Article Response: Africa Raps

i was suprised at the, like, accent, kind of. how they make french sound a lot thicker in the throat, kind of. like german or something. that was the first thing i've noticed. i've never actually heard any other french hip-hop, though. so, maybe it's how it all sounds. i saw a thing about french hip-hop fashion in a magazine but that's about it.

and. a lot of tracks were the total basics. a beat and rhymes. like amateurish underground hip-hop from anywhere in the world. but that has its charm, i guess. and there was lots of stuff which went beyond that. like the escrocs track. or the girlchorus on the didier one. and the bizarre political speech samples on the omzo one. and the sen kumpe one too, i guess. and the almost ragga-y djoloff track and the other one that was kind of groovy african pop.

the liner notes were pretty cool. i agree with the thing about that. it's a look at some crazy time and place i never knew existed.

From my POV, your last para is interesting:

>>> "To many an American listener, happy in the home of hip-hop, there's no problem here: American rap is the real thing and anything else is a charming or laughable imitation. To a listener in Dakar - or Paris or London, for that matter - enjoying hip-hop means negotiating however reluctantly between these clashing reals, listening to the local crews who steal ideas from the Americans and use them to talk about blocks of flats or marabouts or Special Brew or Dakar ambulance drivers stopping to buy cigs instead of taking you to the hospital. And of course hip-hop is a global music because of this tension, because (America) is the secret parenthesised presence in everything that happens nowadays, culture's background noise. Hip-hop is so big, so everywhere now because it's about life on every street, and at the moment life on every street is a life lived in America's shadow".

It seems to me that you're getting at sth big here. One question: is the process very different from eg. Scottish bands trying to sound like Californians? (ie: you are talking about a process of 'cultural translation' - is this generalizable, or specific to hip-hop?)

'Hip-hop is big cos it's about life on every street': this seems to imply that it is relevant to, or explains, or describes, all our lives. Surely you don't think this will hold up?

Are you making a key distinction between 'the street' and elsewhere: eg. 'indoors'? I live indoors, but I go outside too, sometimes. Hip-hop is presumably about some people's lives out there, but not mine.

I'm also making the point that hip-hop in the US has partially moved away from this basis in the 'street', and a tension in the music is the looking-to-America (which all hip-hop does, I think) balanced against the fact that America doesn't really care about global hip-hop and that American hip-hop is so different now (and has its own divisions and tensions which don't make sense in smaller markets).

I think hip-hop is the most prevalent global music at the moment but I think a version of this tension probably happened with rock. The thing is that the nature of hip-hop - sampling beats to make records - works to make this Americo-centricity even stronger. i.e. a rock band in Senegal could have bought its instruments and it was then up to them to play what they liked. Whereas with hip-hop, both hardware (turntables, studios) and software (beats) often needs to be 'imported'.

I do feel like that when I'm buying jap psych. and looking at some of the translations of keiji haino lyrics, I'm glad he doesn't sing them in english.

It's a good article, which reminds me of that article on charlamange palestine (both obscure but at least 'africa raps' relates to hip-hop, which we all know abt) that you wrote a long while back but you got (i think) near zero replies to. I would've said something but i was only lurking at the time. that was good too!

note on 102: will it be in four parts again like part one?

sure hope syphilus isn't airborne