Necessarily Black: Cape Verdean Youth, Hip-Hop Culture, and a Critique of Identity by Saucier P. Khalil

Author:Saucier, P. Khalil [Saucier, P. Khalil]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781628952285
Publisher: Michigan State University Press

CAPE VERDEAN NOIZE

Hip-hop culture and rap lyrics, in particular, help define what it means to be young and black in the United States. Since Cape Verdean youth are primarily consumers of hip-hop culture, and as a result are influenced by both the local and global presence of hip-hop, I offer the following investigation into the lyrics of some Cape Verdean hip-hop artists, namely Chachi Carvalho, D. Lopes, and Tem Blessed. I chose these artists largely due to their popularity among second-generation Cape Verdean youth in the Greater Boston area. Hip-hop music performed by Cape Verdean artists is instructive, for it allows for us to “examine the contexts and processes that produce the narratives commonly found in rap music” (Neal 1997, 134). In other words, what does the music tell us about being Cape Verdean in America?

Too often the idea of indigenization, the reformulation of cultures within sets of specific localisms, is applied to the study of foreign societies and cultures, and not to local cultural communities. Like other cultural forms, hip-hop in the Cape Verdean diaspora, particularly in New England, has been localized and indiginized in relation to the political, economic, and sociocultural realities of Cape Verdean youth. Hip-hop speaks to the reality of Cape Verdeans in the United States, past and present. More robustly, it speaks of their encounters with antiblackness.

Both Chachi and D. Lopes tackle the experience of Cape Verdeans in the United States with songs like “Cape Verdean in America” and “My People.” In “My People” D. Lopes speaks not of his struggles in the United States, but of his mother’s struggles related to being a first-generation immigrant and a women raising kids in a land with little opportunity for those racialized as black. Similarly, Chachi’s “Cape Verdean in America” speaks candidly of the struggles many Cape Verdean youth experience, the reason why the song was a major success on the New England hip-hop scene. As one informant enthusiastically said to me, “Everything you hear in that song, I’ve been through. I’ve lived.”

In “Cape Verdean in America,” Chachi not only illustrates for its listeners what Cape Verdeans endure in the United States, he simultaneously uncovers and deconstructs the idea that America is the land of opportunity and freedom. Chachi begins his narrative by racializing the subject:

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.