What's Burmese about Burmese rap? Why some expressive forms go global

Abstract

Although older Burmese associate contemporary Burmese rap with an indigenous call‐and‐response genre, younger Burmese rap fans link it only to international models. The content of Burmese raps strikes an outsider as tame, but rap in Burma resembles foreign prototypes closely in its preoccupation with youthful masculine power. In Burma and elsewhere, rap's lyrical contents reflect a libertarian ideology in keeping with its emphasis on the autonomy of individuals and widespread anxieties of and about young males, in particular—this despite many commentators’ wish to see in rap an empowering political voice. [rap music, Burma, masculinity, globalization, resistance]

On gammon, global noise and indigenous heterogeneity: Words as things in aboriginal public culture

“…9. This local critical sensibility regarding genre and race complicates both Keeler's (2009) relatively anxious concerns about hip hop's globalization and Condry's (2006) celebratory analyses by bringing to light the bind that many face in their appreciation of potential racially marked musical genres. 10.…”

Burmese Super Trouper: How Burmese Poets and Musicians Turn Global Popular Music intoCopy Thachin

“…Cover songs, according to Griffiths (2002), have been identified as having three different kinds of relationships with their original songs: 1) renditions, which are attempts to copy or mimic the original; 2) transformations, which make more explicit attempts to modify the song; and finally, 3) appropriations, which make boundary crossings across genre, market, and thus, listening community. In a milieu of constant and explicit borrowing, adapting and re-signifying, there are challenges to notions of cultural authorship (Ginsburg, Abu-Lughod, and Larkin 2002;Jackson 2003;Keeler 2009;Mankekar 1999;Novak 2010). Concerns about cultural authorship are exogamous to some fan cultures that might be more interested in a jocular approach to sounds and meanings, and for performers, who can borrow, rework and creatively adapt songs at will.…”

“…In recent decades, rap and hip-hop have emerged as popular genres on the Burmese music scene, and often many hip-hop songs are copy thachin of previously recorded US and Korean hip-hop songs. According to Ward Keeler (2009) when the Burmese artists perform in styles and rhythms that are derivative of US rap, they do not adopt the original social meaning or 'essence' of the genre. This stance posits the genre of rap in the US as opposed to that played in Burma as a separate pantheon, and Burmese artists are missing out.…”

Music, Language, and Texts: Sound and Semiotic Ethnography

“…In linguistic anthropology, given the field's orientation toward language, this has meant focusing on linguistic dimensions of song. Although routinely coupled to careful consideration of performance, including its political aspects, such work often pays little attention to the text's musical or sounded dimensions (Ahearn 1998, Faudree 2011, Keeler 2009, Mannheim 1998, Rumsey 2007, Shoaps 2002see Graham 1995 for an earlier exception to this trend that draws on an incipient attention to "soundscape"). Even work attempting to attend fully to both musical and linguistic elements generally separates them in analysis, making it harder to address the interactions between different expressive channels.…”