No Hatchet

Abstract

CONTEXTUAL STATEMENT
This piece is a song commissioned in 2019 and featured on Specifik’s album The Ill Circus, released on Berlin-based Britcore Rawmance, 2019.
The research questions the song interrogates are spatio-geographic. Questioning the validity of the positions of hip-hop artists from rural areas vis-à-vis the broader national-global political context, the song decentralizes the core of British hip-hop and makes visible the regional-rural and provincial presence of rap, additionally attesting to an alternate glocal viewpoint from this perspective.
The song achieves this firstly through its sonics and structure. The song is split into two distinct parts. Part one opens with a typical Blaxploitation-esque sample driven 8-bar drum-pattern, after which a standard 4-stanza/16-bar verse is delivered, repeated in part two. The two breakdowns offer narratives of cultural distance and closeness, entering into a full 4-bar drop of ‘Take Me To The Mardi Gras’ – its full break with bells – ensuing with the ‘Mardi Gras’ break repeated, but fully filtered suggesting detachment from hip-hop’s roots. The author murmurs menacingly “Another classic” over each pattern. These vocals are repeated in the breakdown of part two. The juxtaposition of “classic” with the remoteness of delivery represents a new decentralized hip-hop habitus, as explored in the author’s article ‘Urban Myths and Rural Legends’: “…this new hip-hop habitus evolves through responding to local regional-rural traditions and the continuing development of glocal hip-hop culture. Furthermore, there is an invisible class system at play between regional-rural dwellers and inhabitants of cities, constructed through what Farrugia describes as ‘…structural inequalities that differentiate rural and urban places’ (2016: 2-16)” (2020). Secondly, these themes are reinforced by lyrics such as: “From borderlands, Lebanon, Syria to southern Cyprus / A liminal sketch I draw I might just”, “I mimic a brick”, and “Spin on the Centre Point I’m counter-point / My counter-raps, I flex it”.
[300 words]