US Elections

What America sounds like

By Jonathan Bradley in Sydney, Australia

24 January 2012

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I've talked often in this space about the utility in using hip-hop as a lens to examine American culture, so I was pleased to find someone making well the same point in otherwise unremarkable Financial Times article:

Rap music is the defining American art form of our time. In its showmanship, its exuberance, its hunger for innovation, its love of technology and its ruthless competitive discipline, it represents mass culture in the US like no other medium.

Country music, the only other contender, showcases a different set of equally American values: community, tradition, compassion, patriotism, resilience, faith. But it is principally a domestic phenomenon, largely ignored overseas. Hip-hop, meaning rap music and its associated culture, is both a global force and a central feature of the face America presents to the world.

Rap as a form of American soft power is easy to see if you know where to look; the relationship between hip-hop and the Arab Spring, for instance, is well documented. This is helped by the music's malleability; it offers its Americanness to the world as something to be remodelled and localised.

The FT piece is right that country doesn't have this global appeal, and it may seem less interesting as a result. I prefer, however, to focus on the similarities between hip-hop and country — each being folk musics for a certain subset of American society that have been adopted by the culture at large. And if country music's conversations are consumed on a largely domestic basis, rather than adopted globally as those of hip-hop are, this suggests that it has something to say about the aspects of American culture that don't cross borders: the strange trivialities unique to that society; the most unassuming type of American exceptionalism.

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