嘻哈乐:从街头巷尾走向主流

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杂谈 |
分类: 文化和教育 |
2013.12.20
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嘻哈乐(Hip-hop)不仅仅是音乐。这个词囊括了一种文化的整体,说明嘻哈乐如何成为对全球娱乐及青少年自我表达影响最大因素之一。无论采取说唱、涂鸦艺术、舞蹈的形式,还是通过高超的DJ技术,嘻哈乐在全世界都是对纷繁复杂的日常生活进行诠释的工具,也是敢于义正词严面对强权的方式。
嘻哈乐不可与商业化饶舌混淆——后者往往美化过度的物质化、暴力或对女性的厌恶——嘻哈乐于40多年前诞生在纽约南布朗克斯区(South Bronx, New York),取代了自我毁灭的帮派文化。嘻哈乐给贫困社区忿忿不平的青年一个机会,把他们的不满转化为艺术而不是暴力。
1973年8月11日,在塞克维克大街(Sedgwick Avenue)的一间出租的娱乐室里,一名出生于牙买加的名叫库尔·赫克(Kool Herc)的DJ首次创造了从唱片歌曲里挑出碎拍(breakbeat)的部份,然后用两个唱机串联起来连续进行播放的艺术形式。库尔·赫克的朋友科克·拉·罗克(Coke La Rock)开始随着这种感染力很强的节拍饶舌说唱。这种音响效果瞬间引发了一场革命,不久就在整个南布朗斯克区的各种聚会上一次次再现。除了饶舌之外,这种持续的碎拍还促进了霹雳舞的发展,而涂鸦艺术家则为音乐和舞蹈表演提供了视觉上的补充。
纽约州伊萨卡(Ithaca,New York)康奈尔大学(Cornell University)嘻哈收藏馆(Hip Hop Collection)助理馆长本·奥尔蒂斯(Ben Ortiz)说:“文化并非一日之功,但是同一天可以发生一系列事件,使很多事情都动起来。”康奈尔大学从2007年开始收藏嘻哈艺术品和唱片,拥有的这类收藏品在全世界首屈一指。
康奈尔大学善本和手稿图书馆馆长凯瑟琳·里根(Katherine Reagan)说,康奈尔大学不仅收藏有关嘻哈起源的历史,也在给创作者和新艺术家一个机会向学生、社区青年组织及音乐学者介绍自己的体会。她说,“我们想让这种活生生的文化发出自己的声音。因为这种文化的创作者绝大多数人依然在世。我们希望在我们仍然能够做到的情况下将他们纳入记录历史的过程。”
康奈尔大学聘请了嘻哈先锋人物阿弗里卡·巴姆巴塔(Afrika Bambaataa)为访问学者。这名南布朗斯克区DJ兼嘻哈乐关注团体“环球祖鲁联盟”(Universal Zulu Nation)创始人选用“嘻哈”一词作为这种文化的名称,同时将其核心要素确定为说唱(或称为emceeing)、DJ碎拍播放、霹雳舞(也称b-boying和b-girling)以及涂鸦艺术。
奥尔蒂斯说,“阿弗里卡·巴姆巴塔谈到的第五个要素是知识,嘻哈乐的艺术形式正是获得知识的工具。在这里知识指的是一种意识,一种对世界的感知和了解,以及对你自己、你的历史、你的传统以及其他人传统的了解。”
嘻哈乐逐渐发展了人声敲击乐,又称节奏口技,以及胶盘刮擦等技术;通过“糖果山帮”乐队(Sugarhill Gang)1979年发布的热门金曲“饶舌歌手的喜悦”(Rapper’s Delight)等唱片,开始吸引越来越多的歌迷,从城市美国非洲裔、加勒比海非洲裔、以及拉美裔社区逐渐扩展到美国市郊所有种族和民族背景的年轻人。
今天,毋庸置疑,嘻哈乐已成为全球现象。霹雳舞已经扩展到一些最近才接入因特网(Internet)的国家,几乎每一种语言都有饶舌歌词。全世界的年轻艺术家很轻松地让嘻哈乐融入自己的文化,按自己喜欢的方式表达自己,不是直言无忌就是滔滔不绝,对爱情、失落、贫穷和腐败等任何问题发表看法。
巴姆巴塔指出,嘻哈乐自南布朗克斯区兴起后经历的发展过程令人啧啧称奇。这种文化“凝聚了大量的人群,超过地球上所有的政治家能够召集的人数” 。
巴姆巴塔说,“原来不同宗教的一些人从不彼此说话,他们通过嘻哈乐汇聚在一起。原来有些不同种族和国籍的人从不会跨越障碍和边界,也从不会相互上门拜访,由于嘻哈音乐和文化,他们互相交往。相互理解是嘻哈乐的力量。”
Read more: http://iipdigital.usembassy.gov/st/chinese/pamphlet/2013/12/20131220289306.html#ixzz2oMRtsydA
Hip-Hop: From the Streets to the Mainstream
21 November 2013
Download pamphlet at right.
Hip-hop is more than just music. The term encompasses a whole culture, and that helps explain how it has become one of the most influential elements shaping global entertainment and youth self-expression. All over the world, hip-hop is a tool for explaining the complexities of daily life and speaking truth to power, whether through spoken lyrics, graffiti art, dance or disc jockey mastery.
Not to be confused with commercial rap — which often glorifies material excess, violence and misogyny — hip-hop was born in the South Bronx, New York, more than 40 years ago as an alternative to self-destructive gang culture. Hip-hop gave disaffected youth in impoverished neighborhoods an opportunity to channel their frustrations into art rather than violence.
In a rented Sedgwick Avenue recreation room on August 11, 1973, a Jamaican-born DJ named Kool Herc debuted the art of separating the breakbeat from recorded songs and extending it using two turntables that were playing the same record. Herc’s friend Coke La Rock began rapping over the infectious beats. The sound sparked an instant revolution, and it was soon being recreated at parties all over the South Bronx. The extended breakbeat also encouraged the evolution of break dancing, in addition to rapping, and graffiti artists offered a visual complement to the musical and dance performance.
“Culture doesn’t begin on a single day, but events can happen on a single day that put a lot of things in motion,” says Ben Ortiz, assistant curator of Cornell University’s Hip Hop Collection in Ithaca, New York. The university has been preserving hip-hop artifacts and recordings since 2007 and boasts the largest collection of its kind in the world.
Cornell’s curator of rare books and manuscripts, Katherine Reagan, says the university not only is preserving the story of hip-hop’s beginnings, but also giving its originators and new artists a chance to tell the story to students and community youth organizations, as well as musicologists. “We want to give this living culture a voice because the originators of that culture are by and large still alive and we want to include them in this process of documentation while we still can,” she said.
Cornell has recruited hip-hop pioneer Afrika Bambaataa as a visiting scholar. The South Bronx DJ and founder of the hip-hop awareness group the Universal Zulu Nation chose the term “hip-hop” as the name for the culture and identified its core elements as rapping or emceeing, breakbeat deejaying, break dancing (b-boying and b-girling) and graffiti art.
“The fifth element that Afrika Bambataa described is knowledge, and hip-hop’s art forms are the tools to achieve it,” Ortiz said. “Knowledge, in this case, means an awareness, a consciousness and understanding about the world and understanding of yourself, your history and heritage and the heritage of other people.”
Hip-hop grew to include techniques such as vocal percussion, known as beat boxing, and vinyl scratching, and through recordings such as the Sugarhill Gang’s 1979 hit “Rapper’s Delight,” its fan base began to expand from the urban African-American, Afro-Caribbean and Latino communities of the South Bronx to include suburban American kids of all racial and ethnic backgrounds.
Today, without question, hip-hop is a global phenomenon. Break dance moves have spread to countries that only recently have been connected to the Internet, and rap lyrics are being spoken in nearly every language. Easily adapting hip-hop to their own cultures, young artists worldwide are using it to express themselves, as bluntly or as eloquently as they prefer, making statements on anything from love and abandonment to poverty and corruption.
Noting hip-hop’s amazing growth from its roots in the South Bronx, Bambaataa said the culture “has brought more people together than all the politicians on Earth put together.”
“Through hip-hop, people in different religions who wouldn’t ever speak to one another come together. People of different races and nationalities who would never cross barriers and borders or come into each other’s homes do so because of the music and culture of hip-hop,” Bambaataa said. “Understanding each other is the power of hip-hop.”
Read more: http://iipdigital.usembassy.gov/st/english/pamphlet/2013/11/20131115286905.html#ixzz2oMRvQneg