Hip Hop in Manokwari: Pleasures, Contestations and the Changing Face of Papuanness

Abstract

Hamburgers and evangelical Christianity are highly successful American exports and so too hip hop has proven to be 'the cultural form most widely appropriated into new contexts around the world' (Bucholtz 2002: 543). In Manokwari, the capital city of the province of West Papua, young people have passionately embraced the music and music videos of American hip hop at a time when cable television and online networks have displaced national control and censorship over print and visual media. Locally referred to as 'lagu rap' (rap songs), 'r 'n' b' (R and B) or 'lagu karpet dans' (carpet dance songs), commercial hits manufactured by the hip hop industry are popular amongst men and women in their teens and twenties. Since it became a capital in 2003, 1 new digital platforms, more reliable electricity and increased access to money in Manokwari have facilitated the consumption of American hip hop. The music is watched on MTV and the internet, and downloaded onto laptops, android-platform cell phones and other music file-holding devices. This African-American cultural form, characterised by four elements (rap music, DJ-ing, break dancing and graffiti art), emerged in the 1970s as a resistant expression to white American hegemony and urban hardships (Chang 2006). In the last two decades hip hop has become a globalised genre appropriated and recontextualised within diverse cultural settings at the same time as becoming a corporate complex that inscribes image and lifestyle through commodities, verbal and body language, and attitude (Kitwani 2004). Hip hop as a marker of lifestyle and identity is apparent amongst Papuan youth who dress in the iconic styles of this genre, wear t-shirts with images of their favourite artists, perform breakdance in the streets and sketch graffiti art on urban walls. The aims of this chapter are twofold. One, I examine the engagement of Papuan youth with American hip hop as well as the opinions of parents about these engagements. Two, I ask what interests in and opinions of hip hop can tell us about the changing shape of beliefs that Papuans are a good and worthy collective, what I call the Papuan pride movement. Taking as my starting point the notion that meaning is not passively received but created through negotiations between cultural context, media content and the priorities of audiences, I explore local