Flip the Script: European Hip Hop and the Politics of Postcoloniality by J. Griffith Rollefson (review)

Flip the Script: European Hip Hop and the Politics of Postcoloniality could only have ended the way it does: with a list of musical artists who inspire the author and an invitation to listen. A gesture of openness as closure, the paragraph concludes a book so rich with methods and missions that any attempt at a grand unifying statement would feel contrived. Rather than tell readers what he has learned about hip hop in over a decade of research, J. Griffith Rollefson spends much of Flip the Script showing us what he has learned from and through the music and its practitioners. Rappers appear as expert witnesses and critical theorists, communicating through intertextual reference and wordplay. Clever double entendres and terminological coinage may serve as the coin of the realm in certain corners of academe, but manifestations of this sort of language in rap have too seldom attracted serious exegesis.

Three epigraphs preface the introduction and return throughout, resonating anew each time. One comes from Paul Gilroy, the next from Edward W. Said—two luminaries of postcolonial thought. Yet by the time Rollefson concludes, readers will know how to parse the third ("We Moorish / More than ya ever seen" [p. 1]) as a scholarly remark, its origins in a song by the rapper Juice Aleem notwithstanding. Rollefson's title applies just as well to the monograph itself as to the inversions of meaning that his musical and poetic sources perform. Ripping up the typical script in which researchers narrate and star in their own writing, Rollefson achieves that rarest of outcomes: a true exchange between artists and academics, guided by at times uncanny convergences of thought across time and space. Rollefson presents his analyses of recorded music and hip-hop scenes in a meticulously organized structure. The resulting book does not challenge or transcend disciplinary boundaries in music studies so much as render them irrelevant. Fluent in most of the methodologies that have defined musicological and ethnomusicological study in recent decades, Rollefson incorporates fieldwork, music analysis, close reading, and an array of postcolonial, critical race, and feminist perspectives into a necessary and overdue synthesis. To characterize books like this as the future of music research is not to give praise but to state a fact that feels more obvious each time Rollefson delivers on one of his prefatory promises.

Rollefson's ambition, as well as its tempering by a concern for cohesiveness, emerge in the introduction, "Hip Hop as Postcolonial Art and Practice." From this statement of purpose unfurls eight chapters, each of which tackles one of the points nested within Rollefson's guiding thesis. Chapters 1 and 2, 3 and 4, and 7 and 8 are pairs, with the first of each covering fieldwork in Paris, Berlin, and London, respectively, and the second of each offering a thick description of a piece of recorded music. The exceptions, chapters 5 and 6, offer a respite from a scheme that could have worn thin had Rollefson retained it throughout.

Having delivered talks on the book's subject matter as early as 2004, Rollefson gingerly folds many strands of inquiry into a unified whole. Banishing the hoary slur that hip-hop lacks historical resonance while also resisting facile comparisons to any particular Afrodiasporic lineage, Rollefson bases his claims on three fundamental "pillars." To raise "Pillar 1" (pp. 4–6), the author invokes a litany of famous names in postcolonial scholarship. These scholars' work steers him toward a vital conclusion: that "double consciousness" of nationality and race, so characteristic of African American artistic expression, represents a local iteration of a global postcolonial experience (p. 6). "Pillar 2" (pp. 7–9) finds Rollefson railing against both defenders and detractors of hip-hop, arguing that the seeming paradox of a commercialized music...