Fortress Europe or Network of Cultures?
attempts are made, miserable failures are suffered and impressive wins are celebrated.
“And you know what, you guys? I love this city!”9 The basic criteria of cultural practice in hip-hop develop in precisely this way and are not stipulated as norms by a handful of privileged individuals, so all members can identify equally with these principles, which are responsible for the tremendous success of hip-hop. The special character of the horizontal network, in contrast to the vertical hierarchical nation-state model, is clearly visible here. Within the network’s rhizomatic structure, hip-hop’s globally evolved values can manifest themselves in the local scene, which plays a decisive role in the quest for personal identity, participation and the empowering feeling of being able to influence one’s own circumstances. This is why the protagonists frequently emphasize their immediate surroundings within a narrow radius and often explicitly mention their hometown in their lyrics: “Beginner” loudly exclaims enthusiasm for Hamburg, “Blumentopf” praises Munich’s local beer, the members of “Massive Töne” ride around Stuttgart aboard “Yellow Blitz” underground trains and “Torch” reports directly from Heidelberg’s youth centre. The local allusions convey a feeling of solidarity and representation. Guérot sees the key to a new Europe in this concept. She is convinced that equal and autonomous regions can be governed with greater strength and efficiency than hierarchically organized nations.
Die Urbane – Eine HipHop-Partei “Die Urbane – Eine HipHop-Partei” (“The Urbanites – A Hip-Hop Party”) has been on the ballot in Germany’s federal elections since 2017. The party derives its extensive platform from the canon of values that inform and underlie hip-hop culture. In so doing, the party demonstrates how political hip-hop can be and how usable its concept is. The founding myth of hip-hop serves Die Urbane as a starting point for the party’s vision. Just as communities suffering discrimination in New York in the 1970s found wholly new and creative forms of expression to combat poverty and violence, Die Urbane wants to encounter politics with creativity and authenticity and to respond to the pressing problems of our day with nonviolent conflict resolution. Might hip-hop’s philosophy soon contribute toward shaping democracy in the German Bundestag? And if it can do that in Berlin, then why not in Brussels as well? Hip-hop culture shows what still remains for
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