The digital material presented here is meant to supplement the article “Hip Hop from ’48 Palestine: Youth, Music, and the Present/Absent” from the current issue of Social Text (30.3, Fall 2012). An abstract for the article can be read below.
Introduction: The Making of a Hip Hop Globe Pedro Alberto Martínez Conde, otherwise known as Perucho Conde, was probably the first rapper to compose a hit song outside the United States. A poet and comedian from the inner-city Caracas … Continue reading “Close to the Edge: In Search of the Global Hip Hop Generation (Book Excerpt)”
As plenty of proud nostalgic discourses locate the residues of hip-hop culture circling the drains of sample exhaustion, scene fatigue, patched-in cameos, or the same old cushy R’n’B, people world over just keep going about inventing new worlds of musical … Continue reading “"In One, All": Senegalese Women Freestyle Artists Unify the Global Ghetto”
Kabu verdi / Nu bai / Gosi nu sta na Portugei / Nu bai / Es ta ben y sai / Chullage “Cape Verde / Let’s go / Now, we’re in Portugal / Let’s go / They [my people] … Continue reading “Bearing Witness and the Challenges of Community in Global Hip Hop”
Sujatha Fernandes’s Close to the Edge explores a variety of contexts in which hip-hop is practiced around the world, and draws them together with the thread of Fernandes’s personal experiences. My own work has been based on the ethnographic … Continue reading “"Wherever I Bless a Microphone": Ethnographic Perspectives on Hip-Hop's Transnational Flow”
One of my earliest recollections of the contradictions inherent in hip hop’s global spread happened in July 1995 when I, rather suddenly, noticed my friend Marwan’s younger brother Samir pointing at me and singing “I said Hello Everybody” from … Continue reading “Leaping Towards The Edge”
It’s hard to say that someone had a bad year because they made fewer millions than usual. And it’s even harder to pity 50 Cent under any circumstances. But still, 2009 was rough on the hip-hop superstar otherwise known as … Continue reading “Curtis Jackson and the Jeweled Skull”
