a global urban subculture that has entered people’s lives and become a universal practice among youth the world over … From a local fad among black youth in the Bronx, it has gone on to become a global, postindustrial signifying practice, giving new parameters of meaning to otherwise locally or nationally diverse identities. (134)
Similarly, Ian Condry suggests that ‘Japanese hip-hop and other versions around the world are interesting in part because they help us understand the significance of what seems to be an emerging global popular culture’. (222) Such statements, however, present a certain dilemma, as the central argument of the book is that hip-hop can no longer be seen as derivative of African-American culture, but rather needs to be considered as locally indigenised and expressive of local cultural and political concerns. So what constitutes this ‘global, postindustrial signifying practice’, this ‘global popular culture’?
Ian Maxwell points to this concern when he warns of the dangers of:
the historico-documentary approach, subsuming specific cultural experiences to totalizing narratives (for example, the kind of writing that takes as its theme an unproblematized transcontextual continuity—say ‘hip-hop’—and views any local narrative engaging this theme as an effect of that continuity). (266)
The point here is that while the book addresses the theme of localisation (not, it should be said, without some ‘historico-documentary’ fabrications of continuity in national or ethnographically construed local hip-hop scenes), it does not answer the question of what ‘a global urban subculture’ or ‘an emerging global popular culture’ might be in relation to such localisations.
This question is not merely about the relationship between global and local cultural forms (a relationship never very adequately addressed by neologisms such as ‘glocalization’), but rather a more difficult question: If the global is always also local, what is it that constitutes the global? If global hip-hop is not the spread of this North American cultural form but rather its local appropriation, is global hip-hop culture the sum of the parts of the localisations or something else?
With regards to resistance and normativity, a commonly discussed tension lies between the commercialised, sanitised world of the popular-music industry and the critical, resistant roots of hip-hop. But there is, I believe, a strong case that can be made for the political significance of hip-hop. Ted Swedenburg’s discussion, for example, shows how the relationship between Islam and hip-hop bands such as Fun-Da-Mental in the UK and IAM in France is significant and often overlooked. We need, he suggests, to realise the ‘importance of paying
close attention to popular cultural manifestations of “Islam” in Europe, given the ethnic, political, and cultural importance of “Islam” to youth of Islamic backgrounds in Britain and
