Hip-Hop Japan: Rap and the Paths of Cultural Globalization (review)

It is difficult to imagine an expressive form more thoroughly "local," rooted in its point of origin, and yet so readily "global" in its portability and potential appeal than hip-hop. "Keepin' it real"—by which emcees mean maintaining, even fetishizing, its longstanding cultural roots in urban African America—is key to hip-hop aesthetics. It is a vision that far too often presumes a uniformity of black experience, that privileges particular ideas, behaviors, and forms of communication as "blacker" than others, and that thus either resists "hybridity" or accepts iconoclasts only on terms established in "ghetto life." On the other hand, as a musical form reliant more on programming skills than instrumental prowess, on rapid-fire rhyming rather than singing ability, hip-hop supposedly "democratizes" artistic production, making it possible for virtually anyone to express themselves—or "represent"—in the genre. This quality makes hip-hop accessible to wider swaths of humanity, regardless of their "street cred" in inner-city African America or lack thereof, and thus a potent site for that epochal process we call "globalization."

It is precisely this tension between the "local" and the "global" that constitutes the thematic core of Ian Condry's superb ethnography, Hip-Hop Japan. The most theoretically ambitious of the recent spate of English-language scholarship on Japanese popular music, it aspires both to revise existing notions of globalization—exploring in detail how "localization and global connectedness can proceed simultaneously"—and to probe the limits of the "power of media industries" to control the transnational flows and development of popular music (pp. 18–19). Its exceedingly complex yet energetically persuasive argument makes Hip-Hop Japan a must-read for scholars in a variety of disciplines, regardless of degree of interest in either hip-hop or in Japan. Without sentimentality, Condry clearly views the days when anthropology could take as its object discrete, bounded "cultures" as long past. Though his command of contemporary Japanese society is impeccable, he tackles "borderless ethnography" with gusto and enthusiasm. In order to pursue an ethnography of hip-hop in Japan, Condry has necessarily mastered and gracefully integrated several distinct disciplinary literatures within the broader fields of Japan studies, African American studies, ethnomusicology, media studies, and the anthropology of globalization. His work thus sets a challenging standard for future generations of Japan anthropologists to meet.

Most American readers approaching Hip-Hop Japan will do so with an initial prurient (and self-satisfied) interest in the spectacle of stereotypically polite, well-behaved Japanese imitating African Americana and posing as in-yo-face ghetto thugs. The book acknowledges this fascination, engages it head-on, and dispenses with it appropriately, before moving on to discuss less obvious but more important issues raised by the presence of hip-hop in Japan. Individual chapters are devoted to rivalries over the definitions and soul of hip-hop, fandom and consumer culture, female assertiveness, linguistic politics, and the business of marketing hip-hop. Though the title hints at a Japanese hip-hop "scene," one of the book's most insistent themes is that hip-hop is understood and "performed" in diverse ways in Japan; although pioneer emcees openly pondered the Japaneseness of Japanese hip-hop, the idea of "representing Japan" has yielded to more circumscribed aspirations to represent specific communities, "families," political stances, and aesthetic positions (p. 161). Condry identifies and cautiously maintains a distinction between "party rap"—with its fluffier lyrical content, more akin to the "pop idol" phenomenon—and "underground hip-hop," which adopts a more aggressive oppositional stance on issues ranging from the history textbook controversy to critiques of Japan's "credentials society" (pp. 41–43, 95–98).

While acknowledging considerable crossover between these two streams, Condry insists there is a meaningful distinction between them, and his sympathies clearly lie with the underground scene. This is, in part, because the underground scene provides a more provocative answer to his...