Description
Book SynopsisTrade ReviewThis is a real treasure trove, full of fascinating stories. It acts as a fine example of academic inquiry that creatively probes hip-hop's practices, providing context for the form's usage across the Eastern Bloc.
The authors of this edited volume do not romanticize and heroize the genre by automatically equating it with political opposition, a fate often suffered by rock before. Instead, the book has to be given much credit for presenting a very nuanced picture of hip hop's entanglement—or non-entanglement, for that matter—with politics in this wide stretch of the world, past and present.
* The Russian Review *
The volume represents a valuable and timely contribution to the study of popular culture in central and eastern Europe. Hip Hop at Europe's Edge will not only appeal to readers interested in contemporary popular culture in central and eastern Europe, but also inspire future research on post-socialism's unique local adaptations of global cultural trends.
* The Soviet and Post-Soviet Review *
The reviewed book is an important contribution to existing scholarship on hip-hop culture. It enhances the history of hip-hop with knowledge of how the idioms of this genre have been adopted and reincarnated through a prism of east European culture. The value of the book should also be weighed in the context of colonial/post-colonial and communist/post-communist studies. The authors show how hip-hop has served social and political needs during the challenging period of transition from communism to capitalism, and how it continues to help newly-independent nation-states define their new status in Europe.
Overall, Hip Hop at Europe's Edge is a notable addition to hip-hop and music scholarship. It is increasingly timely, given current geopolitical affairs.
* Notes *
All in all, with its interdisciplinary approaches, the volume makes an important step in opening up a hitherto overlooked region for the study of hip hop. It is therefore a highly welcome addition to the growing number of publications making research of hip hop in Europe available in English.
* Music and Letters *
Table of ContentsAcknowledgments
Introduction / Adriana Helbig and Milosz Miszczynski
Part 1: Hip Hop, Postsocialism, and Democracy
1. Rapping into Power: The Use of Hip Hop in Albanian Politics / Gentian Elezi and Elona Toska
2. Nothing Left to Lose: Hip Hop in Bosnia-Herzegovina / Jasmin Mujanović
3. Russian Rap in the Era of Vladimir Putin / Philip Ewell
4. Rap Music as a Cultural Mediator in Post-Conflict Yugoslavia / Alexandra Baladina
Part 2: Hip Hop and Emerging Market Economies
5. Diesel Power: Serbian Hip Hop from the Pleasure of the Privileged to Mass Youth Culture / Goran Musić and Predrag Vukčević
6. "The Underground is for Beggars": Slovak Rap at the Center of National Popular Culture / Peter Barrer
7. Music, Technology, and Shifts in Popular Culture: Making Hip Hop in e-Estonia / Triin Vallaste
8. Wearing Nikes for a Reason: A Critical Analysis of Brand Usage in Polish Rap / Milosz Miszczynski and Przemyslaw Tomaszewski
Part 3: Hip Hop on the Margins
9. Cosmopolitan Inscriptions? Mimicry, Rap, and Rurbanity in Post-socialist Albania / Nicholas Tochka
10. Violence as Existential Punctuation: Russian Hip Hop in the Age of Late Capitalism / Alexandre Gontchar
11. Unmasking Expressions in Turkish Rap/Hip Hop Culture: Contestation and Construction of Alternatıve Identities Through Localizatıon in Arabesk Music / Nuran Erol Işik and Murat Can Basaran
12. Hip Hop as a Means of Flight from 'Gypsy Ghetto' in Eastern Europe / Michal Ruzicka, Alena Kajanova, Veronika Zvánovcová, and Tomas Mrhalek
13. Rapping the Changes in North-East Siberia: Hip Hop, Urbanization, and Sakha Ethnicity / Aimar Ventsel and Eleanor Peers
Part 4: Hip Hop and Global Circulations of Blackness
14. La haine et les autres crimes: Ghettocentric Imagery in Serbian Hip Hop Videos / Irena Šentevska
15. The Power of the Words: Discourses of Authenticity in Czech Rap Music / Anna Oravcová
16. "Keep it 360": (Re)envisioning The Cultural and Racial Roots of Hip Hop through DJ Rhetoric and Ethnography / Todd Craig
List of Contributors
Index
