribbean musical connections, which have produced a ‘digitally enabled diasporic consciousness’.[2]
Global Noise looks at indigenisation of rap and hip-hop in France, the UK, Germany, Bulgaria, the Netherlands, the Basque region, Italy, Japan, Korea, Australia, Aotearoa New Zealand and Canada; it also considers Islamic hip-hop, particularly in France and the UK. As Mitchell explains, these studies aim to avoid glib uses of postmodernism as an explanatory framework:
The essays in this book explore these national and regional appropriations of rap and hiphop within their different social, cultural and ethnic contexts. In doing so, they avoid the clichéd Eurocentric rhetoric of postmodernism too often invoked in academic attempts to explain rap inadequately in terms of pastiche, fragmentation, the loss of history, and the blurring of boundaries between ‘high art’ and popular culture. (10)
As with any book that tries to look at the global context, there’s inevitably an enormous amount missing. You won’t find South America, Africa or South Asia represented here. Overall, however, the book provides enough cases to carry the argument that localisation itself is differently inflected when occurring in diverse contexts.
Alongside the specific themes that the book addresses—various music scenes; the need to understand hip-hop in terms of local appropriations; and issues such as cultural imperialism, globalisation, commercialisation, authenticity and localisation—other key ideas cut across these and are worth discussing in greater depth. Two I would like to mention briefly are captured in the tensions between globalisation and appropriation, and resistance and normativity. Related themes that I will pursue are language and localisation, and directionality.
First, globalisation and appropriation. Writing about Bulgaria, Claire Levy remarks that hip-hop constitutes:
