English (United Kingdom)

https://curated-unify.zendy.io/wp-json/zendy-region/v1/featured_content/oa?rat=en

https://curated-unify.zendy.io/wp-json/zendy-region/v1/highlighted_journal/

Zendy Open

Presents the pdf analysis as premium feature

PDF Analysis

Insights

Presents the summarisation as premium feature

Summarisation

Presents the keyphrase highlighting as premium feature

Keyphrase Highlighting

Presents the zaia usage as premium feature

ZAIA

Zendy Tools

Zendy Plus

Presents the access of premium content as premium feature

Premium Content

This article argues for an attention to the DIY digital studio as a key site where aspiring hip hop MCs in the contemporary moment negotiate between their desire for individual success and their commitments to various forms of local belonging, not least which includes staying true to a hip hop ethos of collectivity. We follow Sonal, a b-boy and MC we worked with in a studio that we set up in Delhi, India in 2013 to work with aspiring MCs in the city’s scene. We trace his subsequent rise to fame in India to argue for an attention to the DIY studio as the material and metaphoric realization of the digital infrastructures of global capitalism. The studio manifests economic and social opportunities for young men like Sonal in Delhi, and, we suspect, for young people across the world who now have access to social media and inexpensive production hardware and software. Yet, in creating opportunities for individual economic and social uplift, the studio poses a threat to the ideal of a hip hop community that undergirds its possibility even as it opens up opportunities to enunciate commitments to other forms of belonging.

Ciphers, ‘hoods and digital DIY studios in India: Negotiating aspirational individuality and hip hop collectivity