Su Raap: Sardinian Hip Hop between Mass Culture and Local Specificities

Since the early 90s, when rap music came to Sardinia, young people began listening to and practicing it. Today the Sardinian hip hop scene is very active and several hip hop bands and rappers perform live music and publish CDs.

Is Sardinian rap the same as the mainstream USA musical genre? Or can we find any differences, any aspects that we can indentify as local and specific? Those questions are the focus of my research on Sardinian hip hop music.

With an ethnomusicological approach, observing, speaking and spending time with rappers and producers, I concentrate my attention on how the translation of this musical genre from USA to Sardinia modified it in the language, the subjects of the lyrics, the wearing style, the performance context, the musical characteristics and so on.

In my paper I will focus on these specificities showing that Sardinian rappers and producers are not ‘victims’ of the music industry but rather they manipulate it ‘from the bottom’, modifying musical objects and symbolic connotations and adapting them to youth needs in the Sardinian social environment.