Hip Hop at Europe's Edge

Music, Agency, and Social Change

Milosz Miszczynski, Adriana Helbig

• Publisher: Indiana University Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9780253023216
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

Essays examining the impact of hip hop music on pop culture and youth identity in post-Soviet Central and Eastern Europe. Responding to the development of a lively hip hop culture in Central and Eastern European countries, this interdisciplinary study demonstrates how a universal model of hip hop serves as a contextually situated platform of cultural exchange and becomes locally inflected. After the Soviet Union fell, hip hop became popular in urban environments in the region, but it has often been stigmatized as inauthentic, due to an apparent lack of connection to African American historical roots and black identity. Originally strongly influenced by aesthetics from the United States, hip hop in Central and Eastern Europe has gradually developed unique, local trajectories, a number of which are showcased in this volume. On the one hand, hip hop functions as a marker of Western cosmopolitanism and democratic ideology, but as the contributors show, it is also a malleable genre that has been infused with so much local identity that it has lost most of its previous associations with "the West" in the experiences of local musicians, audiences, and producers. Contextualizing hip hop through the prism of local experiences and regional musical expressions, these valuable case studies reveal the broad spectrum of its impact on popular culture and youth identity in the post-Soviet world. "The volume represents a valuable and timely contribution to the study of popular culture in central and eastern Europe. Hip Hop at Europe's Edge will not only appeal to readers interested in contemporary popular culture in central and eastern Europe, but also inspire future research on post-socialism's unique local adaptations of global cultural trends." — The Soviet and Post-Soviet Review "The authors of this edited volume do not romanticize and heroize the genre by automatically equating it with political opposition, a fate often suffered by rock before. Instead, the book has to be given much credit for presenting a very nuanced picture of hip hop's entanglement—or non-entanglement, for that matter—with politics in this wide stretch of the world, past and present." — The Russian Review

PART I

HIP HOP, POST-SOCIALISM, AND DEMOCRACY

CHAPTER 1

RAPPING INTO POWER

The Use of Hip Hop in Albanian Politics

Gentian Elezi and Elona Toska

SINCE ITS BEGINNINGS in the 1970s among African Americans in the South Bronx, New York, hip hop has been a vehicle for promoting messages of dissent for culturally, sociopolitically, and economically alienated communities. Given its role in giving voice to the marginalized, it is no surprise that it became one of the most popular art forms of its kind, alongside jazz, blues, and be-bop. Though it has a short history, hip hop in one of its three forms—rap, break dancing, and graffiti—has been a strong influence in many political movements, using linguistic and stylistic tools to push forward politically charged messages.

One of the unique features of hip hop, and particularly rap, the musical genre of hip hop, is its local specificity. Despite being embraced in many marginalized communities in the United States and abroad, rap lyrics are full of lyrics of home, whatever that might be to the rapper or hip hop artist (Perry 2004). This artistic and creative flexibility enabled “hip hop [to be] a cultural form that attempts to negotiate the experiences of marginalization, brutally truncated opportunity, and oppression” (Rose 1994). Most importantly, through choices of vernacular, messages, and beat, hip hop was able to go global, an artistic and social movement with a global reach through local expressions (Mitchell 2001). Inspired by the US hip hop movement, Brithop emerged in the United Kingdom among urban communities. Hip hop was embraced as a tool for mobilization by Islamic movements in the United States, United Kingdom, and France (Das 2005); disenfranchised Middle Eastern and sub-Saharan African youth in France (Cutler 2007); national identity in the Basque country (Urla 2001); redefining a concept of place and identity in Istanbul (Solomon 2005); and gender discourse in the Czech Republic (Oravcová 2012), among other such expressions.

Perhaps exactly because it was born among marginalized youth in the multiethnic melting pot of New York City, hip hop was attractive to many other groups in other parts of the United States and the world. In many hip hop scenes around the world, New York included, artists and their performances are recognized as having “mainstream” and “underground” components, each carrying out different functions in the rebellion of the marginalized against race, gender, economic, or sociopolitical injustice. Some of the new scenes noted above have been more mainstream, while others have had more of a purist, underground nature. Tools such as language (vernacular lexicon, English vs. mother tongue), style (clothing, adornment, gesture, and hairstyles), ethnic markers (dialectisms, national symbols such as flags), gender norms, and self-identified authenticity are inextricably linked to how hip hop artists and particularly rappers build their identities (Cutler 2007). Their application is a fluid process that enables artists both to appeal to members of the community they are aligning themselves with and to distance themselves from others.

Hip hop’s overt engagement in dissenting against power structures defined by racial, social, economic, and political inequities has been played out outside the formal political structures of the communities whose concerns it voices. Though significant, compared to its sociocultural and economic influence, hip hop’s political power remains weak compared to its social and cultural impact (Butler 2004). Despite this overall trend, in recent years, perhaps due to the increased popularity of many hip hop singers among African Americans, but also in the white middle class, there has been a greater overlap of hip hop as a social movement and political campaigns or elections. The United States is a particular example of this intersection of hip hop and formal political structures. Though hip hop’s potential contribution to politics was dismissed following the 1984 elections, hip hop artists across the United States have been vital and active participants in the most recent elections. In 2003–2004, Russell Simmons’s Hip Hop Summit Action Network, P. Diddy’s “Vote or Die,” and Jay Z’s “Voice Your Choice” campaigns were significant bipartisan social movements aimed at political engagement. In the last eight years, the engagement of hip hop with mainstream politics in the United States has taken the form of bipartisan promotion of voter registration from bodies such as the League of Young Voters, the Hip Hop Caucus, the Hip Hop Summit Action Network (NBC 2004), or formal endorsements of political candidates, such as the grassroots mobilization by Questlove of The Roots and Jay Z and Beyoncé’s $40,000-a-seat fund-raising dinner for the Obama campaign (Grant 2012). Leaders of the League of Young Voters propose that as a result of the increased participation of hip hop artists in getting out the young vote, the highest number of previously marginalized 18- to 24-year-old African Americans registered and voted in the 2008 and 2010 elections. Despite disagreements over the effectiveness of the electoral system among hip hop artists in the United States,¹ many analysts agree that the engagement of hip hop with mainstream politics has been useful for both politics and hip hop. Particularly in the case of the Obama campaign over the last two elections (2008 and 2012), but also during local elections in 2010, many believe that it was through the involvement of the hip hop movement that greater political engagement of marginalized youth was reached. However, there are those who argue that this political engagement was reached because, in many ways, President Obama’s path, like that of many hip hop artists and the movement itself, was paved with struggle and dissent.

POETRY AND BEAT IN ALBANIA

The hip hop movement came to the Balkans and Albania in the early 1990s, alongside many other new musical forms previously forbidden by the communist regime. In a vacuum of postindustrialization, amid racial and religious majorities and minorities, hip hop succeeded in taking root and becoming one of the most popular musical forms, easily accessible through the media. Dozens of new Albanian artists chose rhythm-and-blues (R&B) and hip hop as their genre, often shifting between the two forms while exploring newfound freedoms of artistic expression.

This chapter explores the role of Albanian hip hop in Albanian politics during the last decade. Through the case study of the involvement of a hip hop band in political campaigns in 2003 and 2009, it will explore the utilization of hip hop as a vehicle for creating an alternative identity for a political candidate and the Albanian electorate. It will focus on the case study of Edi Rama (artist-turned-politician and main opposition party leader) and West Side Family, one of Albania’s best-known hip hop bands, during Edi Rama’s political campaign for mayor of the capital, Tirana, in 2003 and the general elections in 2009. During these two campaigns, West Side Family’s Edi Rama created two songs: “Tirona” (local dialect for the name of the capital) during the 2003 local elections for mayor of the capital, and “Çohu!” (Rise Up!), the soundtrack of the Socialist Party’s campaign for the national general elections in 2009. Our analysis will explore themes of hip hop as a tool of political and radical dissent as well as increased political engagement and will assess to what degree this case study represents an example of a social movement co-opted into a partisan political fight under the guise of dissent and rebellion.

The global hip hop movement, in its full span of local forms, has been studied through a variety of academic lenses: ethnomusicology, anthropology (Solomon 2005), sociolinguistics (Morgan 1993, 2001; Cutler 2007), cultural studies (Mitchell 2001), postmodernist social theory (Potter 1995; Caldwell 2007), and many other social sciences and humanities. However, research on the development of the hip hop scene in Albania and Albanian communities is scarce. The aim of this chapter is to present a case study through an interdisciplinary lens. The chapter draws on themes of cultural studies and the globalization of hip hop, social theory and hip hop as a force of resistance challenging the dominant forces, and sociolinguistic analysis of dialects, lexicon, and identity creation.

UNDERSTANDING THE ALBANIAN CONTEXT

In Albania, music has been used as a tool for ideological control and political promotion, especially during the highly repressive communist regime. Prior to 1944, there was a rapid development, referred to as the National Renaissance of Albanian art and culture, whose study and performance was banned during the communist regime for ideological reasons (Koco 2005). During World War II, fighters for the National Liberation Army of Albania wrote and performed military songs used to inspire and galvanize the troops to continue in their path of guerrilla-style fighting against the foreign invaders. Following the war, art and culture succumbed to a “socialist realism” ideology whose main aim was to create the “New Socialist Man” (Capaliku and Cipi 2011). During the 40-year dictatorship, songs were written to praise leaders, inculcate ideology, and promote specific sociocultural and political norms and lifestyles, glorifying the new man of the Communist Party—known in Albania as the Party of Labor of Albania. While these musical creations belonged to several musical genres—classical, folk, or light rock—the range of exploration and innovation remained strictly controlled by the socialist regime. The censorship process established clear demarcations of what counted as Western influence—bourgeois tendencies considered to be threatening to the peace and well-being of the socialist Albanian society (Koco 2005).

Cultural events were mostly organized in Tirana, which was home to the Opera and Ballet Theatre, Theatre of the People, the Hall of State Variety Show, the Concert Hall of the Palace of Culture, the Hall of the High Institute of Arts. Performances at these venues, and many others in smaller cities and rural centers, were focused on keeping morale high through positive lyrics, mainstreamed use of formal Albanian language (the Tosk dialect), and specific beat patterns. To attain this purpose, the content and form of songs were controlled and strictly censored to fit with the dictatorship’s specific agenda, particularly with regard to “Albanian” as a uniform ethnic, linguistic, socioeconomic, and political identity. The main musical genre was defined as “light music,” which is folk in style.

Nonetheless, American (i.e., Western) influences were felt in Albanian arts and culture. Voice of America and various other programming sources were available to the public, though in many cases only after being filtered through the Soviet system. This does not mean that Albanians were encouraged to access these art and media forms. People were persecuted and jailed for “agitation and propaganda” for listening to the Voice of America or other stations such as Rai Uno (an Italian TV station) and, after 1961, Yugoslav TV stations such as JTR-1 and JTR2 (Kadija 1994).

Despite this rigorous control, most art forms, including music, developed in two streams: the visible and the hidden. Unlike literature, which could be smuggled and published abroad, the hidden struggle of music could hardly remain silent. Though many Albanians continued to listen to forbidden music and read forbidden books, a large number of artists were not able to experiment, create, or perform their chosen genres freely. Whenever they battled the socialist regime, any nonapproved music genre or performance was met with harsh censorship. Perhaps one of the most notable examples is the case of the more “jazzy” creations of the second and eleventh National Festivals of Albanian Music, which were met with censorship and repression in 1972 (Satka Mata 2011). Following performances at the festivals in 1963 and 1972, the party and its leader, Enver Hoxha, discharged and actively prosecuted the organizers of the festival by declaring them “enemies of the people” for introducing “immoral values” in the songs and performance...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part I. Hip Hop, Post-Socialism, and Democracy
• Part II. Hip Hop and Emerging Market Economies
• Part III. Hip Hop on the Margins
• Part IV. Hip Hop and Global Circulations of Blackness
• Contributors
• Index