‘Cut ‘n’ Mix’ music: the sounds of syncretism
For some authors, however, the expression ‘hybridity’ is problematic, given its history within the racist discourses of colonialism. Instead, the 1990s saw the term ‘syncretic’ (derived from anthropology) - which has more positive, dynamic connotations — sometimes preferred as a way of describing the processes through which new cultural forms and identities are constituted at the intersection of different places, histories, and experiences. According to theorists such as Paul Gilroy and Stuart Hall, attention to this ‘syncretic’ criss-crossing of cultural discourses opened up new ways of theorising ethnicity and identity — an approach that moved away from notions of ethnic identities as essential and fixed, and instead conceived them as constructed, multiple, and dynamic. Both Hall and Gilroy used the term ‘diasporic culture’ to explore the complex intercultural exchanges and transnational linkages through which ethnic identities are translated and transmitted, and in which ‘new ethnicities’ are made and remade (Gilroy, 1993i; Hall, 1992i).
In some respects, this attention to processes of cultural exchange and the hybridity of identities was anticipated by Dick Hebdige’s (1987) historical survey of Garibbean music. Tracing the development of calypso and ska, through reggae and Jamaican club culture, to New York rap and hiphop, Hebdige emphasised the dynamism of Garibbean musical forms, their histories, and associated identities. Instead of attempting to trace the roots of these genres to their historical source, Hebdige argued that the ‘roots’ themselves were in a constant state of flux. ‘The roots’, Hebdige explained, ‘don’t stay in one place. They change shape. They change colour and they grow’ (Hebdige, 1987: 10). Hence, Hebdige drew attention to the way Caribbean music had developed through ongoing ‘cut ‘n’ mix’ processes of fusion and interconnection — a ‘splicing together’ of sounds and identities that addressed communities stretching from Africa to Western Europe and the US.
This ‘splicing together’ of dynamic and ‘hybridised’ cultural forms has been a core trait of modem youth culture, style, and music. Indeed, with its fusion of black R'n’B and white country and western music, 1950s rock ‘n’ roll was the ‘granddaddy’ of hybridised youth cultures. Rock ‘n’ roll was, itself, a syncretric phenomenon; but it also spawned a host of other hybrid forms as it became rearticulated and re-embedded across the world. Eric Zolov (1999), for example, shows how the popularity of rock ‘n’ roll among Mexican youth fed into the country’s shifting cultural and political relations during the 1950s and 1960s. As in Europe, the 1950s saw conservative opinion in Mexico condemn American rock ‘n’ roll and US youth style as harbingers of cultural decline. In public debate, Zolov argues, rock ‘n’ roll became associated with notions of desmadre — a slang term denoting a condition of social chaos that springs from the literal ‘unmothering’ of a person or situation. The controversy continued into the 1960s and, as many Mexican youngsters embraced the music and values of the Western counterculture, critics feared their interest undermined indigenous culture and ‘reinforced subservience to foreign values’ (Zolov 1999: 111). But, according to Zolov, the American texts did not simply bulldoze their way across Mexican cultural life. Instead, elements of US youth culture were combined with local cultural forms in a configuration that, Zolov argues, ‘allowed youth to invent new ways of being Mexican, ways that ran counter to the dominant ideology of state-sponsored nationalism’ (Zolov 1999: 111).
The development of rai music in Algeria stands as another example of a creative blending between Western media and indigenous culture. Originally an Algerian acoustic folk music, rat was transformed during the 1980s as local popular songs and rhythms were increasingly mixed with Western instruments (electric guitars, synthesisers, and drum machines), and influences from American disco and Europop. As a consequence, Marc Schade-Poulsen has observed, modern rat became a fusion that expressed the ‘ambivalent or fundamental duality in the identity of Algerian youth’ (Schade-Poulsen, 1995: 85). According to Schade-Poulsen, rat music’s popularity lay in the way its melding of different musical idioms addressed Algerian youth’s own attempts to negotiate the tensions between their interest in Western lifestyles and their commitment to traditional institutions of family and religious life.
Hybridity is also, Deborah Hernandez (2010) suggests, a characteristic of Latino musical practice. The music cultures of Latin Americans living in the US, Hernandez argues, have always been characterised by ‘multiple origins and intersecting pathways’ (2) that have blended the music of their homelands with genres from the US and the wider world. And the fusion, she contends, has become increasingly complex as new waves of immigrants have introduced additional musical styles, such as nterengue and bachata (from the Dominican Republic), and cumbia (from Columbia). The result, Hernandez contends, has been:
... a dazzling variety of musical practices - many of them not usually identified as Latino — each with its own intricate genealogy and each giving voice to the quintessential^ blended and layered qualities that characterize the experience of being Latino in the United States.
(Hernandez, 2010: 2)
For some theorists, reggaeton (or reggaeton, or regueton) also stands as a quintessential musical hybrid. Originating in the clubs of San Juan, Puerto Rico during the 1990s, reggaeton combined the rhythms of hip-hop and reggae with Spanish rapping and singing. Beginning as an ‘underground’ music, it was associated with poor, urban, non-white youth and many of its songs dealt with the troubles of inner-city life, along with themes of violence, drugs, sex, and friendship. Initially demonised and censored by the Puerto Rican authorities, reggaeton nevertheless became one of the most popular music genres in the Spanish-speaking Caribbean. And, during the early twenty-first century -partly through social media and Internet platforms such as YouTube - reggaeton found audiences in North America, Europe, and Asia as artists such as Daddy Yankee and Ivy Queen broke into the commercial mainstream.3
But, for Petra Rivera-Rideau (2015), what makes reggaeton significant is not just its transnational popularity, nor simply its fusion of hip-hop and reggae. Rather, Rivera-Rideau points to the way reggaeton created a new space for the negotiation of black identities in Puerto Rico. While Puerto Rico likes to think of itself as a harmonious ‘racial democracy’, dominant definitions of Puerto Rican national identity have privileged whiteness and Spanish cultures, and have marginalised poor, non-white communities. In this context, Rivera-Rideau argues, reggaeton has served as a space for expressing a “‘race-based cultural politics’” (1). By drawing on aesthetics and signifier, from other sites in the African diaspora, she argues, reggaeton has provided a new language to speak about the black presence in Puerto Rico and has ‘produced new understandings of Puerto Riccanness that center blackness and diasporic belonging and ... [that] articulate Afro-Latino identities on the island and elsewhere’ (2).
Oher music genres also stand out as examples of the way new, hybrid identities are created through diasporic interconnections. For Paul Gilroy, the history of hip-hop culture and rap music was especially emblematic of the processes. As Gilroy explained:
Rap is a hybrid form rooted in the syncretic social relations of the South Bronx where Jamaican sound-system culture, transplanted during the 1970s, put down new roots and in conjunction with specific technological innovations, set in train a process that was to transform black America’s sense of itself and a large proportion of the popular music industry as well.
(Gilroy, 1993Ü: 125)
Indeed, from its beginnings, rap was characterised by processes of fusion and the creation of new cultural spaces.4 Its antecedents lie in the vernacular poetry that has long been a central feature of the oral traditions of African-American culture, but its more immediate precursors were politicised, black poets such as Gil Scott Heron, Amiri Baraka, and The Last Poets who, during the late 1960s and early 1970s, experimented with a blending of music and poetic verse. During the mid-1970s rap was further developed in New York’s South Bronx, where Jamaican émigré DJ Kool Here introduced American dancefloors to the Jamaican practice of ‘toasting’ — improvised, syncopated wordplay laid over dub versions of records - while artists such as Afrika Bambaataa and Grandmaster Flash exploited technological developments in mixing, dubbing, and sampling as they cut-up and reassembled fragments of music, lyrics, and soundbites in an eclectic, rhythmic soundscape. For Tricia Rose (1994) this distinctive mix emerged from the context of deindustrialisation, economic decline, and racial tensions that characterised New York during the late 1970s. Rap and the associated culture of hip-hop (graffiti, dance, style), Rose argued, were spaces in which young African- and Caribbean-Americans won a sense of status through forging new identities and by symbolically re-appropriating the urban environment.
In 1979 the success of the Sugarhill Gang’s single, ‘Rapper’s Delight’, brought rap wider commercial attention, and during the 1980s artists such as Run DMC, Eric B. & Rakim, Boogie Down Productions, and Public Enemy established rap as an integral part of the US music industry. But, as rap was taken up and re-articulated by different social groups, it spawned new cultural expressions and identities. Young Mexican-Americans and Latin Americans, for example, were involved in hip-hop culture since its inception, and during the 1980s and 1990s artists such as Gypress Hill created a distinctive sound by fusing hip-hop beats with Latino rhythms.
Transformation and translation also took place as rap and hip-hop took root on the West Coast, the 1980s seeing the rise of Los Angeles ‘gangsta’ rappers such as Ice-T and N.W.A (Niggaz Wit Attitudes), who rewrote the hip-hop agenda in visceral anthems to LA gang life.5 But hip-hop has also resonated with many audiences outside the US. As George Lipsitz argues, while hip-hop ‘circulates as a commodity marketed by highly centralized monopolies from metropolitan countries’, it also ‘serves as a conduit for ideas and images articulating subaltern sensibilities’ (Lipsitz, 1994: 36)/’ Indeed, for Lipsitz, the global popularity of rap and hip-hop has been ‘perhaps the most important manifestation of postcolonial culture on a global scale’:
Hip hop expresses a form of politics perfectly suited to the postcolonial era. It brings a community into being through performance, and it maps out real and imagined relations between people that speak to the realities of displacement, disillusion and despair created by the austerity economy of post-industrial capitalism.
(Lipsitz, 1994: 36)
