Global Noise :
Rap and Hip-Hop Outside the USA

This excellent overview of the phenomenon of rap and hip-hop will be well received by hardcore enthusiasts, cultural ethnographers, and musicologists everywhere. Mitchell (writing and cultural studies, Univ. of Technology, Sydney ; Popular Music and Local Identity : Rock, Pop, and Rap in Europe and Oceania) presents 12 essays by mostly academics on the impact of the rap and hip-hop idioms on local music scenes in Canada, Europe, Asia, Australia, and Polynesia. Rather than the perhaps expected conclusion that American cultural imperialism has come to dominate local scenes, the essays show how rap outside the United States is not simply an emulation of African American culture but a means of redefining local identity wherever it is embraced. Other sources, including David Toop’s "Rap Attack" series and Adam Krims’s Rap Music and the Poetics of Identity (Cambridge Univ., 2000), afford us a superb examination of the origins and implications of rap music, but this book is the first to focus solely on hip-hop as a global phenomenon.


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