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Hip Hop at Europe's Edge
Music, Agency, and Social Change
Contributions by
Adriana N. Helbig, Alexandra Baladina, Elona Toska, Gentian Elezi, Goran Music, Jasmin Mujanovic, Milosz Miszczynski, Philip Ewell
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Synopsis
Responding to the development of a lively hip hop culture in Central and Eastern European countries, this interdisciplinary study demonstrates how a universal model of hip hop serves as a contextually situated platform of cultural exchange and becomes locally inflected. After the Soviet Union fell, hip hop became popular in urban environments in the region, but it has often been stigmatized as inauthentic, due to an apparent lack of connection to African American historical roots and black identity. Originally strongly influenced by aesthetics from the US, hip hop in Central and Eastern Europe has gradually developed unique, local trajectories, a number of which are showcased in this volume. On the one hand, hip hop functions as a marker of Western cosmopolitanism and democratic ideology, but as the contributors show, it is also a malleable genre that has been infused with so much local identity that it has lost most of its previous associations with "the West" in the experiences of local musicians, audiences, and producers. Contextualizing hip hop through the prism of local experiences and regional musical expressions, these valuable case studies reveal the broad spectrum of its impact on popular culture and youth identity in the post-Soviet world. New & Used
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What Reviewers Are Saying
This is a real treasure trove, full of fascinating stories. It acts as a fine example of academic inquiry that creatively probes hip-hop's practices, providing context for the form's usage across the Eastern Bloc. The authors of this edited volume do not romanticize and heroize the genre by automatically equating it with political opposition, a fate often suffered by rock before. Instead, the book has to be given much credit for presenting a very nuanced picture of hip hop's entanglement-or non-entanglement, for that matter-with politics in this wide stretch of the world, past and present. * The Russian Review * The volume represents a valuable and timely contribution to the study of popular culture in central and eastern Europe. Hip Hop at Europe's Edge will not only appeal to readers interested in contemporary popular culture in central and eastern Europe, but also inspire future research on post-socialism's unique local adaptations of global cultural trends. * The Soviet and Post-Soviet Review * The reviewed book is an important contribution to existing scholarship on hip-hop culture. It enhances the history of hip-hop with knowledge of how the idioms of this genre have been adopted and reincarnated through a prism of east European culture. The value of the book should also be weighed in the context of colonial/post-colonial and communist/post-communist studies. The authors show how hip-hop has served social and political needs during the challenging period of transition from communism to capitalism, and how it continues to help newly-independent nation-states define their new status in Europe. Overall, Hip Hop at Europe's Edge is a notable addition to hip-hop and music scholarship. It is increasingly timely, given current geopolitical affairs. * Notes * All in all, with its interdisciplinary approaches, the volume makes an important step in opening up a hitherto overlooked region for the study of hip hop. It is therefore a highly welcome addition to the growing number of publications making research of hip hop in Europe available in English. * Music and Letters *