In the first class this fall, Prof. Ian Condry used a rap music video –
“You Better Listen Up” – to introduce himself and his research
to his students in Introduction to Cultural Anthropology.
The artists, in ponytails and cocked baseball caps,
swagger across a smoky set waving and pointing to a quickly-moving camera.
The performance looks and sounds as if it could have been performed by any
of dozens of American artists. Except that the lyrics are in Japanese.
The messengers, in this case a Japanese group known as
Rhymester, seem every bit as urgent as their American counterparts as they
implore the next generation to overcome the recession in Japan and
“find the strength to leave something for the next century.”
But absent from Rhymester's lyrics – and those of
other Japanese rap artists – are themes common to many American rappers:
guns, violence, sex and drugs. In their place are socially conscious
messages about homelessness, unemployment or injustices in the educational
system.
“It is not very revolutionary by our standards, but
yet the idea that you should speak out in a society where there is sharp
age grading and youth are supposed to be quiet is fairly outrageous,”
says Condry, who wrote his doctoral dissertation on “Japanese Rap
Music: An Ethnography of Globalization in Popular Culture.” His
project presents a case study for evaluating the impact of mass culture,
media and transnational cultural flows on everyday life.
“I am interested in how culture can flow across
national and ethnic boundaries,” Condry says. “And music in hip
hop certainly does that.”
Condry grew up in Dryden, N.Y. (near Ithaca), with a
father who played a lot of folk music. “People like Bob Dylan and Tom
Waits, these are my heroes,” he says. “I've always been
interested in how little songs can tell big stories.”
Introduced to rap as an undergraduate at Harvard, Condry
cultivated the interest – and learned Japanese – during his college
years. He lived in Japan several times, at one point teaching English to
youngsters in northern Japan. After a master's from Yale, he returned
for his doctorate. With a Fulbright Fellowship, he launched two years of
mostly nocturnal fieldwork in Japanese nightclubs and recording studios
that would be the basis of his dissertation.
As with rap in the West, J-Rap has two often-competing
divisions: party rap and underground rap, Condry explains. Typical of the
genre, one party rap song uses the refrain “Maicca” (akin to
Bobby McFerrin's “Don't Worry, Be Happy”) about a young
couple grappling with the intricacies of dating. A typical underground rap
by the group King Giddra centers on criticizing the injustices of the
education system. Party rappers have huge audiences with teenage girls.
The underground hip hoppers tend to appeal to older males.
Just as in the U.S., Condry says, there is an industry
of (mostly) male academics who cite youth culture, including rap, as
evidence that society is breaking down. Condry points out that Plato made
the same observation about music in ancient Greece.
The Japanese language – with its tonal accents and
verb-ending sentences – does not lend itself to the meter and rhyme of
rap, Condry says. So J-Rappers have improvised, adding stress accents and
sprinkling their lyrics with English words.
Condry's dissertation – on CD ROM – has a number
of video clips in which the rappers describe their music; copies are
available from Condry.