Assembling Aarhus West
Glocal rap, genre and heterogeneity
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1558/pomh.30377Keywords:
genre theory, hip-hop studies, globalization, assemblage, heterogeneityAbstract
Aarhus West rap music constitutes a dominant trend within Danish hip-hop. Throughout the 2000s, a number of rappers with a common background in a specific area in the western part of Aarhus rose to national fame, setting sales records while bringing issues of ethnic and socio-geographical marginalization into the Danish popular music and cultural mainstream. In this article, I present Aarhus West as a case study to discuss (sub)generic developments within hip hop as a global phenomenon. While considering current developments in popular music genre theory, I argue that predominant notions of “glocalized” rap as ‘resistance vernaculars’ or ‘global noise’ (cf. Hawkins et al. 2004, Mitchell 2001) risk maintaining overly homogenous understandings of genre. In particular, I appeal to the Deleuzian concept of assemblage to highlight heterogeneity – and more specifically continuous de- and re-territorialization within a heterogeneous milieu of rap music, hip hop culture, social, ethnic and geographical conditions, media, political and commercial interests – as a key issue in understanding musico-generic development, persistence and strength.
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Potter, Russell A. 1995. Spectacular Vernaculars: Hip-hop and the Politics of Postmodernism. Albany: State University of New York Press.
Regev, Motti. 1994. ‘Producing Artistic Value: The Case of Rock Music’. Sociological Quarterly 35/1: 85–102. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1533-8525.1994.tb00400.x
Robertson, Roland. 1995. ‘Glocalization: Time-Space and Homogeneity-Heterogeneity’. In Global Modernities, ed. Mike Featherstone, Scott Lash and Roland Robertson, 25–44. London: Sage Publications. https://doi.org/10.4135/9781446250563.n2
Toop, David. 2000. Rap Attack #3. London: Serpent’s Tail.
Toynbee, Jason. 2000. Making Popular Music. London: Arnold.
Walser, Robert. 1993. Running with the Devil: Power, Gender, and Madness in Heavy Metal Music. Middletown, CT: University Press of New England.
Anderson, Ben, and Colin McFarlane. 2011. ‘Assemblage and Geography’. Area 43/2: 124–27.
Androutsopoulos, Jannis, and Arno Scholz. 2003. ‘Spaghetti Funk: Appropriations of Hip-hop Culture and Rap Music in Europe’. Popular Music and Society 26/4: 463–79. https://doi.org/10.1080/0300776032000144922
Bennett, Jane. 2010. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. London: Duke University Press.
Born, Georgina. 2005. ‘On Musical Mediation: Ontology, Technology and Creativity’. Twentieth-century Music 2/1: 7–36. https://doi.org/10.1017/S147857220500023X
—2011. ‘Music and the Materialization of Identities’. Journal of Material Culture 16/4: 376–88. https://doi.org/10.1177/1359183511424196
—2012. ‘Music and the Social’. In The Cultural Study of Music, 2nd edn, ed. Martin Clayton, Trevor Herbert and Richard Middleton, 261–74. London: Routledge.
Brackett, David. 2016. Categorizing Sound: Genre and Twentieth-century Popular Music. Oakland, CA: University of California Press.
Brunstad, Endre, Unn Røyneland and Toril Opsahl. 2010. ‘Hip Hop, Ethnicity and Linguistic Practice in Rural and Urban’. In The Languages of Global Hip-hop, ed. Marina Terkourafi, 223–55. London: Continuum.
Chang, Jeff. 2005. Can’t Stop, Won’t Stop: A History of the Hip-Hop Generation. London: Ebury Press.
Clarke, Sandra, and Philip Hiscock. 2009. ‘Hip-hop in a Post-insular Community: Hybridity, Local Language, and Authenticity in an Online Newfoundland Rap Group’. Journal of English Linguistics 37/3: 241–61. https://doi.org/10.1177/0075424209340313
Connor, Ben. 2003. ‘Good Buddha & Tzu: “Middle-class Wiggers from the Underside”’. Youth Studies Australia 22/2: 48–54.
DeLanda, Manuel. 2006. A New Philosophy of Society. London: Continuum.
Deleuze, Gilles. 1988. Foucault. London: Athlone.
Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari. 1987. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. London: University of Minesota Press.
Deleuze, Gilles, and Claire Parnet. 1987. Dialogues. London: Athlone.
Drott, Eric. 2013. ‘The End(s) of Genre’. Journal of Music Theory 57/1: 1–45. https://doi.org/10.1215/00222909-2017097
Fabbri, Franco. 1981. ‘A Theory of Musical Genre: Two Applications’. In Popular Music Perspectives, ed. David Horn and Philip Tagg, 32–52. Goteborg and Exeter: International Association for the Study of Popular Music.
Frith, Simon. 1996. Performing Rites. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
George, Nelson. 2004. ‘Hip-hop’s Founding Fathers Speak the Truth’. In That’s the Joint! The Hip-Hop Studies Reader, ed. Murray Forman and Mark Anthony Neal, 45–55. New York: Routledge.
Hardt, Michael. 1993. Gilles Deleuze: An Apprenticeship in Philosophy. London: University of Minnesota Press.
Hesmondhalgh, David. 2005. ‘Subcultures, Scenes or Tribes? None of the Above’. Journal of Youth Studies 8/1: 21–40. https://doi.org/10.1080/13676260500063652
Holt, Fabian. 2007. Genre in Popular Music. London: University of Chicago Press. https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226350400.001.0001
Kassabian, Anahid. 2013. Ubiquitous Listening: Affect, Attention, and Distributed Subjectivity. London: University of California Press.
Knudsen, Jan Sverre. 2010. ‘“Playing with words as if it was a rap game”: Hip-hop Street Language in Oslo’. In Multilingual Urbana Scandinvia—New Linguistic Practices, ed. Bente A. Svendsen and Pia Quist, 156–69. Bristol: Multilingual Matters.
Krogh, Mads. 2016. ‘Aarhus V som hip-hop-brand—heterogene forbindelser af musik, genre og miljø’. In Populærmusikkultur—i Danmark siden 2000, ed. Mads Krogh and Henrik Marstal, 95–126. Odense: Syddansk Universitetsforlag.
Latour, Bruno. 1996. ‘On Actor-Network Theory: A Few Clarifications’. Soziale Welt 47/4: 369–81.
—2005. Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Law, John. 2004. After Method: Mess in Social Science Research. New York: Routledge.
Lund, Johnny. 2006. ‘Static & Nat ill—“Teamwork” (Album)’. Copenhagen Rapspot, http://rapspot.dk/2006/01/12/static-nat-ill-teamwork-album/ (accessed 19 February 2016).
Martin, Peter J. 2006. Music and the Sociological Gaze: Art Worlds and Cultural Production. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Mitchell, Tony, ed. 2001. Global Noise: Rap and Hip Hop outside the USA. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press. https://doi.org/10.7228/manchester/9780719072161.001.0001
Mitchell, Tony. 2004. ‘Doin’ Damage in my Native Language: The Use of “Resistance Vernacular” in Hip Hop in Europe and Aotearoa/New Zealand’. In Music, Space and Place: Popular Music and Cultural Identity, ed. Sheila Whiteley, Andy Bennett and Stan Hawkins, 108–123. Aldershot: Ashgate.
Morgan, Marcyliena, and Dionne Bennett. 2011. ‘Hip-Hop and the Global Imprint of a Black Cultural Form’. Daedalus 140/2: 176–96. https://doi.org/10.1162/DAED_a_00086
Neale, Stephen. 1980. Genre. London: British Film Institute.
Negus, Keith. 1999. Music Genres and Corporate Cultures. London: Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203169469
Nitzsche, Sina A. 2013. ‘Hip-hop in Europe as a Transnational Phenomenon: An Introduction’. In Hip-hop in Europe: Cultural Identities and Transnational Flows, ed. Sina A. Nitzsche and Walter Grünzweig, 3–34. Zürich: LIT Verlag.
Omoniyi, Tope, Suzanne Scheld and Duro Oni. 2009. ‘Negotiating Youth Identity in a Transnational Context in Nigeria’. Social Dynamics 35/1: 1–18. https://doi.org/10.1080/02533950802684678
Potter, Russell A. 1995. Spectacular Vernaculars: Hip-hop and the Politics of Postmodernism. Albany: State University of New York Press.
Regev, Motti. 1994. ‘Producing Artistic Value: The Case of Rock Music’. Sociological Quarterly 35/1: 85–102. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1533-8525.1994.tb00400.x
Robertson, Roland. 1995. ‘Glocalization: Time-Space and Homogeneity-Heterogeneity’. In Global Modernities, ed. Mike Featherstone, Scott Lash and Roland Robertson, 25–44. London: Sage Publications. https://doi.org/10.4135/9781446250563.n2
Toop, David. 2000. Rap Attack #3. London: Serpent’s Tail.
Toynbee, Jason. 2000. Making Popular Music. London: Arnold.
Walser, Robert. 1993. Running with the Devil: Power, Gender, and Madness in Heavy Metal Music. Middletown, CT: University Press of New England.
Published
2017-12-21
Issue
Section
Articles
How to Cite
Krogh, M. (2017). Assembling Aarhus West: Glocal rap, genre and heterogeneity. Popular Music History, 10(3), 280-296. https://doi.org/10.1558/pomh.30377
