GLOBAL NOISE: Rap and Hip Hop Outside the USA

With this groundbreaking collection of 13 essays on current hip-hop music and culture outside the U.S., Mitchell, who teaches writing and cultural studies at Sydney's University of Technology, offers an intelligent, engaging contribution to pop cultural studies. Upholding the widely held criticism that U.S. hip-hop's "rhetorical conventions and tropes have become increasingly atrophied, clichéd, and repetitive," Mitchell and the other contributors, including Jacqueline Urla, André J.M. Prévos and Claire Levy, exhibit exemplary research skills in their far-ranging explorations of "the expression of local identities globally through the vernaculars of rap and hip-hop in foreign contexts." Their subjects include Islamic rap in the U.K. and France; German-language rappers' expressions of second-generation immigrant experience; the Sydney group Def Wish Cast's attempt to forge a white, Australian-accented, nationalistic hip-hop culture; the revolutionary rhetoric of Italian "combat" rappers like Onda Rossa Posse and Assalti Frontali; mainland China's Cui Jian, who questioned the 1997 handover of Hong Kong; the Basque group Negu Gorriak's deployment of U.S. hip-hop styles within a radical identity politics; and artists in Aotearoa–New Zealand who combine rap, soul and reggae with traditional Maori music. While Mitchell explored similar ground in his 1996 book Popular Music and Local Identity, and while most of the essays are rooted in fashionable critical theories about regional world cultures being dominated by global, and especially U.S., consumer culture, this book explores the new phenomenon of worldwide hip-hop artists "reclaiming... localities as sites for the construction of imaginary local identities." Artists, activists and academics will look to this benchmark collection for a long time. 14 illus. (Feb.)