Globalisation
America doesn’t give a damn about me’
Dam Native
In simple terms, globalisation focuses on the ‘global flow’ of people, information, technology, commodities, capital, ideas and images across national borders.1
Once upon a time, every overseas country was foreign to us. Every country had different ideas, cultural practices, languages, money systems and local religions. Young New Zealanders set off on their ‘Overseas Experience’ wide-eyed and unsure what strange new worlds they would discover… These days the world has come to us – and to many it looks increasingly like the United States of America.
Hip Hop arrived in the form of films, bits and pieces of articles, pictures, cassettes, record covers - pretty much anything that showed Hip Hop culture in the early '80's. Te Kupu, ot The Word, (of Māori descent) recalls his earliest memory of a breakdancer doing a handstand in NME (New Musical Express) in 1983.
When, in the 1980s, MTV started tapping into youth culture through its music videos, US popular music spread across the world.
In 1988, the annual record sales of Hip Hop music reached $100 million. This accounted for 2% of the music industry’s sales. The next year, Billboard added rap charts to its magazine, and…MTV debuted Yo!MTVRaps, which quickly became the network's highest rated show.2
By 1992, rap generated $400 million annually, roughly 5% of the music industry’s income.3
But it wasn’t just American music setting sail across the globe. Over this same period of time China opened its first McDonalds, Africans learnt English by watching Sesame Street and the whole world was united by drinking Coca-Cola.4
Within only a few years…everything from soft-drink commercials to ‘white’ pop music appropriated Hip Hop’s …style.5
And, indeed, the influences of early local Hip Hop were clear – Aotearoa youth dressed like African-Americans and Latinos and rapped imported ‘Americanisms’ in American accents. This is not to say that the role models sought were 'American' but, rather, that the Hip Hop role model most often accessed originated from America. As Phil Fuemana commented in an interview with the New Zealand Herald in March 1994: ‘The performers were all dressed like Americans when they first went out and I don’t dis that because we’re all affected by American music and culture… but the trick is to get something of ourselves into the music.’
Breaking Free
The debate over the use of American accents by New Zealand artists still continues to this day, and is illustrated by this comment on the nzmusic.com site, (16 Dec, 2004): ‘Racist: disrespect for race… non-American rappers who rap in American accents are being racist… disrespecting their own race!’
Zane Lowe (founding member of Urban Disturbance and producer of Dam Native’s debut album) was more optimistic. He summed up ten years of Hip Hop in Aotearoa New Zealand in terms of ’what was a child looking towards its American forefathers for inspiration… has developed into a teenager keen to break free and make its own mark on the world of Hip Hop’.6
In much the same way as the British Empire colonised Aotearoa and profited from its wealth, these days huge international corporations ‘look at [teens] like this massive empire they are colonising and their weapons are films, music, books, CD’s, Internet access, clothing, amusement parks, [and] sports teams’.7 In terms of the American export of Hip Hop, it’s been said ‘that never before has a Black culture been so profitable for White Corporations’.8
We’ll look at the pros and cons of the commercialisation of Hip Hop – the power games, brands, labels and media manipulation - more thoroughly in Theme Three: Commercialisation. But, as we’ve seen in the section on Identity, globalisation is not all bad news.
Fellow Human Beings
Through the global spread of Hip Hop, youth all over the world have recognised a new way to express who they are, and to find purpose and respect through this. Connecting with other indigenous and immigrant groups, and recognising each other’s struggles, helps encourage and strengthen such causes. Even just the ability to visit other countries more easily, or to learn more about them, helps turn ‘foreigners’ to ‘fellow human beings’.
Technology Leads the Way
Technology has played a big part in opening access to the ‘global village’. Films, documentaries, television, music, and written material are now available to many. Musicians and artists can take their work to new audiences worldwide. As DLT (of Māori descent) said of his first encounter with Hip Hop:
It would have been a magazine article in LIFE about the Bronx and Breaking, DJing, MCing and graffiti… I ripped the five page spread out and took it home to read again, because I couldn’t work out what the kids in the photos were doing, one guy was spraying and in another picture were four young guys wearing shellies, puffers and caps doing locking and different freezes. I didn’t know what was up, but it did look like fun.9
Internet
The Internet has surely been one of the biggest influences in opening up the world to Aotearoa and vice versa. The Internet is a positive spin-off of globalisation, with access to information located in one central space. Every age group can use the Internet to search out information on anything and everything they desire – including Hip Hop culture. It’s all now, literally, at your fingertips.
Pakeha graffiti entrepreneur Askew10 refers specifically to the role of the Internet in promoting global Hip Hop, ‘… Internet is an overwhelming tool for spreading the culture world wide as well as networking… it’s an exchange of culture through our common interest in Hip Hop culture.’ And, while not denying the importance of the Internet, Reakt11 (Tuhoe Māori graffiti writer) also highlights the importance of other information sources, ‘Global Hip Hop is what you see on TV, everything you hear on the radio, what’s blowing up on the music charts’.
Making it Relevant
Hip Hop researcher and graffiti writer Jillski12 describes global Hip Hop as each community around the world ‘taking the values and morals of American Hip Hop as it started and then doing that plus making it relevant to their community’.
A number of local Hip Hop artists have travelled overseas to make global connections, network, and discuss joint business ventures. One of these, Te Kupu, made a rapumentary of his experiences, sharing Hip Hop, activism and poetry with other indigenous groups around the world.13 His video expresses a strong sense of the ‘shared experience’ with all the indigenous communities he made contact with and proves that distance and language are not barriers to shared understanding.
Local crews and individual artists have also featured in overseas publications, including Smooth Crew (a New Zealand pioneering writing crew) being featured in the now famous 1986 publication Aerosol Art, and articles have appeared in Australian Hip Hop magazine Out4Fame and American magazines VIBE, Oneworld, and Murder Dog.
The Christchurch graffiti writer Ikarus14 talks about global Hip Hop in reference to rap, ‘rap is all around the world… I listened to some German Hip Hop the other day, I didn’t understand what they were saying but I could tell it was good because of the good flow and beats. It is like a language, it’s real easy. Like I meet other painters from other countries, like this dude from Switzerland, he couldn’t talk English but he understood paint and had an understanding of Hip Hop culture’.
It is this widening of world views that is, perhaps, globalisation’s most positive aspect. And Hip Hop, by providing a universal starting point and language, is very much a part of that.
Test your knowledge
- How much money did Hip Hop generate annually by 1992 in the United States?
- How does Zane Lowe sum up Hip Hop’s adaptation to Aotearoa?
- In what ways could huge international corporations be said to be ‘colonising’ a country?
- How does technology give greater access to the ‘global village’?
- Which local writing crew were featured in the 1986 publication Aerosol Art?
- What is one of the most positive spin-offs of globalisation?
Extend your thinking
What do you see as the positive outcomes of living in a more globalised world? What about the negatives? Do you think it’s possible to support globalisation, and also hold onto the unique features of a culture?
1. Bennett, A. 1999, Hip Hop am Main, Media, Culture and Society, Vol. 21, No. 1.
2. Samuels, 1995; Silverman 1989.
3. Vaughn, 1992.
4. Introduction (by Yadana Saw) - ‘The Next – An Impression of Hip-Hop Expression’, p7.
5. McLeod, K. 1999, Journal of Communication 49(4):134-150.
6. Mitchell, T. ‘Global Noise’ Chapter 12 Kia Kaha! (Be Strong) page 302.
7. Robert McChesney.
8. Richardson, J E. ‘Towards A Theory Of Hip Hop’ p6.
9. DLT, 2001.
10. In an interview from ‘The Next – An Impression of Hip-Hop Expression’ p69.
11. Ibid.
12. Ibid.
13. ‘Nga Tahi: Know the Links’ 2003 Kia Kaha Productions.
14. In an interview for ‘The Next – An Impression of Hip-Hop Expression’ p69.
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