Rapper Mrs. M
|
Rapper XL
|
"The SoundCloud-inspired spread of hip hop may continue to inspire new scenes around the world, but there’s one Asian city where a vibrant hip hop culture has been hiding in plain sight for several decades: Ulan Bator.Rappers have been a big deal in Mongolia ever since the economic transition to capitalism in the 1990s that followed decades of Soviet domination, and in the intervening years hip hop has become more or less mainstream among young people in the country. The first breakout star of that scene is rapper Mrs M – real name Tamir Enkhatul, also known as Tami – who’s gaining increasing international attention with a following in China and, increasingly, the West. As a result, she’s starting to tour overseas and perform in English. " (South China Daily Post)
Documentary on Mongolian Hip Hop
Quotes from the Documentary
One artist featured says her sole motivation is to make people happy. “It’s just about the music and the feeling, it doesn’t matter what language it is,” she says.
“Before [when Mongolia was a communist state] it was closed off like North Korea. Suddenly there was a democratic revolution, and everything is free. Hip-hop is free speech. I can say whatever I want. If I rap it people will listen. That is the power of hip-hop.” Mongolian hip-hop emerged in the mid 1990’s not long after the fall of Communism. As MTV and US Hip Hop made its way into Ulaanbaatar, its citizens shared mixtapes, and were inspired by acts such as 2Pac, Snoop Dogg and Wu-Tang Clan. " |
While Mongolian hip-hop clearly bears global influences, Mongolian rappers are often fiercely passionate about their heritage and use their lyrics to shed light on social issues affecting Mongolian society – such as alcoholism, domestic violence and political corruption. For many in Ulaanbaatar’s rapidly changing environment, hip-hop provides an outlet to voice their concerns openly in a way they couldn’t years ago. |
The Hip-Hop Impulse
The Globalization of Novelty
By Jon Ivan Gill and Jay McDaniel
Hip-hop culture is alive and well in many parts of the world, including Mongolia. Musical and cultural globalization make this possible. This kind of globalization entails a de-territorialization of music genres and the ways of life that inspire them in one part of the world and a re-territorialization in other parts.
In this re-territorialization, people in new cultural settings take what is received and combine them with elements of their own musical and social culture, creating something new. Something is received and something is created.
This dynamic of reception and creation has a yin-yang quality of its own. We are reminded of Whitehead’s notion of an actual entity, with its two poles. The entity begins by receiving influences from others but then adds novelty to what is received, thus creating itself out of the influences. In Korea, Japan, China, India, and other nations, hip-hop culture is among the influences being musically and culturally received by musicians, listeners, and practitioners of the art of better living alike.
Originating in America, hip-hop culture is now being re-territorialized in new settings and evolving along the way. Hip-hop culture is the perfect instance of Whitehead’s airplane example, for its cultural norms, accessories, methods of linguistic discourse, and philosophy of life were first tested in the richest ghettoes of urban New York City and grafted into the multiplicity of the world’s communities. Asia is a prime example of this successful cultural transfusion, an example that many of us knowingly and subconsciously sculpted by the essence of hip-hop culture in the United States are immensely proud of.
What is being received? Musicians will rightly tell us that distinctive and creative styles of rhythm, melody, harmony, and lyricism are being received. These styles are creative adaptations of inherited traditions from jazz, the blues, African and Caribbean (including Spanish and Portuguese-derived Latin and Afro Latin and indigenous) traditions, black poetry, imported kung-fu movies, and, of course, urban experience. Thus there is really no absolute beginning to hip-hop, just as there is no absolute beginning to any kind of music or culture. Even before humans created sounds, the birds were singing.
Still, for Whiteheadians, there is something unique about hip-hop styles. In a Whiteheadian context a musical style is not merely a system of techniques. It is a way of experiencing and responding to the world. As Whitehead puts it: “How an actual entity becomes constitutes what an actual entity is.” In the context of Chinese philosophy we might speak of the hip-hop style and rhythm of life as a dao: a path on which people can travel with their footsteps adding to the path.
But hip-hop is not only a style, in a Whiteheadian context it is also a subjective aim, a hope, an impulse. It is a possibility in the immediate future which is felt in the present, and which can be actualized in the present. Let us put it in the technical terms of Process and Reality: that is, in the specific language of actual entities.
We suggest that you, our readers, envision a person as such an entity. An actual entity is not a thing. It is an activity amid which a subject experiences and responds to the world she receives and, in so doing, creates herself. Think of a woman living in Chicago, twenty-five years old, working as a clerk in a grocery store, a single parent to a child. In her very experience – her life – as lived from the inside, she is an actual entity. Her experience is her actuality. If she happens to be within a context in which she is able to access hip-hop methods of and perspectives to life, she will by conscious choice or noncognitive ingression be a participant in the culture of hip-hop. She will be guided by what we call the hip-hop impulse.
The "hip-hop impulse" is a push toward a novelty, or perhaps better a pull toward novelty, that defines an actual entity as it is unfolding. In North American culture, and perhaps also in Asian cultures, this impulse can potentially conquer the racist, cultural, socioeconomic, and political monotony that people face. This impulse simultaneously releases people to embark on an "adventure of ideas" that proves progressively liberating to them.
This impulse is not merely psychological, though. It has tangible expression in the materiality of culture and music itself. An example of this is the incorporation of the turntable into the hip-hop aesthetic in the early seventies. DJ Kool Herc, the Jamaican-born originator of the modern day uses of turntables for carpal acrobatics such as scratching, mixing, and beat juggling, took an instrument that was not even intended to be used for these purposes and redefined people groups with them. In this reinvention of the turntable, Herc and other DJs drew on West Indian, Latin American, and other traditions in their ancestry, combined with those that were not in their ancestry, and turned the needle of the tone arm into a fist of revolution. Thus the "hip-hop impulse" in this instance took an instrument used to uphold the views of the dominant culture and creatively transformed it into a vessel of the budding hip-hop community of New York which eventually transmitted the under-represented values of the underclass into the mainstream. Herc's redefinition of the turntable is now virtually inseparable from our thoughts of it. In a North American context such reinventions served the purpose of proving that impoverished Latino/as, Blacks, Whites, and other ethnicities in urban New York in the early to mid seventies could redefine themselves in meaningful ways without relying on the stereotypes of the dominant culture, which "classify" instead of "measure," akin to Whitehead's use of the two terms in Science and the Modern World.
As described in this way, the hip-hop impulse involves a relation with the past and the future. It includes reverence for the history of a thing -- a turntable, for example -- and the speculation on how it should/can become most usefully intense in successive epochs.
This impulse has now been globalized. It is now being re-territorialized in setting outside of North America, and taking on a history of its own. As this happens, people in Asia and other nations are finding their own versions of the turntable. And as this happens the hip-hop impulse travels through space, not unlike the way in which an actual entity survives the perishing of its own immediacy, with its influence splayed into successive moments of experience, incorporated in different ways. But in the case of hip-hop culture, the impulse continues where it started (but did not begin) in the United States, too. It is evolving as we write this essay, in ways both healthy and unhealthy. Our hope is that it continues to evolve in ways that enable people to redefine themselves, and take measures of their own lives that gain freedom from oppressive cultures in which they may live. The hip-hop impulse does not have a fixed essence, but it does have a living trajectory. We, as cognitive experiencing actual entities, can allow ourselves to be lured by this impulse to say “yes” to self-definition, “yes” to freedom, “yes” to life and “no” to racism, sexism, authoritarianism, religionism, and any other “ism” which functions to subdue and control the flourishing of life. The hip-hop impulse is Whiteheadian for the progression toward a subsequent epoch that is more intense, complex, and full of dynamic possibilities, possibilities that vanquish static understandings that hip-hop culture and music are one-way tickets toward human and universal devolution.
In this re-territorialization, people in new cultural settings take what is received and combine them with elements of their own musical and social culture, creating something new. Something is received and something is created.
This dynamic of reception and creation has a yin-yang quality of its own. We are reminded of Whitehead’s notion of an actual entity, with its two poles. The entity begins by receiving influences from others but then adds novelty to what is received, thus creating itself out of the influences. In Korea, Japan, China, India, and other nations, hip-hop culture is among the influences being musically and culturally received by musicians, listeners, and practitioners of the art of better living alike.
Originating in America, hip-hop culture is now being re-territorialized in new settings and evolving along the way. Hip-hop culture is the perfect instance of Whitehead’s airplane example, for its cultural norms, accessories, methods of linguistic discourse, and philosophy of life were first tested in the richest ghettoes of urban New York City and grafted into the multiplicity of the world’s communities. Asia is a prime example of this successful cultural transfusion, an example that many of us knowingly and subconsciously sculpted by the essence of hip-hop culture in the United States are immensely proud of.
What is being received? Musicians will rightly tell us that distinctive and creative styles of rhythm, melody, harmony, and lyricism are being received. These styles are creative adaptations of inherited traditions from jazz, the blues, African and Caribbean (including Spanish and Portuguese-derived Latin and Afro Latin and indigenous) traditions, black poetry, imported kung-fu movies, and, of course, urban experience. Thus there is really no absolute beginning to hip-hop, just as there is no absolute beginning to any kind of music or culture. Even before humans created sounds, the birds were singing.
Still, for Whiteheadians, there is something unique about hip-hop styles. In a Whiteheadian context a musical style is not merely a system of techniques. It is a way of experiencing and responding to the world. As Whitehead puts it: “How an actual entity becomes constitutes what an actual entity is.” In the context of Chinese philosophy we might speak of the hip-hop style and rhythm of life as a dao: a path on which people can travel with their footsteps adding to the path.
But hip-hop is not only a style, in a Whiteheadian context it is also a subjective aim, a hope, an impulse. It is a possibility in the immediate future which is felt in the present, and which can be actualized in the present. Let us put it in the technical terms of Process and Reality: that is, in the specific language of actual entities.
We suggest that you, our readers, envision a person as such an entity. An actual entity is not a thing. It is an activity amid which a subject experiences and responds to the world she receives and, in so doing, creates herself. Think of a woman living in Chicago, twenty-five years old, working as a clerk in a grocery store, a single parent to a child. In her very experience – her life – as lived from the inside, she is an actual entity. Her experience is her actuality. If she happens to be within a context in which she is able to access hip-hop methods of and perspectives to life, she will by conscious choice or noncognitive ingression be a participant in the culture of hip-hop. She will be guided by what we call the hip-hop impulse.
The "hip-hop impulse" is a push toward a novelty, or perhaps better a pull toward novelty, that defines an actual entity as it is unfolding. In North American culture, and perhaps also in Asian cultures, this impulse can potentially conquer the racist, cultural, socioeconomic, and political monotony that people face. This impulse simultaneously releases people to embark on an "adventure of ideas" that proves progressively liberating to them.
This impulse is not merely psychological, though. It has tangible expression in the materiality of culture and music itself. An example of this is the incorporation of the turntable into the hip-hop aesthetic in the early seventies. DJ Kool Herc, the Jamaican-born originator of the modern day uses of turntables for carpal acrobatics such as scratching, mixing, and beat juggling, took an instrument that was not even intended to be used for these purposes and redefined people groups with them. In this reinvention of the turntable, Herc and other DJs drew on West Indian, Latin American, and other traditions in their ancestry, combined with those that were not in their ancestry, and turned the needle of the tone arm into a fist of revolution. Thus the "hip-hop impulse" in this instance took an instrument used to uphold the views of the dominant culture and creatively transformed it into a vessel of the budding hip-hop community of New York which eventually transmitted the under-represented values of the underclass into the mainstream. Herc's redefinition of the turntable is now virtually inseparable from our thoughts of it. In a North American context such reinventions served the purpose of proving that impoverished Latino/as, Blacks, Whites, and other ethnicities in urban New York in the early to mid seventies could redefine themselves in meaningful ways without relying on the stereotypes of the dominant culture, which "classify" instead of "measure," akin to Whitehead's use of the two terms in Science and the Modern World.
As described in this way, the hip-hop impulse involves a relation with the past and the future. It includes reverence for the history of a thing -- a turntable, for example -- and the speculation on how it should/can become most usefully intense in successive epochs.
This impulse has now been globalized. It is now being re-territorialized in setting outside of North America, and taking on a history of its own. As this happens, people in Asia and other nations are finding their own versions of the turntable. And as this happens the hip-hop impulse travels through space, not unlike the way in which an actual entity survives the perishing of its own immediacy, with its influence splayed into successive moments of experience, incorporated in different ways. But in the case of hip-hop culture, the impulse continues where it started (but did not begin) in the United States, too. It is evolving as we write this essay, in ways both healthy and unhealthy. Our hope is that it continues to evolve in ways that enable people to redefine themselves, and take measures of their own lives that gain freedom from oppressive cultures in which they may live. The hip-hop impulse does not have a fixed essence, but it does have a living trajectory. We, as cognitive experiencing actual entities, can allow ourselves to be lured by this impulse to say “yes” to self-definition, “yes” to freedom, “yes” to life and “no” to racism, sexism, authoritarianism, religionism, and any other “ism” which functions to subdue and control the flourishing of life. The hip-hop impulse is Whiteheadian for the progression toward a subsequent epoch that is more intense, complex, and full of dynamic possibilities, possibilities that vanquish static understandings that hip-hop culture and music are one-way tickets toward human and universal devolution.
Gennie
Загасан ширээт тамга - Би Монгол хүн
Mongolian melody: Hip-hop duo splices traditional singing and urban beats
"Ulaanbaatar’s urban music scene is buzzing with a new vibe created by a hip-hop duo mixing into their sound the traditional art of throat singing, or “Khoomei”, as Mongolians refer to it. Rap group Fish Symboled Stamp, named for a fish-shaped seal traditionally used to brand horses in the landlocked nation, incorporates the nearly 1,000-year-old vocal tradition of communities across Siberia and Central Asia. Khoomei means “pharynx”, and performers imitate the sounds of nature, emitting a melody of harmonics alongside a continuous drone, UNESCO, which added the art form to its intangible heritage listing in 2009, says on a website describing it.
Lead bass vocalist Sanjjav Baatar, 32, founded the group with rapper Battogtokh Odsaikhan, 30, in 2010, when they started experimenting with music styles....more
Lead bass vocalist Sanjjav Baatar, 32, founded the group with rapper Battogtokh Odsaikhan, 30, in 2010, when they started experimenting with music styles....more
|
|
|