Dr Karen Malone

Faculty of Education

Monash University, Peninsula Campus VIC 3199

Culture here signifies the particular ways social groups live out and make sense of their given circumstances and conditions of life. It can be defined as the set of practices, ideologies and values from which different groups draw to make sense of their world. Culture can be constructed in local and global environments or both, glocalisation. For many youth engagement in Hip Hop is a way of connecting with a global youth culture and appropriating through forms of hybridisation, as glocal subculture. Exploring the role of youth subcultures, such as Hip Hop, in terms of how they are consumed, appropriated and reproduced by youth are useful for understanding the lifeworld of the postmodern youth. Hip Hop also presents a unique opportunity to explore postmodern youth culture and its link to globalisation, new technologies and marketisation. Additionally, it creates a fascinating case study for unpacking how race, gender, class and culture are being is being reconstituted by youth in a postmodern world.

Young people actively construct identities with the tools of cultural production made available to them in a postmodern world. Hip Hop as a cultural product and marketed commodity of youth culture has emerged as having a significant influence on young people seeking to explicitly celebrate and support ethnic diversity, individualism and collective communities - simultaneously! While its roots are certainly embedded in Black African-American subcultures - why and how young people are seen to be adopting Hip Hop's influence has become the focus of recent media attention. Middle-aged, White director James Tobrak explores an example of this in the 1999 movie Black and White. Taken from the opening scenes of the movie the following abridged transcript alludes to the resurgence of what Norman Mailer coined the 'White Negro' in his 1957 essay of the same name. He wrote (cited Bynoe 1999:4):

Tobrak explores through the movie Black and White the fascination among affluent White teenagers for hip-hop culture and by extension, the lure of Black sexuality.

What is the relationship between identity, culture and race? We are led to believe for the female characters in this very Anglo-centric B-grade movie, Charlie, Kim and Raven, the relationship is playful, fickle: Charlie - "I am a little kid. Little kids go through phases". For these females youthful transgression into the ghetto provides the ideal locale for rebellion against their upper Manhattan lifestyles - to slip on an alternative identity. The theory of the White Negro expanded below from the commentaries of Black activist Bynoe (1999) and the work of Lury (1996) and Kenway and Bullen (2001) draws on theories of a plagiaristic commerce between Black and White cultures - where fantasy imitates reality: Charlie - "I'll be over it soon. But for right now while I am in school and where I've got comfort and I'm OK and all my friends are into it. I can go and hang out ... be a part of it" and the flow between cultures is controlled and dominated by a White fetish for mimicking Black culture. So how much does this movie reflect reality? Does it, for instance, represent the complexity of interchange and negotiations that go on between youth and their response and interaction to global cultures such as Hip Hop? Alternatively, does it reveal the insecurities of White middle class communities who fear their young people are being seduced by a demonic force- the exotic Black 'other'?

The commodification of Black culture, is also a theme explored through the movie as the young Black males endeavour to get a record deal juxtaposed with an ironic twist when supermodel Claudia Shiffer (a iconic symbol of the marketing of the white female body) plays the part of a Masters student who is doing an anthropological study of Black culture and living with one of Black male characters. Her intentions positioned as genuine in contrast to the fanciful, promiscuous actions of the younger White females.

Bynoe (1999:3) describes the movie as "a conceptual melange of the movies Kids and Jungle Fever, mixed with the essay 'The White Negro' ". She believes the film which was a sensation in White circles, but had little impact at all on hip-hop culture, "amounted to little more than a regurgitation of the same old racial stereotypes". Bynoe (1999) believes the White Negro can only enjoy African-American culture (and exploit it financially) as long as the African-American is deemed by society as different, strange or erotic. She concludes the co-opting and appropriation of African-American characteristics by White youth is:

Bynoe (1999:3) notes that when their youth fades: "White Negroes ultimately shed their hop-hop personas and assume their places in White society, with their biases about African-Americans as 'different' largely in tact".

Hip Hop's emphasis on the contextual Black (male) body also promotes a biological essentialism that asserts a counter-hegemonic celebration of the body, but resists much of the liberal logic of equality in favour of cultural and physical difference. Rapper Wise Intelligent highlighted this biological essentialism when he stated: "You have to understand that the potency of melanin in the Black man makes him naturally rhythmic ... This is blood" (Decker, 1994: 111) or in more simple terms (Bynoe 1999): It's a Black thing, you wouldn't understand. A sentiment often espoused by the Black character's in Tobak's movie.

Commenting on the impact of many White youth who claim their affinity towards Black people through an allegiance to Hip Hop culture Bynoe states: "The appeal of rap music and hip-hop culture to the new White Negroes has little to do with African-Americans or their culture" (1999:3). She believes White teenagers have an interest in Black culture because it positions them on the edge.

The position presented by the movie Black and White that White youth are playfully engaging in Black culture as an antagonistic rebellion to middle class value systems could be viewed as narrow and unsupported by the recent growth in localised Hip Hop cultures in countries around the world. Cultures that provide the tools for youth to adopt multiple lifeworlds - one clearly rooted in a shared global youth culture (of which Hip Hop is only partially represented) and the other in the community environments through which they cope and react to their life experiences. D'Souza and Iverson (1999) drawing on the work of Mitchell (1998) to explore the local identity of the youth Hip Hop scene in Australia support this view:

It is this intersection between Hip Hop culture and the local and global lifeworld of young people that is of interest to the author of this paper. Beginning with a short introduction to Hip Hop and then turning to a discussion on the variety of forms it takes in youth cultural studies the paper concludes by presenting some issues concerning the role of postmodern youth identities in classroom pedagogy.

Amid the de-industralisation and grinding poverty of South Bronx, New York in the mid-1970s, there emerged a musical form and culture known as Hip Hop. Undaunted and indeed inspired by economic devastation and limited technologies, Black and Puerto Rican teenagers were able to produce their own musical style with two turntables, a microphone and some old soul and funk records (Back 1996). Along with breakdancing, graffiti and a particular dress style they created a vibrant form of expression that relied on street-based production of cultural capital. They looped old beats and placed them in their own particular social context with specific lyrics, making a medium that not only had a referential relationship to the past, but a contextual link to the lived experience of being Black and on the streets. Although rap music was originally more a part of the social culture than anything overtly political, its values, narratives and structure were often directly contradictory to the logic of dominant White middle-class western culture. Its recycling of pre-recorded sounds inverted western views of production, its celebration of the Black body and cultural style undermined dominant attitudes towards physical repression.

As Hip Hop gradually grew beyond its New York birthplace it quickly became part of popular youth culture. Its commercial viability introduced new tensions within the Hip Hop culture by providing an opportunity for many inner-city Blacks (mostly males) to become upwardly mobile through the commodification of its appeal to White middle class youth. The commercialisation and shift to the hard core realism of LA rap that told the story of racism and rage in the gang-ridden ghettos found a niche in the music market of a youth population, growing up in an insecure global climate. Unlike many other Black musical mediums that were watered down for White consumption, gangsta rap with its violent and misogynistic overtones has proved the more hard core, the more Black the experience, and the more powerful was its hold on the youth music market. The reach of Hip Hop into a global environment has paralleled the acceleration of new technologies and their use by global youth. Moral panics over the infiltration of hard core Hip Hop into the bedrooms of young people worldwide quickly followed.

With the aid of new technologies, music images propagating Hip Hop's posture, its style, and its gestures have spread throughout the global youth community. Sounds transmitted directly across Internet downloads has created the technology for youth to manipulate and appropriate Hip Hop textures. By mixing and blending the forms and meanings of the overtly Black inner city expression with their own cultures, musical tones and lived experiences, youth whether in urban or rural, low or high income nations are constructing a hybridised transnational youth culture. In this way Gilroy (1987) argues Black culture becomes a global culture, its style, music and images crossing with a range of different national and regional sensibilities throughout the world and initiating a plurality of 'localised' responses. For Rose (1994) the key to understanding Hip Hop then relates not so much to its point of origin as to the way its "primary properties of flow, layering and rupture simultaneously reflect and contest the social roles open to inner city youth at the end of the twentieth century" (1994:72). For Decker, the immersion of Black culture in the global domain "reverses a history of Western economic dependency and cultural imperialism by placing a distinctly African value system at the centre of the worldview" (1994:111). This position is contested by Black Hip Hop commentators (Bynoe 1999) who argue the appropriation of Hip Hop by middle class youth only serves to perpetuate stereotypical views of Black youth and negates the protest and social commentary that is the basis for rap music and Hip Hop culture.

Alternatively, Hip Hop commentators such as Mitchell (1996), Bennett (1999) and d'Souza and Iverson (1999) argue the reworking of Hip Hop by young people around the world provides opportunities for youth to engage in cultural reterritorialisation. Cultural reterritorialisation being the concept used by Lull (1995) to describe the view of cultural products as malleable resources, reworked and inscribed, with new meanings relating to the particular contexts within which they are appropriated. For example, research by Mitchell (1996, 1998) on Australian Hip Hop followers reveals that Australian youth are applying Hip Hop culture as a means for negotiating their place in a rapidly globalising urban environment. Mitchell (1996, 1998) argues appropriation of Hip Hop culture is a form of glocalisation - an indigenised, 'glocal' phenomenon. This localisation of Hip Hop culture is not always a smooth transition. Bennett (1999) found in his research with young White working class Hip Hop heads in Newcastle on Tyne in northeast England:

Much has been written about Hip Hop's relationship to the postmodern practice of pastiche. Hip Hop producers recycle musical samples and combine oral narrative to create new compositions. New global technologies play a critical role in this exchange as samples are shared and shuffled around the Internet - downloaded and reused by wannabe rappers in bedroom studios and remixed by DJs in R&B clubs around the globe. Adding and blending your own musical samples then rapping and inserting your own rhythmic lyrics - a simulacrum emerges for consumption. Hybridisation, allows Samal a young rapper from the Caribbean small island nation of St Kitts to blend his local Caribbean identity with a global Hip Hop culture:

'Rap' defines the style of vocal delivery in which rhyming lyrics are spoken, or rapped, by a rapper (the performer) over a continuous backbeat or mixed musical samples. According to Keyes (1991), this emphasis on the narrative and the distinctive rapper vocal technique:

For Tricia Rose, who has written extensively on Black Hip Hop, it is a post-literate cultural form that embraces both the collective ethos of oral tradition and the individualistic voice of the postmodern author:

The relationship between the speaker and the text and also the rapper and their listener is key to the dynamic flow of Hip Hop music. Rebensdorf (1997:15) explains:

Along with an emphasis on the lyrical embodiment of Black experience through the use of ebonics (a style of speaking) and Hip Hop slang, Hip Hop culture includes a focus on other forms of cultural expression such as graffiti and dress codes. For Geordie a participant in Bennetts (1999) study of White Hip Hop heads in Tyne this cultural expression amounted to an emphasis by youth on taking up and being visible in their communities:

Although there is a tendency to simplify the consequence of Hip Hop being negotiated in the White communities, many believe the authenticity of White appropriations are still questionable in the absence of a local Black population. Bennett (1999) writes:

According to Iverson (1997) for Australian youth Hip Hop has been a useful tool for cultural production because, in part, it provides a new means for representing the ethnic diversity of our nation:

Mitchell (1998) also explores the appeal of Hip Hop to Australian youth from Non-English background in his essay Australian hip hop as a 'glocal' subculture and notes the appropriation of Hip Hop, particularly the borrowing of cultural styles in dress and semantics, is influenced by a fetish for imaginary life styles of urban ghettos which in the most are not the experience of Australian youth.

The appropriation of Hip Hop has not been meet with resounding support, particularly by Black rappers from America who argue it is almost impossible for White, particularly in predominantly Anglo-Saxon communities with no Black referent point, to have a real affiliation with Black culture. Chas Walker in his essay Cultural Weaponry quotes infamous rapper M-1 to support his belief the loss of the political edge of Hip Hop is due to the appropriation of Hip Hop in communities where there is no referential marker to its origins. M-1 argues:

Identifying with the history of Black political struggle is a key to M-1's use of hip-hop lyrics as this following example illustrates:

Based on the content of rap's lyrics and imagery of Black ghetto culture, Whites are seldom represented in the commercial Hip Hop repertoire. Rappers lyrics repeatedly reify White rap fans as suburban voyeurs and videos by Black artists almost never include White hip-hoppers. In contrast, in an attempt to be seen to be taking on Blackness White Hip Hop artists drape themselves in all that is Black. The consequence of keeping White youth on the margins of the culture means they predominantly participate only in the most non-visual and disembodied aspects of Hip Hop culture. White Hip Hop writers, promoters and web producers have grown in number as they take on the role as the promoters rather than the producers of Hip Hop culture. Although, this is changing with the evidence that localised forms of Hip hop emerging in countries around the world. Chiefly, the majority of White Hip Hop heads are still more often than not positioned as the consumers rather than the producers of Hip Hop culture.

The commercial packaging and marketing of Hip Hop culture as a global commodity has facilitated its easy access by young people worldwide (Bennett 1999) - the consequence being the upward mobility of Black youth who now profits from its popularity. Rap music continues to outsell all other genres of popular music in America and many other places around the world. Since Americans of African decent comprise of about 12% percent of America's population, this means that the vast majority of documented rap music consumers are White teenagers.

For idealists, White youth buying rap music could represent a level of racial understanding and acceptance unbeknown to their White middle-class parents. However for realists, states Yvonne Bynoe this phenomenon is nothing more than the re-emergence of the White Negro, because true cross-racial engagement 'necessitates meaningful interaction'. Does buying a CD, talking in Ebonics, dressing in baggy pants or aerosoling graffiti tags on your local street corner count as meaningful interaction? Or as one character from the movie Black and White states: Can you be ghetto if you don't live in the ghetto?

Rappers have been criticised by many for propagating what is seen as the dominant capitalist logic of hyper-consumption. Its blatant materialism seems to glamorise American hegemonic commodity culture, which for many seems counterproductive to its political edge of defeating repression. Critics have invoked elements of Bauldrillard's 'hyperconformism', saying that Hip Hop's lyrics and images uncritically adopt capitalist ideology (Marlowe 1992:222). Other commentators believe rappers by exaggerating wealth status symbols such as larger than life gold necklaces and pendants, fake Rolex watches; fast cars are caricaturing mainstream consumption. While this may have been true in the beginning, the commodification of cultural capital through the global Hip Hop market has lead to the accumulation of real wealth for many Black musicians. As Samal the young rapper from the Caribbean clearly articulates, for many (poor) budding rappers the lure of upward mobility has great appeal:

Edward Shei (2001) is his recent essay on the development of a small Hip Hop following in China expresses the contestation of the market economy driving Hip Hop in his country and its original aim of liberating disenfranchised Black youth:

In Australia, this relationship between the mass consumer market and the development of a viable Hip Hop culture was according to Iverson (1997: 40) an imperative: "Without the mass consumer market in music, there would be no rap in Australia".

The emergence of a postmodern generation of youth with a large buyer power has also not been lost on advertisers and large corporate companies who use Hip Hop to promote burgers and fries, coca cola, Nikes etc... Giroux (2001) observes: "Corporate advertisers are leading the way in their attempt to theorise a pedagogy of consumption as a means for appropriating postmodern differences among youth in different sites and locations". Youth music cultures have had a long tradition of being both contributors and critiques of the consumer market this has always confirmed a suspicion that any radical potential in youth culture and music is compromised by the marketisation of manufactured cultural commodities. Does this commodification of Hip Hop culture signal the erasure of discrete cultural forms that are now transformed into an eclectic aesthetic that celebrates fascination rather than contemplation? (Lee 1993, Kenway and Bullen 2001) Is it another example of the capitalist west cashing in on the cultural capital of diasporic peoples? (Bhabha 1994, Mercer 1994)

Giroux brings to our attention the exoticised position youth find themselves in academic texts often positioned simultaneously as both vulnerable and dangerous. Youth although gazed upon and disapproved of by many adults seldom have the opportunity to express and explore the meanings they are making of their world. Historically schools particularly have resisted the opportunity to expose the youth identity as evolving, fluid and transgressive and its relationship with the pedagogy of our classrooms. The complex connection between the emergence of a global and local culture of Hip Hop, how it draws attention to issues of racial and cultural appropriation, how it links space, locale and identity in a compressed - stretched out continuum, all speak to a youth experience many teachers have little desire to understand. Now place this within a 'pedagogical machine' (Kenway and Bullen 2001) where consumer-media markets are at the centre of the transactions of cultural capital being played out in young people's lives due to the lack of guidance and nurturance of other social institutions such as schools (Davis 1996).

Rod, a teacher working with youth in the Bronx identifies this disparate relationship between teachers and their understanding of young people's lives by describing how even in a neighbourhood where Hip Hop is as real as the crack in the park and guns in the streets is not recognised or valued by the teachers in the schools:

Kenway and Bullen (2001: 187) explore explicitly the lack of congruence between consumer media culture and classroom pedagogy. They present the question: What new notions of schools, teachers, pedagogy, and notions of students do these changes necessitate? The emergences of new technologies and global consumer markets have diminished the faith youth have in the power of human agency. The traditional vision of schooling as a means for upward mobility is being replaced (particularly in Hip Hop culture) by a hybridised common consumer culture focusing on desire, exploration and appropriation. You might even ask yourself: How relevant is neighbourhood schooling to the postmodern global youth?