bby balooga
A little international travel will quickly show you that hip-hop has gone global. From Brazil to England to France to Japan to India to South Africa, young (and some old) people are finding a voice, a sense of style and even a sense of self in hip-hop. While it might appear as though people have shallowly appropriated the style and sounds and aren't truly feeling the movement, this isn't necessarily so. Sure, there are those -- what some Americans would call imitators or wannabees -- who are merely moving through the elements of hip-hop on their way to the next Western pop culture import, but others are integrating the movement into their own local situation.
In an article titled "Japanese Hip-Hop and the Globalization of Popular Culture," Ian Condry mentions how strange it can be to fly from New York to Tokyo and find teens decked out in the same hip-hop style as those he just saw in the United States. But he points out that, while everything seems the same, it's not. The borrowed hip-hop culture is imbued with local cultural dynamics. The local b-boys and b-girls have added their regional flavor to the mix [source: Condry].
In Italy, where hip-hop culture and rap music have had a strong and growing following for more than two decades, rappers rhyme in their local dialects. According to a New York Times article, "Nearly 50 percent of all Italians still speak in dialect, at least within the family, and the musicality of most dialects adapted well to the rhyme and cadence of rap." The subject of Italian rap music, while more recently is concerned mostly with love and other conventional topics, has included everything from the Mafia to government corruption to homelessness to drug addiction -- in Italy, not New York [source: Povoledo].
Musical movements have made their way across geographical divides before, but hip-hop is more than just music -- it's a way of life that encompasses physical movement and personal expression. As S. Craig Watkins writes, "Yes,
In an article titled "Japanese Hip-Hop and the Globalization of Popular Culture," Ian Condry mentions how strange it can be to fly from New York to Tokyo and find teens decked out in the same hip-hop style as those he just saw in the United States. But he points out that, while everything seems the same, it's not. The borrowed hip-hop culture is imbued with local cultural dynamics. The local b-boys and b-girls have added their regional flavor to the mix [source: Condry].
In Italy, where hip-hop culture and rap music have had a strong and growing following for more than two decades, rappers rhyme in their local dialects. According to a New York Times article, "Nearly 50 percent of all Italians still speak in dialect, at least within the family, and the musicality of most dialects adapted well to the rhyme and cadence of rap." The subject of Italian rap music, while more recently is concerned mostly with love and other conventional topics, has included everything from the Mafia to government corruption to homelessness to drug addiction -- in Italy, not New York [source: Povoledo].
Musical movements have made their way across geographical divides before, but hip-hop is more than just music -- it's a way of life that encompasses physical movement and personal expression. As S. Craig Watkins writes, "Yes,