Recent research on globalization and popular culture provides a framework for exploring how people may create and explore Muslim identities through rap music. It is not necessarily contradictory or paradoxical that some people may fi nd it useful and compelling to imagine their identities using both Islam and rap music. It is perhaps not surprising that the long-standing world religion Islam1 and the more recently global musical genre of rap have intersected in various ways.2 Both the religion and the musical style have spread over the globe as people and ideas move around and people use the material and expressive resources at their disposal in practices of identity construction. Rap music and hip-hop youth culture have also, in their brief history, achieved global status, as the essays in Tony Mitchell's edited volume Global Noise (2001b) illustrate. This is why, as Tony Mitchell argues, “hip hop and rap cannot be viewed simply as an expression of African American culture it has become a vehicle for global youth affiliations and a tool for reworking local identity all over the world” (Mitchell 2001: 1).Īt the beginning of the twenty-first century, Islam had, according to various estimates, between 900 million and 1.4 billion adherents in more than fifty countries, making it the second-largest religion in the world. On the contrary, it is crucial to analyze these different adaptations and interpretations of hip hop culture within each distinct cultural and societal context. However, even with the global transmission of hip hop culture, it would be inappropriate to argue that this culture is adopted globally without any local adaptations. With its protest sound, resistant attitude and virile style, it attracts migrant populations from all over Europe, especially within the young populations.
When hip hop culture migrated from the United States to Europe, it remained the music of the excluded, mainly as a form of musical expression among migrants groups. Just like other music genres, hip hop music migrates from one part of the world to the other and inevitably takes on different forms along the way. Through examining the remixing of electronic dance tracks by local DJs and the rewriting of lyrics of dance tracks by local clubbers, I will explicate how local actors ingeniously hybridize, appropriate and re-articulate local and global musical materials. I will illustrate, through analyzing a range of clubbing practices that hybridize singing with dancing, how Cantopop electronic dance music empowers local audiences by giving them a central role in music reproduction. Although this dance music has not inherited the many desirable sociocultural properties of Western electronic dance music, it has gained new ones through processes of cultural hybridization. In this essay I show that Cantopop electronic dance music has valuable sociocultural characteristics and I elaborate on what they are.
Popular music critics and professional musicians in Greater China also dismiss Cantopop electronic dance music as insincere or incompetent imitations of global (i.e., European and American) electronic dance music. While scholars have positively appraised numerous aspects and subgenres of Cantopop they have never paid attention to local genres of electronic dance music.
This electronic dance music emerged in 1998 and became the dominating club music in Greater China in the early 2000s. This essay examines “Cantopop electronic dance music,” a term that collectively designates the several sub-genres of electronic dance music which originated in Hong Kong.