France’. (76) Indeed, post–September 11, we would do well to pay even closer attention to the ways in which anti-racism and new formations of Islamic identity are being articulated through popular culture. But hip-hop researchers are often in search of a local, disenfranchised politics and only reluctantly admit to it if ‘their’ rappers lack marginalisation:
In Japan, too, hip-hop is associated with place, but not any kind of marginalized residential neighborhood or region. On the contrary, Japanese hip-hop is generally associated with Shibuya, a trendy shopping district in Tokyo where many of the key nightspots and record stores are located. (241)
Maxwell points to an aspect of this problem when he criticises work that ‘over-emphasizes a purported “political” dimension to cultural practices, overreading them perhaps, from the position of a nonreflexive organic intellectual’. (266) But the issue is not only that there is the possibility of reading desirable politics into hip-hop and engaging, at times, in a romanticisation of resistance, but also that there is, I believe, a non-reflexive normativity to those politics. This is perhaps most obvious in a writer such as John Hutnyk, for whom the only good music seems to be that which conforms to his anti-global capitalist and anti-racist politics.[1] In this book there is a tendency to admire those who distance themselves from the violence of US ‘gangsta rap’ and espouse causes such as language maintenance, education, the environment or anti-racism. There is, then, a normativity here that suggests not only that mimicry of the US is problematic, and that syncretic, hybrid appropriations are preferable, but also that adoption of certain political formations over others is preferable. There is of course nothing wrong with this, but without a more reflexive accountability for their politics, writers can collapse together aesthetic preferences and normative values because the cogs of the critical machinery have worn out.
Turning to language and localisation, what interests me is the extent to which the language in which rap is performed is linked to levels of appropriation and forms of politics. Global Noise would have benefited from greater attention to issues of language use, which was signalled by Mitchell in his introduction. Because the issue of localisation is central (including the argument against US essentialism and authenticity) to the book, each contribution necessarily operates around a distinction between the US and the rest. But to what extent is this an issue of rap in English versus rap in other languages? With regards to the Netherlands, Mir Wermuth argues that there is a local ‘Nederhopper’ culture, despite the constant struggle over what is ‘authentic’, the small size of the Dutch market, the lack of political commitment, the absence of a strong black (Dutch African-Caribbean) presence and the tendency to use American-style rap English rather than Dutch. In the context of the Netherlands, then, it seems possible to localise while using English.
- ↑ John Hutnyk, Critique of Exotica: Music, Politics and the Culture Industry, Pluto Press, London, 2000.
