Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
Figure 4.18
Paris, France.
French Hip Hop artist MC Solaar.
©
AP/Wide World Photos
when the mass consumer picks up on it and runs with it
and then it actually kills it.
Midwestern and Southern hearths became the authentic
spaces of Hip Hop and rap. Neighborhood venues
became the best place to enjoy an authentic perfor-
mance, and the lyrics refl ected the importance of local
places to the music itself.
The Hip Hop from these hearths diffused abroad,
especially to major cities in Europe. MC Solaar (Fig. 4.18),
Die Fantastischen Vier, and Jovanotti each made Hip Hop
their own by writing music that connected with the youth
of their country (France, Germany, and Italy, respectively).
As Hip Hop diffused throughout Europe, it mixed with
existing local cultures, experiences, and places, reterritori-
alizing the music to each locale.
In Southeast Asia, Indonesia serves as a good exam-
ple of the process of reterritorialization. Imported Hip
Hop diffused fi rst to a small group of people in Indonesia;
then, Indonesians began to create Hip Hop music.
Through the creation of their own music, Indonesian Hip
Hop artists integrated their local culture with the prac-
tices of the “foreign” Hip Hop hearth to create a hybrid
that was no longer foreign.
As Hip Hop has diffused and grown, artists have
addressed the major concerns of their local cultures in
their lyrics. Hip Hop artists in the United States wrote
about social issues in the 1980s and 1990s, and some
wrote about violence, crime, and surviving during the
gangsta rap of the 1990s. Some artists write more about
having fun and partying. In France and Germany,
This description is a perfect story of the hierarchical dif-
fusion of traits and trends in popular culture.
With these kinds of infrastructure behind the pro-
duction of popular culture, we may expect popular cul-
ture to act as a blanket, evenly covering the globe. Even
as popular culture has diffused throughout the world, it
has not blanketed the world, hiding all existing local
cultures underneath it. Rather, one aspect of popular
culture (such as music or food) will take on new forms
when it encounters a new locality and the people and
local culture in that place. Geographers and anthropol-
ogists call this the
reterritorialization
of popular cul-
ture: a term referring to a process in which people start
to produce an aspect of popular culture themselves,
doing so in the context of their local culture and place,
and making it their own.
Reterritorialization of Hip Hop
Hip Hop and rap grew out of the inner cities of New
York and Los Angeles during the 1980s and 1990s. Places
such as Compton (Los Angeles) and the Bronx and
Harlem (New York) came to represent the hearths of
Hip Hop. These neighborhoods as well as places in
Detroit and Atlanta that later served as the basis for the
