Author Description

This book is about the global impact of Hip Hop Culture and the making of a Global Hip Hop Nation (GHHN). In the early 1970s, a full decade before Hip Hop began to become a global phenomenon, this cultural movement was developing in the African American and Afrodiasporic communities of New York City. Hip Hop Culture -- what was once termed "Black Noise" by Tricia Rose (1994) -- has been termed "Global Noise" one decade later by scholar Tony Mitchell. This book explores the Hip Hop cultural practices that constitute this borderless GHHN -- an international community of practice(s) engaged in the flow and exchange of notions of culture, community, nationhood and knowledge. While viewing Hip Hop Culture as a global cultural and social movement, we take tha cipha - the highly charged communal and competitive rhyming ritual that is fundamental to street-level Hip Hop Culture - as our conceptual framework. We explore issues of nationalism, transnationalism, globalization, cultural-linguistic flow and circulation, commodification and consumption of culture across perceived borders of all sorts. Importantly, this text presents a paradigm by which the study of Hip Hop Culture can be conducted. The new approach, hiphopography, integrates the varied approaches of ethnography, biography, and social, cultural, and oral history to arrive at an emic view of Hip Hop Culture. This approach obligates us to directly engage with the cultural agents of the Hip Hop Culture-World, revealing rappers as interpreters of their own culture. The fieldwork for this study is part of an on-going research agenda carried out by three researchers over a period of 20 years involving artists from several continents (North America, including the US and the Caribbean, Europe, Africa, and Asia) and includes hundreds of hours of video and audio-taped conversations with Hip Hop practitioners.