Hip-Hop Japan

Hip-Hop Japan PDF Author: Ian Condry
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 0822388162
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 263

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Book Description
In this lively ethnography Ian Condry interprets Japan’s vibrant hip-hop scene, explaining how a music and culture that originated halfway around the world is appropriated and remade in Tokyo clubs and recording studios. Illuminating different aspects of Japanese hip-hop, Condry chronicles how self-described “yellow B-Boys” express their devotion to “black culture,” how they combine the figure of the samurai with American rapping techniques and gangsta imagery, and how underground artists compete with pop icons to define “real” Japanese hip-hop. He discusses how rappers manipulate the Japanese language to achieve rhyme and rhythmic flow and how Japan’s female rappers struggle to find a place in a male-dominated genre. Condry pays particular attention to the messages of emcees, considering how their raps take on subjects including Japan’s education system, its sex industry, teenage bullying victims turned schoolyard murderers, and even America’s handling of the war on terror. Condry attended more than 120 hip-hop performances in clubs in and around Tokyo, sat in on dozens of studio recording sessions, and interviewed rappers, music company executives, music store owners, and journalists. Situating the voices of Japanese artists in the specific nightclubs where hip-hop is performed—what musicians and fans call the genba (actual site) of the scene—he draws attention to the collaborative, improvisatory character of cultural globalization. He contends that it was the pull of grassroots connections and individual performers rather than the push of big media corporations that initially energized and popularized hip-hop in Japan. Zeebra, DJ Krush, Crazy-A, Rhymester, and a host of other artists created Japanese rap, one performance at a time.

Hip-Hop Japan

Hip-Hop Japan PDF Author: Ian Condry
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 0822388162
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 263

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Book Description
In this lively ethnography Ian Condry interprets Japan’s vibrant hip-hop scene, explaining how a music and culture that originated halfway around the world is appropriated and remade in Tokyo clubs and recording studios. Illuminating different aspects of Japanese hip-hop, Condry chronicles how self-described “yellow B-Boys” express their devotion to “black culture,” how they combine the figure of the samurai with American rapping techniques and gangsta imagery, and how underground artists compete with pop icons to define “real” Japanese hip-hop. He discusses how rappers manipulate the Japanese language to achieve rhyme and rhythmic flow and how Japan’s female rappers struggle to find a place in a male-dominated genre. Condry pays particular attention to the messages of emcees, considering how their raps take on subjects including Japan’s education system, its sex industry, teenage bullying victims turned schoolyard murderers, and even America’s handling of the war on terror. Condry attended more than 120 hip-hop performances in clubs in and around Tokyo, sat in on dozens of studio recording sessions, and interviewed rappers, music company executives, music store owners, and journalists. Situating the voices of Japanese artists in the specific nightclubs where hip-hop is performed—what musicians and fans call the genba (actual site) of the scene—he draws attention to the collaborative, improvisatory character of cultural globalization. He contends that it was the pull of grassroots connections and individual performers rather than the push of big media corporations that initially energized and popularized hip-hop in Japan. Zeebra, DJ Krush, Crazy-A, Rhymester, and a host of other artists created Japanese rap, one performance at a time.

24 Bars to Kill

24 Bars to Kill PDF Author: Andrew B. Armstrong
Publisher: Berghahn Books
ISBN: 178920268X
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 203

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Book Description
The most clearly identifiable and popular form of Japanese hip-hop, “ghetto” or “gangsta” music has much in common with its corresponding American subgenres, including its portrayal of life on the margins, confrontational style, and aspirational “rags-to-riches” narratives. Contrary to depictions of an ethnically and economically homogeneous Japan, gangsta J-hop gives voice to the suffering, deprivation, and social exclusion experienced by many modern Japanese. 24 Bars to Kill offers a fascinating ethnographic account of this music as well as the subculture around it, showing how gangsta hip-hop arises from widespread dissatisfaction and malaise.

Hip-Hop Japan

Hip-Hop Japan PDF Author: Ian Condry
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 9780822338925
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 268

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Book Description
An ethnographic study of Japanese hip-hop.

Traveling Texts and the Work of Afro-Japanese Cultural Production

Traveling Texts and the Work of Afro-Japanese Cultural Production PDF Author: William H. Bridges
Publisher: Lexington Books
ISBN: 1498505481
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 303

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Book Description
Traveling Texts and the Work of Afro-Japanese Cultural Production analyzes the complex conversations taking place in texts of all sorts traveling between Africans, African Diasporas, and Japanese across disciplinary, geographic, racial, ethnic, linguistic, and cultural borders. Be it focused on the make-up of the blackface ganguro or the haiku of Richard Wright, Rastafari communities in Japan or the black enka singer Jero, the volume turns its attention away from questions of representation to ones concerning the generative aspects of transcultural production. The contributors are interested primarily in texts in motion—the contradictory motion within texts, the traveling of texts, and the action that such kinetic energy inspires in readers, viewers, listeners, and travelers. As our texts travel and travail, the originary nodal points that anchor them to set significations loosen and are transformed; the essays trace how, in the process of traveling, the bodies and subjectivities of those working to reimagine the text(s) in new sites moderate, accommodate, and transfigure both the texts and themselves.

Global Noise

Global Noise PDF Author: Tony Mitchell
Publisher: Wesleyan University Press
ISBN: 9780819565020
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 356

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Book Description
International scholars explore the hip hop scenes of Europe, Canada, Japan and Australia.

Babylon East

Babylon East PDF Author: Marvin Sterling
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 0822392739
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 316

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Book Description
An important center of dancehall reggae performance, sound clashes are contests between rival sound systems: groups of emcees, tune selectors, and sound engineers. In World Clash 1999, held in Brooklyn, Mighty Crown, a Japanese sound system and the only non-Jamaican competitor, stunned the international dancehall community by winning the event. In 2002, the Japanese dancer Junko Kudo became the first non-Jamaican to win Jamaica’s National Dancehall Queen Contest. High-profile victories such as these affirmed and invigorated Japan’s enthusiasm for dancehall reggae. In Babylon East, the anthropologist Marvin D. Sterling traces the history of the Japanese embrace of dancehall reggae and other elements of Jamaican culture, including Rastafari, roots reggae, and dub music. Sterling provides a nuanced ethnographic analysis of the ways that many Japanese involved in reggae as musicians and dancers, and those deeply engaged with Rastafari as a spiritual practice, seek to reimagine their lives through Jamaican culture. He considers Japanese performances and representations of Jamaican culture in clubs, competitions, and festivals; on websites; and in song lyrics, music videos, reggae magazines, travel writing, and fiction. He illuminates issues of race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and class as he discusses topics ranging from the cultural capital that Japanese dancehall artists amass by immersing themselves in dancehall culture in Jamaica, New York, and England, to the use of Rastafari as a means of critiquing class difference, consumerism, and the colonial pasts of the West and Japan. Encompassing the reactions of Jamaica’s artists to Japanese appropriations of Jamaican culture, as well as the relative positions of Jamaica and Japan in the world economy, Babylon East is a rare ethnographic account of Afro-Asian cultural exchange and global discourses of blackness beyond the African diaspora.

To the Break of Dawn

To the Break of Dawn PDF Author: William Jelani Cobb
Publisher: NYU Press
ISBN: 0814716717
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 208

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Book Description
With roots that stretch from West Africa through the black pulpit, hip hop emerged in the streets of the South Bronx in the 1970s and has spread to the farthest corners of the earth. "To the Break of Dawn" uniquely examines this freestyle verbal artistry on its own terms. A kid from Queens who spent his youth at the epicenter of this new art form, music critic William Jelani Cobb takes readers inside the beats, the lyrics, and the flow of hip hop, separating mere corporate rappers from the creative MCs that forged the art in the crucible of the street jam.The four pillars of hip hop - break dancing, graffiti art, deejaying, and rapping - find their origins in traditions as diverse as the Afro-Brazilian martial art Capoeira and Caribbean immigrants' turnstile artistry.

The Games Black Girls Play

The Games Black Girls Play PDF Author: Kyra D. Gaunt
Publisher: NYU Press
ISBN: 0814731201
Category : Games & Activities
Languages : en
Pages : 239

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Book Description
Illustrates how black musical styles are incorporated into the earliest games African American girls learn--how, in effect, these games contain the DNA of black music. Drawing on interviews, recordings of handclapping games and cheers, and her own observation and memories of gameplaying, Gaunt argues that black girls' games are connected to long traditions of African and African American musicmaking, and that they teach vital musical and social lessons that are carried into adulthood. - from publisher information.

Tokyo Urban-hip Hop Culture

Tokyo Urban-hip Hop Culture PDF Author: Makoto Nakajima
Publisher: Digital Manga Publishing
ISBN: 9781569709696
Category : Comic books, strips, etc
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Instructed by Japanese street experts and drawn by industry veterans of manga, this valuable instructional guide helps readers depict the fast-pace urban lifestyle of Tokyo, Japan's largest mecca for the Hip Hop subculture it bears by its youth today. Through a series of studied drawings of various character designs, urban environments, city living conditions and youth entertainment, which are essential elements to creating this unique genre, this book presents to the novice artist step-by-step illustrations and design instructions which ultimately lead up to formulating a short urban story. With focus on creating characters with the hippest hairstyles and latest trends in fashion, down to constructing the various local youth settings, this book makes the perfect uniquely themed reference guide for anyone wanting to draw on urban manga drama!

The Revolution Will Not Be Televised

The Revolution Will Not Be Televised PDF Author: Noriko Manabe
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190606533
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 465

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Book Description
Nuclear power has been a contentious issue in Japan since the 1950s, and in the aftermath of the Fukushima nuclear power plant disaster, the conflict has only grown. Government agencies and the nuclear industry continue to push a nuclear agenda, while the mainstream media adheres to the official line that nuclear power is Japan's future. Public debate about nuclear energy is strongly discouraged. Nevertheless, antinuclear activism has swelled into one of the most popular and passionate movements in Japan, leading to a powerful wave of protest music. The Revolution Will Not Be Televised: Protest Music After Fukushima shows that music played a central role in expressing antinuclear sentiments and mobilizing political resistance in Japan. Combining musical analysis with ethnographic participation, author Noriko Manabe offers an innovative typology of the spaces central to the performance of protest music--cyberspace, demonstrations, festivals, and recordings. She argues that these four spaces encourage different modes of participation and methods of political messaging. The openness, mobile accessibility, and potential anonymity of cyberspace have allowed musicians to directly challenge the ethos of silence that permeated Japanese culture post-Fukushima. Moving from cyberspace to real space, Manabe shows how the performance and reception of music played at public demonstrations are shaped by the urban geographies of Japanese cities. While short on open public space, urban centers in Japan offer protesters a wide range of governmental and commercial spaces in which to demonstrate, with activist musicians tailoring their performances to the particular landscapes and soundscapes of each. Music festivals are a space apart from everyday life, encouraging musicians and audience members to freely engage in political expression through informative and immersive performances. Conversely, Japanese record companies and producers discourage major-label musicians from expressing political views in recordings, forcing antinuclear musicians to express dissent indirectly: through allegories, metaphors, and metonyms. The first book on Japan's antinuclear music, The Revolution Will Not Be Televised provides a compelling new perspective on the role of music in political movements.