ABSTRACT
Popular music is nothing if not dialogic, the product of an ongoing historical conversation in which no one has the fi rst or last word. The traces of the past that pervade the popular music of the present amount to more than mere chance: they are not simply juxtapositions of incompatible realities. They refl ect a dialogic process, one embedded in collective history and nurtured by the ingenuity of artists interested in fashioning icons of opposition. (99)
This vision of hip-hop as dialogic highlights its role as not only resistance to but also simultaneous engagement with the historic and socio-cultural: a navigation of voice, power, and subjectivity. For many hip-hop artists, this musical space provided a voice for a collective reality not addressed on a mainstream and political level. The music and lyrical content challenged the belief that only a few were entitled to self-expression. By chronicling day-to-day lives, struggles, and dreams, hip-hop artists spoke to local concerns and a larger public that crossed the boundaries of specifi c, individual and regional texts. It became an example of what Roland Robertson describes as the glocal: “combining the global with the local, to emphasize that each is in many ways defi ned by the other and that they frequently intersect, rather than being polarized opposites” (qtd. in Mitchell 11). As hip-hop spread beyond the boundaries of the U.S., its social and political function was adopted and transformed by communities fi ghting different manifestations of oppression around the world. As rap and hip-hop culture developed into “local, linguistic, musical, and political contexts” they have
become a particularly pointed tool for youth protest, ethnic minorities, and political statements on local, racial, sexual, and class issues (Mitchell 10).
