Belonging in the Mix: Indigenous and Minority Popular Musics in the Hip Hop Mainstream

Abstract

Whose sounds fit in the nation-state? Always a politicized question, an exploration of popular music that enters the mainstream offers one way into interconnected questions about belonging. In Canada in particular, a recent history of racial and ethnic minority pop musics influencing mainstream sounds shows how artists and media professionals respond to histories of not-listening. What does it take to sound Canadian? And how do Indigenous groups who live in what is now Canada interact with the nation-state while still maintaining sonic sovereignty? This presentation delves into questions of racialized belonging by exploring expressions of Black Canadians, linguistic minorities, and Indigenous people in Canada through hip hop music. Musicians’ experiences of minority or Indigenous status differ and converge in instructive ways. As Canadian hip hop was coming into its own in the early 2000s, Indigenous hip hop artists told stories with sonic and visual markers that trope Blackness in a particular way. These were heard alongside Black Canadian hip hop, which fought for airtime in a national context whose radio waves have often sounded whiter than the nation itself. This presentation traces histories of erasure, building on Rinaldo Walcott’s theorization of intelligibility. It then listens to musicians in these sometimes-overlapping groups, notably Kardinal Offishall, Webster, and Winnipeg’s Most, to hear how minority and Indigenous groups express belonging and sovereignty, respectively. In so doing, the presentation opens into discussion of how national belonging forms and reforms over time and across minority and Indigenous groups, raising questions relevant across particularities and borders.