European Hip Hop Watch

Hip Hop Subversive Art

2006-02-19T19:05:00.000+01:00

Behind the debate of whether graffiti is art or vandalism, there is another discourse, remaining relatively untouched by the popular press, at least in the parts of North America and Europe that I have personally lived in.

Background
Teenagers and adults alike have a need for cultural myths and folktales to provide a storyline, giving families a context of the past from which to draw models and visions for the future. While Claude Lévi-Strauss is falling off in importance for many researchers, he remains a leading theorist and figure for many conservative, traditional researchers in the United States. He states that myths reinforce the solidarity and identity of the group; and he considers myth a universal organizing principle that is a collective manifestation of individual minds within a social group. Consciously or not, high-school academic canon and religious doctrine strips minority cultures of the opportunity to collectively share legends and myths. William S. Simmons, for example, argues in Spirit of the New England Tribes: Indian History and Folklore, 1620-1984 that although Europeans recorded bits of indigenous mythology, Christianity swept this genre away, or rather, replaced it with Christianity's own biblical equivalents. Myth forms a tiny part of the corpus of this study.

Filtering
Hip hop fans in the United States, when exposed with opportunities to meet minority cultures in other countries, find a conversational link and receive lots of energy from other people who can cite examples of how various dominant cultures strip away and "bleach" the history of minority groups. (See my own personal account of this in my Bobby Digitals, Please Stand Up post, dated Feb 14, 2006, under the Hip Hop International, subhead).

Three examples of American filtering that come to my mind, among others, are the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II in concentration camps. Even for families that were American citizens for 150 years or more.

Another is the Tuskegee Study. This is an experiment whereby African Americans - some of Caribbean lineage - were diagnosed as having the syphilis bacteria. The study involved 399 poor black sharecroppers in Macon County, Alabama, who had the disease. And another 201 men without the disease who served as controls. The infected men in the study were not informed of this diagnosis. While they had already contracted the illness, it was wrong to not inform them or treat them. In exchange for their participation, the men received free meals, free medical examinations, and burial insurance.

The lack of public discourse on this topic enabled a popular misconception to propagate in some pockets of American society: Many people spread the rumour that these patients were intentionally injected with syphillis, and thereafter studied by Tuskegee University researchers to trace the disintegration of the body, when it is infected by the syphillis bacteria and left untreated over a period of more than 20 years (at which point it can effect the nervous system and bones).

In reality, the architects of the Tuskegee Syphilis Study were United States Public Health Service physicians and were primarily responsible for the long-term studies. It is also true that some Tuskegee University staff were involved. Furthermore, the infected individuals were indeed NOT informed that they were being studied in an attempt to learn about the life-shortening disease, at the expense of innocent patients who thought they were coming to receive health care. A sort of human guinea-pig experiment had been performed, breaching elements of the Hippocratic Oath.

And finally, a third is the history and personal narratives of a white subculture in America: Irish-Americans. Today, there are more people in the United States that can claim Irish descent than English descent. But from my personal American education experience, roughly 85% of high school education focuses on the Anglo aspect of America's cultural development. About 1% or 2% of historic discourses are Irish. Furthermore, the prejudice toward the Irish "to keep them in check" is not covered at all. Fortunately, books such as How the Irish Became White, by Noel Ignatiev, address this cultural gap.

Linking the Past to Present-Day Phenomenon
So, filtering is a huge topic worthy of much analysis because it is a reason for many disparities in awareness, when comparing the disaffected or disenfranchised group to the dominant or mainstrem culture. It is also what keeps minority groups from understanding one another and recognizing those areas where they may have common struggles and pain to share, as part of a collective catharsis. This is unfortunate.

Filtering can also be partly blamed for hate talk. Here's how. (More coming soon ...)

What Is Hip Hop

2006-02-17T15:41:00.000+01:00

I would like to expand the traditional definition of hip hop (MCing, graffiti, dance and DJing) to include other areas. For example, in the movie industry, Jails, Hospitals & Hip-Hop and Hip Hop Homos (don’t let the title make you think it's kitsch) contribute to the scene in the form of documentary and film. Spike Lee movies, and just as importantly, his in-your-face commentary on social issues such as the Rodney King beating (police brutality in the USA, surprised it exists even today?) paved the way. Even helping to make Fort Greene, New York, a hood in Brooklyn, a trendy locale for quality NYC living, just over the Brooklyn Bridge. For those people who like living with some flavor and multi-culturalism, at least.

Hoop Dreams (5 years of filming and 7 years of work, documenting the process of going from b-ball to big time, with sacrifices, pressure and losses reviewed) is yet another. If someone can point me to European releases, I would be happy to add them here.

Then there are the films that are already taking hip hop elements to the level of Hollywood romp, and are probably a strong turn-off for most hip hop fans. Films such as Hip-Hop Task Force and, to a lesser extent, Prêt-à-Porter, whose setting is present-day Paris.

By the way, if you yourself are wishing to make a screenplay or movie and are a bit how to do it, or if you wonder whether you should take the night course in downtown instead of snuggling with your kids or whomever, this is one of the most brilliant and concise places for advice: Esther's Screenwriter News. Helpful, insightful and from the heart.

Graffiti During the Holocaust?
So, as hip hop fans mature, enter society and move into various industries, perhaps adding film to the hip-hop bandwagon is no large task.

But, for the traditional areas, there is an issue of finding acceptance. If you have a relative that thinks your music, scratch, tag or spray paint is worthless, email them a story of how even during the holocaust, graffiti gave HOPE.

But I recommend you check out a tool built in Europe, over the past 5 years, and just finding its potential in society today. It enables you to re-mix music and publish it in their web community. Artists can get recognized here and find new markets without being enslaved by their labels. The community will be up-and-running before spring of 2006. They have a preliminary eCard that can give you a taste of things to come, and don’t forget to click on the GIVE ME MORE button. It is a site that will enable, for example, an American song to be posted, edited by someone in Brazil or China and re-posted. A great place for fans to connect, compete and work their own skill. Users can pick up remixes and listen to them as Internet radio or at their own home poker game or chess party. The same version is also in Taiwanese. These are only demos, you need to go to the home page to download full tracks (ranging from a few MBs to 130 MBs), as well as the plug-in for your favourite music software, such as QT or Windows Media Player. It’s the only software I know to have an auto-improv button. So, when I am busy, and like the groove, I just hit that and keep pouring through my writing and design work. Saves me some downtime searching for a new album or folder in my music libraries.

I did some looking around for hip hop imagery to add to my own web pages, and here is what I found. Big ups to another hip hop genre, fontography. Yeah, that’s right, the people who make text, type, symbols and dingbats for PCs, Macs and the Internet. If you want to find a free cool image from graphxedge to flip some pics or web pages, check out their free stuff, like GE Zoom here. Also, at Iconian, in the dingbat section, you will find Daniel Zadorozny’s symbols of downtown Philadelphia, Ninja images and other hip-hop related imagery. On the other side of the Atlantic, in Italy, check out Gabriele Magurno. You can pick up stuff from turntables to bootylicious (what is the noun form of that?), and from keyboards to splotches. My favourite work of his is THEBOMB.TTF. If you use it, make sure you respect his copyright, by giving him the credit that he deserves for contributing to the community.

Bobby Digitals, Please Stand Up

2006-02-14T16:29:00.000+01:00

In 1998, Wu-Tang member RZA released the first Bobby Digital series of CDs. The main character is a black urban globetrotting gangsta lover.

Via love and sex relationships, hip hop music gets European American and African romance tracks (Slow Grind Italian, Slow Grind French, Slow Grind African, Love Jones) mixed in with the usual hard-hitting tracks that the Wu tribe is known for. As people say in Europe, relationships are the best way to pick up a new language.

About the same time, I took on an international job. It was funny, I often reflect, to find myself in the business lounge at Frankfurt International Airport or Hong Kong, sipping wine, headphoned to RZA As Bobby Digital In Stereo on full tilt and with my fingers meticulously editing XML code that is accessing a financial back-office database. I am dressed like a roller-blader or nutty professor. Suits all around me.

Hip Hop International
During one such trip, I remember running into members of a Maori Hip Hop band. The Maori, for those who don’t know, are the largest indigenous New Zealand tribe. And for every bit of progressive political success with regards to integrating their language and tradition into white society, there are political forces in New Zealand getting wet over stripping it all away. Anyway, the Maori rapper I spoke with was quite enthusiastic, having come back from performing in New York and meeting with globally-aware Wu members.

Unfortunately, some of the loyalty toward the Wu which I witness in Sweden, Hungary and New Zealand, is not burgeoning any longer, stateside. It seems that pop culture elites, whatever that is, and industry execs, can't see value in putting such rappers on a soda or software commercial. I mean, when you go to marketing or MBA programs, its the death of your entrepreneurial skills. You are taught to divide society into 4 or five slices of some analytical pie. That is how big money thinks. What I say to big money is this: "if you getting your skills from a thesis seven years old, your inspiration is old, yo." But that is OK, it gives some opportunity for the rest of us.

As anyone talking to a psychology/sociology/communications/criminology student thinking they got it all figure out, has witnessed, such thinking is boring and suffocating. Similarly, the muli-layered nature of Hip Hop can not be plotted on a bell curve. Nor can the intelligence of individuals, the society that they participate in, and their ever-evolving nature, ever be contained in a single formula. But, business bullshit aside, fans are also to blame. This deserves future analysis on this blog, when I can have a think about how "street credibility" opinions are not always so credible to pay mind time to.

So, for whatever reason, fans, vis-a-vis industry to some extent, stop supporting mind-opening projects and rap experiments. The rappers, it seems, when their minds go as big as great architects (Gaudi), painters (Delacroix), (Siqueiros) or composers (Mozart) need to rely on future awareness and intellect to revisit them. And that is fine and dandy, too.

But these same projects are primed and mature enough to receive voice in sophisticated publications. For example, I have not come across anyone praising RZA for mixing anime/japination cartoon imagery with Blaxploitation film allusions outside of the Internet. Big ups to JR Valery's hip hop discourse on this theme.

It Is Over When You Stop Wanting To Be Understood
Another beautiful act is Domestic Violence, which is also on this album. Notice, I intentionally did not call it a song.

In this track, there is a “fight to end all fights.” The verbal onslaught that comes when a relationship is at the first step of the end stage of the end phase, but still has issues of attachment and expectation.

It is the sort of argument that reminds me of what my friend Zeljko, of Yamamoto Group, once said: It is nice to imagine a calm, peaceful understanding break up, after years of marriage between two reasonable, mature and respectful people. Unfortunately, the final steps of the break-up process never unfold in that way we imagine. I once found myself at the wrong site of a cracked wine bottle, and getting stopped by the boys with a breathilizer on the same night. I had only a few sips of wine and was exiting to save a traumatic experience from being witnessed by the little ones. Not violent, not a drinker nor a drinker-and-driver. But there I was, needing to explain my situation: an American in Central Europe. Shit.

Back to the track. Both man and woman hurl insults about the deepest part of what they hate in each other. Behind it, of course, they are unfurling unexplored terrain within themselves - their true needs, - the part of their lives that they are each responsible for, but not for the other person, for themselves.

To be true to their own image of what they want to have in a relationship. Cut into this diatribe and chaos is a third element, an educated close friend of the pair is on the phone, with the phone off the hook, bearing witness to the mayhem we never show the world outside the home-in-shambles, even after we have experienced it. And he is pleading for healthy calm. But it sounds like he does not want calm for calm's sake. Or peace for the tranquility of the couple. He going for his, ... probably a business need.

If anyone wants to join forces on a project to take Bobby Digital concepts further, please contact me for some ideas.

coming up soon

2006-02-10T18:11:00.000+01:00

Edo Maajka feature...
Edo Maajka is the premiere rapper of the region known today as the Western Balkans. Known also as the former Yugoslavia (the tired term means “land of the south slavs”).

His raps aim at themes relevant to countries such as Serbia and Montenegro, Croatia, Bosnia, Slovenia and Bulgaria, as well as the extensive diaspora in Western Europe (Hungary, Austria, Germany, Sweden, UK), N America, New Zealand, S Africa and Australia.

This diaspora must hold some sort of world record. I believe it's the only European region to have cause for exodus based on four war-time periods in the past century (Balkan Wars after demise of Ottomans, WWI, WWII and final break-up when Yugoslav leaders did not transition to confederacy and democracy fast enough in the wake of the Berlin Wall's dismantling).

I plan on talking a bit about the Edo Maajka phenomenon in the next week or so. Particularly, the conflict between the new generation of the hip hop can-do attitude among youth and the control-oriented conservatism that is a common manifestation of parents who grew up in a “have-not economy.” The dichotomy of love and fear will be behind the discourse.

Anyway, to get a taste of Maajka, see a full run-time Sikiriki video (in Macromedia Flash). Sikiriki is a play on sekirati (to worry about something) and kikiriki (a playful word that means peanut).

Or, the Nemozes video, produced in Stockholm, which was outlawed from being shown on Serb TV, due to the defacing of government property. Fortunately, no other Balkan governments or broadcast media saw this video a threat to their civil society. :-)

If you love the feeling of spray cans in the night, you will love the way Nemozes kicks off.

Why Come To This Blog?

2006-02-10T18:06:00.000+01:00

I have lots of entrepreneurial interests, but this will not be the place to discuss them. If you are interested in the relationship between hip hop and interactive media, postmodernity, corporatism or post-structural analysis, then you might get some bang for your buck, here.

Act Like You Know
If you want to be challenged about the music and art scene, you might get some good news here. I had humble beginnings at Stress Magazine. This was a New York City hip hop magazine that competed with The Source, for the local NYC youth market. We floated for several years and then sunk. To us, hip hop went beyond the mic, DJing, grafitti and dance. It was about giving the dispossessed (dispossed, for whatever reason, who cares) a chance to get empowered. It was about re-introducing an old idea into the urban youth community: When you don't know something, it is best to ask. If you can't ask, then act like you know, until that time that you do know. Certainly, it is not about taking pride in ignorance. See what you can be. Visualize the pathway from here, to there. It was the anti-thesis to some of what was happening out in the streets at that time. There was a covert war against El Salvador, the support of fascisim in banana republics continued, this time under the guise of Drug Wars, government involvement in the crack-cocaine epidemic, critiques against eubonics, and backlashes against graffiti and free expression in the art world. Oh yeah, and lots of money taken away from social institutions and community art programs, once the other war - the one against communism - was won.

Since then, I have done business-process software education, design, video on 5 continents. So, being lucky to have seen so much and having my roots in the USA and Europe, I want to let people be aware of how much their information is filtered. To this end, I also want to share the up-coming talent I come across, while I pay my bills, working out of the UK, Sweden, Hungary and New York. Perhaps you will learn about opportunities for yourself if you read between the lines.

Keep me in check. Let me know if its too confusing or too non-sensical so I make sure the audience, wherever you are, get a kick in ways that you just can't get from your local media provider.

Peace,
Age