Selling, Selling Out or Resisting Dominant Discourses? Rap and the Uses of
Hip-hop Culture

This paper looks at rap and its position at the centre of wider hip-hop
culture:  The themes of internationalism and trans-nationalism in pop will
be touched on to address the entanglement of rap with formal and informal
education to keep youth on the "straight and narrow" path away from "the
street" with all the associations that this entails. The two main examples
of the co-option of rap in public sector youth projects from Strasbourg
France and Manchester England will be used to demonstrate how youth
creatively fashion context-dependent musical-cultural forms in street-speak
vernacular tongues that reflect their local environments; potentially
providing a counter-balance to the negative version of globalisation
whereby a top-down process of cultural homogenisation forcibly flattens
cultural diversity.

Paper given to Postcolonial Research Group at a major North American University


Fritz W. Efaw, SB, AAdipl, PhD,
Rose of Cimarron Distinguished
Chair of  Excellent Edu-Babble.

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