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HIP HOP GENERATION NEXT HIP HOP GENERATION NEXT: BEYOND BARRIER HIP HOP GENERATION NEXT: GLOBAL REINVENTIONS In the mid 1980s, just as hip hop was finding its way into mainstream American consideration via Hollywood movies like Flashdance and Beat Street, a funny thing happened abroad. Hip hop also found deep pockets of admiration and devotion from young people in Australia, Germany, France, Japan. Like their American counterparts, international b-boys and b-girls practiced their moves in alleyways and streets, at the clubs and in the basements of their friends, testing out ideas and possibilities to be used at the next local competition. The abiding goal was pretty much the same the world over: how could you perform a movement in such an unprecedented way that your audience would forget that anyone else had ever done it before you? During its ascent into the pantheon of defining realms of popular culture, hip hop, like jazz, gathered an international cohort of participants. During the 1990s and after the millennium, we could attend performances of any of the elements of hip hop - emceeing, or rap; b-boying and b-girling, or breakdancing; dj’ing or musical production; or graffiti, or visual culture - in any corner of the globe. Some artists turned to hip hop to shift possibilities for local youth culture. For example, in the mid-1990s, Japanese emcees rejected the prevalent pleasantries of J-Pop to produce political rap that criticized the media and the social status quo. In other parts of the world, hip hop offered new avenues of physical fun. In 2001, audiences in Umea, Sweden witnessed a group of barely-teenaged Scandinavian boys honing their 1980s-era popping and locking for an inter-generational audience at the Swedish Dance Biennial. Early on, hip hop inspired international circulations. In 2002 I met a locally acclaimed underground DJ in Melborne, Australia who admitted to traveling with a friend to the South Bronx back in 1984 after they had seen the already-classic underground Charlie Ahearn film Wild Style. They didn’t really have a tourist plan; they just knew they had to be where hip hop had been born. And hip hop has always crossed boundaries of high and low. Earlier this year, the Grand Palais in Paris displayed 300 commissioned works of tag and graffiti art, confirming the arrival of a once-criminal form of hip hop expression to the regarded realms of contemporary art. Like any art, hip hop knows no national boundaries; its calls for a “hip hop nation” ruled by “one love” suggests youth connectivity outside of governmental ambitions. And yet, hip hop is indebted to the local circumstances that shape its practitioners. Hip hop fans recognize references to local politics as well as global and local pop culture; we follow local and international artists, we turn to its culture to learn about local geography and rites of passage as well as international sites of political unrest, abject poverty, and social oppression. It is likely this mixture of the local and the global, the high and the low, the life-changing and the frivolous - that provides hip hop a huge measure of its enduring, and still under-appreciated, appeal. Among all this, the hip hop imperative to bring knowledge to your art - to know your history and share it forward to the next generation - survives and thrives. Many hip hop hedz still claim that knowledge is the fifth element of the realm, and without a working sense of those who have come before, we cannot offer our own version of where we might want to go. The best artists in this realm bring knowledge to bear on their dance moves, their rhymes, their djing and graffiti art. Hip hop grows in social situations like block parties and competitions where the audiences can test the performers and their understanding of local lore. Transporting these local concerns onto international stages becomes possible because of hip hop’s flamboyant sense of style. Style, or the ability to customize performance in exceptionally individualistic ways, forms a foundational hip hop aesthetic. Some artists approach hip hop style working as a group, trying to gather collective energy into dances that are impossibly synchronized; while others work toward apocryphal iconic status as the only rapper alive who could make this or that claim. In every case, artists enjoy the response of audiences who may or may not know the local referents. By 2009, the global reach of hip hop has not slowed, although different regions emphasize different aspects of its related arts. Hip hop can express the difficulties of living young under abject poverty and political repression; it can explore the pure dynamism of physical bravado; it can offer a vibrant time capsule, a means to remember how life was back in the day. All of these uses are valid extensions of the form, and each of them is represented in this multi-borough Hip Hop Generation NEXT season assembled by Dancing in the Streets’ Executive and Artistic Director Aviva Davidson. Hip hoppers thrive in the realm of competition, in the ciphers and dance-offs traditionally decided by the response of the audience. In many award-winning performances, South Korean dancers have taken on the project of projecting hip hop’s physical attitude toward the future. Today’s b-boys and b-girls follow a long tradition of African American derived social dances including the cakewalk, the charleston, the lindy hop, and the Soul Train line, where popping and locking first took national root, and then achieved international acclaim. The political import of hip hop has seldom gone unnoticed in the art of emceeing, or rap. Rappers tell truth to power; sometimes critiquing local dynasties of authority, at other times revealing the fissures of public policy gone awry. Since 1982, when Melle Mel opined "Don't push me 'cause I am close to the edge / I'm trying not to lose my head" on “The Message,” hip hop has opened avenues of discourse too-long denied to young people. In the developing nations in Latin America and Africa especially, hip hop emcees express local and international concerns, offer wry observances and advice for youth, and shout out respect to rising young lions ready to change the game. In the United States, hip hop looks backward and forward simultaneously. Hip hoppers remember and honor the roots - “Rapper’s Delight” anyone? - and invent original ways to move the crowd. Chinese Martial Arts inspired many early hip hop dancers, and the presence of these forms within hip hop is undeniable. New dance forms, like footworking and “get lite,” showcase the dynamism of youthful invention, while older forms like House Dancing are re-imagined for contemporary audiences. In all, US hip hoppers demonstrate the continuity of cultural invention that feed the world with hip hop GENERATION NEXT - Global Reinventions leading the way.
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Dancing in the Streets Staff Aviva Davidson Mathew Heggem | ||||||||||||
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