1. The (Global) Hip Hop Generations: Can’t Stop, Won’t Stop
Presented by:
Paige Bohn, Ekam Athwal
and Ellie Chen

2. The origins of rap music
Rap music can be traced back to the Bronx district of NYC in the early 1970s.
Hip hop culture originated as a form of expression for young people living in the Bronx.
Rap became important as a community-wide means of addressing and negotiating the extreme socio-economic circumstances which characterized everyday life in the Bronx.
Young people could spontaneously express their views or vent their frustration regarding issues such as interracial violence, poverty and unemployment.

3. Ladies First
During a decade when politicians and journalists in the U.S.A. regularly depicted Black women as unwed mothers and “welfare queens,” Latifah’s video presented them as “Queens of Civilization” and “mothers” who give birth to political struggle.
At a time when gangsta rap glamorized the aggression and violence of street criminals, “Ladies First” celebrated the militancy of collective struggles for social change.
Latifah hailed the historic accomplishments of African-American women and emphasized the need for equal dedication and commitment from Black men and Black women in their common struggle against racism.

4. Cultural Significance of Rap Music
Lipsitz: Hip hop brings a community into being through performance, and it maps out real and imagined relations between people that speak to the realities of displacement, disillusion, and despair created by the austerity economy and post-industrial capitalism
Rap and hip hop as a discourse has helped in the formation of cultural links between globally dispersed peoples of African origin who make up the African diaspora.

5. Cultural Reterritorialization
Lull’s concept reassigns cultural forms as impressionable resources that can be inscribed with new meanings relating to the particular local context within which such products are appropriated.
Cities and regions across the globe have reworked the rap text in ways that incorporate local knowledge's and sensibilities, thus transforming rap into a means of communication that works in the context of specific localities.
Bennett argues that rap music's core text is continually re- explored and redefined through the inscription of particular urban narratives. He draws on examples of the cultural reterritorialization of rap and hip hop across various geographical locations.

6. Hip Hop in Western Europe, Japan and Oceania
MC Solaar is one of the most established European rappers who was raised in Paris and often accused of addressing an educated elite rather than the social, political and cultural concerns of the Paris suburb and African subculture he comes from.
Mitchell states that “much of the rationale for Solaar’s approach to rapping stems from a desire to avoid the stereotypes attached to U.S rap while simultaneously working within a French literary and cultural tradition deemed to be the foundation for effective socio-political commentary.
Given the relatively privileged socio-economic life of Japanese youth, little direct identification can be made with the scenarios of hardship and deprivation portrayed in African American rap lyrics.

7. Decker
Decker identifies two distinct but related sensibilities in African American rap and hip hop.
Hip hop nationalists are involved in the production of a form of cultural politics which addresses the everyday struggles of working class blacks in the U.S.
Public Enemy:
Afrocentricism attempts to reverse a history of Western economic dependency and cultural imperialism by placing a distinctly African value system at the center of the worldview.
Tupac:

8. Commercialization and reworking the rap text
The commercial availability of rap music and hip hop style at a global level has ensured its broadening appeal with the result that it is no longer viable to speak in terms of rap and hip hop as being exclusively “black” cultural forms. Bennett’s examples of rap and hip hop across western Europe and Japan demonstrates how rap and hip hop have become culturally mobile.
However, Bennett notes that certain discourses of African American rap and hip hop addressing issues of racism, inequality and oppression, remain central to rap text, while others have become loosened from what was once considered to be an organic connection with the inner-city districts of the U.S.
Even though rap and hip hop become appropriated and reworked in particular local contexts, new debates about the authenticity of particular groups and individuals claiming to be hip hoppers arise.

9. Discussion Questions:
Would you consider contemporary mainstream rap and hip hop artists authentic if their music and lyrics are not representative of the origins in which African American rap music and hip hop culture originated?
What examples can you think of that demonstrate the ways that rap and hip hop have been reworked to reflect and engage with local issues in different cities and regions around the world? Would you consider those examples authentic? Why or why not?
Do you think female rappers are moving away from the building blocks laid down by Queen Latifah and producing more rap and hip hop music that is mainstream and catchy? Think about popular female rappers in the media. Are they rapping about women’s struggles, or have they become overtly conventional and commoditized?