ABSTRACT
Wade, a teacher in the Tucson, Arizona, school system, is an example of students, globally, who utilize elements of Hip Hop culture to negotiate features of their lives on a daily basis. Although there are many, the fi ve primary elements of Hip Hop are taggin’ [graffi ti art]; deejayin’ [playing and mixing recorded music]; emceein’/rhymin’/spittin’/fl owin’/rappin’ [reciting Hip Hop lyrics with music]; beat-boyin’ and beat-girlin’ [ break dancing is a term created by the media]; and studyin’ the knowledge of self. Rose (1994) defi ned Hip Hop as “a cultural form that attempts to negotiate the experiences of marginalization, brutally truncated opportunity and oppression within the cultural imperatives of African-American and Caribbean history, identity and community” (p. 21). These elements of Hip Hop are reconfi gurations of certain African traditions maintained in the Diaspora for more than 400 years; moreover, since the late 1960s, having been used to successfully create a public space to communicate sensitivities of youths previously disenfranchised who had no public voice, these elements have been appropriated by youths internationally, although not universally. For example, a student from Albania wrote in a research paper on Jay-Z that because his family was extremely poor when they migrated to
the United States, he and his siblings were ostracized and teased by children at school and in their community. He learned to cope with the bullying by listening to various Hip Hop rhymes by Jay-Z, noting how Jay-Z coped with the stresses of growing up in an impoverished area of Brooklyn, and thereby using Jay-Z as a role model. As another illustration, during the last presidential elections in Senegal, by rhyming about the differences between the candidates running for that offi ce in their music, Hip Hop emcees were instrumental in bringing attention to corruption in the offi ce of the incumbent president, ultimately causing his defeat.
