Articles tagged with ‘hip-hop and academia’

• Hip-hop as a “glocal” subculture

  “…in relation to postmodernism’s decentring relativity, displacement and fragmentation, I think one of its most idiotic embodiments is McKenzie Wark’s mantra ‘We no longer have roots, only aerials’. This expression, parrotted at monotonously regular intervals, and borrowed from the Brazilian musician Gilberto Gil, was expressed in a context of which Wark seems to be entirely ignorant, epitomises the exact reverse tendencies of hip-hop, which is almost always about the celebration of roots in place, neighbourhood, home, family, roots and nation. It is this dominant aspect of topos and geography which makes rap such a fertile area of study, particularly in its manifestations outside the USA.”

  - Tony Mitchell

  Given as a seminar talk at UTS all the way back in 1998, this talk/paper represents the beginnings of the Local Noise project and contains – to this day – its main areas of concern: hip-hop’s multicultural history, it’s diaspora, indigenisation and the importance of place, rapping in langauges other than English, and hip-hop as a form for the marginalised. Present at this talk were future Local Noise partner Alastair Pennycook and MC Trey.

  Tags: hip-hop and academia, localising hip-hop, Ian Maxwell, Tony Mitchell, glocal subcultures, MC Trey, Western Sydney, education, multiculturalism, Conference Papers

• Sydney-centrism, Parochialism and Popular Music Studies: a review of Ian Maxwell’s book “Phat Beats, Dope Rhymes”

  A review of Ian Maxwell’s book Phat Beats, Dope Rhymes: Hip-hop Down Under Comin’ Upper (Middletown, CT:Wesleyan University Press), 2003, 294 pp. ISBN 0-8195-6638-1), published in the UTS Cultural Studies Review.

  Tags: subcultural theory, Ian Maxwell, four elements, Tony Mitchell, Music Forum reviews, Place, localising hip-hop, hip-hop and academia, Sydney, Western Sydney, 2SER, cultural identity, self expression, masculinity, Press & Media