In his densely-packed analysis of Japan's music scene, from earnest debates on the potential misappropriation of black music to dochaku, or the process of shaping global goods and ideas to suit local markets, Condry illustrates Japan's hip-hop phenomenon as a negotiable space of localization and hybridization, both of which feed off each other in the development of a unique sound wherein authenticity both is and isn't the point.
Indeed, Condry intimates that the vast body of rap in Japan can be viewed on one level as a signifier of marginalized youth and rebellion against both the adult and the sociocultural status quo, but also as a commercial force that participates in Japan's strategy of economic revitalization, powered by the very forces – trademarks, patents, copyrights, mainstream accessibility – that it purportedly disdains.
However, Condry's analysis is also careful to avoid rigid binarizations of cultural purity versus artistic validity, the 'Japanese' sound versus the 'American', cultural blending versus appropriation, corporatist "sell-outs" versus voices from the "streets." Instead, he calls attention to the dynamic performative space of genba as almost the reconstruction of an alternate realm – one that, while presenting the hip hop scene as a mirror image of the conflicts between culture and commerce in an era of globalization, is also a symbol in itself of the alignment between artistic expression and distinct modes of both subjectivity and collective identity.
By witnessing the interactions between the emcees and their fans, and understanding the linkage with nodal actors in the music industry at both the upper level of a hierarchy, and with horizontal competition between rival performers, it becomes clear that the definition of 'hip hop' in Japan proves as protean in its complexity as in the United States, and where the styles and sounds of both nations converge and diverge offers not just interesting insights about discursive historical and cultural parameters, but also their different means of negotiating through global flows and resisting, or yielding to, the agendas of varying power structures.
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