Under Ground Hip Hop (Essay Sample)

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Introduction
Underground hip-hop is home to a small but vibrant hip-hop community, with participants active in all the arts usually associated with hip-hop: rapping, breakdancing and graffiti. In this paper I discuss some of the ways in which participants in the underground hip-hop community – particularly people who make, listen to, and talk about rap music – work to construct a specifically local version of hip-hop. I suggest these local uses of rap have implications for the study of how people make meaning with mediated music’s and challenge some common assumptions about how globally circulating musical styles are received and used outside their points of origin in the so-called ‘centre’ or ‘core’ countries of production. The approach I have taken in developing this case study draws from two parallel, if somewhat separate currents of research. Ethnomusicologists and anthropologically oriented researchers on popular music have, in the last decade...