bloggedy blog: the personal weblog of a music lover and aging punk wannabe

:: Wednesday, May 25, 2005 ::

The World Is Phat: hip-hop from tha global hood
Interesting piece from Slate describing and analyzing global influences on hip-hop. Martin Edlund writes that American hip-hop, with its obsession on local influences -- from the street to the hood, Philly or L.A. -- has missed out on some global sounds. But all that is about to change.
The recent influx of three international styles—reggaeton from Puerto Rico, grime from Britain, and baile funk from Brazil—suggests that this situation may finally be changing. Taken together, they dispel the notion that globalization breeds homogeneity. Each is the product of a country importing American hip-hop, blending it with native traditions, and refashioning it in its own image.
Reggaeton (pronounced reggae-tone) is "an amalgam of foreign and domestic styles: hip-hop, reggae, merengue, and the Puerto Rican dance music bomba," and is gaining ground among mainstream hip-hop artists. Grime "grew out of London's mostly black projects, called council estates, sometime around 2002, and spread via pirate radio, which functions in Britain essentially as mixtapes do here." And baile -- "perhaps the unlikeliest candidate for import" -- arose from the slums of Rio de Janeiro. "Composed in makeshift studios on vintage equipment with bootlegged computer programs, baile funk is hip-hop as it might sound in the post-apocalyptic wasteland of Mad Max."

Edlund thinks these new global sounds will reinvigorate hip-hop the way local (non-East Coast/West Coast) scenes have over the past five years or so.
Throughout the 1990s, U.S. hip-hop was all about the East Coast/West Coast divide; everything else was the rap suburbs. But in the last five years, the map has been redrawn to include Atlanta and the Dirty South, St. Louis, Detroit, Chicago, and Houston. Each new locale announced itself with a distinctive sound, slang, and set of personalities.

Foreign hip-hop has followed a similar model. Reggaeton, grime, and baile funk—like Jamaican dancehall before them—arrived on America's doorstep as complete packages, with their own identities and sounds. They succeeded simply by innovating, not imitating.

:: Andrew 07:27 + ::
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