Alastair Pennycook

“ Given the extent to which language can be a difficulty for some in engaging with rap, it is worth noting that hip-hop gets taken up in differing forms. In a number of contexts where English is not the first language, break-dancing first gained people’s attention—in part because of the cultural and linguistic difficulties in understanding rap, in part because of the more immediate appeal of the physical. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The North American cultural forms of rap and hip-hop may be in the process of becoming localised, but is there an influence in the opposite direction? As Pennay comments in his discussion of rap in Germany, ‘Regrettably, the flow of new ideas and stylistic innovations in popular music is nearly always from the English-speaking market, and not to it’. ”

“ Preisler goes on to show the broad knowledge of hip-hop slang among a group of Danish hip-hop street dancers. The language of hip-hop may be, then, one of the best candidates when looking for emergent global Englishes.
If we can develop an understanding of how global rap and hip-hop and the spread of English are related, there are important considerations for educational and curricular outcomes. Since these are the forms of popular culture in which many people are investing, as educators, we too need to start engaging with these forms. ”

“ For a sense of innovation, surprise, and musical substance in hop-hop culture and rap music, it is becoming increasingly necessary to look outside the USA to countries such as France, England, Germany, Italy, and Japan, where strong local currents of hip-hop indigenization have taken place. ”

“ While, at one level, local development of rap and hip-hop can still be seen in terms of appropriation of African-American cultural forms—and there is still a tradition of imitation—at another, the local context in which the form evolves may engage a quite different range of cultural, musical and linguistic forms, mobilising a politics that may include anti-globalisation and anti-Americanism. ”

“ 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’. ”

“ 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’. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Rather, Africans and Asians have significantly shaped the process of English spread. The formation of language policy in British colonies shows the centrality of the struggle against imperialism to the creation of World English. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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:
a global urban subculture that has entered people’s lives and become a universal practice among youth the world over ... ”