Articles tagged with ‘localising hip-hop’

• 2nd Generation Migrant Expression in Australian Hip-hop

  “Lebanon ain’t got no money, but there’s no land more greener, So proud to be a child of the cedar. Some Aussies can’t believe it when I look ‘em in the face. Proud to be a wog, I mentally laid them to waste. They say ‘But wait, you’re Australian’. ‘You wait and stop your speaking, I am, but I’m descendant from Phoenicians.’ … What we gotta do is not forget our culture, Yallah my brother, your culture given from Allah, remember your history, it helps you work harder, Helps you respect more your mother and your father, Your parents or grandparents came from another land, You might be Australian now but it’s not your mother land.”

  – Sleek the Eilte, ‘Child of the Cedar’

  This essay focuses on 2nd generation migrant hip-hop artists including MC Trey, Maya Jupiter, Sleek the Elite and Hau from Koolism and their distinctive use of hip-hop as a tool of expressing their status of being in-between their ethnic heritage and Anglo-Australian culture.

  Tags: Maya Jupiter, MC Trey, hip-hop and migrant experience, Sleek the Elite, self expression, Tony Mitchell, localising hip-hop, multilingualism, multiculturalism, South West Syndicate, Curse ov Dialect, Downsyde, Western Sydney, TZU, Koolism, breakdancing, Hau, Conference Papers

• Compass: The Mistery Of Hip-hop

  A story run by the ABC’s TV program Compass looking at hip-hop and it’s localisation in Australia. Compass filmed an interview with Tony for the show, which focussed particularly on Brethren MC and graffiti artist Mistery, and the intersection of his Christian faith with hip-hop. A full transcript of the program can be viewed on the Compass website.

  Tags: Tony Mitchell, external media, ABC, localising hip-hop, Christianity, Brethren, Mistery, Press & Media

• Doin’ damage in my native language: the use of “resistance vernaculars” in France, Italy, and Aotearoa/New Zealand.

  This essay was first published in the UK journal Popular Music and Society (vol 24, no.3) in 2002, and subsequently published as a book chapters in both Bennett, Hawkins and Whiteley’s (eds) Music, Space and Place: Popular music and cultural identity (2003) and Berger & Carroll’s (eds) Global Pop Local Language (2004). Using examples from across the gobal hip-hop world, this essay explores the use of local vernacular’s in hip-hop as a form of expressing and embodiying resistance.

  Tags: Language and hip-hop, Tony Mitchell, globalisation, localising hip-hop, Culture, New Zealand, Maori culture, Maori hip-hop, Maori language, glocal subcultures, multilingualism, politics, refugee, language, cultural identity, vernacular, hip-hop and migrant experience, multiculturalism, hip-hop and folk music, Conference Papers

• Global Noise Rap

  This rap was written by Tony Mitchell for the launch of his book ‘Global Noise: Rap and Hip Hop outside of the USA’. He also performed this rap again at a symposium in Adelaide on indigenous hip-hop. In it’s entirety, the piece is over 3000 words long and must be a world record for the most amount of names dropped in one rap. Those names and the places they come from exhibit the full scope of the book. The rap itself stands as testament to the fundamental argument of the book: that hip-hop is undeniably global, and its globalism is not just a consumption of African American hip-hop, but rather as reproduction of hip-hop as a form for decidedly local expression and identification.

  Tags: localising hip-hop, globalisation, Tony Mitchell, multilingualism, self expression, world music, language, vernacular, Conference Papers

• Hip-Hop and Contemporary Australia

  A look at the place and role of hip-hop in contemporary Australia.

  Tags: Thematic Video, localising hip-hop, cultural identity, Video

• 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

• Hip-hop as dusty foot philosophy: Engaging Locality

  Dusty foot philosopher means the one that’s poor, lives in poverty but lives in a dignified manner and philosophises about the universe and talks about things that well-read people talk about, but they’ve never read or travelled on a plane.

  - K’Naan

  This paper aims to open up an understanding of the ways in which localised hip-hop can on the one hand still be part of a global, digital world and yet at the same time have its feet and fingers in the dirt; how it can participate in the global spread of hip-hop and yet at the same time be part of the critique of those forms of global media that participate in the denigration of African and Aboriginal people; how local hip-hop can be both part of international popular culture while at the same time articulating local philosophies of global significance; both dusty-footed and philosophical. This article is to appear in: H. S. Alim, A Ibrahim and A Pennycook (Eds) Global Linguistic Flows: Hip Hop Cultures, Youth Identities, and the Politics of Language, Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.

  Tags: localising hip-hop, politics, globalisation, gangsta rap, Alastair Pennycook, Tony Mitchell, refugee, Somalia, philosophy, Wire MC, K’naan, Canada, Africa, Conference Papers

• Indigensing hip-hop: an Australian migrant youth culture

  “…far from representing the loss of Australian national identity in the face of global capitalism, Australian hip-hop artists are engaged in the project of attempting to build a multicultural national identity in place of a racist monocultural model that is now gaining strength in Australian national politics.”

  - Kurt Iveson

  Published in Melissa Butcher and Mandy Thomas’ (eds) Ingenious: emerging youth cultures in urban Australia, this essay discusses, from a Sydney perspective, the history of hip-hop’s localisation in an Australian context. In particular, the essay looks at ways in which ethnic and migrant youth have used its naturally syncretic form to express a hybrid sense of self and place.

  Tags: globalisation, localising hip-hop, Hip-Hopera, Tony Mitchell, MetaBass ‘N’ Breath, multilingualism, multiculturalism, Western Sydney, 2SER, breakdancing, Indigenous hip-hop, Conference Papers

• Lecture at University of Sydney - Aboriginal Hip-hop: a modern day corroboree.

  An edited recording of a lecture given by Tony Mitchell to the Koori Centre’s Indigenous Studies class (run by Peter Minter) on the 16th of May, 2007.

  Tags: DIY ethos, multilingualism, self expression, localising hip-hop, Aboriginal language hip-hop, Tony Mitchell, gangsta rap, education, Redfern, language, Sydney, workshops, cultural identity, community work, Indigenous hip-hop, Audio

• 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

• The DIY Habitus of Australian Hip-hop: Embodied Histories, Community and Scene

  If habitus is regarded as ‘deep seated generative principles of thought, perception, appreciation, and action’, this ‘fit’ seems eminently applicable to the ‘embodied history’ of hip-hop subcultures and the expression of their ‘objectified history’ in practices such as recording, performing, internet interaction, music journalism, and independent radio and television broadcasting.

  This paper, originally published in Media International Australia, looks at the Australian hip-hop culture in terms of its do-it-yourself ethos, which is, in part, a result of a lack of support from the commerical record labels. Tony Mitchell here discusses the artists, groups and independent labels that have championed this DIY ethos and have built a community of practice outside the mainstream industry.

  Tags: localising hip-hop, community radio, authenticity, independent record labels, Tony Mitchell, Aboriginal language hip-hop, DIY ethos, Pegz, Elefant Traks, Obese, Hilltop Hoods, Koolism, Reason, Indigenous hip-hop, Conference Papers

• The Reography of Reason: Australian hip-hop as Experimental History and Pedagogy

  If habitus is regarded as ‘deep seated generative principles of thought, perception, appreciation, and action’, this ‘fit’ seems eminently applicable to the ‘embodied history’ of hip-hop subcultures and the expression of their ‘objectified history’ in practices such as recording, performing, internet interaction, music journalism, and independent radio and television broadcasting.

  This paper, originally published in Media International Australia, looks at the Australian hip-hop culture in terms of its do-it-yourself ethos, which is, in part, a result of a lack of support from the commercial record labels. Tony Mitchell here discusses the artists, groups and independent labels that have championed this DIY ethos and have built a community of practice outside the mainstream industry.

  Tags: Reason, education, localising hip-hop, globalisation, Tony Mitchell, environment, community work, patriotism, Melbourne, Obese, workshops, politics, ARIA, Conference Papers