Hip Hop at Europe's Edge , livre ebook

HIP HOP
AT EUROPE S EDGE
HIP HOP
AT EUROPE S EDGE
MUSIC, AGENCY, AND SOCIAL CHANGE
Edited by
MILOSZ MISZCZYNSKI AND ADRIANA HELBIG
This book is a publication of
Indiana University Press
Office of Scholarly Publishing
Herman B Wells Library 350
1320 East 10th Street
Bloomington, Indiana 47405 USA
iupress.indiana.edu
2017 by Indiana University Press
All rights reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The Association of American University Presses Resolution on Permissions constitutes the only exception to this prohibition.
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences-Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.
Manufactured in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Miszczynski, Milosz, editor. | Helbig, Adriana, editor.
Title: Hip hop at Europe s edge : music, agency, and social change / edited by Milosz Miszczynski and Adriana Helbig.
Description: Bloomington ; Indianapolis : Indiana University Press, 2017. | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016043843 (print) | LCCN 2016048153 (ebook) | ISBN 9780253022738 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780253023049 (pbk. : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780253023216 (e-book)
Subjects: LCSH: Rap (Music)-Europe, Eastern-History and criticism. | Rap (Music)-Europe, Central-History and criticism. | Rap (Music)-Social aspects-Europe, Eastern. | Rap (Music)-Social aspects-Europe, Central.
Classification: LCC ML3531 .H567 2017 (print) | LCC ML3531 (ebook) | DDC 782.4216490947-dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016043843
1 2 3 4 5 21 20 19 18 17 16
In loving memory of Urszula Miszczynska .
CONTENTS
Acknowledgments
Introduction / Milosz Miszczynski and Adriana Helbig
PART I. Hip Hop, Post-Socialism, and Democracy
1
Rapping into Power: The Use of Hip Hop in Albanian Politics / Gentian Elezi and Elona Toska
2
Nothing Left to Lose: Hip Hop in Bosnia-Herzegovina / Jasmin Mujanovi
3
Russian Rap in the Era of Vladimir Putin / Philip Ewell
4
Rap Music as a Cultural Mediator in Postconflict Yugoslavia / Alexandra Balandina
PART II. Hip Hop and Emerging Market Economies
5
Diesel Power: Serbian Hip Hop from the Pleasure of the Privileged to Mass Youth Culture / Goran Musi and Predrag Vuk evi
6
The Underground Is for Beggars : Slovak Rap at the Center of National Popular Culture / Peter Barrer
7
Music, Technology, and Shifts in Popular Culture: Making Hip Hop in e-Estonia / Triin Vallaste
8
Wearing Nikes for a Reason: A Critical Analysis of Brand Usage in Polish Rap / Milosz Miszczynski and Przemyslaw Tomaszewski
PART III. Hip Hop on the Margins
9
Cosmopolitan Inscriptions? Mimicry, Rap, and Rurbanity in Post-Socialist Albania / Nicholas Tochka
10
Violence as Existential Punctuation: Russian Hip Hop in the Age of Late Capitalism / Alexandre Gontchar
11
Unmasking Expressions in Turkish Rap/Hip Hop Culture: Contestation and Construction of Alternative Identities through Localization in Arabesk Music / Nuran Erol I ik and Muran Can Basaran
12
Hip Hop as a Means of Flight from the Gypsy Ghetto in Eastern Europe / Michal Ruzicka, Alena Kajanov , Veronika Zv novcov , and Tomas Mrhalek
13
Rapping the Changes in Northeast Siberia: Hip Hop, Urbanization, and Sakha Ethnicity / Aimar Ventsel and Eleanor Peers
PART IV. Hip Hop and Global Circulations of Blackness
14
La haine et les autres crimes: Ghettocentric Imagery in Serbian Hip Hop Videos / Irena entevska
15
The Power of the Words: Discourses of Authenticity in Czech Rap Music / Anna Oravcov
16
Keep It 360 : (Re)envisioning the Cultural and Racial Roots of Hip Hop through DJ Rhetoric and Ethnography / Todd Craig
Contributors
Index
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
THIS VOLUME SEEKS to define hip hop, popular culture, and systemic transition. It explores an experience of a generation treating hip hop as an important element of its life. It shows multiple meanings and dimensions of popular culture. It also reflects complexity of experiences of westernization, globalization, and capitalism on the edge of Europe. It has been a very fruitful and valuable experience to work on this project.
I am grateful to Indiana University Press and Raina Polivka for their interest in the project from the initial call for papers. It has been an excellent collaboration. I would like to also thank all of the authors and reviewers for their work and valuable advice in shaping the final vision of this volume.
I am much obliged to all the institutions that helped me while editing this volume. The work was realized during my doctoral studies at the Institute of Sociology at the Jagiellonian University, Poland. I worked on this project while affiliated with the University of California, San Diego, Columbia University, New York, and the University of Oxford.
Thanks to my colleagues who supported the development of ideas and provided insightful feedback about the book. I would like to thank Jacek Nowak, my friend and academic mentor who provided valuable practical advice on the process of editing and always encouraged new developments. Important roles in supporting me at various stages of this project were also played by Marek Kucia, Janusz Mucha, Martha Lampland, David FitzGerald, Christina Turner, Akos Rona-Tas, and Saskia Sassen. I thank them kindly for their friendly advice, openness, support, and faith in the project.
Without the support of my friends and family, this project would probably not have happened. Emma Greeson has been the best partner I could imagine, supporting the volume s idea from the very beginning. My wonderful parents, Urszula Miszczynska and Jan Miszczynski, were always there for me, ready to listen and providing valuable directions. I would like to thank all of my friends who helped me through all the stages of my work: Przemek Tomaszewski, Maciej Zacharewicz, Andrzej Kuta, Charlotte Lercel, and Erwin Tarczyn.
Finally, I would like to thank Adriana Helbig, who joined me as a coeditor and was an invaluable asset in shaping the contents to the book and leading to the final stages of its publication.
Milosz Miszczynski
HIP HOP
AT EUROPE S EDGE
INTRODUCTION
Milosz Miszczynski and Adriana Helbig
V LADIMIR P UTIN MADE headlines when he appeared on the televised 2009 Battle for Respect music contest run by Muz TV (Russia s MTV) to deliver an antidrug message to young people. Putin s decision to engage with hip hop, while admittedly awkward, hints at the powerful cultural and political role that the genre plays in former socialist contexts. From the most marginalized to the most influential, people engage with hip hop to shape and make credible their economic, political, and social realities. However, if even the president of a country as influential in global politics as Russia is participating in televised rap events, then why is scholarship on hip hop in former socialist countries so scarce?
Hip hop in Eastern Europe has been stigmatized as inauthentic, due to its apparent lack of historical connection to the genre s African American roots and alleged lack of connection to black identity. Strongly influenced by aesthetics from the United States since the early the 1990s when hip hop first traveled across post-socialist borders, hip hop has since developed unique trajectories in each locale. The degree of access to music from the United States in the post-socialist era depended on a country s political relationship with the West prior to the breakup of the Eastern Bloc. The state of the music industries following socialist collapse also determined how musical genres were introduced, circulated, and appropriated, post-1989. Networks of corruption that took root in the collapsed Eastern economies in the 1990s determined the type of technologies to which people had access. Illegally dubbed cassettes and compact discs sold at bazaars shaped post-socialist aesthetics and relationships to music from the West, which in certain aspects of the everyday seemed just as inaccessible for the majority as it had during the socialist era. Social, economic, and political attitudes toward digital piracy were shaped by the degrees to which copyright laws pertaining to digital media were introduced and the varying ways they were enforced. Digital piracy rates continue to be very high, and in certain contexts are still on the rise as access to digital technology and the internet increases. As post-socialist consumers traverse digital borders, varying abilities to physically move across borders have also shaped musical consumer culture. New borders, reshaped territories, the expansion of the European Union, the Schengen Zone, economic migration, educational and professional opportunities, and foreign language skills shape new realities for the young generation of consumers born in the post-socialist era.
To say that hip hop was merely yet another genre appropriated from the West in Central and Eastern Europe is to gloss over the complex ways that certain genres marked listeners as cosmopolitan and reconstituted power dynamics in social systems where Western cultural products were imbued with high degrees of social capital. Complex social networks among family, friends, a