Family Reunion: A Way Out and a Way In

• In Event: Sound Arts, Hip-Hop, and Arts-Based Educational Research: A Performatively Corrective Counter-Factual

Abstract

This proposed paper addresses questions of sounds, hip hop, and musical sensibilities from the perspectives of two nation-states that tend to be understood as having often disparate sociocultural perspectives, Norway and Malawi. Our work addresses how hip-hop is often experienced in our respective nations and our experiences in its affects and effects as musicians and educators.

Hip-hop for Author 1 is an assemblage of references, opening beat-driven expressions that interrupts many dominant, often more “strict” Norwegian sociocultural norms and values, including the importance of not drawing attention to one’s self or standing out (Gopal 2004, Author1 2013, Loftsdottir 2016). This marked difference in its openness, explicit expressions of self, and its ability to speak against the norms create a productive friction (Tsing, 2005) for many Norwegian hip-hop fans, including myself: an affect that is at once “un-Norwegian” yet more like themselves (Author 1, 2013). As such, for many, irrespective of age or generation, hip-hop serves as a way out of their conceptions of Norway, a way to be a different kind of Norwegian as well as a trajectory into the wider world and more deeply into themselves.

In contrast, hip hop for Author 2 is a familiar unfamiliarity, a remixing that rides on waves of traditional Southern African music and everyday sounds where sonic outbursts, energies, forms, expressions, flows, ways of rhyming, and, on occasion, actual beats, are common. Author 2 feels that hip-hip is like a cousin that left a long time ago and became rich in a country far away. When you meet them again, they are familiar because you share something inherited, ancestors, ways of moving or the same hair, but you don’t share the language maybe, or the clothes, the style or the values. The familiar in the strange and the strange in the familiar.

Yet hip-hop performs/acts/practices something “modern” (Author1, 2021) that has at once lost its self but gained financial and cultural capital. From a Malawain musician’s perspective, hip-hop artists may look to be for and about individuals not communities and technological productions that eschew traditional African practices. However, if one listens, the sounds tell another story where one hears the relations to ancestors, narratives, and practices.
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When these worlds collide in the Author’s(s’) music-making practices—a Malawian musician toasting on top of some reggae beats mixed with Malawian traditional rhythms and songs, an off-beat ryhmical accordion sometimes filling in and filling out in a melodic line at an open mic-event in a small town in Norway—it is not a hybrid. When Malawian hip-hop/dance hall musicians like Tay Grin, The Nyau King (2023) combine modern production, traditional knowledge systems of technique, with sonic narratives, it is a Family Party,

Our paper attends to what gets made in these moments where hip-hop becomes a vehicle for interpersonal sonic entanglements and sociocultural expression. It is a performative discussion of how hip-hop not only serves as tools for engagement across apparent disparities but also what sounds do to musicians and audience in the process

Authors

• Sunniva Skjøstad Hovde, Norwegian University of Science and Technology

• Rosha Benard Vole, Independent Scholar