‘Alpenrap’ / Alpine Rap: Contested imaginaries of the alps in contemporary hip hop music videos

Description

The alps, often considered to be ‘the European mountains,’ are long-since serving as a paradigmatic image for the sublime of wilderness, and at the same time also as a visual cliché in touristic imaginations of nature and leisure—imaginaries that are increasingly coming under threat by climate change and land consumption.

In the last couple of years, the alps figured as music video space in a range of hip hop tracks, the most prominent being Tyler The Creator’s Hot Winds Blow and AntsLive’s Number One Candidate. Our presentation will focus on this ‘visual genre’ of alpine hip hop music videos, ‘Alpenrap’/AlpineRap.

While the term ‘Alpenrap’ was coined by Austrian group EAV for a song parody bringing together elements of rap and yodelling in the early 1980s, the more recent takes on the alps as a music video space explore both nostalgic tourist gazes as well as (alternative and alienated) views on home and belonging.

Within these diverse views, the alps figure as a projective space reflecting on a idea of Europeanness and imaginaries of ‘old wealth’ (e.g. Tyler the Creator) as well as a fragile and contested lifeworld deeply entangled with the challenges of the Anthropocene (PastorX). Our presentation situates these music videos within a genealogy of ‘alpine gazes’ (Bernhard Tschofen) and explores their aesthetic and political negotiations of alpine imaginaries.

Period	13 Oct 2023
Event title	Reframing Music Video Research
Event type	Conference
Location	Turku, FinlandShow on map
Degree of Recognition	International