"I think if you truly identify with hiphop, then its probably in you. I do think hiphop is black music, however, like all US black music that has come out, there have always been our paler brethren accepting it as their own, whether for better or for worse. And for those who want to set up a hierarchy of oppression...ie...class trumps race...it's never a good idea, because things just dont quite work that way."


Maybe not in the US- your society is way too strict in the black/white divisions, from what i can tell- but for the majority of the rest of the world, there is, more often than not, unity in oppression AS WELL AS race.

And of course hiphop is a creation of black america. Nobody can deny that. But if you have given something this powerful to the world, ya gotta understand that the rest of the world wants to create their interpretations, for themselves, through (and about) their own society and culture. And if the culture they are living in is more racially tolerant than American culture, then race struggles won't have so much emphasis in their artistic expression for the simple fact that their race- them being who they are- doesn't have so much emphasis in their everyday life.

Good points, though. I was reading "Crosstown traffic", a biography of Hendrix, last night. The author (forget his name) raised some thought-provoking points about the "borrowing" of black music, from the blues to rock'n'roll. Being a Polish boy raised amongst Maori and fed on reggae and hip-hop since i was little (the first record I bought was the 'Raising Hell' 7") I find myself throwing these concepts around in my head...

I'm sure that if my country actually had, like America has, a "black part of town", or a history of slavery as opposed to a (mostly) clean history of unity and co-operation between different races, or a deeply-ingrained class structure based primarily on race, then these are questions that I would have to think long and hard about, to work out where I stand.
As it is, though, the culture I live in doesn't require me to act a certain way or like a certain type of music because of who I am, and I am not confronted for being a "white boy who thinks he's black" just because I like hip-hop... I'm just another person.

In Aotearoa, we can call everyone 'bro' or 'sis'.

(cue Nelson from the Simpsons: HA-ha)