Transcript For Season Two Episode Six

Jennifer Jill Fellows: In 2010, a resistance movement began in Tunisia in response to government corruption. And from there, it’s swept across the Arab world. Protests and uprisings and anti-government demonstrations were seen in Libya, Yemen, Syria, and Bahrain. Called the Arab Spring, this movement was fueled, at least in part, by a powerful combination of hip hop music and social media. That combination proved to be a potent and compelling medium of resistance and rebellion. But it was not immune from commercialization.

JJF: Hey everybody, welcome to another episode of Gender Sex and Tech: Continuing the Conversation. I’m your host, Jennifer Jill Fellows. And today I’ve invited Dr. Jovian Radheshwar to the show to talk about hip hop music, digital and musical technologies, politics and globalization. Dr. Jovian Radheshwar is a political science instructor at Douglas College. So, he’s a colleague of mine. His areas of interest include psychoanalysis, globalization, Black Studies, hip hop and politics, Indian politics and history, and Pakistani politics and history. Jovian is also a hip hop musician and a poet. Thanks for joining me today, Jovian.

JR:  Thanks for having me Jill. Good to see you.

JJF: I’m going to pause for a moment to recognize that digital space is physical space. The internet is built and sustained with physical infrastructure and the servers and cables that connect us today occupy physical space. So it’s important to remember that this digital reality is physical and that it has physical effects. And so as I record Gender Sex and Tech: Continuing the Conversation today, I want to recognize that it is recorded on the unceded territory of the Coast Salish people of the Qiqéyt Nation. And can you tell us where you are located today, Jovian?

JR: I’m located on the unceded territory of the Kwikwetlem Nation. Another one of the Coast Salish peoples whose land has been taken by Canada, by quote unquote ‘British Columbia’.

JJF: So I was wondering if you would share with the listeners a bit about your academic journey. Like how did you come to be a political scientist?

JR: I have a weird story in that regard. I feel like it’s weird people get into politics and academics for all kinds of reasons. I actually am somebody who almost was born into this. I have been interested in politics since I was a little kid. My parents are somewhat interested in politics, but I’m way more interested in politics than they are. And since I was 6, 7, 8 years old, I’ve been reading the New York Times and watching CNN with my parents around the dinner table when I was little and didn’t fight to change the channel. I watched, you know, the Gulf War when I was a little kid on TV. I think I was in the sixth grade then when the US attacked Iraq in 1991. I still remember Bernard Shaw on TV at night talking about surgical strikes for the first time then I was like very, very little at that time, a little kid, and none of my friends were interested in it. It was very much a personal exploration. And originally, I just liked reading the New York Times sports page when I was like seven and then I just flipped a few pages over and started reading the A-1 headlines. And I don’t know, I guess the rest is history in a way. I’ve just been pretty much obsessed with politics my whole life. I watched too much news. I read too many articles. It’s never really been any different for me. I can’t even tell you exactly when this all started. It just seems to have been a lifelong trajectory.

JJF: Wow, I think that’s really remarkable. Especially the part where you said you didn’t fight to change the channel that you were like they’re watching the news with your parents. I mean, it sounds in part like like your family contexts made a lot of this available to you, right? Like so your parents had it on the news and I guess the New York Times is there for you to flip through and stuff like that. So it sounds like in part your own interests, but also just kind of a culture of all this being available for you around you as something that you could explore that just kinda nurtured this interests that you had?

JR: Yeah, absolutely, Absolutely. My dad, for example, is somebody who’s really outspoken the left wing, at least it used to be when I was little. He told me a lot of powerful things when I was little about genocide in the process of settler colonialism, he told me a lot about communism in general, he’s a communist, outspoken communist. And him and my mom are both very educated people, avid readers. Dinner table conversation in my house when I was growing up was very much almost exclusively about politics. It was almost exclusively about, about world affairs. And I was expected to participate when I was seven or eight years old. So I just always wanted to have something to say about it. So yeah, I guess I just picked it up.

JJF: Can you tell me in a different vein, one of your other interests? Can you tell me a bit about your musical journey and how you came to be drawn to hip hop.

JR: So this is an interesting one when I was little, and to this day actually probably my favorite rock band outside of Modest Mouse is Guns and Roses. And that was the first band I listened to when I was a little kid. I remember I have two cousins in Seattle who are a few years younger than me, but we all kinda grew up together. And one of them is a woman, her name is Mona and the other one is a man, his name is Neil. The two of them and myself were the three Americans in our family tree because there’s 33 first cousins in my family and the three of us are the three youngest and we were the three who grew up in the United States. And Neil was always interested in heavy metal too, because he took after me when I was much younger and he was much younger and he called it boys’ music. And Mona liked rap and she called it fun music. And we all hung out a lot. And so I listened to music with them. And I remember one day I heard a couple of songs that she had played were actually Beastie Boys songs, which is like a old school New York rap group. Ironically, one of the few old school groups that’s actually white rappers, all Jewish guys from New York City. And they all went to my rival high school, Stuyvesant High School. I went to the Bronx High School of Science. And so there’s this kind of New York nerd connection that starts with Beastie Boys. And then I remember one time I was on a trip to North Carolina with my family. We’re on this family trip. I went to a pawn shop for the first time in my life. And there were all these little tape at the pawn shop for two bucks a pop. And I remember buying three cassettes. One of them was Beastie Boys License to Ill. Another one was Michael Jackson’s Bad. And another one was Weird Al Yankovic In 3D. And I listened to all of them on a Walkman in the car ride from North Carolina back to New York. But after I had heard all of them once, I just went back to that Beastie Boys album and kept listening to it on repeat. And one of the songs is called “No Sleep Till Brooklyn.” And we were literally on a road trip from North Carolina back to New York. So it just kind of stuck in my head like this song. I listened to them a lot over the next year or two. Then by the time I was in the later in the fourth grade, I had this one friend who on a class trip, he just started rapping the lyrics of Beastie Boys songs. And I was like, oh, I know those lyrics. So I just started rapping with him. We just started doing this like not in front of other people, just me and him on a class trip. And it was a lot of fun. So I got into other rap after that. I was always on the radar for what’s new and interesting that’s coming out there. And for awhile I went through, you know, like everybody goes through the exploration of music. They start with pop music. So I remember MC Hammer came out at that time. I was listening to that a little bit as well. And then one day, it’s like the sixth grade, I had a little bit of a problem with my sixth grade teacher. I was in the quote, unquote ‘gifted program.’ And this is on the upper east side of Manhattan where I grew up, in the gifted program because I took an IQ test that got me into this silly thing. I’ll tell you, Jill, the the program was it was, it was in a public elementary school, but it was so racist because the people who are not in the gifted program were all Black and Latino. And the people who were in the gifted program were all white, white and Jewish or Asian? Or there are few of us who are Indian, who were in the school, but very small at that time, the population of Indian kids was very small. I’m South Asia in case people didn’t figure that out from listening already. But basically, in the sixth grade, I was in a conflict with this one teacher and they shifted me to the half gifted, half regular student class. And this was the first time I actually had like Afro-American friends. And one of them, a young man named Michael, he came up to me and said, “yo know, you like rap, I heard so I got this tape. You want to check it out?” And I was like, “Okay, sure.” And it was NWA and he was playing the song for me, “Fuck the Police”. And around that time, maybe like a year or two later I was in junior high school, I believe, when Rodney King was attacked by the Los Angeles Police. And of course we’re living through such times right now when we see the video of this man Tyre Nichols who was murdered by the police in Memphis, Tennessee. And so when I saw this happening and just thought, the reactions of everybody around me, my teachers at my relatively privileged but still public school. They were saying, “Oh, you guys got to all go straight home today. Don’t stay out on the street because there’s going to be riots,” and we’re in New York, we’re not even in Los Angeles where across the country. But our teachers are warning us about riots and this sort of thing. But somehow at that time NWA started to really make sense to me. And obviously their music is extremely political and really just transforms the consciousness really of mid-nineties United States society really forcefully brings the discussion over toward um racism and police brutality. And from there, like I got into all the other main West Coast rappers, many of whom were once in NWA, like people like Dr. Dre, for example, that’s around the time that Dr. Dre, also in 1992, released the album The Chronic, which is of course a big anthem of modern stone or culture with people, or people like Dr. Dre and Snoop Dogg, or now the titans of that modern stone or culture and the billion-dollar industries associated with it. Just around that time, I started getting into friendship circles where we’d buy tapes or we buy CDs, or we’d exchange them with each other and burn them or make uh, mixed tapes first or mix CD’s later. I remember when I was in high-school, staying up really late at night making mix tapes of off of the radio. You know? Like waiting for them to play my song and having the tape ready to go.

JJF: Yes. I remember that stuff. You call in and request and then sit up all night waiting for the radio to play your song.

JR: I’d stay up until 05:00 A.M. like, on school nights. I’d actually put a towel on the door of my bedroom when I was growing up so that the light wouldn’t escape the bedroom. My parents couldn’t tell if I was asleep or not.

JJF: You’ve talked a little bit about your entry into hip hop music. Can we talk a little bit about what might characterize kind of broader hip hop culture. And I know this is a huge question because obviously it’s gonna be different in different locations and for different communities. But are there some generalities for people who may not be familiar?

JR: Yeah, absolutely. And there’s been a lot of interesting academic work that’s been done on this over the years. And as a practitioner and a fan of this music, I think I can offer some insights gently into that without creating an exclusion of about things that maybe I might not include. So hopefully this is an interesting methodology. Basically, hip hop is a way of talking that is loose, that is not confined to the conventions of grammar that are heavily emphasized and in fact, deliberately plays with those conventions. It also plays with the meanings of words and looking for double meanings, coded meanings, and all of that. But it’s way more than that. It’s also how you dress. It’s also bodily gestures while you’re walking around. It’s also your capacity for, you know,  you’re walking, you’re walking and then suddenly you hear a beat and then you can start dancing just like on cue like that because you’re available for that moment. And it’s also about how rhythms are or, polyrhythms really are, are, underlying, pretty much all human societies around the world. And that’s one of the reasons I feel hip hop has become so globally significant is because it just doesn’t get back to these bare human realities. And I left out a big one so far. I mentioned polyrhythms, but let me be even more direct. Drums, right? Hip hop is about drums. And if you study some of the origins of African American hip hop in the United States, a lot of that can actually be traced back to West African cultures where people use drums in a particular way. And there’s gods that are invoked when one plays the drums. There are conversations one can have between drums. And this is not even something that’s just in Africa. They have this in Latin America, what’s called Latin America today, but obviously there are many indigenous cultures. This is something you find in South Asia with a culture called Qawwali, which is based around the playing of the tabla and harmonium and sitar. People associated with the artists us, Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, who is a Pakistani folk singer. People associate him with Sufism and whirling dervishes and that community of people. There are many kinds of avenues into hip hop. I’ve even seen recently Polish hip hop that emphasizes like Polish, pre-Roman, pre-European, Slavic cultural styles as well. There’s Irish hip hop that emphasizes the Gaelic for example and those kind of Pagan styles that come from before Christianity and the Roman Empire or normalize huge swaths of Europe. So one of the things that KRS-One, one of the big supremum of old-school hip hop says, and this is why I think really answers the question is, hip hop is the oldest thing that people have been doing anywhere ever in the world. Because what it entails essentially is just talking over a beat, talking rhythmically over a beat. And you could even do that without a beat. And that’s what poetry is, right? It’s just talking with a rhythm, without a beat. And one of the scholars that I’ve unfortunately perhaps had to read a lot of in my life as Heidegger. And he talks a lot about poetry in some of his work. And he cites this one German poet named Friedrich Hölderlin, who has a great quote that I always enjoy a great deal. It’s very simple. “Poetically man dwells.” Now obviously that leaves out women and there’s a problem with that quote. But when we say “poetically, humans dwell,” right? Essentially what I read that as is that poetry is mapping feelings that have not been mapped in language before. And usually you have to have new coinages, new uses of words to map those feelings. And you know, when you hear a good poem that, that’s kind of speaking to something you haven’t been able to express or you didn’t even know other people could express. But then when they express it, it has a kind of self-evident character to it. So that’s kinda what I think hip hop is, is, is people using primitive tools, right? Drums and their own voices to map out things that are not being spoken to. And of course, we are a lyrical being that’s always having new feelings and new ideas about the world. So when we think about expressing ourselves, if we’re all closed up and we don’t have a way of saying it because there’s no ready-made avenue for that, hip hop is about creating that avenue.

JJF: So listeners will know, we’ve talked on this podcast before about how language itself is a form of technology that helps shape our lived experiences and our reality, allowing us to name and shape things around us. And given what you just said, it strikes me that the language of hip hop and maybe perhaps also the music, the beats and the drums is a form of technology as well that can be a very powerful both for helping us conceptualize and understand our reality, but also to communicate. And maybe to communicate in a way that feels more authentic. I wondered if you could talk about that idea of hip hop a little bit.

JR: Yeah, absolutely. Our normal way of speaking is dependent on largely getting certain things done, right? A lot of what we do as humans in any society, but there’s a certain premium that’s put on that in our capitalist and white supremacist society when we think about hip hop, and I’d also say patriarchal society, right? Because when we think about for example, the reaction that so many people have towards people like Cardi B or Nikki Minaj for example, these women are just talking about human feelings that they have. But there’s so much hostility towards what they’re saying because it’s off-script. It’s outside of tropes of standard femininity, or it’s outside of tropes of appropriate sexual desire that, that doesn’t like threaten monogamy or male super-ordination within relationships for example, and these women are just speaking their truths. And when rappers that I like that talk about politics and say opposing the police, for example,. when they’re talking about that, going back to NWA, I think really they’re really the perfect example of this is they all tried to get them band right away, right? Tipper Gore was the, the wife of Al Gore, right? She tried to get all these heavy metal albums and hip hop albums at the time band. And that’s why there’s that parental advisory sticker, at least in the US. I don’t know what happened in Canada. Maybe it’s the same.

JJF: Yeah, they had it here. What I remember is everybody wanted to buy the stuff that had a parental advisory sticker on it, right? Because you’re like, Oh, it must be good.

JR: And not buy the stuff that didn’t have the sticker on it.

JJF: Yeah.

JR: So that’s of course interesting too, because that already was subverted the moment they even tried to do this censorship, it was already pre subverted because hip hop had kind of gotten people ready to do that. And of course, we have to credit Rock and Roll from the ’60s and ’70s. It’s rebellious spirit back then for paving the way as well for a lot of that. But going back to the question about language, original hip hop, it’s drumming, it’s poetry, Right? Today’s hip hop is all computer-based, like all the new rap songs, most of the beats are made on a computer, right? And a lot of it can be quite beautiful. But for me, at least I’m partial to old school rap where they sample old soul music. And actually really since the pandemic started more than anything else, I’ve spent a lot of time at home alone, listening to old soul music, going back over the samples and then finding the original songs. I got to tell you that’s been a journey of just pure love and discovery for myself to go through. And I’m not African American, but I relate to the anti-racist and sort of feeling of lostness in North America that we hear in so much rap music. But if you listen to this old soul music, it’s even more powerful, the political commentary. And especially like one thing that sadly lost in a lot of rap music is beautiful, romantic side that you get in the old soul music as well. So a lot of these rappers, right? They grew up listening to these records that people like Marvin Gaye, people like Miles Davis, people like Syl Johnson, people like The Dramatics, people like Donald Byrd. I mean, the list goes on and on. And that could be a whole other podcast. But basically, there’s this immense treasure of Black music that if you read like Angela Davis, for example, she has a great texts, call them “Black Feminism and Blues Legacy”. And in that book she looks at the music of Ma Rainey and other famous Black musicians that pioneer a kind of modern version of what WEB Dubois calls the sorrow songs or the spirituals, which go back to the question of how do you deal with the fact that you’ve been enslaved and you’re on this plantation, right? So there’s this desire to sing about very painful feelings of loss and subjugation and lost love and all of that. And then there’s this like immense, beautiful human effort that goes into sharing these feelings, even though these are Black feelings, which means of course in a white supremacist contexts, they’re dismissed. So the sheer, like strength and love you get from old soul music is undeniable. So even if you’re stupid video game playing boy, like me growing up in New York City, it’s like when I was younger, I wouldn’t listen to that stuff. I’d be like, that’s like love songs, why am I going to listen to that I want to listen to some hard edge music, right? But it turns out that all the rappers, I like they were sampling all that stuff as well. So there’s a, there’s a continuum there, There’s a whole musical civilizational tradition there, that is a politics of resistance.

JJF: There’s a lot in that answer that I really like and I want to pick out. So we have this idea that the language and the poetry and the music and the beats of hip hop encourage or facilitate kind of speaking of truth to power and speaking the things that we’re not supposed to speak or going off script as you said, right? So we have references of female hip hop artists who are speaking against traditional notions of femininity and patriarchy and things like that. And also the long history of Black hip hop artists speaking against white supremacy and colonialism. And I find that really interesting, that it’s a way of kind of being authentic and saying the things that normally get dismissed in mainstream society. But the other thing that I thought was really interesting in that answer is that not only is it a way of being authentic yourself, but a way of reaching back and bringing a community or a history with you. And you talked about sampling with regards to this, right? The idea that Black hip-hop artists could reach back to Soul to American Soul music and sample that music in the ’90s or in the 2000s as they’re making hip hop music as a way of saying that there’s this connection and this continuum of authentic resistance, and we’re going to represent that in our music. So I was wondering if you can talk about sampling a little bit more, especially for people who may not be familiar with what that is.

JR: Yeah, for sure. Essentially, it’s when you take recognizable loop from a song and you loop it over and over again. And you can either use a drum machine or a live drummer, or even the drum track from the original song itself. And you put that underneath the sample. Hip hop is almost exclusively done in a pop music meter, right? I don’t know much about music theory, but I know this much. It’s done in a 4/4 beat, right? For the most part. So there’s four beats per measure, right? And four measures per verse essentially. And so this 4/4 beat structure is something that most normal drumming that you hear in a rock song or a soul song is going to have. Jazz music is harder to sample because there is not necessarily going to be a specific beat in jazz music, but that’s something that’s often done as well sampling of jazz songs because horns can be used more rhythmically from that. So check out, there’s a great book by a woman named her writer name is Tricia Rose. And I think today she might be a professor at NYU or Stanford, but she’s a professor of ethnomusicology. And this is kind of a funny story about my childhood too. I was once at the fifth Avenue, New York Book Fair when I was like 12 or 13 years old, my mom used to take me down to that. And this woman, Tricia Rose, was selling her book at the Book Fair. And she’s an academic. It’s like now when I look back on that, I’m like, wow, I feel sorry for this academic having to sell her book at a book fair. But the book was called Black Noise and I bought a copy and I have an autographed, she autographed it for me. I’ve still got it over here and I’ve written a few papers on it over the years as well. And one of the points Tricia Rose makes in the book Black Noise is essentially when you think about sampling, what you’re doing is you’re, as you said Jill in your question, you’re drawing on this lineage that comes from way back before. That’s when she gets into ideas of like what she calls orality, which is part of the oral traditions of West Africa, and also into the use of the drum in a specific way. So when we think about the idea of sampling, right, drawing on this legacy and being able to conjure it up allows for people who are African-American, people who are tracing their roots to Africa to reconnect with lineages that they’ve been disrupted through the process of slavery, right? So this is a very powerful technology, sampling, that allows people to form those kinds of connections. But of course, when you think about it, they’re doing something new, right? Yes, they’re going back into the old, but they’re developing a completely new sensibility at the same time. So for me, that’s a very exciting set of possibilities.

JJF: So I think I have a pretty clear understanding now of some of the general features of hip hop music and hip hop culture and how you became interested. But there’s a few things that we’ve talked about as we’re going through this. So we’ve talked about the idea that there’s various different types of hip hop. So you talked about Polish hip hop, for example. And we’ve talked about this kind of resistance or a culture of resistance. And part of the reason I invited you on the podcast is that you gave a guest lecture for my class a couple of years ago. And in that guest lecture, you said this and I quote, because I thought it was so striking “Hip-Hop gets us to the heart of the discussion of white supremacy and racism and globalization.” It seems that we’ve been circling around this big idea as we unpack what hip hop is. So can you talk a little bit about, about what you mean by that?

JR: We live since 500-600 years now and white supremacist world political system. It’s been dominated by Britain, it’s been dominated by France, it’s been dominated by the United States, it’s been dominated by Western European countries in one shape or another. I’m not a scholar of say, Chinese imperialism or other imperialism. So I can’t speak to this as a universal process, but the way white supremacy has worked as a form of imperialism, it has colonized the knowledge of different parts of the world, suppress that knowledge among those parts of the world and then reproduce the market friendly version of that knowledge within its own political economy as well, right? The colonization of Indigenous knowledge, obviously very simply the bio-piracy of indigenous resources and then turning them into medicines and this sort of thing like pills or whatever that our companies make after getting the various raw precursor elements of those pills from different parts of the world, right? We see the same thing happening right now with cannabis, for example, which is a thing that comes from India, and it’s a thing that has Indigenous significance there and in other parts of the world, but it’s a pill now. Alright, it’s being turned into a, a pill in various ways. And sometimes science is a good thing, but sometimes obviously it’s also a handmaiden of imperialism as well. So with regard to art and culture more generally, we’ve seen this happening for a long time. One of my favorite composers is Antonín Dvořák. Famous Czech composer. I’ve been actually to his house and in Prague many years ago I went to the Dvořák house and Museum. When you go actually to the house and museum there, there’s a lot of stuff about how he actually got inspiration from the Roma and Sinti the peoples living in the hinterlands of Prague. So even in classical music in Europe, this sort of a process of appropriation is ongoing, right? This kind of re-translation of authentic expression into something for the masses or for the market, or for the adulation of the true musician who, who knows better than those folk musicians, right? But the beauty of hip hop is that it’s just the undeniable lyricism and affect of gesture that is distributed infinitely across the world space. We all move our hands in weird ways. We all pronounce things a little different. We all walk a little different. We all have different appearances that we wish to stylize in different ways. But of course, part of our sort of white supremacist culture is especially, and I feel bad for white people and that’s something that Gandhi and Martin Luther King would be happy that I’m saying that right? I feel bad for white people in the sense that white supremacy is ultra repressive towards white people. White people are the ones who have to constantly wonder if they’re being normal enough. And of course, for people of color, It’s am I white enough. Am I fitting in enough? Right? Hip hop, it turns that on its head and it says don’t do that anymore instead, just be yourself, whatever that is, right, just be yourself. And if you want to be real or authentic, or somebody who gets props for being brave and courageous, then you just have to rock who you are, you have to just be yourself. One of my favorite songs since coming to Vancouver is by a local artist named Missy D. And that song is called “XX”. And in that song she talks about how as a woman, she wants to rep being a woman, right? That’s what she means by the double X, she’s talking about chromosomes. And in the music video, there are women from many different ethnicities. There are women from many different backgrounds. There’s gender queer people. There’s people who we would, in our common parlance called quote unquote ‘disabled.’ But they’re rocking their, their disability no matter what they’re doing their thing anyway. There’s all kinds of definitions of what a woman is, right? This sort of very broad inclusive definition of woman that goes against the Terfs and all these people that make these other kinds of arguments about what a woman is. So Missy D is essentially saying, be proud of yourself for being a woman. I’m gonna give you an anthem to rock while you get into your mindset to be proud of yourself, right? And so that’s kinda what I think the true spirit if, if I could make such audacious claim, I think that’s what the true spirit of, of insurgent or authentic grassroots hip hop, let’s say, is right, as opposed to obviously the capitalist hip hop which you alluded to in your question. And you need look no further than watch a Brooklyn Knicks game because Jay-Z is courtsided every Brooklyn Knicks game. And why is that? It’s because he owns the Brooklyn Knicks. Right. And he’s one of along with Dr. Dre who’s like in cahoots with Apple, making his Beats headphones and all that. These are some of hip hop’s first billionaires, right? These folks, it runs the whole spectrum in terms of the possibilities of human expression being supported in various forms versus of course, those forms being co-opted, commercialized, repackaged. So there’s a whole lot of avenues of expression that are available for people. And the beauty of the technology you mentioned technology that we see today is that people can really use this technology with obviously a little bit of privilege, they can use this technology to reach a much larger audience than at other times historically.

JJF: Yeah, that was the next thing I was going to ask about because we’ve talked about the technological affordances that allow hip hop artists to do sampling and to do sampling in different ways. So we’re reaching out to grab something from history and bring it forward, but we’re using modern technology. But there is also, I think we all know how commercial hip hop gets spread. We kind of understand the machine that the marketing and all of that kind of stuff that goes into it. But you have consistently talked about hip-hop as this kind of tool of resistance and the ways in which technologies that we have currently might allow for hip hop artists who aren’t billionaires to reach wide audiences or who don’t have, who aren’t signed to labels perhaps are not signed to big name labels don’t have a huge amount of commercialism working in the background there. So can we talk a little bit about various technologies that are used to help spread more grassroots hip hop messages.

JR: Yeah, absolutely. You know, the first example that comes to mind, obviously, you know, simple, the Internet, but more specifically social media, which obviously there’s a cat and mouse game about how free social media is or not. And there’s also all kinds of networks, people create, chat networks, dark web, you know, all this kinda stuff. Obviously if it’s dark web that might limit its reach at first. But in certain contexts that might be the only web that people are willing to rely on. Because if you’re say in China, and it’s just all WeChat from the government, maybe you have to use the dark web and maybe that’s how people communicate. But also at times, you know, social media, simple social media like Facebook or Twitter has played a role. And so the example that comes to mind is the Arab Spring, the various revolutions around the Arab Spring in Tunisia, there was a rapper named Psycho-M, who made a 15-minute song about the leaders of Tunisia back in 2010. And those songs from that rapper really inspired the revolution over there on note about Psycho-M. And he was actually an Islamist rapper who explicitly embraced themes of like Jihadist violence in his music. So you can’t really control what people say. But there’s a wide spectrum, right? There’s also for example secular revolutionary calls from the Muslim world as well. There was a rapper named El General, who was coming out of, I believe it was Egypt at the time. And El General’s music figured prominently in the January 25th, 2000, uh, I think it was 2011, the Arab Spring uprising that happened in Egypt back then his, his music was an anthem for that uprising. That music inspired rappers, including an Iraqi Canadian rapper named Narcicyst from Montreal, who I think did his master’s degree in ethnomusicology and Concordia University out in Montreal. He got involved in that and made a global remix of the January 25th song from El General. So there’s that. And these, these are movements that shook the entire world. Now of course, since that time, the Egyptian government has reverted to being a fascist totalitarianism under Fattah El-Sisi. And the Tunisian revolution is sort of half born. It didn’t really ever get to take flight as it were, because there’s been a lot of political violence, a lot of political instability. Western countries that are often very eager to support dictators were not very eager to provide economic and political support to the new democratic movement in Tunisia at that time. And the other Arab Spring movements got shut down, the ones in Syria, for example, brutally shut down in the most horrific ways we could possibly imagine. So hip hop at least lead to enough of an upsurge that there was a sense there had to be some kind of counterinsurgency against it. And that has happened. There has been an involvement of state actors in hip hop music and hip hop culture in recent years. With Hillary Clinton getting involved when she was Secretary of State promoting hip hop in Europe and in the Middle East with certain US geopolitical goals in mind, especially around ideas of de-radicalization of Islamist groups, for example. And other governments to write the French have gotten involved in that. The British have gotten involved in that, and other European governments have gotten involved. And there’s also official pro-Putin, Russian Hip Hop I’ve learned in recent years as well. And there’s also anti-Putin, Russian hip hop. And of course, in the spirit of hip hop, which is the same as the spirit as punk rock. We would have to give a shout out to the sisters from Pussy Riot who are still out there fighting against Putin. And they just released an incredible anti-war song and video just a few weeks ago protesting the genocidal war in Ukraine that has been launched by the Russian government over there. So there’s a variety of contexts in which hip hop or the spirit of hip hop has used whatever tools are lying around essentially to make something new, right? Pussy Riot came on the stage first one day, went into a Russian Orthodox Church and made a low budget music video in that space, right? And so that’s something that we see people doing in a DIY cultural context all over the world all the time. And it doesn’t have to look like African inspired or Black inspired hip hop. It can take various forms in various contexts. And that’s ultimately, I think the beauty of this sensibility. And this is where as a philosopher I get interested in it too. And that sort of overburdensome language of philosophy. The hip hop is existence versus metaphysics, right? It’s the bubbling undeniable reality of human existence that’s teaming, that’s overflowing beyond the borders of metaphysical categories that we see created by our modern, I mean, let’s just say it right, modern white supremacists context. There has to be an authentic poetry coming out of those spaces. And sometimes it’s not gonna be pretty, sometimes it’s gonna be violent and it’s gonna be insecure and it’s going to be maybe even mimicking some of those supremacist structures of patriarchy or white supremacy. Because that’s the only way people can imagine that they can transcend and be in a secure space themselves. I actually think Jill, That’s why a lot of, like, rich old white people are very uncomfortable with hip hop because they’re like, Oh shit They’re telling us about what we do. They wanna do what we did!

JJF: Yeah, we look bad here!

JJF: So on the one hand, we have a history of hip hop music that roots it quite strongly in Black American experiences, perhaps having influence from African oral tradition and African drumming. But we also have this understanding of hip hop is kind of a globalized phenomenon that we have Korean hip hop, Polish hip hop, et cetera, et cetera. To, to what extent is there a risk of cultural appropriation here?

JR: A lot of risk, Absolutely. And you know, you mentioned really the big one on everybody’s minds these days in your question about Korean hip hop, right? Because there’s, there’s some Korean hip hop that rappers like in North America, meaning, not that North American rappers, by the way, are the ones who stamps somebody with a stamp of authenticity, who knows right where that stamp can be found, right? There are many authentic kinds of rappers, but there’s one guy from Korea named Keith Ape, who a few years ago made a song called “It G Ma”, which is a riff on a song by American rapper, who’s, who’s African-American guy named OG Maco. And OG Maco song is called “B**** You Guessed It,” right? “B**** You Guessed It,”  You know what I’m saying? Right? So that’s what his song is called. And so Keith took the exact same beat, stylize it a little bit, didn’t change at all that much. And in fact does almost the same music video where they’re all him and his friends partying and hotel rooms basically. And “It G Ma”, is actually a song where Keith Ape is joined by two Japanese rappers. So it’s actually a song where you have Korean and Japanese being rapped at the same time, right? And so that’s kind of unique and of itself because Korea and Japan never made up after World War II, they still have beef with each other there. So that’s an interesting thing to see. Hip hop culture bring these otherwise somewhat hostile nations, cultures, and languages together in one work of art. By the way, the song, they talk about World War II. So it’s like, it’s like really cathartic if you’re a Korean or Japanese, the lyrics of that song, right? So that’s a song that a lot of rappers in North America have greatly appreciated. And Keith Ape has done collaborations with rappers in North America. He’s invited in as one of hip hop’s own, even though he’s from another country, even though he’s not Black, he’s been embraced, right? Another example of that is a Chinese rapper from Hong Kong, whose name is MC Yan and MC Yan is a rapper who is very political. He’s very critical of the Communist Party. And he’s one of these sort of Hong Kong holdout fellows. And he’s also critical of the US’s war on terror. He has made a song about the Iraq war. He’s innovated a rhyme structure in the Mandarin language, I’m sorry, in his case in the Cantonese language, excuse me, that leverages the grammar of the Cantonese language in order to fit it into a 4/4 beat structure authentically. And also MC Yan converted to Islam. And some people have talked about how Islam is a religion that many rappers or feel an affinity to. And obviously Islam is a global religion that encompasses people from every racial and ethnic and cultural background all over the world. So that’s something that also speaks to that global inclusivity in a way that might not be perhaps problematic with regard to negative appropriation. But there are examples of negative appropriation as well. And we can talk a little bit about that. One that immediately comes to mind is the South Korean boy band, right? I think they’re called BTS, if I’m not mistaken, I think that’s what they’re called. They’re really famous. I still haven’t heard any of their music because I’m basically living under a rock. But they’ve been accused of cultural appropriation, of basically stylizing hip hop dance in a way that’s palatable for consumption by South Korean elites, and that doesn’t really talk much about more overt political issues. Now, to their credit, I’ve also read that they’ve tried to include some issues in recent years about racism against immigrants in Korea for example,. their music, right? So that’s, that’s pretty cool that they’re actually trying to do that. But on the surface, a lot of people say they’re just ripping off the style of hip hop. That’s all they’re doing. This kind of appropriation is part of the machinery at this point of capitalism and hip hop. And a lot of women performers are put into hypersexualized route maybe that they might not want to take all the time. Some of them do, and that’s their business obviously, but many of them now would be expected to do that. So one of my favorite rappers, MC J Natural, she’s released a great song on this. I recommend people look it up. There’s a great video. The song is called, “They Want Sex.” It’s her and a woman from Compton, California named Medusa, who are rappers in that song. And they talk about how that’s, that’s pretty much all that they can mark it to the audience is their physicality, is their appearance. Is their sex. And she has a great line when she says in that song she says, “they want sex, but most will only feel it when I’m rocking the mic,” right? So she’s being very self-aware of the fact that she as a beautiful woman, is a person that many people will desire sexually. They’ll feel attracted to her, but she doesn’t want to be reduced to that. So she’s openly playing with it. And of course in the video, she looks pretty hot wearing cut-off shorts and is playing with a hose, like showering herself with a hose and Medusa, the other rapper. But then in the song, after their kind of showering each other with hoses at the beginning, which is kind of making fun of what men expect from, from women artists. Two women, they go to the salon and they get takeovers that are like their power make overs that are then rocking their own style. So it’s like them also showing how they can take the power of their sexuality back. And that’s a lesson that I take also as a man, because as a man like we’re all so suppressed. The same way white people are suppressed in white supremacy, men are suppressed in patriarchy to be certain gender performance all the time, a certain sexuality performance all the time. And what that robs us of is love, right? We can’t hug our friends, we can’t give our homey like a kiss on the cheek. We have been in a repressive culture from the get-go. So we suppress our animal side. And when I say animal side, I don’t mean that in a negative way. I think the animal is beautiful, right? That, that’s part of who we are. And one of the problems with modern society is the animal doesn’t have any place to go. You know, like we live in a world that we have, we’ve taken the animal and push them out, right? That’s also what Freud says we should do in Civilization and its Discontents, right? So obviously other people in the psychoanalytic tradition, the Frankfurt School tradition especially, but then later people like Herbert Marcuse, right? They make the argument that essentially what we’ve done is we have sublimated the animal, but you can’t do that. It’s going to team out. At some point, it’s going to bubble over. The problem for modern capitalism is how can you de-sublimate in a way that’s repressive and that doesn’t allow for the animal to really take form but as simply given a vent. So these kind of titillating marketing, where we get to see a little skin or where somebody talks a little bit about drugs, or where somebody curses a lot, or where black men perform the role of the gangster for white men to then project their own repressed masculinity onto. This has become a modus operandi of global hip hop. And so this is a problem we can see in many contexts. And I’ll, I’ll share one last example on this question. Because we are talking about global hip hop and commercialism and all that too. In India in the last year, there was a very famous rapper who was assassinated and his name was Sidhu Moose Wala. And I have mixed feelings on this guy because you might notice I’ve got a Tupac and Biggie image right over there above my head. Right over there.

JJF: Yeah.

JR: This guy Sidhu Moose Wala. He loves Tupac and Biggie. He’s kinda brought them in to his worldview and he’s studied their music and all that. In any case Sidhu Moose Wala, he was assassinated a year ago when he got into politics. He was assassinated. That’s another story. But the music that he put forth is all extremely hyper-masculine and all is the expression Punjabi Jutti cast machismo culture, where it’s assumed that if you’re a man, you have to somehow control, dominate, et cetera. And he is the most popular musician among the Punjabi youth diaspora all around the world today, including right here in Canada, many of our students and I’ll be fully honest with you. His music sounds dope, like if you listened to his music, it sounds great. Aesthetically. I don’t know Punjabi. So I had to look up the lyrics myself, with the exception of a couple of his songs, all of his lyrics are just about killing his enemies, dominating women, this sort of thing. He has a couple of political songs. But in that way, maybe he’s a bit like the figure of Tupac, which is, you know, he’s this emblem of this contradictory moment we live in where he expresses the, the pent-up, toxic masculine rage in these communities, in our global communities. But he also at the same time is as an artist expressing vulnerable feelings that go beyond that. So what we choose to look at or what hits, what makes the money, unfortunately, is more often going to be the titillating stuff, right? There’s stuff that’s just on the surface. So that’s a little bit difficult to overcome because now it’s become a bit of a marketing formula too. And he’s probably the most popular rap artists in the world today, just by virtue of the number of hits on YouTube, given the very large population of people, not just in India but also in Pakistan who are um his fans, but of course globally as well, right?

JJF: So what we’re seeing here then is that hip hop can be used authentically as a tool of resistance. That it can be used as a way to bridge boundaries between different groups of people, different nations. It can be used for cultural appreciation and cultural exchange, but it can also be a harmful tool of a capitalist global economy where we see it promoting patriarchal ideologies, toxic masculinities, cultural appropriation without any kind of appreciation or exchange. And that, it sounds like there’s a lot of power in that. And this maybe more commercialized version of hip hop, does gain a lot of attention.

JR: Yeah, absolutely, It sure does. It sure does. It’s hard to find I like the question or the comment because it really is, it draws attention to the fact that it’s very hard to find these, these interstitial spaces where people are authentically, lyrically, poetically existing, right? That’s something that we can’t lose sight of, but it’s easy to lose sight of it. I’ll share one example just to counter what I mentioned about Sidhu Moose Wala. He’s a complex figure, right? I can’t boil him down to one thing or another in what I’m saying right now about him. But there’s, in the Punjabi community specifically, there are two examples from Britain from the ’90s that are just incredible. One of them is a rapper named Punjabi MC, that’s his name. And he is a pioneering British DJ who worked with Indian rappers, with Black rappers. And in fact, he’s from a community context in South London, where he was mainly friends with Black immigrants from the West Indies. In the UK the “N word” or the word “Black” is actually sometimes used to refer to anybody who’s African, Indian, or Pakistani. Right. My PhD advisor, the late great Cedric Robinson, the writer of Black Marxism and one of the people who created the legacy of Black Lives Matter, he did a postdoc at Oxford many years ago and he always used to tell me when he was still around that, when he would play basketball, he would get heckled by white people who would call him “Paki Boy”, right? Even though Cedric Robinson is a Black guy from Oakland, California. So there’s this kind of shared racialization space that we see happening in the empire. And Punjabi MC was somebody who very much spoke back against all of that in his music. But I’ll mention one other example who is contemporary to Punjabi MC. And I find them, they’re kind of a lost group in the shuffle. And they’re not really rappers. There have been more like a punk rock group that combines like Bhangra music with punk rock and also with like groove music, dance music.

JJF: That sounds so cool.

JR: They’re called Asian Dub Foundation. They have this, I mean, they have a lot of goods songs, but they have this one song called “Rebel Warrior” from like 95. And in that song they talk about how the official ideology of Britain is multiculturalism. But that they are anti-racist and they want to go beyond multiculturalism because multiculturalism segregates everybody into their own colored community. Whereas anti-racism envisions a unified culture that transcends the historical legacies of racism. And these are some Punjabi brothers as well. So just to give a little props to the Punjabi diaspora, I’m not Punjabi, so I don’t want to talk shit on Punjabi people. Obviously, I want to show the multifacetedness of that community to write because in your question and your comment from before about the tendencies within hip hop and the fact that commercial hip hop has become such a dominant force, right? These kinds of lost histories, we can recover them. And indeed that’s what hip hop is, right? It’s finding your parents records and playing them and giving them a totally new meaning that they didn’t necessarily have that form.

JJF: Playing with them, right?

JR: And playing with them, scratching them, listening to little micro components of them.

JJF: I want to thank you so much for joining me today for this discussion. Is there anything else that you would like our listeners to know about hip hop and globalization today?

JR: Yeah, KRS-One, you know, I think it’s a helpful thing to share. He says that hip hop is the oldest thing that people have been doing. Which is to say, it’s not from the Bronx where I went to high school. It’s not from Harlem where I grew up. It’s not from the United States. It’s something that authentically bubbles up and happens in its own unique way all over the world, all the time, right? And so we all have like knacks, funny little tics that we do, right? We tap our feet that things, right? Or we like to wear our hair in a certain way, or we like to dress a certain way and nobody is going to make us change because we’re not going to talk in our shirts, right? Because who the hell does that, right? So all of those kinds of little resistances that we have that make up who we are, if we find a way to bring what’s inside to the outside, right? And then accompanied with a rhythm or with any kind of melodiousness, which could just be from your voice to you don’t even need instruments, right? That’s what I think hip hop is and that really makes it very similar or even identical to poetry in a basic way. And so we live in a world where, you know, poetry is something that people say only poets do. But I would just want to say that it’s something that people do, that humans do. And we would have a much more rich experience, all of us, if we got to hear everybody’s poetry.

JJF: This episode of Gender, Sex and Tech continued a conversation that began when Jovian gave a guest lecture for a class of mine on hip hop and globalization, and I had to know more. I really want to think Jovian for sharing his knowledge of and passion for hip hop with me today. And thank you listener for joining me for another episode of Gender Sex and Tech: Continuing the Conversation. If you would like to continue this conversation further, please reach out on Twitter @tech_gender or leave a comment on this podcast. Or maybe you could consider creating your own essay, podcast, video, or other media format to continue the conversation in your own voice. Music was provided by Epidemic Sound. This podcast is created by me, Jennifer Jill Fellows, with support from the Marc Sanders Foundation for Public Philosophy. If you enjoyed this episode, please consider buying me a coffee. You can find a link to my Ko-Fi page in the show notes. Until next time everybody. Bye.