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Hip Hop at Europe’s Edge: Music, Agency, and Social Change. Ed. by Milosz Miszczynski and Adriana Helbig

2019; Oxford University Press; Volume: 100; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1093/ml/gcz020

1477-4631

Leonard Schmieding,

Music History and Culture

Hip Hop at Europe’s Edge presents two fresh perspectives on hip hop’s most recent history. First, by analysing hip hop culture, the contributions detail how identity politics, consumption practices, and power dynamics changed in post-socialist Central and (south-)Eastern Europe. Secondly, the contributions invite us to think about how hip hop takes on new cultural meanings and social functions in times and areas of radical transitions. Organized into four parts, the sixteen chapters deliver insightful analyses of hip hop, its practitioners, and its fans in a region of transition after the end of the Cold War. The contributions examine the role of hip hop culture in post-socialism and democracy; its function in emerging market economies; its significance as cultural practice on the margins; and its role as carrier of global circulations of blackness. To highlight a few case studies: in Albania, an intellectual-turned-politician collaborated with a hip hop group for his political campaigns—both coming in as outsiders, both becoming mainstream but with an outsider aesthetic as rebels (ch. 1). In Bosnia-Herzegovina, hip hop and mainly rap serve to express a youthful and militant critique of ethno-chauvinism and international (i.e. European and American) administration under the Dayton Accords, which hip hoppers perceive as apartheid (ch. 2). In Serbia, the consumption of hip hop changed from a practice of middle-class youth in the late 1980s and 1990s to include now a more proletarian stratum, the grassroots dizel culture, which is also associated with turbofolk and eurodance (ch. 5). Similarly, in Tirana, Albania’s capital, so-called rurbanites (i.e. not yet integrated rural migrants) have left their mark on the city’s cosmopolitan hip hop scene in the last decade, changing its sounds and lyrical themes (ch. 9). And in a move to get out of ‘the ghetto’, Romani rappers use hip hop to voice their experiences of living on the edge of Europe’s post-socialist societies (ch. 12).