Hip Hop at Europe’s Edge: Music, Agency, and Social Change

Description

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 US, 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. Acknowledgments Introduction / Adriana Helbig and Milosz Miszczynski Part 1: Hip Hop, Postsocialism, 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 Post-Conflict Yugoslavia / Alexandra Baladina Part 2: 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 Vukevi 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 3: 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 Alternatve Identities Through Localizaton in Arabesk Music / Nuran Erol Iik and Murat Can Basaran 12. Hip Hop as a Means of Flight from ‘Gypsy Ghetto’ in Eastern Europe / Michal Ruzicka, Alena Kajanova, Veronika Zvánovcová, and Tomas Mrhalek 13. Rapping the Changes in North-East Siberia: Hip Hop, Urbanization, and Sakha Ethnicity / Aimar Ventsel and Eleanor Peers Part 4: Hip Hop and Global Circulations of Blackness 14. La haine et les autres crimes: Ghettocentric Imagery in Serbian Hip Hop Videos / Irena Šentevska 15. The Power of the Words: Discourses of Authenticity in Czech Rap Music / Anna Oravcová 16. "Keep it 360": (Re)envisioning The Cultural and Racial Roots of Hip Hop through DJ Rhetoric and Ethnography / Todd Craig