In the UK the issue is rather different, the question being what version of English to use. With the strong African-Caribbean musical force in the UK, it has often been Jamaican English that has predominated. One of the most interesting developments has been the growth of Asian hip-hop bands, in which young British Asians have appropriated the forms of their African-Caribbean neighbours. According to David Hesmondalgh and Caspar Melville: ‘The productive syncretism of diasporic cultures is further demonstrated by the creative use British Asian musicians have made of hip-hop as the basis of musical-cultural statements about how they are negotiating new ethnic identities’. Thus, hip-hop is ‘only one node in a complex web of postcolonial cultural elements’. (87) Regardless of the use of South Asian music and Bollywood film samples, the issue for British-Asian hip-hop artists is generally one of appropriating a form of English to articulate a new localisation.
For some, the dominant force is the ‘English speaking world’. Mark Pennay, writing about hip-hop in Germany, suggests that ‘generalizations made about the characteristics of a genre on the basis of its development within the English-speaking market cannot be transferred wholesale to other national contexts’. (128, my emphasis) The use of German, therefore, takes on considerable significance in this mode of appropriation. Similarly, with regards to Italy, Tony Mitchell discusses the shift from English to standard Italian and then to Italian dialects. Meanwhile in Quebec, according to Roger Chamberland, the growth of Frenchlanguage rap has, of course, been influenced by the large hip-hop scene in France (where, as André Prévos and Tony Mitchell note, French has also been greatly influenced by Caribbean and North African languages and creoles). This move to rap in local languages was partly a result of difficulties with English. The development of German rap, for example, was to some extent a result of the inaccessibility of Black-American English, particularly for former East Germans. The use of local languages is also a political move. The Basque group Negu Gorriak uses Basque language as a political statement about nationalism. And, as Jacqueline Urla tells us, that group’s decision to use Basque (over Castillian) did not appear to weaken its appeal elsewhere, giving it instead a sort of localised authenticity.
So what is the relationship between localisation and language? While it might be tempting to assume that the development of rap in some minor language signals a greater level of indigenisation, we should be cautious as the relationship between language and culture is not so simple. Tony Mitchell’s discussion of the Upper Hutt Posse shows not only that its use of Maori is part of a strong political and cultural statement, but also that there is compatibility between rap and Maori forms of oral discourse. Fijian-Australian rapper Trey has made the same point about hip-hop and Pacific Island cultures, suggesting that dance, graffiti, MCing and rap have strong links to the traditional oral cultures of the Pacific. Of course, there is a danger here of essentialising, and of suggesting intrinsic links between so-called oral
