Hip Hop Ukraine: Music, Race, and African Migration

Introduction

1 Just as popular music from the United States has had a major impact on the development of popular music throughout the world, so its philosophies have inspired social and political movements worldwide. Hip hop, in its historical association with African American culture, has had a profound influence on cultural changes, civil rights movements, social developments, political situations , and globalizing cultural processes throughout the world. Numerous books, journals, internet articles, blogs, and social media sites reinforce the now commonly accepted notion that hip hop is a global genre that serves as a voiceforyouthsofdifferentbackgrounds.Hiphop’srootsgrowmorecomplex along the routes of its appropriation. The technology available, the political climate, and the ethnic, racial, and class relationships among musicians and their audiences add to the vibrant developments and multitude of meanings “hip hop” has come to hold in the world today. In the United Kingdom, AfroCaribbeans use the genre to stand up to police brutality and racial profiling. In France, rappers such as MC Solaar and groups including Suprême NTM and IAM are from former colonies who bring postcolonial politics, police brutality, Islamic identity, and equality to the foreground (Durand 2002). In similar socially conscious fashion, hip hop in Germany helps bring race to the forefront when post-Nazi politics are silent on the issue (Rollefson 2009). Rap on the African continent has begun to shed American influences and incorporatelocallanguagesandlocalissues(Charry2012).Bringingattention to racial inequality, urban culture, power, materiality, and violence, hip hop in its global forms has cachet as a commodity through its association with the United States that is reshaped through local contexts and identities. Recent research into the genre’s racial complexities in the United States has reinforced notions of hip hop’s ability to reach across racial and class INTRODUCTION 2 Hip Hop Ukr aine boundaries. Bakari Kitwana, author of Why White Kids Love Hip-Hop: Wankstas , Wiggers, Wannabes, and the New Reality of Race in America, argues that white youths seek out hip hop as a way to reject old racial politics and incorporate the inclusive rhetoric that “all men are created equal” (2006). Kitwana draws on themes of alienation across class lines and points to a changing racial climate in the United States that allows for more contact between white and African American cultures. Political rhetoric has embraced such interracial blurring during the presidency of Barack Obama. Obama, dubbed by the music industry as the first “hip hop president” for his public affinity with black music culture, has embraced certain representatives of hip hop, like Jay-Z, while rejecting others, for instance, calling Kanye West a “jackass.” During his first run for the presidency, members of the U.S. hip hop community responded to Obama’s outreach and released songs in support, including Nas’s “Black President” and Young Jeezy’s anthem “My President Is Black.” At a pre-inaugural event for Obama’s second term in office, however, Lupe Fiasco was escorted offstage for his anti-Obama rap. Such instances point to the political nature of hip hop and to the ways in which the genre has reached the mainstream while attempting to keep hold of its rhetoric of free speech. In Thug Life: Race, Gender, and the Meaning of Hip-Hop, Michael Jeffries warns against overemphasizing the political cachet of hip hop, asserting that it is not rap-as-resistance as much as it is a resistance against white patriarchy (2011). Jeffries argues that white young men enjoy hip hop because of how it sounds, while for black young men, the music is intertwined with racial identity. Drawing on ethnographic research in New York City public and private schools, linguist Cecelia Cutler identifies middle-class white youths who mark their affiliation with hip hop culture through adopted speech practices that have their roots in African American English (2007). Yet hip hop is no longer an issue of black or white. Today, ethnic hip hop among Asian Americans (Wong 2004) and South Asian Americans (Sharma 2010) illustrates immigrant stories and diasporic sensibilities. Hip hop offers ways for relatively silenced populations to push past reductive representations and to offer agency in various frameworks, whether capitalist,postcolonial,socialist,orpost-socialist.InitiallyviewedwithsuspicionbytheCubangovernment ,hiphophasbeenembracedasarevolutionary form and funded by the government since the late 1990s (Fernandes 2006). The government formed the Agencia Cubana de Rap (Cuban Rap Agency) 3 Introduction that runs a state-sponsored record label, issues a hip hop magazine, and supports the annual Cuban hip...