‘I’m the voice of the streets’: Hyperlocal performances of style in Bombay Hip Hop.
Elloit Cardozo
Title of paper: ‘I’m the voice of the streets’: Hyperlocal performances of style in Bombay Hip Hop.
Affiliation: Maulana Abul Kalam Azad Institute of Asian Studies (MAKAIAS), India.
Abstract: Zoya Akhtar’s 2019 film Gully Boy marked a seismic moment in the history of Hip Hop culture n India. Inspired by the stories of Divine and Naezy, the film introduced the masses to Mumbai’s burgeoning underground rap scene. As a result, a more rustic, more ‘gully’ variant of Hip Hop became a much more in-demand and consequentially, a lot more marketable ‘commodity’. Rappers adhering to Hip Hop’s tenet of “reppin’ the ’hood” by spouting the PIN codes of their localities, and rapping in ‘Bambaiyya’ (a linguistic variety spoken in Mumbai) as opposed to English or Hindi, quickly started becoming synonymous with Bombay Hip Hop. In this paper, I discuss this apparent paradigm shift in Bombay Hip Hop around and since the release of Gully Boy. I look at the changing significations of a more ‘gully’ style (akin to Dick Hebdige’s street style), especially in light of its much more frequent appearances in Bombay Hip Hop. Drawing on a term commonly used in studies of business and media, I argue that these increasingly ‘hyperlocal’ performances of style can be understood within the ambit of Dick Hebdige’s conception of spectacular subculture as intentional communication.
Biography: Elloit Cardozo is a Junior Research Fellow at Maulana Abul Kalam Azad Institute of Asian Studies (MAKAIAS), an autonomous body under the Ministry of Culture, Government of India. Elloit’s project at MAKAIAS studies underground Hip Hop culture in India as part of a larger global expressive culture that is simultaneously influenced by local sociopolitical and artistic elements. He holds a Master’s Degree in English from the University of Mumbai, where his dissertation comparatively studied Dudeism, and Albert Camus’ Absurdist thought as countercultural worldviews. His work has appeared in peer-reviewed journals such as University of Pittsburgh’s CINEJ Cinema Journal and Intellect Books’ Global Hip Hop Studies (GHHS). Elloit is also a coordinator for Show & Prove Mumbai, an upcoming collaborative conference with the University of California Riverside, set to be the first ever conference on Hip Hop Studies in India.