Paradoxically, or maybe not, hip-hop is at once the fastest spreading and most local pop music in the world. The media-saturated, electronically hooked up world, anyway. Ethnomusicologists mourn the indigenous idioms that mutate or fall into disuse once their practitioners get a load of Bucharest or Bangui, and in a sense, hip-hop reverses this process, not musicologically but emotionally. From 'hood to city to coast, what other pop genre makes so much of geography? Early rock and roll lived off a dynamic in which the local went national, usually from a base of local radio; now, local radio barely exists, and even in the Internet-surfing, CD-scarfing indie/college realm, local scenes rarely generate local sounds or more than a smattering of local references. In hip-hop, styles are regionally distinct, although they certainly crossbreed, and representing where you're from is the rule, especially when you're coming up. Hip-hop speaks so loudly to rebellious kids from Greenland to New Zealand not because they identify with young American blacks, although they may, but because it's custom-made to combat the anomie that preys on adolescents wherever nobody... More >>>