Forging traditions: continuity and change in the mid 2000s Australian Hip-Hop scene

ABSTRACT

In this paper, I explore how Hip-Hop enthusiasts in the Adelaide and Melbourne scenes related their practices to a romanticised ‘American’ or ‘South Bronx’ origin point. I draw on ethnographic research conducted from 2006 to 2008 to show that while some Hip-Hop fans and artists worked to connect their beliefs and behaviours to an idealised past, others sought to separate themselves from these historical narratives and to establish Australian Hip-Hop as a distinct cultural form. These differences created tensions as people debated how authenticity should be assessed in the Australian context and what it meant to be a Hip-Hop practitioner in Australia.

KEYWORDS:

• Hip-Hop
• rap
• authenticity
• Australia
• history
• origins

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the editorial team and two anonymous reviewers for their constructive feedback on this article and the Hip-Hop fans and artists who gave up their time to participate in this study. This research was funded by a Divisional Scholarship awarded by the University of Adelaide.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on Contributor

Dr. Dianne Rodger is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Anthropology and Development Studies at the University of Adelaide, Australia. Her work focuses on media, popular culture and communication, in particular the production and consumption of music and the use of new information and communication technologies in health promotion. Her PhD thesis was a study of the Adelaide and Melbourne Hip Hop scenes.

ORCID

Dianne Rodger http://orcid.org/0000-0002-2649-442X

Notes

1. It should be noted here that these origins are contested, mythologised and romanticised (c.f. Chang 2006: 3; Harrison 2008; Williams 2011; Tiongson 2013).

2. The terms ‘American’ and ‘U.S.’ Hip-Hop were frequently used by my participants to describe Hip-Hop produced in the American context, including by artists from different racial and ethnic backgrounds. For this reason, I use the broad descriptor ‘American Hip-Hop’ in this paper unless my participants explicitly used other terms such as African-American, Black, Latino or Hispanic. However, I note that these categories may not adequately represent the diverse ways that Hip-Hop fans and artists in America identify themselves (e.g. other terms such as Puerto Rican or Cuban-American may be preferred). Pan-ethnic classifications like ‘Latino’ and ‘Hispanic’ can blur important distinctions between Hip-Hop practitioners with different cultural backgrounds and experiences including nation of origin (see Flores (2000); Harrison (2009): 23–25).

I am also aware of recent criticisms that ‘Latino’ is an androcentric term. While ‘Latino’ has ‘traditionally encompassed both male and female genders according to the rules of the Spanish language’ it is increasingly being replaced or supplemented with gender neutral terms like ‘Latin, Latino/a, Latin@, and Latinx’ (Salinas Jr. and Lozano 2019: 303). ‘Latinx’ emerged from online queer communities to address concerns that alternative concepts like ‘Latino/a’ and ‘Latin@’ excluded non-binary, queer, trans, and genderfluid people (Salinas Jr. and Lozano 2019: 307). In this article, I use Latino because it was the term used by my participants and was normalised at the time of my study, nonetheless, I am mindful of its limitations and the scope for further research that focuses on the terminology used by Hip-Hop practitioners in Australia and how this relates to their world views.

3. Socio-economic status or class is also a significant factor that shapes how people claim authenticity. Unfortunately due to space restrictions I am unable to explore class distinctions in this paper.

4. During my fieldwork women rarely performed and I was often one of a small number of women in the audience at events. Elsewhere (Rodger 2011) I argue that authenticity in this field was gendered, showing how Hip-Hop was posited as authentically ‘masculine’ (c.f. McLeod 1999). In this paper, I do not explore gendered experiences of authenticity because I did not note any differences in the ways that my female and male participants connected their practices to the origins of Hip-Hop or their relationships to global scenes. However, the three women that I interviewed did contend that their authenticity was more heavily scrutinised than their male peers. They felt that they had to display or perform their authenticity (including historical knowledge) to be accepted in ways that men did not.

5. This was my experience but there are numerous intersecting factors that can influence how researchers form relationships in the field. I am not suggesting that there is an innate bond between people of the same gender.

6. The time-difference between my research and the publication of this article is also a distancing factor.

7. This point should not be read as overlooking or undermining the importance of Hip-Hop for minority groups in Australia which I explore in the final section of the article. In a 2003 article, Mitchell showed that Hip-Hop practitioners in Australia were from ‘Lebanese, Turkish, Pacific Islander, Italian, Chilean and Filipino immigrant backgrounds as well as Aboriginal artists’ (Mitchell 2003a: 200).

8. Hip-Hop events in Melbourne were also held in a more diverse range of locations (e.g. inner city and outer suburbs) while events in Adelaide were concentrated in the CBD.

9. This is a selective list not an exhaustive overview of all of the authors who have made contributions to the study of Hip-Hop. I have privileged scholarly accounts that have problematised and investigated how Hip-Hop is given meaning in specific locales. For broader overviews of Hip-Hop scholarship see: Forman and Neal (2004) and Williams (2015). Basu and Lemelle’s (2006) collection is also notable for including research on U.S. Hip-Hop and global scenes in the same volume.

10. Appert’s (2016: 244) ethnographic account of Hip-Hop in Senegal explores the ‘disjunctures and convergences’ that existed between two problematic and romanticised origin ‘myths’.

11. My study focused on Hip-Hop music and did not include an in-depth consideration of Graffiti or B-Boying/B-Girling. Other authors have demonstrated that Australian Graffiti Writers (Lombard 2007) and Breakers (Marie 2018) have developed distinctive aesthetics and practices. Further, the three Hip-Hop practitioners that I engaged with who employed local authentication strategies were fans who were not producing Hip-Hop music. This is a limitation of the study that could be addressed in future research.

12. At the time of my study people were highly critical of MCs that were seen to be adopting an American accent in their music, although what constituted a ‘natural’ accent or ‘local’ themes were contentious issues that I discuss further in Rodger (2011).

13. A central participant (Blaze) in Maxwell’s study (2003: 50) also describes early engagements with Hip-Hop by Australians as a ‘package deal’.

14. Mitchell’s (2001b: 3) valorisation of Hip-Hop produced outside of the U.S. is also found in the introduction to Global Noise where he writes that ‘for a sense of innovation, surprise and musical substance in hip-hop culture and rap music, it is becoming increasingly necessary to look outside the USA’. This argument has been criticized by scholars who contend that it homogenises Hip-Hop produced in the U.S. as a ‘monolithic and stagnant culture’ (Basu and Lemelle 2006: 5), overlooking both the innovative Hip-Hop that can be found in the U.S. and the ‘pop oriented and unoriginal’ Hip-Hop that is produced elsewhere (Zemke-White 2003: 327).

15. Maxwell (2001; 2003) describes three central aspects of Hip-Hop (breaking, writing and rapping). Mitchell (2003b: 41) contends that Maxwell’s work ‘overlooks the importance of scratch DJing’. It is unclear from Maxwell’s writing if members of the Sydney Hip-Hop scene used the term the ‘Four Elements’. However, by the mid 2000s usage of the term had become entrenched in Adelaide and Melbourne.

16. The title of the ‘father’ of Hip-Hop is typically given to DJ Kool Herc (Fricke and Ahearn 2002). Afrika Bambaataa was a DJ who was renowned for his extensive record collection and as founder of the Zulu Nation, a group formed in the Bronx to channel people away from gang involvement (Chang 2005). In 2016, Bambaataa was accused of sexually abusing teenage boys (Rhys 2016). These allegations have not been investigated and no charges can be laid because of the statute of limitations in New York (Chang 2005).

17. In an early account of Hip-Hop d’Souza and Iveson (1999: 61) identify competing definitions of authenticity in the Sydney Hip-Hop scene with ‘blackness’ being a measure for some young people and ‘practising at least one of the four elements’ being critical for others.

18. Numerous participants evoked KRS-One’s mantra ‘Rap is something you do, Hip-Hop is something you live’ (Kristyles 2003).

19. Nathan’s commitment to Hip-Hop emerged throughout the interview and was further highlighted when his phone rang and it turned out to be a producer/DJ who was calling to talk about a new beat.

20. Slang for people.

21. This was a serendipitous interview that was conducted after the central period of fieldwork in the writing-up stage.

22. Foundation is a term that is also used by Hip-Hop producers and consumers in other contexts to explain what they do and why. In his study of B-Boys/B-Girls in New York city in the early and mid 2000s, Schloss (2009: 12) found that the term ‘foundation’ was a ‘core b-boy philosophy’ used by breakdancers in this context to ‘refer to an almost mythical set of notions about b-boying that is passed from teacher to student’. Schloss’s work further highlights the importance that many Hip-Hop fans and artists place on education, in particular, mentors passing down knowledge.

23. The 2007 tour did not include Adelaide.

24. Upon reading a draft of this paper one of my participants suggested that this content could also be viewed as ‘corny’ and ‘full of platitudes’ which was different than a lack of identification with earlier Hip-Hop artists and eras (Email 31/10/2019).

25. Yet, as indicated earlier while the rhetoric of difference was fundamental to these participants, I did not identify any aesthetic characteristics that separated them from other Hip-Hop fans. I did not interview any producers of Hip-Hop music who solely engaged with Australian content.

26. Numerous participants indicated that lyrical content was important to them and because of this they did not tend to listen to Hip-Hop which they could not understand because of language barriers.

27. An American documentary about Hip-Hop culture focused on Graffiti Writing.

28. The delineation of different Hip-Hop ‘genres’ was a contentious issue amongst my participants. Some suggested that Hip-Hop could be usefully grouped into different categories whereas others stated that it was ‘all Hip-Hop’.

29. Immigrants fleeing Sudan’s civil war and resettling in Australia are the most recent group to be ‘othered’ and demonised (Majavu 2018).

30. The international success of Eminem in the late 1990s was also a factor influencing the acceptance of White rappers in London (Speers 2017: 38).

31. Tim is referencing an event that occurred in 2001 when the Norwegian tanker (MS Tampa) rescued 433 asylum-seekers from a sinking boat in the Indian Ocean but was refused entry into Australian waters by the Howard government. This became a controversial political issue and was the focus of a Hip-Hop song by Australian group The Herd titled ‘77%’ in reference to the reported number of Australians who supported the government’s actions (The Herd 2003).

32. I did not ask my participants about racist attitudes towards non-Australian Hip-Hop practitioners (e.g. prejudice towards African-American or Latino artists) and none of them identified it as an issue. They were principally concerned with a lack of recognition of Hip-Hop’s racial/ethnic history by some Australians.

33. This is a song title from the album Fear of a Black Planet (1990).

34. For a detailed discussion of the other views expressed in this article see Cox (2016).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the University of Adelaide [Divisional Scholarship].