Flip the Script (Paperback)

Paperback. Hip hop has long been a vehicle for protest in the United States, used by its primarily African American creators to address issues of prejudice, repression, and exclusion. But the music is now a worldwide phenomenon, and outside the United States it has been taken up by those facing similar struggles. Flip the Script offers a close look at the role of hip hop in Europe, where it has become a politically powerful and commercially successful form of expression for the children and grandchildren of immigrants from former colonies. Through analysis of recorded music and other media, as well as interviews and fieldwork with hip hop communities, J. Griffith Rollefson shows how this music created by black Americans is deployed by Senegalese Parisians, Turkish Berliners, and South Asian Londoners to both differentiate themselves from and relate themselves to the dominant culture. By listening closely to the ways these postcolonial citizens in Europe express their solidarity with African Americans through music, Rollefson shows, we can literally hear the hybrid realities of a global double consciousness. In his history of hip-hop, ethnomusicologist J. Griffith Rollefson combines ethnography and music analysis to look at the three foundational cities in the hip-hop world of twenty-first century Europe. He first explores Paris's musical response to the National Front in France, then Turkish German groups in Berlin, and finally M.I.A. and other South Asian critiques in London. Throughout, Rollefson shows how African-American expressive cultures, especially rap music and hip-hop culture, are central to minority identity in the UK, France, and Germany, and how music plays a pivotal role as a point of political commentary and action. He offers great insight into cross-cultural and postcolonial minority experience and the paradoxes of Western modernity, such as the use of a commercialized music as a form of resistance. This engaging and provocative study helps to show how music can outline the cultural dimensions of ethnicity and race in the modern Western world. Shipping may be from multiple locations in the US or from the UK, depending on stock availability.…