Nep-hop for peace? Political visions and divisions in the booming Nepalese hip-hop scene

Abstract

The article explores the burgeoning Nepalese hip-hop scene – commonly known as nep-hop – as a discursive intervention in the post-war politics of Nepal. Its core argument is that nep-hop oftentimes demonstrates an ethos of peacebuilding through popular culture. Indeed, many songs explicitly criticize violence, war, and the political leaders who recently brought the nation to a civil war. Yet, this political critique appears to often fall on deaf ears, due to the fact that nep-hop is commonly decoded as a radically ‘alien’ and ‘vulgar’ genre by audiences in mainstream Nepalese society. Importantly, however, this should not be read as a rejection of the ideological content of nep-hop, but rather as a negative evaluation of the aesthetic form of the genre, which bars many Nepalese citizens from engaging with its political messages in a meaningful manner.

Freestyling in war and peace: rap and transitional justice in Colombia

“…For instance, hip-hop from Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina, uses an unpolitical grammar appealing to youngsters that directly contests institutional post-conflict narratives in terms of ethnicity and national identity (Kadich 2019). Moreover, the relationship between rap and transitional justice can be so complex that even when ideologically supporting peace, rappers have faced resistance to their musical activism, such as in Nepal, where the genre is considered foreign and vulgar (Lundqvist 2021). Thus, rap may help to foster an official narrative of transition and, at the same time, act as an unofficial counterpart to its status quo (Bahun 2016).…”