October 1, 1999: Volume 47, Number 4

Rap Music Flows Across Boundaries: Prof. Condry

In the first class this fall, Prof. Ian Condry used a rap music video – "You Better Listen Up" – to introduce himself and his research to his students in Introduction to Cultural Anthropology.

The artists, in ponytails and cocked baseball caps, swagger across a smoky set waving and pointing to a quickly-moving camera. The performance looks and sounds as if it could have been performed by any of dozens of American artists. Except that the lyrics are in Japanese.

The messengers, in this case a Japanese group known as Rhymester, seem every bit as urgent as their American counterparts as they implore the next generation to overcome the recession in Japan and "find the strength to leave something for the next century."

But absent from Rhymester's lyrics – and those of other Japanese rap artists – are themes common to many American rappers: guns, violence, sex and drugs. In their place are socially conscious messages about homelessness, unemployment or injustices in the educational system.

"It is not very revolutionary by our standards, but yet the idea that you should speak out in a society where there is sharp age grading and youth are supposed to be quiet is fairly outrageous," says Condry, who wrote his doctoral dissertation on "Japanese Rap Music: An Ethnography of Globalization in Popular Culture." His project presents a case study for evaluating the impact of mass culture, media and transnational cultural flows on everyday life.

"I am interested in how culture can flow across national and ethnic boundaries," Condry says. "And music in hip hop certainly does that."

Condry grew up in Dryden, N.Y. (near Ithaca), with a father who played a lot of folk music. "People like Bob Dylan and Tom Waits, these are my heroes," he says. "I've always been interested in how little songs can tell big stories."

Introduced to rap as an undergraduate at Harvard, Condry cultivated the interest – and learned Japanese – during his college years. He lived in Japan several times, at one point teaching English to youngsters in northern Japan. After a master's from Yale, he returned for his doctorate. With a Fulbright Fellowship, he launched two years of mostly nocturnal fieldwork in Japanese nightclubs and recording studios that would be the basis of his dissertation.

As with rap in the West, J-Rap has two often-competing divisions: party rap and underground rap, Condry explains. Typical of the genre, one party rap song uses the refrain "Maicca" (akin to Bobby McFerrin's "Don't Worry, Be Happy") about a young couple grappling with the intricacies of dating. A typical underground rap by the group King Giddra centers on criticizing the injustices of the education system. Party rappers have huge audiences with teenage girls. The underground hip hoppers tend to appeal to older males.

Just as in the U.S., Condry says, there is an industry of (mostly) male academics who cite youth culture, including rap, as evidence that society is breaking down. Condry points out that Plato made the same observation about music in ancient Greece.

The Japanese language – with its tonal accents and verb-ending sentences – does not lend itself to the meter and rhyme of rap, Condry says. So J-Rappers have improvised, adding stress accents and sprinkling their lyrics with English words.

Condry's dissertation – on CD ROM – has a number of video clips in which the rappers describe their music; copies are available from Condry.

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