No gully in the sídliska

Vernacular hip hop in Europe

'Eastern Europe' is a term loaded with some implicit Slavic connotations. If you find yourself deploying the term in Estonia, locals would correct you— Baltics are Northern Europe, not Eastern. And the same in the Czech Republic, where you would be scolded for mistaking Central Europe for Eastern Europe. One of Slavoj Zizek's more famous sniffling anecdotes aptly highlights the contentious nature of the boundary of the Balkans. My time in Eastern Europe has required me to introduce myself and my nationality to different people, and invites a similar if inverted controversy. There is always the initial disbelief— of course, I cannot really be Indian, as I am not brown enough, not bobs-and-vagene enough, and so on. If I insist, they double down— okay, I must not be from the 'real' India, right? Brown-ish skin inspires suspicion— at best, you are a foreigner, at worst, you are an internal alien, an ethnic minority like that of the Roma community.

In this context, I find myself as the only brown-skinned person at an outdoors gig on a sweltering summer evening at S-Klub in Olomouc, Czechia. On stage in front of me, Slovakian grime and drill rapper Gleb towers over the crowd, delivering a fire-quick flow over a drum and bass track. His command is imperial– this is a choreographed crowd that knows every track, and that unerringly finishes his hooks for him when he prompts them with the mic. For the most part, my accompanying friend Radka had to translate for me. She explains to me how popular DnB, grime, drill and dubstep is in the Slovakian scene in which Gleb has emerged on top.

Gleb raps in Slovakian, but most local hip hop around the world cannot avoid at least some global references and language, and so my attention was naturally drawn to the few words I could recognise. For example, from his track alibababigbass :

“money-moneymake, Abu Dhabi swag out / na ulici pripomínam arabského šejka / lietajúci koberec, dávam pull up na Shellkách / s nami Alibaba smokin’ oriental” (“money-moneymake, Abu Dhabi swag out / on the street I resemble Arabic sheik / flying carpet, Imma pull up on Shell / Alibaba with us smokin’ oriental”)

With the globalisation of hip-hop, local scenes across the world began with imitating American rap. But two decades hence, it is truism now to note the obvious importance of local languages in regional scenes. Vernacular rap flaunts a locally-embedded authenticity that champions the stories and identities of urban youths. Staying 'real' means staying true to your neighbourhood, dialect, lived experience and geographical context, in the face of cultural homogenisation imported from the West. This is why Peter Barrer has noted that rap in Slovakia is "staunchly" rooted in the Slovak language (2017: 150), instead of insincerely imitating terms and topics from outside the domestic scene: "While informed from abroad, Slovak rap is not an imitation of these trends but is rather an appropriation and adaptation of a dynamic musical idiom into the Slovak context." (2009: 72)

English rap is not simply imported and imitated, but nor is it simply rejected outright. There is instead a glocalisation of the imported language and style, in which the dialogue between local and global produces new cultural forms. Western rap is first imitated, followed by negative reaction that champions local linguistic authenticity, and then finally the dialectic movement is completed with multilingual experimentation and a hybridised 'translocality'.

Gleb is an example of Slovak-English language-mixing and code-switching. But re-discovering local and personal authenticity extends beyond the linguistic. As my friend explained to me, Gleb has won the hearts of his audience because he is a refreshingly new break from the Western-imitative styles and topics of his peers in the scene. He rejects the spectacular opulence of rap, its fetishisation of luxury, and the codes of 'flexing' through wealth to demonstrate success. His authenticity instead derives from how he represents and gives back to his community. For example, on a 2020 track Budeme Tam (“We’ll Be There”):

“buck buck, nerobím za chicka-change / ale ne kvôli bazénu a veľkému domu / no kvôli tomu aby som to vrátil späť” (“buck buck, I don’t work for chicka-change / but not for a pool and a big house / but to give it back”)

And on the 2021 track noc v opere (“night at the opera”):

“ak si rapper, tak musíš mínať, moju bandu vozí limuzína / ale necítim sa v nej dobre, cítim sa trápne, vráťte mi peniaze naspäť / prinútila ma rap game, Gleb je ovešaný v zlate / ale necítim sa v tom dobre, cítim sa trápne vráťte mi peniaze naspäť” (“if you’re a rapper, you gotta spend, my posse rides a limousine / but I don’t feel good in it, I feel awkward, refund my money back / I was forced by the rap game, Gleb is behung with gold / but I don’t feel good in it, I feel awkward, refund my money back”). (all translations from the Bachelor's thesis of Damir Daniel Demovič)

And yet, despite using Slovak in a dynamic way with English to navigate, express and negotiate regional and local identities, the scene in Slovakia is still dominated by 'white' Slovak-speaking middle class youths. In Slovakia and the Czech Republic, topics of social exclusion are minimal, and ethnic minorities are left underrepresented. The same flow that appropriates the American gangsta ghetto, in the same breath represses, silences or objectifies the social and ethnic underclass of Slovak ghettos: "While tackling issues of urban malaise, Slovak rap lyrics do not present the sídliska as a ghetto reality." (Barrer 2009: 72)

The ethnic minorities referred here are often those from the Roma community in Europe, which has faced systematic oppression, exclusion and racist marginalisation as 'gypsies' for centuries. In the hip hop scene, Romani dialects are appropriated into Slovak rap, while Roma rappers and issues are silenced. As Oravcová and Slačálek (2019) note, the Romani rapper struggles with a 'triple inauthenticity': the first inauthenticity sees rap as a foreign art form imported from America. The second level relates to the Romani subaltern as an ethnic minority in Europe, i.e., as inauthentically European. The third inauthenticity is caused by the "the fact that the Czech majority defines what it means to be Roma, which creates a burden of expectations placed on the community" (ibid.: 939). This means that the individual Romani rapper is forced into expressing themselves only through the pre-given stereotypes assigned to them in the hip hop scene and in the broader Czech society: stereotypes of Romani as either talented musicians or criminals and lazy freeloaders living on benefits. This simultaneous cultural straitjacketing and appropriation of Romani cultures as exotic and Oriental extends beyond hip hop, of course— there is much written about how despite the soothing fantasy of multicultural harmony in European dance scenes, 'gypsy' music is sampled and remixed while the Roma communities themselves are ignored, discredited and marginalised (see, for example, Silverman 2015).

In this context, what is the fate of another brown-skinned ethnic minority in Eastern Europe? There is more than just (contested) linguistic and genetic ancestry shared between the Roma and the Indian subcontinent. The Indian community in Slovakia is small, mostly comprising students, restaurant staff, IT workers, and lower income factory staff. Cultural exchange with Eastern Europe across translocal music scenes is not uncommon, either. We may recall as a recent example Krunk's collaboration with Slovenia, exchanging artists between Bass Camp festival 2023 and Channel Zero, Ljubljana respectively.

Indians in Eastern Europe also remain the target of prevailing negative stereotypes— but we would be dangerously amiss to equate the struggles of the Romani subaltern with those of the Indian diaspora. Yes, my skin colour draws second looks, but they do not carry the same weight as the white gaze on the Roma. Is it worth speaking of transnational solidarity? Substantial scholarship has already drawn comparison between the social justice issues of the Roma and Adivasis, Dalits and other marginalised subalterns in India (see for eg. Dragomir 2022). But beyond the realms of social critique, can subcultural expertise be shared? Trans-national subaltern and youth cultural movements do not have to always draw precedent from the Western and English-speaking worlds. In a sense, gully rap and hip hop in India in general represents a rare breakthrough in subaltern participation in hip hop culture— that is yet to appear in many scenes in Eastern Europe.

References

Barrer, Peter.2017. "The underground is for beggars": Slovak rap at the center of national popular culture.

Barrer, Peter 2009. “My White, Blue, and Red Heart”: Constructing a Slovak Identity in Rap Music. Popular Music and Society. 32. 59-75.

Demovič, Damir Daniel 2022. White, Blue, Red Flow? Analyzing the Role of English in Slovak Hip Hop. Bachelor Thesis, Charles University, Prague.

Dragomir, Cristina-Ioana 2022. Power on the move: Adivasi and Roma accessing social justice. London New York Oxford New Delhi Sydney: Bloomsbury Academic.

Oravcová, A., & Slačálek, O. 2019. Roma youth in Czech rap music: stereotypes, objectification and ‘triple inauthenticity.’ Journal of Youth Studies, 23(7), 926–944.

Silverman, C. 2015. DJs and the Production of “Gypsy” Music: “Balkan Beats” as Contested Commodity. Western Folklore, 74(1), 5–29.