Roots & Routes: Hip Hop as a Global Language
Panel Discussion and Performance
Location: Stadtpalais, Konrad-Adenauer Str. 2, 70173 Stuttgart
Admission: Free
Language: English
Registration: Please register via anmeldung@daz.org
Hip Hop emerged from a very specific set of conditions — the Black and Latino communities of the South Bronx in the 1970s, shaped by poverty, displacement, and an extraordinary burst of collective creativity. Yet within decades it had traveled to every corner of the world, finding resonance with young people in contexts that looked nothing like its birthplace. This topic explores that paradox: how an art form so deeply rooted in one community’s particular experience became a genuinely global language — and what that journey reveals about how culture travels, transforms, and takes root in new soil. It also invites an honest reckoning with what gets lost or distorted along the way: questions of appropriation, authenticity, and who gets to claim ownership of a culture that has, in many ways, left home. In this context, it is also possible to examine what the Stuttgart Hip Hop scene looks like from an American perspective.
With: Corey James Gray, Next Level Site Manager; Kelli Forman, Next Level Dancer; BS, Next Level MC; Demetrius, Next Level Aerosol Artist; Frankie Leroux, Next Level Beatmaker; Fausan Abouharia, Underground Soul Cypher Board Chairman and Dancer; and a Next Level Academy participant.
In cooperation with: Next Level, Underground Soul Cypher e.V., and StadtPalais-Museum für Stuttgart
Kindly supported by: the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs, Meridian International Center, and the U.S. Consulate General in Frankfurt