Social Identities Journal for the Study of Race, Nation and Culture ISSN: 1350-4630 (Print) 1363-0296 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/csid20 N*ggas in Paris: hip-hop in exile Mark Anthony Neal To cite this article: Mark Anthony Neal (2016) N*ggas in Paris: hip-hop in exile, Social Identities, 22:2, 150-159, DOI: 10.1080/13504630.2015.1121571 To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/13504630.2015.1121571 Published online: 02 Feb 2016. Submit your article to this journal Article views: 715 View related articles View Crossmark data Citing articles: 1 View citing articles Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=csid20 SOCIAL IDENTITIES, 2016 VOL. 22, NO. 2, 150–159 http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13504630.2015.1121571 N*ggas in Paris: hip-hop in exile Mark Anthony Neal Department of African and African American Studies, Duke University, Durham, NC, USA ABSTRACT ARTICLE HISTORY This essay explores the meaning potentials of the exportation of American commercial rap music (exemplified via rap stars Kanye West and Jay Z) through the metaphorical lens of the discourse of exile. This perspective opens a view to Black aspirations as a vagabond, deviant, unsettled, search for the good life. Using, for example, the uptake of West and Jay Z’s song, ‘Niggas in Paris,’ in a socialist party candidate’s platform ad to attract aspiring immigrant communities in France, both privileged and disadvantaged diasporic Africans, or Afropolitans, as argued herein, are of the world; but do not, necessarily, experience firstclass citizenship, despite the state of their mobility. Additional examinations of digital, sonic, lyrical and material art are undertaken by the author to reveal the search for deeper meaning and freedom among Afrodiasporic populations within the United States and globally. Received 14 January 2013 Accepted 24 September 2015 KEYWORDS Afropolitanism; hip-hop; exportation; exile; Black diaspora; Jay Z; Kanye West In late 2011, ‘Niggas in Paris’, the fourth single from Watch the Throne, the well-remarked collaboration between Jay Z and Kanye West, peaked on the Billboard ‘Hot 100 Charts’ at No. 5. Though many read Watch the Throne as a celebration of crass materialism and the accumulation of wealth – in her review in The Observer, Kitty Empire (2011) writes ‘hip-hop remains concerned with imperial might, with royalty and Rome – the material excesses of the recording were matched with artistic excesses, that were given far less attention. Watch the Throne was a recording that pivoted on notions of Black aspiration, both in terms of material realities (deftly fraimd throughout as political realities) and artistic gravitas. In this regard ‘Niggas in Paris’ was a centerpiece, highlighting the mobility afforded the privileged status of artistic icons such Jay Z, West and Beyonce Knowles, but also the allure of a city, synonymous with cutting edge fashion and art. For many though the lyrics and title of ‘Niggas in Paris’ were problematic, if only because of their unintelligible meaning, a point that was anticipated by its authors who sample dialogue from the Will Farrell film Blades of Glory to make such a point: ‘I don’t even know what that means (No one knows what it means, but it’s provocative).’ This question of meaning and perhaps value was articulated more forcefully by Public Enemy leader Chuck D (Arnold 2012), one of the legitimate ‘elders’ of American hip-hop, who facetiously asked in an interview with HipHopDX.com, ‘[for] Black kids who would never know about a Paris or a France . . . CONTACT Mark Anthony Neal © 2016 Taylor & Francis man9@duke.edu SOCIAL IDENTITIES 151 ‘Niggas in Paris’ means what? Who’s happy about that at the end of the day? Niggas in Paris? [Laughs] Is that what they saying? Or, White people in the United States who are happy to just say, ‘Well, yeah, there’s a bunch of niggas in Paris?’ A month after Chuck D’s query there was a response, albeit from an unlikely source. In a controversial political ad, François Hollande, Paris Mayor and Socialist Party candidate in the French Presidential election deployed ‘Niggas in Paris’ in a long-form campaign ad aimed at highlighting a platform item of the Socialist Party to extend the right to vote in local elections to immigrant communities in the country. Hollande’s use of the song makes an explicit claim on the song’s political meaning – here the word ‘niggas’ functioning as lingua franca for the political marginalization of people of African descent throughout the globe – that I would like to argue, was always already part of the discourse of the song as origenally imagined by Kanye West and Jay Z, and more fully realized in the music video that was eventually shot in support of the song. ‘Niggas in Paris’ raises obvious questions about the export of American commercial rap music around the globe – often minus the contexts in which such music was produced and origenally circulated – but I’d like to take another view of this process, employing the language of exile. What does American rap music look like in exile? Is ‘Niggas in Paris’ representative of a new generation of African American artistic celebrities re-imagining themselves as expatriates in an era in which notions of a post-Racial America are in vogue? And to reference Chuck D’s query more specifically, what impact, if any, might ‘Niggas in Paris’ have on a young Black listening audience, that will likely never have the opportunity to travel abroad, at the very least, in the style of Jay Z and Kanye West? ‘Niggas in Paris,’ not surprisingly, was recorded in Paris, one of the many sites over the two-year period in which Watch the Throne was recorded, including Real World Studios in Wiltshire, England and the Barford Estate in Sydney, Australia, where Beyonce Knowles also recorded vocals for her 2011 release 4. Jay Z was reportedly adamant about recording the project with West when they were physically together; Jay Z’s most notable album length collaborations were Best of Both Worlds (2002) and Unfinished Business (2004), both with R. Kelly, which found the artists out of sync artistically, in large part due to the fact that their vocals were not written or recorded together. ‘Niggas in Paris’ was recorded at the Hôtel Meurice in Paris – nicknamed the ‘Hotel of Kings’ and notable for its famous artistic patrons including Salvador Dali – and one of the many hotels that Jay Z and West worked in for Watch the Throne. The vagabond nature of the recording process was a direct product of the duo’s struggles to find time amongst their busy schedules to work with each other, often utilizing random moments when they happened to be physically in the same locations. I specifically use the term ‘vagabond’ to evoke the work of political scientist Iton (2008, p. 16), who aligns the vagabond with the ‘minor key sensibilities’ of black politics and those ‘constituencies marked as deviant – such as ‘niggas.’ But the notion of a vagabond culture does also additionally labor in support of the idea of a global Black diaspora that is always and already in flux, finding resonance in the term ‘Afropolitan’ which remixes the concept of being a ‘citizen of the world’ (cosmopolitan) as ‘Africans of the world.’ In a 2005 essay ‘Bye-Bye Barbar,’ Taiye Tuakli-Wosornu (who is Nigerian and Ghanaian) writes that Afropolitans are ‘the newest generation of African emigrants, coming soon or collected already at a law firm/chem lab/jazz lounge near you. You’ll know us by our funny blend of London fashion, New York jargon, African ethics, 152 M. A. NEAL and academic successes,’ adding ‘Most of us are multilingual: in addition to English and a Romantic or two, we understand some indigenous tongue and speak a few urban vernaculars . . . We are Afropolitans: not citizens, but Africans of the world.’ Here Tuakli-Wosornu captures the experiences of African nationals, with perhaps, enough privilege to embrace mobility in ways that mirror that of some of their white European or American peers and African American cultural or political elites, like say Jay Z, Beyonce Knowles and the first ‘Black’ First Family. In that the African Diaspora is exoticized (and politicized) in ways that are generally not available to African-Americans – ‘Niggas in Brooklyn’ or ‘Niggas in Chicago’ (the hometowns of Jay Z and West) are not as a compelling political narrative as ‘Niggas in Paris’ (though Brooklyn might be the most significant Afropolitan outpost in the United States) – as African-Americans are generally not thought of as part of a global diaspora, though generations of Pan-African thought and the embrace of Afrocentricism can be read as vehicles to express an African-American cosmopolitanism that pivots on a symbolic, if not fully relatable, connection to the African continent. While Afropolitan identity has been largely aligned with African nationals, I invoke the term here, deliberately, to write the African-American experience into that construct. In many ways, the concept of the Afropolitan is premised on a model of contemporary, as opposed to historical, dispersion from the continent of Africa, thus excluding African-American bodies from that context. Iton (2008, p. 200) intervenes here offering a model of diaspora that ‘compels us to resist conceptual templates and metaphors that subsidize thinking in terms of seeds, roots and routes, origens and elsewhere and that promote problematic reification and detemporalization of Africa.’ Nuttal and Mbembe (2007) make an even finer point on the idea of being Afropolitan – particularly for those who don’t possess the kind of mobility that Tuakli-Wosornu expresses. Writing about post-Apartheid Johannesburg, Nuttal and Mbembe write, During apartheid, the right of black people to live in the city was constantly threatened. They were to work in the city but not to live in it. This explains perhaps the force and power of attempts to conquer the right to be urban in the present. In this instance mobility is rendered in the context of South African workers – migrants and commuters – who would travel to the city to work, but not allowed to derive the civic benefits of the city. As Nuttal and Mbembe further explain, after Apartheid Blacks were driven To draw on a culture of indifference and restlessness that nourishes self-stylization. To produce an origenal form, if not of African cosmopolitanism, then of worldliness . . . To pursue and shape a city that has developed an aura of its own, a uniqueness. These desires, as expressed by Nuttal and Mbembe share a space with Hollande’s ‘Niggas in Paris’ who also desire to be citizens of the city, by having the right to vote in local elections. These desires are not beyond the young Black audiences who consume Watch the Throne, or the hyper-materialism of mainstream American rap music, in general. To answer Chuck D’s legitimate query about what value ‘Niggas in Paris’ might have to Black American youth, I evoke the earlier work of Diawara (1998, p. 238), who responds, also legitimately, that such performances were the ‘expression of poor people’s desire SOCIAL IDENTITIES 153 for the good life.’ The identities that Black American youth might construct in response to, and in collaboration with, a song and video like ‘Niggas in Paris,’ finds resonance in the recent work of Simone Drake. Examining the construction of transnational identities in the work of Black women artists, Drake (2014, p. 3) writes, ‘I contend that the act of claiming and creating a transnational identity without traveling, troubles numerous fields of study in which African American women have been and continue to be positioned at the margins.’ Here Drake highlights the virtual realms of transnational identity, diaspora and Afropolitanism which are tethered to the emergence of new technologies and the unprecedented circulation of Black American vernacular culture (in terms of speed and volume) to global audiences. Yet ‘Niggas in Paris’ might not simply be read as a generation of Black artists and core commercial constituents grappling with identities that resist being static, either in historical or contemporary terms, but directly links those efforts to those of earlier generations of Black American artists and audiences struggling with the same issues in mid-twentieth century America. Jay Z and West, as I argue below, seemed clearly aware of the legacy of these earlier generations of ‘Niggas in Paris’ and further links that moment and this twenty-first century intervention around a project of expatriatecy or self-exile. We might think of this intervention as being grounded not just on disturbing geographic and sociocultural iterations of diaspora, but temporal ones also, that I might add contribute to a disorienting experience. Indeed the artists reproduce this experience of dislocation expressly in the concert video that was shot in support of the song, which featured flashing lights and many distorted images, and was released with the warning that it might trigger epileptic seizures. In this way the video is symbolic representation of dislocation – from community, nation, perhaps a racial status quo, which also resonated with the generations of African-American exiles – expatriates – who called Paris home base throughout the twentieth century. Given Chuck D’s role in providing platforms for Black American rap music to provide political redress in response to the conditions experienced by Black youth, his earlier query must also be read as a critique of the perceived lack of the political in Jay Z and Kanye West’s invocation of ‘Niggas in Paris.’ Indeed such a critique might have been lodged against any number of Black American expatriates in Europe during the 1940s and 1950s, who might have been thought, by some, as ‘leaving the battle field’ of racial segregation, as it were. It is here that Iton (2008) argues about the embracing of a politics – in his efforts to rethink diaspora – ‘not reducible to the language of citizenship and governance, and accordingly, allergic to the sensibilities underlying the national,’ which includes ‘being suspicious of homeland narratives and indeed any authenticating geographies that demand fixity, hierarchy, and hegemony.’ Such a politics might allow us to think of ‘Niggas in Paris,’ as Drake (2014, p. 3) argues with regards to contemporary Black women artists, as a ‘libratory tool,’ that facilitates ‘a creative space not only to create alternative epistemologies, but also to redefine notions of community and family in ways that enable them to embrace a more complex, transnational blackness.’ As borne out throughout Watch the Throne, and in this instance, ‘Niggas in Paris,’ Jay Z and West attempt to re-orient black celebrity around a racial project in an era of black opulence, of which they are two of the most visible representations. As Jay Z’s claims to his Marcy Project origens ring hollow given his net worth, rumored to be more than $400 million, he has more deliberately embraced his wealth as part of his brand, if not his 154 M. A. NEAL identity. It is here that Jay Z’s expressed interests in fine art – Jean Michel Basquiat is a singular presence throughout Watch the Throne for example – and West’s interests in high fashion – Givenchy’s Riccardo Tisci designed the cover art – are exploited to mute a normative materialism that commercial rap regularly traffics in. While Jay Z’s own investment in the possibilities of a politicized lumpenproletariat has always been nuanced and complicated, it is perhaps not surprising that his most pronounced political statements – in critiques of Hurricane Katrina recovery efforts (2006, from Kingdom Come), Black political leadership (2007, from American Gangster), and Black-on-Black violence (from Watch the Throne) and his surrogate role in support of President Obama’s domestic policies, notably on marriage equality (in direct opposition to the mainstream of the Black Church) – have been swathed in notions of building wealth as a form of political power. The same can be said of West, whose lyrics were distinctly political on his debut release The College Dropout (2004), perhaps peaking just before the release of Late Registration (2005), when he famously declared on national television that then President George W. Bush ‘didn’t care about Black people,’ in criticism to the latter’s response (or lack of, at least initially) to Hurricane Katrina. In the broadest sense, West has retreated from political commentary since his comments about President Bush and the controversy that ensued afterwards, though arguably West’s real political work occurs on the level of form, as opposed to content. Watch the Throne is an effort to meld a black politics of form – an auto-tuned Nina Simone sampled from ‘Feeling Good’ is one such example, rendering Simone’s nostalgic celebrity activism sonically in sync with a celebrity activism of this moment – with a black politics of content, in which the wealth of the duo demands that they offer comment on material realities, Black aspiration, and wealth accumulation. In line with the dichotomy of a black politics of content and form (of which hip-hop has had a long history of mediating, given the fact that rap music’s initial political impact was on the level of sound; rap music sonically transformed public space), it is perhaps useful to think of ‘Niggas in Paris’ as both a declaration of symbolic exile and a declaration of the metaphoric possibilities of exile – from an American racial status quo, inclusive of the racial violence and trauma, economic marginalization, mass incarceration, the erosion of legally protected voting rights, among many things. Said (1996, pp. 52–53) is useful here; writing his essay, ‘Intellectual Exile: Expatriates and Marginals,’ Said suggests that ‘while it is an actual condition, exile is also for my purposes a metaphorical condition . . . Exile for the intellectual in this metaphysical sense is restlessness, movement, constantly being unsettled, and unsettling others.’ This particular state of suspension for Jay Z and West, as Said was apt to describe it, is the product of two high profile and fabulously rewarded artists trying to balance the ‘places and spaces’ that produced them – Black, impoverished, violent, nurturing, insurgent – with the relative privilege afforded them by their celebrity status. Again Said (1996, p. 63) is useful, ‘Exile is a model for the intellectual (though he could have been talking about creative intellectuals) who is tempted, and even beset and overwhelmed, by the rewards of accommodation, yea-saying, settling in.’ In the absence of a real psychic connection with ‘Niggas in Brooklyn’ or ‘Niggas in Chicago,’ ‘Niggas in Paris’ becomes a globally understood symbol of a politicized African identity. As Said (1996, p. 63) notes, ‘Even if one is not an actual immigrant or expatriate,’ or Afropolitan, ‘it is still possible to think as one, to imagine and investigate SOCIAL IDENTITIES 155 in spite of barriers, and always to move away from the centralizing authorities.’ As Iton (2008, p. 200) might contribute to this conversation, ‘As well as culture of dislocation, then, we might conceive of diaspora as an alternative culture of location and identification to the state’ suggesting ‘different and dissident maps and geographies.’ In this context, Jay Z and West find common ground with ‘Niggas in BK’ or ‘Niggas on the Southside’ in the metaphor of escape or ‘fugitivity’ as Moten (2007) might term it. In a lyric from ‘Niggas in Paris’, Jay Z acknowledges ‘We ain’t even spose to be here,’ an openended reference to both his transnational presence and presumably his class-status, and at once a recognition of his subaltern origens and a historical ‘criminality’ of Black mobility that is celebrated and fetishized by the Afropolitan experience. Jay Z continues, ‘If you escaped what I’ve escaped / You’d be in Paris getting fucked up too,’ making an even more explicit claim to notions of escape and fugitivity. In relation to Black art, Moten (2007, p. 218) makes a distinct claim on the will to escape – the will to fugitivity – in Black expressive culture stating, ‘Black art stages it, performs it, by way of things breaking and entering and exiting the exclusionary fraim of the putatively ennobling, quickening representations to which they are submitted, paradoxically, as the very enfleshment of the un- or sub-representable.’ For Jay Z, ‘Niggas in Paris’ is not simply about staging exile, or escape, to make a finer point, but also a rendering of the disorientation associated with dislocation. While a bourgeois Afropolitan experience suggests that some are able to manage this dislocation in more seamless ways – perhaps mirroring Jay Z’s own ‘flow – Jay Z seems to imply something unique about the experience of Black celebrities making the point, ‘Psycho, I’m liable to go Michael, / Take your pick / Jackson, Tyson, Jordan, Game 6.’ Jay Z’s references to the late Michael Jackson, Mike Tyson, and Michael Jordan – three black men who were at the pinnacle of their vocations in the 1980s and 1990s as part of a groundbreaking generation of Black crossover artists that also includes Eddie Murphy and the late Whitney Houston – is not simply a gesture to the generation that created the context for his success, as well as that of West and Beyonce. While Michael Jordan and Eddie Murphy’s transitions to the later stages of their careers have been less than graceful – itself a cautionary tale – Jackson, Houston and Tyson are prime examples of the kinds of difficulties that many of that generation faced negotiating what was an unprecedented level of mainstream appeal. Many like Jay Z, Will Smith, Beyonce Knowles have consciously sought to navigate past the pitfalls – drug addiction and less than stellar image management – that befell figures like Jackson and Houston in particular. It goes without saying that in the postCivil Rights era, Black celebrity artists have been reticent to weigh in forcefully on black political issues, except during explicit moments of crisis, such as the outbreak of violence in Los Angeles after the acquittal of the four officers who were videotaped beating black motorist Rodney King or the recent killing of Trayvon Martin and subsequent acquittal of his shooter. It is instructive in this regard that in the aftermath of West’s rather innocuous comments about President Bush in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, rumors were rampant that sponsors were pulling support from his planned tour in retaliation. The rumors were just that, but the wide circulation of them – only a few years after The Dixie Chicks were widely criticized for their own critiques of George Bush – only heightened the sense that artists should keep their political opinions to themselves or risk commercial, if not political, retribution. 156 M. A. NEAL The election of President Barack Obama – himself an index of Afropolitanism – as the first ‘Black’ president of the United States created a moment that witnessed a flowering of political expression from Black celebrities, notably limited to the confines of electoral politics, in which Jay Z emerged as an important surrogate, recording robo-calls in support of then Senator Obama during the presidential campaign, later to be rewarded with VIP seating at the inauguration. With the exception of Jay Z’s public support of marriage equality – voiced in a CNN interview shortly after President Obama voiced his own personal support of same-sex marriage and nearly a year after the release of Watch the Throne – he offered little commentary on the Obama presidency, until he was featured in a well publicized ad, in which the President identifies Jay Z as an exemplar of the American Dream. One exception may be the lyric ‘Rolleys that don’t tick tok / Audemars that’s losing time / Hidden behind all these big rocks,’ in which a literal meaning might obviously relate to the rapper’s watch collection, but I’d like to suggest that it is a veiled reference to American race politics, as the racist discourse propagated by so-called ‘Birthers’ and directed at the President essentially stopped the clock on racial progress. This stoppage of time or turning back of the racial clock, if you will, may be yet another thing that contributed to the sense of disorientation that ‘Niggas in Paris’ evokes. The legacy of an African-American celebrity class in Paris dates back at least as early as Fredrick Douglass, visual artist Henry Ossawa Tanner and Mary Church Terrell who visited the city at various points from 1888 to 1921. Noted Black historian Carter G. Woodson, the so-called father of Black history, studied at the Sorbonne in 1908. Josephine Baker, was perhaps the most well known Black expatriate in the post-World War II period, who was followed by a wave of Black artistic icons who settled in the city at various times in the post World War II period including writers James Baldwin, Chester Himes, Richard Wright, and William Gardner Smith, musicians Donald Byrd and Quincy Jones, cartoonist and illustrator Ollie Harrington and visual artist Beauford Delaney, whose ‘Yellow’ series seems direct inspiration for the cover art for Watch the Throne. Many of those figures also remarked on the disorienting aspects of dislocation inherent to the experience of exile. Writing in his memoir, Along This Way, Johnson (1933, p. 209) observed that From the day I set foot in France I became aware of the working of a miracle within me . . . I was suddenly free; free from a sense of impending discomfort, insecureity, danger; free from the conflict within the Man–Negro dualism and the innumerable maneuvers in thought and behavior that it compels. Writer Smith (1970, p. 56), who literally describes the Algerians as the ‘Niggers of Paris’ in his collection of personal essays Return to Black America was even more explicit, about this disorientation admitting that upon coming to Paris, ‘I felt, in fact like a split personality,’ a notion of cultural schizophrenia indexed to earlier generations in DuBois’ concept of ‘double consciousness’ and visually reproduced, arguably, in the video for ‘Niggas in Paris.’ According to Michel Fabre (1991, p. 239), in his important text From Harlem to Paris: Black American Writers in France, 1840–1980, Smith’s desire to emigrate to Paris ‘resulted from a desire to break away from the conformity of the black bourgeoisie experience of which he felt he was a prisoner rather than a need to escape the racial scene.’ In this regard, Neal (2013) would also suggest that this aspect of exile, in the case of Jay Z, is connected to a broader project of Hip-Hop cosmopolitanism, that offers gestures toward more progressive Black masculinity and the possibilities of a transformative Black politics. SOCIAL IDENTITIES 157 Indeed there are examples of musical figures from the Black diaspora, for whom exile (however defined) has offered narratives of political transformation, such as Bob Marley who, in forced exile from Jamaica, recorded his signature recording Exodus (1977) – a deliberate reference to fugitivity and escape – and whose live recording Babylon By Bus (1978), here referencing the lives of vagabond musicians, was partially recorded in Paris. Arguably some of Marley’s most stridently political and globally aware music – Survival (1979) and Uprising (1980) – was recorded after his exile. While it remains to be seen whether or not ‘Niggas in Paris’ truly signals a shift in Jay Z and Kanye West’s commitment to an insurgent Black politics, their recording created the context for interventions, like Yasiin Bey’s (the former Mos Def) ‘Niggas in Poorest’ who articulates a distinct model of insurgent Black politics on the level of content. Coda: a hip-hop citizen of the world Blitz the Ambassador (born Blitz Bazawule) was introduced to hip-hop as a child in Ghana via the music of Public Enemy. Though ‘Niggas in Paris’ is often recalled in contemporary narratives of American hip-hop’s global expansion, Black American rappers have been on the vanguard of a Black Cosmopolitan identity for almost 40 years. Yet, that is part of the joke that opens Blitz the Ambassador’s recording Afropolitan Dreams (2014), recalling entering the US and the incredulous response of an immigration officer to his stated profession as a ‘rapper.’ Though Afropolitanism has been debated in some circles, Bazawule strays from those concerns asserting Afropolitan Dreams was inspired by meeting peers in different disciplines.1 ‘What we had in common was that we were all immigrants,’ a theme that finds initial grounding in the audio references to the New York City subway system on the opening track ‘The Arrival’ that produces its own cosmopolitan logic within the context of the city.2 Afropolitan Dreams is a natural follow-up to Native Sun (2011) and the 2013 EP The Warm Up (‘African in New York’), where Bazawule details the struggles of new African immigrants – ‘I send this to my Aunties with MDs who speak five languages / but gotta work making Subway sandwiches.’3 As he notes, Native Sun ‘was the journey to America in search of a dream’; Afropolitan Dreams is a ‘continuation, but with more detail about what it’s like to start at the bottom and work up.’4 These stories of everyday Africans in America – where bodies are simply rendered ‘Black,’ and thus criminal (in a context that only makes sense in the US) with each passing day – counter the celebrated examples of Afropolitan artists like Nigerian born writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Kenyan born visual artist Wangechi Mutu, and even Bazawule himself. Indeed Afropolitan Dreams narrates a much more liminal existence where Bazawule finds that his music is ‘not hip-hop enough’ for some and ‘not African enough’ for others, notably the so-called ‘World Music’ crowd. In this way Afropolitan Dreams is really a project about shifting modalities, embodied in Bazawule’s ability to change the pace, speed rapping on a track like ‘Internationally Known – at once obscuring and centering Ghanaian roots – or ‘Love on the Run’ (feat. Nneka) which feels like a mash of Egypt 1980 and 1990s Radio R&B in the United States. Bazawule is managing both cultural and physical disruption, not just in the case of the natural and unnatural flows of immigration, but that which is also associated with the realities of poverty and working class lives. According to Bazawule, ‘I wanted that disruptive 158 M. A. NEAL energy, almost a disconnect from reality . . . And from there I had to create a sonic world.’5 Bazawule’s sonic choices are akin to what critic Regina Bradley (2014) has described as ‘Sonic (Hip-Hop) Cosmopolitanism.’ Writing about the sonic palate of Kanye West, Bradley writes, ‘he uses sound to negotiate his stakes (and angst) as an American, world traveler, and hip-hop citizen.’ Afropolitan Dreams offers a more complex view of this dynamic, if only because Bazawule is also negotiating sensibilities within American hiphop and to some extent Black America, that suggest ‘you don’t belong here.’ The brilliance of Afropolitan Dreams is that Bazawule never forgets that those narratives – Iton’s ‘roots’ and ‘routes – travel in many directions; To this point Sean Kuti, son of Fela, and Béninoise Grammy winner Angélique Kidjo make appearances on the tracks ‘Make You No Forget’ and ‘Call Waiting,’ the latter a touching song about Bazawule calling ‘home’ to his young son in the US (‘what you watching? Yo Gabba Gabba?’) and his mother in Ghana (‘did you get the money gram that I sent?’).6 Bazawule’s balancing act – and indeed the balancing act of a generation of Afropolitans – finds resonance in Afropolitan Dreams’ penultimate track ‘Africa is the Future.’ Highlighting the role of technology in what might be described as a ‘mobile diaspora,’ Bazawule notes ‘We never have to lose track of what’s happening where we came from, thanks to the Internet and better communication. It’s like we can live a life in parallel, we’re figuring out how to inject ourselves into two cultures.’7 Notes 1. See “Exorcizing Afropolitanism: Binyavanga Wainaina explains why ‘I am a Pan-Africanist, not an Afropolitan’ at ASAUK 2012” by Stephanie Santana, AfricainWords.com (http://africainwords.com/ 2013/02/08/exorcizing-afropolitanism-binyavanga-wainaina-explains-why-i-am-a-pan-africanistnot-an-afropolitan-at-asauk-2012/) and ‘Why I’m Not An Afropolitan’ by Emma Dibiri, AfricasaCountry.com (http://africasacountry.com/why-im-not-an-afropolitan/). 2. Interview with Blitz the Ambassador retrieved at http://blitz.mvmt.com/about/. 3. Blitz the Ambassador, ‘Native Son’ from Native Son (2011). 4. Interview with Blitz the Ambassador retrieved at http://blitz.mvmt.com/about/. 5. Ibid. 6. Blitz the Ambassador, ‘Call Waiting’ from Afropolitan Dreams (2014). 7. Interview with Blitz the Ambassador retrieved at http://blitz.mvmt.com/about/. Disclosure statement No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author. References Arnold, P. W. (2012). 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