ABSTRACT
Following the discussion of language use and authenticity in the previous chapter, one might still be tempted to ask whether the direction of infl uence is nevertheless in one direction: while swarap in Tanzania may have developed its own style that has diverged from North American rap in terms of language, culture, style and ideology, is there any effect in the opposite direction? As Perry (2004) suggests (see Chapter 5), the cultural isolation of the United States may render talk such as Gilroy’s (1993) of the ‘stereophonic, bilingual, or bifocal cultural forms originated by, but no longer the exclusive property of, blacks dispersed within the structures of feeling, producing, communicating, and remembering that I have heuristically called the black Atlantic world’ (p. 3) little more than a romantic fantasy of mutual infl uence. Pennay (2001, p. 128) comments in his discussion of rap in Germany: ‘Regrettably, the fl ow of new ideas and stylistic innovations in popular music is nearly always from the English-speaking market, and not to it.’ Similarly, in her discussion of the Basque rap group Negu Gorriak (featuring the Mugurza brothers), Jacqueline Urla points out that ‘unequal relations between the United States record industry and Basque radical music mean that Public Enemy’s message reaches the Mugurza brothers in Irun, and not vice versa’ (2001, p. 189). Is it then the case that while hip-hop changes and transforms around the world, it is always caught in a one-way fl ow of spread and diversifi cation?
