Customer Reviews

The Africanist Aesthetic in Global Hip-Hop: Power Moves

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I have been recently studying the literature on global hip-hop, and have often been troubled by how many writers seem to be satisfied just listening to records and writing about them, without doing any ethnographic research--and, even when they do such research, only talking with their favorite artists. So I was particularly grateful for the depth of Osumare's work. For example, she applauds the Hawaiian rap group Sudden Rush for using Hawaiian chants and discussing local political issues in their work--as writers typically do when covering international hip-hop--but most writers leave me wondering, "So what do local rap fans think of this? Are most of them listening to Snoop Dogg or 50 Cent instead of the people the writer loves?" And there it is, two pages later Osumare is writing about what local high school students think of Sudden Rush, and finds that they mostly prefer gangsta rap, a fact that she follows with a nuanced discussion of possible reasons and influences.

I have found few if any other books that both celebrate hip-hop's spread around the globe and allow local voices so much space to articulate their views--including the view that the local spread is just an imitation, and the "real" hip-hop is still coming from African Americans. I have no stake in either side of the "authenticity" debates, but am terribly tired of academics acting as if they have found the key to hip-hop authenticity (whether on the streets of the US or in New Zealand), so it was a great relief to read someone approaching these issues with an open mind and telling me what local listeners thought.