Articles tagged with ‘philosophy’

• 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

• Joelistics

  This 2005 interview with Melbourne-based TZU MC Joelistics took place in Sydney while he was taking part in a Sydney Festival hip-hop event bringing together artists from The Herd, The Bird, Resin Dogs and TZU. In a lengthy conversation, the ever-articulate Joelistics covered a huge range of issues. He spoke about the early influence of Eastern philosophy and its splicing with the influence of hip-hop and freestyle rapping. He also talked about hip-hop as a form given to political polemics and Empty shows (held in empty warehouse and industrial city spaces where artists would converge). Joelistics spoke of the influence of Terrence McKenna on his ideas about language, both in the way that the world forms language and how language forms and structures the world. He talked also of hip-hop workshops, the influence of Jack Kerouac, the orthodoxy of hip-hop and Curse ov Dialect, music labels and the industry, the history of hip-hop and appropriations of the form in terms of aesthetics, identity, place and self-pride.

  Tags: workshops, empty shows, politics, freestyling, language, Melbourne, philosophy, Interviews

• K’naan

  K’naan is a Somali refugee who now lives in Canada. His family escaped Mogadishu on the last commercial flight to leave the capital before the airport shut in 1991. He got into hip-hop by memorising rhymes from records by Eric B and Rakim that were sent to him by his father from the US. He considers hip-hop to be the ‘poor people’s weapon’, an art form that is present where ever there is struggle and oppression. His lyrics deal with the superficial, glorified notion of the ‘gangster’, often contrasting the commerical image of the ‘gangster’ with the young people in Somalia who are the victims of extreme violence and bloodshed. In this interview, conducted at the Enmore Theatre cafe before he supported Xavier Rudd, he talked to Local Noise about the Somali tradition of poetry, the inherent connections between hip-hop and Africa, and his notion of the ‘dusty foot philosopher’.

  Tags: politics, Islam, multilingualism, refugee, Somalia, philosophy, Canada, Africa, Interviews