HIP-HOP.

• Position: Rap music analysis

Becoming Worldwide Language for Youth Resistance

Many middle-class parents thought it was just a fad when their adolescents and teenagers started wearing baggy jeans that sagged below their hips in imitation of hip-hop culture. However, it did not pass. Almost 30 years after hip-hop got its start in the black urban scene of the 1970s, this complex, riveting mixture of sound, rhythm, dress, attitude, and poetics has become a universal, underground culture for youth resistance around the globe, maintains Halifu Osumare, a faculty member at the University of Hawaii, Honolulu.

In 1999, rap--one of four components of hip-hop culture --became the top-selling music genre in America. "It began in black and Latino American communities, but you can't go to any youth culture in any capital city on the globe today where you won't find rappers talking about their marginalization using similar lyrics, similar music, and similar dress," Osumare points out. She has found, in research on hip-hop cultures in Japan, England, France, and Germany, that youths in each region adapt American patterns to their own demographics:

* In London, marginalized East Indian youth blend Indian melodies and Hindi with English rap as a street form of protest.

* In Paris, poor Jewish, Middle Eastern, and West African youth coming out of the projects use hip-hop styles and rap to talk about their poverty and police brutality, as exemplified in a French video called "La Haine" ("Hate").

* In Japan, female hip-hoppers use the genre to defy gender restrictions for women.

"Hip-hop has become a universal tool for talking back to the mainstream of any society," Osumare notes. However, the very success of this genre has created something of a schism in hip-hop culture, according to Osumare and Michael Barnes, a graduate student in sociology at the University of California, Berkeley, who is also a disc jockey and was one of her teaching assistants when she taught a course on "Power Moves: Hip-hop Culture and Sociology" at Berkeley.

Community-based underground rappers are drowned out by the mass appeal and commercialization of the big-time, best-selling artists, some of whom are marketing a gangster persona with songs that focus on wealth...