3-5 paragraph on music

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Rebeca Eunice Vargas Tamayac

“Hip-hop from the perspective of Cultural Studies”

Stories don’t have happy endings here in the maws of these gray cities

where gray murals hide the sad gray lives of unhappy men and women

for whom justice never arrives because it is mute and deaf, as well as blind, refusing to see everything that I see.

And I see oppression, repression, exclusion - I see marginalization and exploitation I see some in grief and others picking through waste

Because that is the base of this fucking system Fragment of “Lo que veo” (What I See), song from Bacteria Soundsystem Crew, 2010

Over the last ten years, hip-hop has become a reference for thousands of youth to identify, speak for, and organize themselves. In the case of Guatemala and of Latin American countries, hip-hop finds its base in the so-called marginal areas of the city, made up of precarious settlements, sometimes normalized, but generally materially and symbolically differentiated from the dominant culture.

In order to understand this phenomenon, it is necessary to analyze it from different points of view. The objective of the essay is to address hip-hop in Guatemala City as an object of study from the perspective of Cultural Studies. I start from a concept of urban, youth and popular cultures in order to understand hip-hop as a contemporaneous phenomenon of cities around the world and end with a proposal on how to make a multidisciplinary analysis of cultural creations of those who identify or can be identified within this group.

Approaching the topic

I begin by considering hip-hop as a subculture. Subculture is understood as a: “cultural minority that occupies a subaltern position in relation to the dominant culture or to a parental culture. Youth cultures are subcultures in both senses.” (Feixa, 1999: 271).

From this perspective, hip-hop is a subculture. However, it is not my objective to see hip-hop as a sub-product of life in the city, and to relegate it to secondary happening, based on a central dominant culture. Although I understand that the development of hip-hop takes place thanks to the condition of subalternity, when I refer to hip-hop, I do so as a culture1.

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To approach the study of hip-hop, I propose to use four perspectives: as urban culture, as youth culture, as popular culture, and from the relationship of hip-hop with industrial culture. I will finish by detailing my proposals as related to hip-hop in Guatemala.

Hip-hop as urban culture

Since their emergence, cities have been organized around the social differences of the groups that make them up. The fully urbanized part of the city is occupied by middle and upper classes. While the middle and upper layers are located in the areas of greater urbanization, the less favored social and economic layers are relegated to the marginal areas of the city. In Guatemala City these are situated, for the most part, in the ravines and slopes of the Asunción Valley. With its particular geography, Guatemala City is a vertically organized city, which an X-ray of the social division of wealth would demonstrate.

As I have already mentioned, these marginal urban zones create the conditions from which youth identify with hip-hop culture, due to their marginal origin and countercultural expressions. In the material sense, poverty is evident in homes at constant risk: irregular electrical and water distribution, very poor health conditions, and difficult physical access. Here, education and health are forgotten. Vertical social mobility is but an illusion that creates few prospects for young people’s futures. In these settlements, people live in extreme poverty, surviving with the little that the almighty marketplace leaves to the informal economy.

1Culture here means a homogeneous nucleus of coherent beliefs, products or social behaviors that belong to a group, community or nation where homogeneity and coherence are emphasized (Garcia Canclini in Castaño, 2007: 214).

The dominant culture often stigmatizes youth from the settlements and blames them for violence. Although it is true that extortion, organized violence, and youth gangs tied to drug trafficking operate in marginalized zones, prejudice contributes to the continued cycle in which poverty justifies violence, and vice versa. It is dangerous to make generalizations, because the generalization of these prejudices has been the main way that marginalized youth have been excluded from jobs and educational opportunities.

What social and cultural effects do these lived conditions have for the inhabitants of marginalized zones? Above all, at issue here is this: how are young people responding culturally when faced with marginalization?

Clearly, forming gangs is not the only response undertaken by marginalized youth. Exclusion can lead youth to seek out other means of approval, as a means of assimilating dominant conservative values. This is the case for some youth who form young families, or who take refuge in fundamentalist religiosity. Taking refuge in conservative institutions such as the family and the

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church can operate as parallel alternatives to gangs. These seem like “controlled” responses, in the sense that they are not only an effect of structural economic conditions, but they are also the images that have been created of the poor, and of the limited possibilities that are imposed on them by the dominant culture.

Without a doubt, non-controlled responses also exist. Hip-hop culture is one of them. Breaking with its condition of subalternity, youth who identify themselves with hip-hop show their social discontent and annoyance through cultural practices that reveal the contradictions of our society. This not only happens in the case of Guatemala City, but in all of Latin America. Hip-hop is a voice that denounces and opposes dominant economic and cultural systems.

To analyze this point, we must consider the way in which the conditions of vulnerability and stigmatization subjectively shape the identities of young people in marginalized urban areas. This challenge goes far beyond quantitatively measuring or describing poverty.

The frailty that exists in Latin America, in terms of hegemonic national identities, can be explained in part in this way. What identity can young people really acquire in a society that punishes them with indifference and exclusion, and a State that denies their existence? The fault lies in that the term marginality should not connote a minority population. In many Latin American cities, poverty is the norm and not the exception. In the absence of a sense of national identity, the identity of young people in conditions of marginality moves towards those who they see as their equals in other cities. Wanting a national identity, they identify the way they express their discontent over the conditions in which they have had to live. Here is a connection with the following perspective of study of hip-hop.

“The identities of urban youth imply a formal or informal organizational structure, which tie group values and ethics, codes of conduct, ways of dressing, and of communicating (visible signs of identification and differentiation)”. (Piña Narváez, 2007: 169)

Hip-hop as youth culture

Sociology has used the term “urban tribes” to explain the multiplicity of identities that young city people have adopted, and have thus given this name to youth cultures. The simile of “tribal” is used as a metaphor to give an account of the different and multiple groupings appearing in globalized cities and streets, with a very strong emotional load and the emblems of a clan or a tribe. (Nateras, 2005: 7). The study of urban tribes has been carried out above all in the United States and in European countries, as they have appeared in their cities since the 60s and 70s. Among them groups such as the hippies, punkers, mods, Rastafari, and skinheads, etc., have been widely studied. Initially, these groups were local, born in very specific contexts, such as the punk rockers who were born in factory worker communities in England.

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Some decades later, with globalization in full bloom, these local cultures have become trans- nationalized. Some more than others have been converted into marketable entities and have entered the logic of a consumer-generated identity, subsumed into the dominant culture. Others, as is the case of Latin American hip-hop, have been nationally and regionally expressed, maintaining a confrontational posture of protest against the dominant culture.

There are no rigid borders between one possibility and the other. The experience of hip-hop in the United States has demonstrated how ably the market can take an expression of protest and converting it into a product of cool consumption. It should be mentioned that these “micro- identities” or “micro-groups” in the contexts of globalization are called juvenile neo-tribalisms.

The return to the tribal is born from a reaction from young people to the social complexity generated by a globalized society (displaying the contradictions of the system on the world stage). Young people seek to return to the collective in defiance of the consumer society’s exacerbation of individualism. In the presence of cultural commodification, the return to the tribe is also a vindication of difference. The tribe is represented as an “existential refuge,” without which young people cannot live in society today.

Hip-hop out of popular culture

Historically, the dominant culture has conceived the masses to be devoid of culture. From the perspective of centrality, the mass and that which is of the people are uncultured and ignorant. Even in Marxism, the masses are considered to only reproduce the ideas of the dominant class. However, the popular space is a source from which cultural productions and manifestations are signified and re-signified, be it out of tradition and custom, from cultural industries, or from the mixture of both.

I conceive hip-hop from the aspect of the popular as a cultural creation, with the understanding that it generates a sense of community and belonging to a group that has been othered by political postures and ideologies imposed by the dominant culture. Above all, it is able to create significance through its artistic and cultural manifestations. While there are important elements that have been introduced from the cultural industry for the purpose of consumption, they are also reconfirmed re-signified and expressed with their own social practices pertinent to local culture.

Another fundamental element is that, despite the fact that those who subscribe to this way of life are found in marginalized zones and therefore considered to have only local influence, these groups who do consider themselves part of hip-hop culture are territorially, regionally, nationally and internationally interconnected.

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However, one fundamental criteria for me to emphasize when I consider hip-hop as culture has to do with the fact that those who consider themselves part of hip-hop live it as a philosophy, not only as a way of symbolic expression or as a fashion trend or by means of consuming cultural products, but also as a method of collectively organizing themselves and relating to others. They are groups with a common identity, who manage to subsume their ethnic and national differences without denying them.

In the specific case of Guatemala, indigenous peoples have taken a lead role in the appropriation and significance of hip-hop. Contrary to countries in which the Afro-descendant cultures find a marginalized ethnic link in hip-hop that helps them to appropriate it, in the case of our country, the link has originated from a generalized subalternity: being poor, marginalized and native. Currently it is common to find artists in hip-hop who express themselves through their mother tongue, connecting the worldview and spirituality of their indigenous peoples to their practices.

Hip-hop and industrial culture

Whether we name young people who identify with hip-hop as neo-tribes, as a youth culture, or as an urban-marginal culture, we must consider that these are categories for analysis and that the reality is much more complex. Part of this complexity comes from the role that industrial culture plays in shaping these identities.

Industrial culture generates consumer processes, and hip-hop, especially American hip-hop, has been commercialized and released to the market as a "cool" product. For youth, there is a symbolic appropriation of what the market has launched; a process that García Canclini has named as cultural consumption. This helps us explain how the style of hip-hop has been adopted in each country, according to its own characteristics and limitations, especially because in Latin America, hip-hop develops in the most impoverished classes.

Hip-hop style is consumed symbolically. Regarding this, Piña Narváez says: "Young people from popular sectors appropriate of mass media goods in another socioeconomic context. Therefore, there is a different appropriation and re-signification of the goods consumed (in comparison with young people from middle sectors). This accounts for the process of mediation carried out by the popular sectors, which according to the social environment and living conditions, make use and significance of the appropriate goods and seek ways either to access that sold-out cultural pattern, or to separate from it. In this way, these young people create peculiar characteristics of the youthful and the sense of being young ". (Piña Narváez, 2007: 167)

With this understanding, I would suggest studying the style of hip-hop culture in Guatemala, based on the mediations occurring between industry and the cultural consumption. We understand style as "the symbolic manifestation of youth cultures, expressed in a more or less coherent set of material and immaterial elements, which young people consider representative of their identity as a group" (Feixa, 1999: 97). Although style is visible (clothes, hair arrangement,

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accessories, etc.), objects on their own do not create a style and one cannot simply hold industrial culture responsible for the proliferation of different forms of youth culture. What makes a style is the organization of objects with activities and the values that reproduce and compose a group identity. Among the cultural elements worth noting to study this style we should mention:

• Language: an important element of group differentiation is the language they use: A type of slang generates identity among the members of the group through specular identification, and as an element of differentiation. The language used by hip-hop in Guatemala emerges within the context of marginality, and many of its expressions are also used by youth gangs. There is a mixture between popular local expressions, and modifications of the Spanish language with Anglicisms, in which the strong influence migrations have had in the diffusion of hip-hop is evident.

• Music: in hip-hop culture, music is a nodal element for group identity, cultural creation, as well as for organization and group formation. In fact, three of the four elements of hip- hop have to do directly with music: the MC, the break-dance and the DJ. To begin with, it is the music of hip-hop, rap, which first travels from culture to culture, and with which some young people identify with and begin to make their own projects. Within the culture of hip-hop music is consumed, disseminated and exchanged. It is perhaps the cultural creation of hip-hop that is most telling, since it uses popular language to describe its environment and express its dissatisfaction with the dominant culture. It is also from music that the largest concentrations of young people in this culture are generated: MC rehearsals, concerts, and battles, break-dance training and battles.

• Aesthetics: perhaps it is the aesthetics of hip-hop that have been most commercialized: Extra-large t-shirts, wide pants, handkerchiefs and caps, Nike or Adidas sneakers. However, poverty has contributed to the origin of the "look" of hip-hop, since young people inherited the big clothes from their older brothers or cousins. Young people who have adopted the aesthetics of hip-hop in Guatemala do so with their own limitations, since they mostly trade clothes, or buy them in sales of used clothing from the United States. But, it is not only the aesthetics, but also the phobias of the dominant culture are imported - this look is also what has stigmatized them, because people fear they are related to youth gangs. I posit that this is an imported phobia, because this is a fear that belongs to the North American society. In Guatemala, the aesthetics of youth gangs is different. But "the other" is always lumped together.

• Cultural productions: Hip-hop is publicly expressed in a series of cultural productions. These productions serve to reaffirm the boundaries of the group. We mentioned there are elements within hip-hop that are differentiated by the type of cultural production taking place, around which subgroups are organized. There are the DJs, the b-boys and b-girls (who break-dance) and the graffiti artists. In these cultural productions is where we can explore how young people in hip-hop culture think and express themselves. Later we will discuss how to study each of them.

• Focal activities: subcultural identification is delimited based on the participation in certain determined rituals and focal activities. In the case of hip-hop, each element has its focal activity, since they require skill and technique. In Guatemala the most important events above all have been those that bring all the elements of hip-hop together, like a hip-hop

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festival reached its fifth year in 2010. Central American groups of all elements participate in it. Furthermore, it is also a space to articulate different regional expressions.

Now, I must emphasize that Latin American hip-hop style has not yet been coopted by the market. I say yet, because the tendency of the market is to seek that popular among the masses and to convert it into a consumer product. It is evident that year after year more young people are incorporated into hip-hop culture. However, there are some elements of this culture that do not yield easily to commercialization. One is its rebellious character. Dominant cultures in Latin America are quite conservative and the ruptures within it would have to be deep for this style to be considered cool. Additionally, young people who follow hip-hop have a strong class identity which is evident in the cultural productions and its messages.

It is also important to note that reggaetón has been commercialized and converted into a product of global consumption. This type of music and style marked by deep machismo and sexuality, which has made it a more viable product of popular consumption. The market definitely prioritized the commodification of a marginalized urban musical genre that is not rebellious and that lends itself very well to the commodification of the aesthetic. Maybe this is has delayed the commodification of Latin American hip-hop. Without a doubt, this topic is worth exploring in depth.

Hip-hop in Guatemala

In the present essay, I have offered some avenues for studying hip-hop as a culture coming from various perspectives of analysis. In this last part, we are going to integrate these perspectives to make a specific analysis of the case in Guatemala.

1. The history of hip-hop in Guatemala, (with information from Gerardo Galicia, from the founders of the hip-hop movement).

The hip-hop culture is now in a stage of expansion and has great drawing power. The first rap group “Alioto Loko” (Crazy Alioto) takes its name from the settlement from where it arises: Mario Alioto Lopez Sanchez. This is around 1994. During the 90s and the first half of the 2000s, small groups in various marginalized urban settlements, and in Guatemala City’s historic center began to practice some hip-hop and to identify themselves with the culture. This is probably linked to the influence brought back by young people who migrated to the United States. Nevertheless, we must point out that young people identified better with Latin American hip-hop than American hip-hop. Maybe the reason why hip-hop culture in Guatemala continues to be a phenomenon relatively outside of the market, is that although it is no longer marginal, it continues to be rebellious.

It was in 2006, at the First “Styles Universe” Hip-Hop Festival, that these scattered groups begin to find spaces to express and organize themselves. The event takes place every year to gather young people invested in hip-hop culture in Central America. There are also activities held each year that are part of already popular cultural productions such as

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freestyle battles called “Raptores”, regional and world breakdance battles, graffiti samples, rap music parties, etc. These events concentrate, especially in the Historic Center, on hip-hop culture. Nevertheless, in the case of local culture, for example settlements and popular neighborhoods in marginalized urban areas, there is more and more community organization around hip-hop. In the local neighborhoods, not only is it practiced, but different elements are also taught and transmitted as part of a program. In addition, there are young people now committed to community organization based on critical perspectives shaped by the culture itself.

Finally, as I previously mentioned, it is extremely interesting to see how young people from indigenous cultures have appropriated hip-hop culture, re-signifying hip-hop’s cultural elements, adapting them and integrating elements of their native culture into it. This is not an “acculturation” as the guardians of tradition might perceive it. The in-depth study of this hybridization might even challenge the perspective that hip-hop comes out of urban youth identity.

2. Study of cultural productions

Hip-hop as culture use arts to create a multiplicity of meanings. To study these cultural productions or artistic manifestations is to enter the thoughts and worldviews of young people in hip-hop culture. Traditionally, hip-hop is manifested in four elements:

• The MCs, masters of ceremony, known as rappers. They are the ones who sing through rhyme and transmit through their lyrics their perspective about themselves and how they see the world. In this element, it is important to study the contents of the lyrics as much as their lyrical and poetic composition.

• Graffiti, a form of visual art typically practiced on city walls. This may be done illegally. This element has two fundamental components: aesthetic creation and the appropriation of public space as a space for expression.

• Break-dance, which consists in the rhythmic dance and gymnastics of the rhythms of rap. Once again, there are two elements to consider. One is the dancers’ physical skill, and the other how these young people organize in collectives for training and competition. It is this element of hip-hop which has summoned the largest amount of youth in Guatemala City.

• The DJ, who creates and mixes the tracks rap is made from, and to which people break-dance. Although DJ’s are not a large group in number, they are important because around them groups are able to organize and compete with another groups. They are figures around which the most local senses of belonging are generated.

To study these elements, you need multiple semiotic tools: musical studies, literary studies, choreography, analysis of use of public space, etc. Also these are very specific studies, from more of a micro-perspective, they help to understand hip-hop culture in all its complexity and totality. Finally, it is all these elements that give hip-hop a

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coherence, making it a culture instead of merely being isolated artistic practices. It is also the group praxis from all these elements that gives a character of movements with organizational and reproductive capacity.

Throughout this essay we have delimited, perhaps quite generally, the scope of hip-cop culture to the marginalized urban areas in the city and the impoverished social classes who have to exist within them. Within this culture, there are also differences, maybe minimal, but significant nonetheless. To practice each one of these elements implies both the availability of leisure time and some economic resources. That is why DJs exist in smaller numbers, since it is necessary to have turntables and a considerable amount of music that must be constantly updated. DJs are often found more in middle class sectors. In contrast, the group of young people who practice break-dance is growing more and more. This is because few economic resources are needed to practice it, since the instrument is one’s own body, although it still requires discipline and daily practice. In the case of graffiti, in addition to the need of economic means to purchase spray cans or special markers, certain personal characteristics are required to assume the risks of breaking the law and taking over public spaces without permission. To be an MC, although economic resources might be dispensed with, a comprehensive management of written and spoken language is required, as well as improvisation skills and the ability to synchronize music and the rhythm of poetry (what they call the flow). What we want to reflect on this is that hip- hop culture, like all cultures, is dynamic, and the individuals who identify with it are diverse, possessing different contexts and opportunities.

In conclusion

At the beginning of the essay we can find fragments from a song by Bacteria Soundsystem, one of the most representative groups of hip-hop culture in Guatemala. I suggest you read it again, because its responsive, poetic, and direct character brings us much closer to the culture of hip- hop than any intellectual effort to explain it.

Bibliography

Castaño, Paola 2007 “América Latina y la producción transnacional de sus imágenes y representaciones. Algunas perspectivas preliminares.” en Mato, Daniel (comp.) Cultura y transformaciones sociales en tiempos de globalización. Perspectivas latinoamericanas. (Buenos Aires: Consejo Latinoamericano de Ciencias Sociales – CLACSO)

Castillo Berthier, Héctor 2005 “Significados, apariencia y pertenencia” en Revista Generación: Tribus Urbanas. (México DF) Año XVI, Tercera Época, número 59.

Costa, Pere Oriol et.al. 1996 Tribus Urbanas. El ansia de identidad juvenil: entre el culto a la imagen y la autoafimación a través de la violencia. (España: Ediciones Paidós Ibérica).

Feixa, Carles 1999 De jóvenes, bandas y tribus. (España: Editorial Ariel)

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Nateras Dominguez, Alfredo 2005 “Los neotribalismos juveniles Urbanos” en Revista Generación: Tribus Urbanas. (México DF) Año XVI, Tercera Época, número 59.

Piña Narváez, Yosjuan 2007 “Construcción de identidades (identificaciones) juveniles urbanas: movimiento cultural underground. El hip – hop en sectores populares caraqueños” en Mato, Daniel (comp.) Cultura y transformaciones sociales en tiempos de globalización. Perspectivas latinoamericanas. (Buenos Aires: Consejo Latinoamericano de Ciencias Sociales – CLACSO)