Music - Journal Articles
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Item A sonic biography of an afterlife: The expelled liberation leader Uria Simango in Mozambican rap(Taylor & Francis, 2024-08-19) Rantala, Janne; Horizon 2020This article focuses on two interlinked trends in public memory in Mozambique: the rise of alternative heroes and parallel invocations of seemingly incompatible heroes, particularly as they relate to invocations of Frelimo’s ousted Vice President, Uria Simango, in Mozambican rap. The empirical material was produced by listening to rap music, attending shows, and through interviews and conversations with hip hop musicians in Beira, Chimoio and Maputo. This material is examined in relation to historical documents and situated alongside other types of public and private remembering. I argue that critical rap music allows insightful examinations of the links between young peoples’ perspectives on liberation history, present experiences and visions of the future. Rap performances also help to examine how the hegemony of official memory is weakening in Mozambique. These performances are a potentially generative source of alternative history; because they are deeply intertwined in public discussions as well as social activism, I argue that they potentially disrupt and transcend state-sanctioned historiographical frameworks. Taking an ambiguous stance towards historical figures, rap also differs from the opposition meta-narrative, which tends to simply reverse the official canon of heroes and traitors. I find that rappers use a variety of techniques to intervene in disputes around history in creative ways. Regional variations in performed histories draw upon both the local and global wisdoms of hip hop communities, improving their accessibility to the public.Item A love interrupted: A Tribe Called Quest’s resilient path of rhythm(Intellect, 2020-06) McNally, JamesIn 2016, the rap group A Tribe Called Quest returned with their long-awaited sixth and final album, We Got It From Here... Thank You 4 Your Service. Behind it was a long and turbulent story without which the record’s full significance cannot be properly understood. In this longform critical essay, hip hop scholar and critic James McNally examines that history, drawing on an extensive archive of historic interviews and visual material to illuminate the impact this pivotal group made on hip hop’s golden age. It maps the disruption in music and values created by the freewheeling collective they belonged to, the Native Tongues; in particular the new, looser, more expressive modes of Blackness and everyteen vitality they injected into hip hop’s late-1980s moral and stylistic universe. Unpacking the tropes of familiality the Native Tongues promoted, the essay is drawn in particular to the de facto sibling relationship between Tribe’s two core MCs – Malik ‘Phife’ Taylor and Kamaal ‘Q-Tip’ Fareed (born Jonathan Davis). It argues their friendship – as ultimately embodied in the sound of Tribe’s music, but also, increasingly, as public biographical knowledge – was central to the group’s appeal. Engaging with their fraternal ambivalence as well as their love, and with the group’s drawn-out implosion after 1998’s The Love Movement, the essay explores themes around masculine friendship and platonic male love, around estrangement, reconciliation and resilience, and, ultimately – following the interruption of We Got It From Here… by Taylor’s untimely death – the personal tragedy of loss. Bringing these themes together, ‘A Love Interrupted’ provides a critical reading of A Tribe Called Quest’s poignant final album.Item Hip-hop producer-hosts, beat battles, and online music production communities on Twitch(First Monday, 2023-06-06) Ng, Jason; Gamble, Steven; Horizon 2020This article introduces a new creative industry actor, the ‘producer-host’, whose novel cultural practices combine several roles: that of performing artist, music production educator, event manager, livestream broadcaster, and community manager. Producer-hosts use the livestreaming platform Twitch (alongside other digital technologies) to run online beatmaking events with communal and participatory dynamics that indicate expanding uses of streaming platforms. Drawing upon 18 months of ethnography, active community participation, and interviews with three producer-hosts, we provide a nuanced analysis of the political economy of Twitch and developments in the contemporary creative industries during the COVID-19 pandemic. We analyse and discuss the outcomes of participation in music production communities on Twitch according to five themes: income and sustainability; personal and professional gratifications; online followings; community identity and belonging; and informal education.Item Thailand (ประเทศไทย)(Intellect, 2023-12-20) Ng, Jason; Horizon 2020Thailand’s hip hop culture has developed at a very different pace to other prominent early adopters in the Asia-Pacific. Given its late adoption of hip hop in the 1990s through popular music labels (Kita Music, GMM Grammy, Bakery Music, RS Promotion), local DJs, MCs, aerosol artists and breakers negotiated hip hop in a relatively short period – pressurized under local market conditions and influenced by multidirectional flows of hip hop that extended across the region and beyond. Hip hop in Thailand now draws on local traditional cultural influences while also being inspired by an immense flow of expat workers, tourists and transient visitors annually. It is not surprising that immanently polycultural music cultures like hip hop manifest in a number of ways in the Thai context, stratified by degrees of appreciation of international aesthetics and reverence for local Thai cultural history and customs. While hip hop exists across the country, with prominent communities in Chiang Mai, Chon Buri and Udon Thani, it is most notably diverse and concentrated in Bangkok – the place it began and where many pioneers have created their legacy.Item Full of rage and references: Understanding Coronel’s Frenesi (Frenzy) (2022) in the Brazilian rap scene – An interview/review(Intellect, 2022-12) Souza Marques, GustavoCoronel is an underground Brazilian rapper and music producer who has a psychologizing and post-gangsta musical work. In his album Frenesi (2022), Coronel shows his rage against fake gangsterism in the Brazilian rap scene utilizing references from a diverse setting of cultural productions ranging from Hitchcock movies to Egyptian gods. This article examines the uniqueness of Coronel’s musical work in the Brazilian rap scene considering his initial maromba rap phase as well. Maromba rap is a subgenre of rap music made for working out comprising motivating but also dissing lyrics against other bodybuilders. As a product of Brazilian rap scene on the internet, maromba rap is an interesting phenomenon that had its apex in early 2010s. However, Coronel’s career moved beyond such a specific subgenre achieving deeper lyrics and more intricate music productions. In other words, this article examines not only Coronel’s Frenesi but also its career as a whole and how the content of his album relates to the different phases he went through as an artist. Coronel comes back with an aggressive album replete with references from cinema to Egyptian gods and videogames.