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                                                                                MUSIC, Page 70

Rap Around the Globe


Fad-hungry kids are dressing down and acting up in a worldwide
rhythm revolution

By JAY COCKS -- With reporting by Ian McCluskey/Rio de Janeiro
and Stacy Perman/Tokyo


    In Italy, one singer calls it "rediscovering the tribal
rhythms of our ancestors." In Brazil, another calls it "the
ideological music of the street." In Russia, yet another
performer says it is simply "a new feeling, a new experience."
In France, they say le rap. In any language, it is a
certifiable, global rhythm revolution.

    Rap, which began as a fierce and proudly insular music of
the American black underclass, is now possibly the most
successful American export this side of the microchip,
permeating, virtually dominating, worldwide youth culture. It
is both a recreational vehicle and a form of social commentary:
you can dance to it (one Mexican rap hit has a salsa kick) and
think it over too (a German piece rails against neo-Nazi goons
and a complacent, fat-cat government). The language may differ
from place to place, even when it's English, but the music is
everywhere -- in the air, on the streets, in the racks.

    And on the backs. Rap is also a worldwide fashion
commodity. Local variations of the basic American street outfit
-- baggy pants, pricey sneakers, hooded sweatshirts, flashes of
jewelry -- turn up everywhere, from dance clubs to fashion
layouts. Yves Saint Laurent produces golden belt buckles with
his logo writ large, Public Enemy-style, and Karl Lagerfeld
loads his Chanel models with enough baubles to sink M.C. Hammer
into the ground like a stake. Spike's Joint in Tokyo (yes, that
Spike) supplies Japanese trendies with film-related merchandise,
from team jackets ($794) to the official Malcolm X baseball cap
($39) -- the one indispensable part of any streetwise uniform,
a kind of overseas emblem for the whole rap army.

    Although Paris is still slave to what French rapper MC
Solaar calls "the cult of the sneaker," other rap accoutrements
like gold jewelry are giving way to a more Afrocentric accent,
notably batik fabrics and African coats of arms of the sort worn
in America by Queen Latifah. The burgeoning dictionary of
Franglais, moreover, includes not only le rap but a
distinctively Gallic version of the standard salutation, "What's
up?" Szup? is what American ears hear, though in Paris it sounds
more like an appetizer course: "Soup?" The genre has spawned one
break-out hit, Auteuil Neuilly Passy, in which a trio called Les
Inconnus (the Unknowns) ridicules the well-to-do who live in
those three ritzy parts of Paris. MC Solaar, who was born in
Chad, easily concedes that "Parisian rap is pretty much a U.S.
branch office. We copy everything, don't we? We don't even take
a step back."

    In Japan, by contrast, fans step forward and jump in.
Whether performed in Japanese or in phonetic English, rap has
become a point of generational challenge. "My parents say no
more disco, but I must go to the disco," says Haruyo Kobayashi,
17. "When I listen to rap music I feel excited, and when I'm
dancing, I feel free."

    Kobayashi can pick up on the latest sounds and steps, but
learning attitude is a little trickier. Keichiro Suzuki is
already a master. Says the truck driver, 20, who sports a snowy
pair of Air Jordans: "I like black people and their music
because they're cool." When Suzuki dances, he can also toss his
dreadlocks, a style in which rap-blitzed kids can invest seven
hours and from $324 to $1,215 at a hair salon. So kakko-ii, or
cool, is it to be black that a lively business is booming in
tanning salons with names like "Neo-Blackers" and mail-order
skin-darkeners like "African Special" ($315 a one-month supply).

    None of these perfervid cultural make-overs, however, has
driven the music itself to any heights of personal expression.
"Chemical material don't you shudder?/ Something awful is
happening we don't suspect" is one kick-butt refrain from Takagi
Kan's Hip Hip Fork. "We can't control MSG/ Our tongue has become
paralyzed." Takagi declares that his song is mainly "about MSG
companies trying to make a lot of money in Asia," though there
seems little risk that he will get boiled as Ice T did in
America over his Cop Killer track.

    In Italy rap is more strongly rooted in ideology. Rappers
use local dialects in their music and form free-flowing social
groups called posses. Forte Prenestino, a former military
installation outside Rome, has become a flourishing social
center where audiences and performers can mix. And what is their
rap? "We express the same message," one posse member told an
Italian magazine. "The disease of Italian society."

    The social centers in Italy are linked by a computer
network that dispenses information about meeting places,
concerts and technical matters concerning instruments. "At first
the groups represented the embryo of a new form of protest,"
explains music critic Alberto Dentice. "But slowly they became
technologically organized. Rap brought out the rhythm that is
inside everyone. It's homemade music within everyone's reach."

    That reach may, in some countries, extend too far. In
Brazil, where the more laid-back, samba-tinged rap of Rio is
dueling for prominence with the harder-edged street anthems of
Sao Paulo, hypercharged groups like Sons of the Ghetto decry the
injustices of the social system. The most popular song is the
work of an 18-year-old middle-class kid who calls himself
Gabriel the Thinker. Only days after its release, the piece was
the most requested number on a local radio station. Last month
the government forced the station to take it off the air.
Gabriel's rap is called I'm Happy (I Killed the President), a
fantasy in which he describes how he assassinated former
President Fernando Collor with a bullet through the eye. They
don't cook with MSG in Rio.

    It is the beat that prevails in Russia too, and the beat
that unites. "Even if you don't understand the lyrics, you feel
the energy," says Ivan Salmaxov, 22, who organizes "rave
parties" in Moscow, where rappers from as far away as Minsk and
St. Petersburg can dance, check out homegrown talent like MC
Pavlov and listen to such heated songs as Bad Balance's Children
of Satan, about growing street violence. Says Bad Balance lead
singer Chill Will: "People like rap because they can dance and
listen to new information at the same time."

    Yet, for all its staying power, there are signs that rap's
primacy may already be getting its first serious challenge. The
early warnings are flashing in England, which is second only to
the U.S. as a hothouse for the care and nurturing of pop
culture. Remember this name, and don't get it confused with Ravi
Shankar's greatest hits: ragga. It sounds like reggae on
mega-vitamins, bulked-up and bass-pummeled, and it has its
origins both in the Caribbean and in an aggressive black
awareness. The music is punchy, insinuating and prime for
export. Those dreadlocks in Tokyo may stay stylish a while
longer.