Cuba e la cultura hip hop. Linguaggi rivoluzionari

Abstract

In Cuba, in the 90s, in the midst of the economic and social crisis caused by the collapse of the Soviet Union, the hip hop cultural movement came to life. While respecting and recognizing the American matrix to which this culture owes its birth, the Cuban movement represents a revolutionary counterpart for what is the conception and representation of the aesthetics of this movement. Cuban hip hop remains anchored to the ethno-musical expressions that represent the folkloristic and anthropological heritage of the country, as well as, from a linguistic point of view, the Lucumí returns to light - under new blood: pidgin among Castilian (imported by the Spanish colonizers) and Yoruba, a language spoken by African slaves who were deported to the Caribbean. Lucumí as a language is a clear expression of a language that is the basis of a historical-identity claim of the exponents of the Cuban hip hop movement, who, taking advantage of the symbolic and phonetic aspect of the words in the Lucumí language, create literary paths and sounds that arouse through Lacanian processes a sort of sense of belonging and social claim within the population which, now, finds the phonemes of a liturgical-linguistic heritage of a popular nature within an artistic panorama that reaches levels of fame international. In addition to the use of an archaic and identity language such as Lucumí, Cuban hip hop presents itself as a revolutionary movement compared to what has happened since the 90s in those countries where hip hop has become a mere commercial product, for what is the drafting of the texts and languages ​​adopted: there is an absence of misogynistic messages, indeed, we find the exaltation of women and the representation of the daily problems that the contemporary female world is facing; unlike what happens in US and Italian rap lyrics, there is an absence of an ego-related language, and attention is focused on the community and the collectivity; finally, the words returns to its most visceral essence: the sound, or as Carmelo Bene would say, the phoné. This is why the language, Spanish or Lucumí, adapts to the rhythmic and onomatopoeic flow so that there is an almost total absence of idiosyncrasy between the written word and the spoken word.