Category: Новини

The word “manga” is used to describe a wide variety of comic books and graphic novels originally produced in Japan. It has long been associated with Asian culture. But new generations of Asian Americans are identifying more with American comic books. Genia Dulot has the report. (Camera: Genia Dulot)
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“Barbie” has legs. Director Greta Gerwig ‘s film phenomenon remained a runaway No. 1 at the box office in its fourth week, bringing in $33.7 million, according to studio estimates Sunday.

The Margot Robbie-led and produced film from Warner Bros., still in 4,137 theaters, refused to drop off as most box-office toppers have this year, surpassing $500 million in North America overall a week after it crossed the $1 billion mark globally — a record for a female director.

The second half of the “Barbenheimer” duo, “Oppenheimer,” returned to the No. 2 spot in its own fourth week after a week at No. 3 overall. The Christopher Nolan-directed film from Universal Pictures brought in $18.8 million from 3,761 locations for an overall domestic total of $264.3 million.

The top pair had thin competition. The week’s only major wide release, Universal’s “The Last Voyage of the Demeter,” finished fifth with a $6.5 million opening weekend.

“Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem,” in its second week, earned $15.6 million domestically for third place, and the Jason Statham shark sequel, “Meg 2: The Trench,” brought in $12.7 million, dropping from second to fifth in its second week in theaters.

“Barbie” is poised to become 2023’s top film. Its $526.3 million domestic total and $1.18 billion global bankroll currently sits second behind “The Super Mario Bros. Movie,” which earned $574.2 million North America, and $1.358 billion globally in the spring. It’s also the second-highest grossing film in the history of “Warner Bros.,” behind only 2011’s “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2.”

The sustained performance of the Mattel movie continues to flip the script on what had been a weak year in theaters, with major sequels underperforming including “Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny” and “Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part I,” which remained in the top 10 this week with $4.7 million.

“‘Barbie’ is as hot a commodity as it was in its first week. It’s just ensconced at the No. 1 spot, and I don’t know if it’s going anywhere soon,” said Paul Dergarabedian, senior media analyst for Comscore. “And Oppenheimer right there with it. They’re just drafting off each other in this box office NASCAR race.”

The midsummer “Barbenheimer” put the industry-wide summer total ahead of 2022. It was lagging behind just a month ago.

“If you think of what ‘Barbie’ and ‘Oppenheimer’ together — just those two movies — have contributed in these weekends at the box office, it’s really a staggering number,” Dergarabedian said.

All movies combined this summer have earned $3.63 billion in North America. With significant releases remaining in August, including DC Comics’ “Blue Beetle,” the video game adaptation “Gran Turismo,” and the Denzel Washington sequel “The Equalizer 3,” the box office has a chance of reaching the $4 billion that was considered a domestic benchmark for a strong summer before the pandemic.

Estimated ticket sales for Friday through Sunday at U.S. and Canadian theaters, according to Comscore. Final domestic figures will be released Monday.

1. “Barbie,” $33.7 million.

2. “Oppenheimer,” $18.8 million.

3. “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem,” $15.6 million.

4. “Meg 2: The Trench,” $12.7 million.

5. “The Last Voyage of the Demeter,” $6.5 million.

6. “Haunted Mansion,” $5.6 million.

7. “Talk to Me,” $5.1 million.

8. “Sound of Freedom,” $4.8 million.

9. “Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part I,” $4.7 million.

10. “Jailer,” 2.6 million.
    …

For a vast number of book writers, artificial intelligence is a threat to their livelihood and the very idea of creativity. More than 10,000 of them endorsed an open letter from the Authors Guild this summer, urging AI companies not to use copyrighted work without permission or compensation.

At the same time, AI is a story to tell, and no longer just science fiction.

As present in the imagination as politics, the pandemic, or climate change, AI has become part of the narrative for a growing number of novelists and short story writers who only need to follow the news to imagine a world upended.

“I’m frightened by artificial intelligence, but also fascinated by it. There’s a hope for divine understanding, for the accumulation of all knowledge, but at the same time there’s an inherent terror in being replaced by non-human intelligence,” said Helen Phillips, whose upcoming novel “Hum” tells of a wife and mother who loses her job to AI.

“We’ve been seeing more and more about AI in book proposals,” said Ryan Doherty, vice president and editorial director at Celadon Books, which recently signed Fred Lunzker’s novel “Sike,” featuring an AI psychiatrist.

“It’s the zeitgeist right now. And whatever is in the cultural zeitgeist seeps into fiction,” Doherty said. 

Other AI-themed novels expected in the next two years include Sean Michaels’ “Do You Remember Being Born?” — in which a poet agrees to collaborate with an AI poetry company; Bryan Van Dyke’s “In Our Likeness,” about a bureaucrat and a fact-checking program with the power to change facts; and A.E. Osworth’s “Awakened,” about a gay witch and her titanic clash with AI.

Crime writer Jeffrey Diger, known for his thrillers set in contemporary Greece, is working on a novel touching upon AI and the metaverse, the outgrowth of being “continually on the lookout for what’s percolating on the edge of societal change,” he said.

Authors are invoking AI to address the most human questions.

In Sierra Greer’s “Annie Bot,” the title name is an AI mate designed for a human male. For Greer, the novel was a way to explore her character’s “urgent desire to please,” adding that a robot girlfriend enabled her “to explore desire, respect, and longing in ways that felt very new and strange to me.”

Amy Shearn’s “Animal Instinct” has its origins in the pandemic and in her personal life; she was recently divorced and had begun using dating apps.

“It’s so weird how, with apps, you start to feel as if you’re going person-shopping,” she said. “And I thought, wouldn’t it be great if you could really pick and choose the best parts of all these people you encounter and sort of cobble them together to make your ideal person?”

“Of course,” she added, “I don’t think anyone actually knows what their ideal person is, because so much of what draws us to mates is the unexpected, the ways in which people surprise us. That said, it seemed like an interesting premise for a novel.”

Some authors aren’t just writing about AI, but openly working with it.

Earlier this year, journalist Stephen Marche used AI to write the novella “Death of An Author,” for which he drew upon everyone from Raymond Chandler to Haruki Murakami. Screenwriter and humorist Simon Rich collaborated with Brent Katz and Josh Morgenthau for “I Am Code,” a thriller in verse that came out this month and was generated by the AI program “code-davinci-002.” (Filmmaker Werner Herzog reads the audiobook edition). 

Osworth, who is trans, wanted to address comments by “Harry Potter” author J.K. Rowling that have offended many in the trans community, and to wrest from her the power of magic. At the same time, they worried the fictional AI in their book sounded too human, and decided AI should speak for AI.

Osworth devised a crude program, based on the writings of Machiavelli among others, that would turn out a more mechanical kind of voice.

“I like to say that CHATgpt is a Ferrari, while what I came up with is a skateboard with one square wheel. But I was much more interested in the skateboard with one square wheel,” they said.

Michaels centers his new novel on a poet named Marian, in homage to poet Marianne Moore, and an AI program called Charlotte. He said the novel is about parenthood, labor, community, and “this technology’s implications for art, language and our sense of identity.”

Believing the spirit of “Do You Remember Being Born?” called for the presence of actual AI text, he devised a program that would generate prose and poetry, and uses an alternate format in the novel so readers know when he’s using AI.

In one passage, Marian is reviewing some of her collaboration with Charlotte.

“The preceding day’s work was a collection of glass cathedrals. I reread it with alarm. Turns of phrase I had mistaken for beautiful, which I now found unintelligible,” Michaels writes. “Charlotte had simply surprised me: I would propose a line, a portion of a line, and what the system spat back upended my expectations. I had been seduced by this surprise.”

And now AI speaks: “I had mistaken a fit of algorithmic exuberance for the truth.”
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What happens when you take Quechua, the most widely spoken Indigenous language in the Americas, and fuse it with K-pop, the global musical sensation with roots in South Korea? 

Ask Lenin Tamayo, who has become a social media phenomenon with “Q-pop” and this week released his first digital album. 

Tamayo grew up listening to his mother, a Peruvian folk artist who sings in Spanish and Quechua, a language shared by 10 million speakers in countries including Peru, Ecuador, Colombia, Brazil, Bolivia, Argentina and Chile. As a teenager, K-pop became his passion and helped him find a group of like-minded female classmates who helped fight the bullying he says he faced at school for his Indigenous looks. 

Now a musician, Tamayo, 23, has fused those chapters, mixing Spanish and Quechua lyrics with K-pop beats to create Q-pop (in which the “Q” stands for “Quechua”). He’s amassed more than 4.4 million likes on his TikTok account and released five digital singles online. 

Making music in his native language “helps embrace the roots but, without being oblivious to modernity and globalization,” he told The Associated Press in a recent interview. 

For Tamayo, the K-pop aesthetic helped influence a personal style where he mixes his own choreography and a way of acting that helps reinforce a key message: Love and freedom. 

“Love to unite people and the freedom to be oneself, because it’s all about embracing existence and seeking a full, full, real life, with depth,” he said. 

Mixing passions

After completing his psychology studies at the Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos, Tamayo could not picture himself practicing in that profession. He wanted to be a singer, and he wanted his music to mix his passions. 

“Why can’t I transfer this K-pop experience to Andean music?” Tamayo asked while practicing dance steps at his home in a Lima suburb. 

Tamayo is the only child of Yolanda Pinares, a contemporary Andean music singer who taught him the importance of showing his Quechua identity in a country where racism “is covered up,” he said. When he was a child, he says he was bullied at school for being shy and for Indigenous complexion, eyes, hair, and cheekbones. 

These traits, he believes, are somewhat similar between Andean youths and South Korean singers, something that has helped K-pop become popular even in remote villages and on the outskirts of Lima, where millions of people with Indigenous roots live. 

“Art is a vehicle to move consciences and generate change,” Tamayo said. 

A new release

This week, Tamayo released “Amaru,” his debut album in digital format. “Amaru” means snake in Quechua, a word that is tied to the history, lyrics, music, mythology of the Incas and modern sounds. 

In a preview video for “Amaru,” policemen are seen beating protesters carrying a Peruvian flag and then chasing a woman who escapes through an Andean forest. The scene evokes the recent citizen protests demanding the resignation of President Dina Boluarte that have left 67 dead, the majority of whom are of Indigenous origin. 

Like thousands of Peruvians, Tamayo participated in the protests at the beginning of the year in the capital. 

“It’s very important to make this type of music because it allows you to generate change and generate hope in young people,” he said. 
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There will be a first-time winner of the Women’s World Cup this year, and maybe, just maybe, it will be host country Australia.

The Matildas, serving as co-hosts of the tournament with New Zealand, became the first home team since the United States in 1999 to win a quarterfinal in nine Women’s World Cups. Australia has reached its first semifinal in team history and faces England on Wednesday for a chance to play for the title.

“I genuinely really believe that this team can do great history in so many ways,” Australia coach Tony Gustavsson said, “not just winning football games, but the way that they can inspire the next generation, how they can unite the nation, how they can leave a legacy that is much bigger that football.”

England, the European champion, advanced with a 2-1 victory over upstart Colombia. England also reached the semifinals in 2015 and 2019, only to finish third and fourth and never reach the Women’s World Cup final.

But before the Australia and England meet, first-time semifinalist Spain takes on powerhouse Sweden on Tuesday in Auckland.

Aside from a 4-0 loss to Japan in group play, Spain has been a force throughout the tournament. It even tuned out an earthquake roughly an hour before its quarterfinal win over 2019 runner-up Netherlands.

The earthquake on Friday in New Zealand’s capital of Wellington measured 5.6 on the Richter scale and created minor shaking in and around the stadium.

“We were so concentrated on the game that we didn’t feel it, although we felt some shakes at the hotel the day before,” Spain coach Jorge Vilda said. “The victory of Spain was the earthquake.”

Sweden, meanwhile, is the highest ranked team still in the tournament at second in the world, according to FIFA. The Swedes got into the semifinals by knocking off previously undefeated Japan, the 2011 winners and last remaining champions in the tournament after so many early eliminations of the best teams in women’s soccer.

“I think we have the team to go all the way,” left back Jonna Andersson said, “and now we are one step closer.”

Australia

The Matildas advanced after a tense — and electric — penalty shootout 7-6 over France in front of a sold-out crowd in Brisbane, Australia.

It took 20 penalties to decide the winner in the longest shootout in the history of the tournament. It was the game of a lifetime for goalkeeper Mackenzie Arnold, who stepped up to take a penalty with the score at 3-3 but hit the post.

Australia, at 12th in the world, is the lowest-ranked team remaining in the tournament.

Sam Kerr, the injured superstar who missed all of group play, came off the bench against France but ended up playing nearly a full game when the match went to extra time. Kerr converted her penalty kick. And the Australians have also been boosted by the play of 20-year-old Mary Fowler, who has stepped in to fill Kerr’s void in this tournament.

England

England very much wants to add a World Cup title to last year’s European championship, and coach Sarina Wiegman understands the Lionesses will have their hands full in a semifinal that will be a home game for Australia.

Wiegman’s only loss as England manager in 37 matches was a 2-0 loss to Australia in a friendly four months ago. Now in the semifinals for a third consecutive World Cup, England must beat the home team to advance to its first final.

“It’s going to be really big,” Wiegman said of the semifinal. “It’s probably going to be bigger than I imagined now. I’ll talk to my players and staff and see what that rivalry is. We’ve had such a warm welcome and we’ve really enjoyed our time here in Australia. I really like the people here but that doesn’t mean there’s no rivalry. So we’ll see that Wednesday.”

Sweden

Sweden’s current team has been labeled the “Golden Generation” of its nation’s history of women’s soccer, but the Swedes have yet to live up to that billing on an international stage.

Now it has knocked off both the United States and Japan to reach the semifinals and a Tuesday match against Spain in Auckland.

A highlight of each Sweden win has been the playing of Swedish band Abba’s songs in the stadiums after the victories, and striker Kosovare Asllani has a request for Tuesday: “I love Lay Your Love on Me,” she said.

“It’s so nice when you hear the Abba songs after the game. You can’t help but smile,” she said. “I’m just very proud of the team performance but we’re not satisfied here. Obviously want to go all the way.”

Spain

Spain was the first team to secure a spot in the semifinals with a 2-1 win over 2019 runner-up Netherlands in extra time of the quarterfinals.

Just making it to the quarterfinals was a boost for Spain, ranked seventh in the world, but never advanced to the quarterfinals in its two previous World Cup appearances. In their third tournament, La Roja have been fantastic.

Spain blew through its first two games of group play before suffering a humiliating 4-0 loss to Japan in the finale. Vilda made a batch of lineup changes for the knockout round, which led to a 5-1 win over Switzerland, and then the quarterfinal upset over the Dutch.

“We’ve reached somewhere we’ve never reached before, and done it playing a good game as well, with a team that is convinced that we can go even further,” Vilda said. “The rival that we meet and face in the semifinals, it will be one of the best teams in the world.”

Spain and Sweden have never met in the World Cup — Spain didn’t even qualify for the first six tournaments — but played to a 1-1 draw last October in a friendly in Cordoba, Spain.
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Education skills and employability are the pathway to a better life — that is the key takeaway expressed by 40% of young people across all age groups who participated in a survey to identify the hopes and aspirations of youth and learn what they need to enhance their prospects for a good, sustainable future.

In a bid to make their voices heard by decision-makers around the world, more than 700,000 children and adolescents between the ages of 10 and 24 participated in the project that coincides with this year’s observance of International Youth Day.

The Partnership for Maternal, Newborn and Child Health, or PMNCH, is a global alliance for the health and well-being of women, children and adolescents, hosted by the World Health Organization. In an effort to work toward improvements, PMNCH shared the preliminary findings of the largest survey into what young people want for their well-being.

The project aims to collect the voices of at least 1 million young people by October, when PMNCH will convene a global forum for adolescents at which the results of this mammoth undertaking will be unveiled.

“To date, there has not been enough knowledge, there has not been enough accountability and evidence around adolescent well-being,” said Helga Fogstad, PMNCH executive director. “This is our effort, together with this 1 million young people, intended to rectify.”

Young people were asked to express their views on a multitude of issues, including climate change, good health, optimum nutrition, connectedness, positive values, contributions to society, safety and a supportive environment.

“Adolescents and young people are responding to a fragile world of high living costs, pandemic disruptions, climate crises” and the rising complexities of the world “in which they live,” said David Imbago, a board member of PMNCH.

“Young people in low- and middle-income countries have been among the most affected of our increasingly fragile world, and there is no way to deny that,” he said. “For example, there are still consequences from the pandemic to school education, household food insecurity and income scarcity.”

UNICEF reports that more than 616 million students remain affected by full or partial school closures during the COVID-19 pandemic. In low- and middle-income countries, it says, school closures “have left up to 70% of 10-year-olds unable to read or understand a simple text.”

More than two-thirds of respondents, 68.8%, are from the Africa region, followed by the Southeast Asia region at 27.5%, and a small minority from Latin America. Most respondents come from India. Uganda is the second-largest contributing country, followed by Indonesia and Zambia.

The survey uses digital technology and face-to-face outreach through teams of trained youth mobilizers.

“I was excited to be a part of this campaign that was asking what we young people want for our well-being and try to be heard by policymakers and government and taking action on them,” said Deep Shikha, a young mobilizer from India.

Shikha said she and her mobilizing team gathered information from chatbots online, visited schools and colleges, and interviewed people in local communities.

“We discussed with young people about what they want, what challenges they face and what they felt was ignored by officers and policymakers,” she said.

Shikha said most of the young people wanted the opportunity to get a higher education but were frustrated by a lack of resources. She said girls were discouraged from getting an education.

“Their parents do not want to send their child to another city for their higher education because they are concerned about their safety,” she said. “And, of course, there are girls who do not get an education because of lack of financial support.”

The survey indicated that addressing the concerns of adolescent girls worldwide was more challenging than addressing adolescent boys’ concerns about health, education, safety, security and well-being.

“It is not a matter of perception,” board member Imbago said. “It is reality.”

PMNCH expects the upcoming Global Forum for Adolescents to energize the 1.8 Billion Young People for Change campaign. The campaign was launched last year to help young people reach their full potential by influencing governments to change current policies and investments that fail to meet their needs.

“The voices of young people and adolescents need to be amplified, and the governments’ budgets and plans need to be more explicit about what young people want,” said Fogstad, the PMNCH executive director.

“This is a population and a generation that has not got enough attention because the evidence was missing,” she said, adding that the evidence produced by the survey results puts an end to that argument.

She said the movement of young people has been converted into a global movement “where young people are now increasingly taking the lead. And that is how it should be.”
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It was born in the break, all those decades ago — that moment when a song’s vocals dropped, instruments quieted down and the beat took the stage. It was then that hip-hop came into the world, taking the moment and reinventing it. Something new, coming out of something familiar.

At the hands of the DJs playing the albums, that break moment became something more: a composition in itself, repeated in an endless loop, back and forth between the turntables. The MCs got in on it, speaking their own clever rhymes and wordplay over it. So did the dancers, the b-boys and b-girls who hit the floor to breakdance. It took on its own visual style, with graffiti artists bringing it to the streets and subways of New York City.

It didn’t stay there, of course. A musical form, a culture, with reinvention as its very DNA would never, could never. Hip-hop spread, from the parties to the parks, through New York City’s boroughs and then the region, around the country and the world.

And at each step: change, adaptation, as new, different voices came in and made it their own, in sound, in lyric, in purpose, in style. Its foundations steeped in the Black communities where it first made itself known and also spreading out and expanding, like ripples in water, until there’s no corner of the world that hasn’t been touched by it.

Not only being reinvented, but reinventing. Art, culture, fashion, community, social justice, politics, sports, business: Hip-hop has impacted them all, transforming even as it has been transformed.

In hip-hop, “when someone does it, then that’s how it’s done. When someone does something different, then that’s a new way,” said Babatunde Akinboboye, a Nigerian-American opera singer and longtime hip-hop fan in Los Angeles who creates content on social media using both musical styles.

Hip-hop “connects to what is true. And what is true, lasts.”

How it all began

Those looking for a hip-hop starting point have landed on one, turning this year into a 50th-birthday celebration. Aug. 11, 1973, was the date a young Clive Campbell, known as DJ Kool Herc around his Bronx stomping grounds, deejayed a back-to-school party for his younger sister in the community room of an apartment building on Sedgwick Avenue.

Campbell, who was born and spent his early years in Jamaica before his family moved to the Bronx, was still a teen himself at that time, just 18, when he began extending the musical breaks of the records he was playing to create a different kind of dancing opportunity. He’d started speaking over the beat, reminiscent of the “toasting” style heard in Jamaica.

It wasn’t long before the style could be heard all over the city — and began to spread around the New York City metro region.

Among those who started to hear about it were some young men across the river in Englewood, New Jersey, who started making up rhymes to go along with the beats. In 1979, they auditioned as rappers for Sylvia Robinson, a singer-turned-music producer who co-founded Sugar Hill Records.

As the Sugarhill Gang, they put out “Rapper’s Delight” and introduced the country to a record that would reach as high as 36 on Billboard’s Top 100 chart list and even make it to No. 1 in some European countries.

“Now what you hear is not a test: I’m rappin’ to the beat/And me, the groove, and my friends are gonna try to move your feet,” Michael “Wonder Mike” Wright said in one of the song’s stanzas.

Wright said he had no doubt the song — and, by extension, hip-hop — was “going to be big.”

“I knew it was going to blow up and play all over the world because it was a new genre of music,” he told The Associated Press. “You had classical jazz, bebop, rock, pop, and here comes a new form of music that didn’t exist.”

And it was one based in self-expression, said Guy “Master Gee” O’Brien. “If you couldn’t sing or you couldn’t play an instrument, you could recite poetry and speak your mind. And so it became accessible to the everyman.”

And everywomen, too. Female voices took their chances on the microphone and dance floors as well, artists like Roxanne Shante, a native of New York City’s Queens borough who was only 14 years old in 1984. That was the year she became one of the first female MCs, those rhyming over the beat, to gain a wider audience — and was part of what was likely the first well-known instance of rappers using their song tracks to take sonic shots at other rappers, in a back-and-forth song battle known as the Roxanne Wars.

“When I look at my female rappers of today, I see hope and inspiration,” Shante said. “When you look at some of your female rappers today and you see the businesses that they own and the barriers that they were able to break it down, it’s amazing to me and it’s an honor for me to even be a part of that from the beginning.”

Plenty of other women have joined her over the intervening decades, from Queen Latifah to Lil’ Kim to Nicki Minaj to Megan Thee Stallion and more, speaking on their experiences as women in hip-hop and the larger world. That doesn’t even begin to touch the list of women rappers hailing from other countries.

They’re women like Tkay Maidza, born in Zimbabwe and raised in Australia, a songwriter and rapper in the early part of her career. She’s thrilled with the diverse female company she’s keeping in hip-hop, and with the variety of subjects they’re talking about.

“There’s so many different pockets … so many ways to exist,” she said. “It’s not about what other people have done. … You can always recreate the blueprint.”

Speaking out about injustice

The emphasis on self-expression has also meant that over the years, hip-hop has been used as a medium for just about everything.

Want to talk about a party or how awesome and rich you are? Go for it. A cute guy or beautiful girl catch your eye? Say it in a verse. Looking to take that sound coming out of New York City and adapt it to a West Coast vibe, or a Chicago beat, a New Orleans groove, or an Atlanta rhythm, or these days, sounds in Egypt, India, Australia, Nigeria? It’s all you, and it’s all hip-hop. (Now whether anyone listening thought it was actually any good? That was a different story.)

Mainstream America hasn’t always been ready for it. The sexually explicit content from Miami’s 2 Live Crew made their 1989 album “As Nasty As They Want To Be” the subject of a legal battle over obscenity and freedom of expression; a later album, “Banned in the USA,” became the first to get an official record industry label about explicit content.

Coming from America’s Black communities, that has also meant hip-hop has been a tool to speak out against injustice, like in 1982 when Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five told the world in “The Message” that the stresses of poverty in their city neighborhoods made it feel “like a jungle sometimes/It makes me wonder how I keep from goin’ under.”

Other figures like Common and Kendrick Lamar have also turned to a conscious lyricism in their hip-hop, with perhaps none better known than Public Enemy, whose “Fight the Power” became an anthem when it was created for filmmaker Spike Lee’s 1989 classic “Do the Right Thing,” which chronicled racial tension in a Brooklyn neighborhood.

Some in hip-hop pulled no punches, using the art form and the culture as a no-holds-barred way of showcasing the troubles of their lives. Often those messages have been met with fear or disdain in the mainstream. When N.W.A. came “Straight Outta Compton” in 1988 with loud, brash tales of police abuse and gang life, radio stations recoiled.

Hip-hop (mainly that done by Black artists) and law enforcement have had a contentious relationship over the years, each eyeing the other with suspicion. There’s been cause for some of it. In some forms of hip-hop, the ties between rappers and criminal figures were real, and the violence that spiraled out, as in high-profile deaths like that of Tupac Shakur in 1996 and the Notorious B.I.G. in 1997, sometimes got very bloody. But in a country where Black people are often looked at with suspicion by authority, there have also been plenty of stereotypes about hip-hop and criminality.

As hip-hop spread over the years, a host of voices have used it to speak out on the issues that are dear to them. Look at Bobby Sanchez, a Peruvian-American transgender, two-spirit poet and rapper who has released a song in Quechua, the language of the Wari people that her father came from. “Quechua 101 Land Back Please” references the killing of Indigenous peoples and calls for land restoration.

“I think it’s very special and cool when artists use it to reflect society because it makes it bigger than just them,” Sanchez said. “To me, it’s always political, really, no matter what you’re talking about, because hip-hop, in a way, is a form of resistance.”

A worldwide phenomenon

Yes, it’s an American creation. And yes, it’s still heavily influenced by what’s happening in the United States. But hip-hop has found homes all over the planet, turned to by people in every community under the sun to express what matters to them.

When hip-hop first started being absorbed outside of the United States, it was often with a mimicking of American styles and messages, said P. Khalil Saucier, who has studied the spread of hip-hop across the countries of Africa.

That’s not the case these days. Homegrown hip-hop can be found everywhere, a prime example of the genre’s penchant for staying relevant and vital by being reinvented by the people doing it.

“The culture as a whole has kind of really rooted itself because it’s been able to now transform itself from simply an importation, if you will, to now really being local in its multiple manifestations, regardless of what country you’re looking at,” said Saucier, a professor of critical Black studies at Bucknell University in Pennsylvania.

That’s to everyone’s benefit, said Rishma Dhaliwal, founder of London’s I Am Hip-Hop magazine.

“Hip-hop is … allowing you in someone’s world. It’s allowing you into someone’s struggles,” she said. “It’s a big microphone to say, `Well, the streets say this is what is going on here and this is what you might not know about us. This is how we feel, and this is who we are.’ ”

The impact hasn’t just been in one direction. Hip-hop hasn’t just been changed; it has made change. It has gone into other spaces and made them different. It strutted through the fashion world as it brought its own sensibility to streetwear. It has revitalized companies; just ask Timberland what sales were like before its workboots became de rigueur hip-hop wear.

Or look at perhaps the perfect example: “Hamilton,” Lin Manuel Miranda’s groundbreaking musical about a distant white historical figure that came to life in the rhythms of its hip-hop soundtrack, bringing a different energy and audience to the theater world.

Hip-hop “has done a very good job at making culture more accessible. It has broken into spaces that we’re traditionally not allowed to break into,” Dhaliwal said.

For Usha Jey, freestyling hip-hop was the perfect thing to mix with the classical, formal South Asian dance style of Bharatnatyam. The 26-year-old choreographer, born in France to Tamil immigrant parents, created a series of social media videos last year showing the two styles interacting with each other. It was her training in hip-hop that gave her the confidence and spirit to do something different.

Hip-hop culture “pushes you to be you,” Jey said. “I feel like in the pursuit of finding yourself, hip-hop helps me because that culture says, you’ve got to be you.”

Hip-hop is, simply, “a magical art form,” said Nile Rodgers, legendary musician, composer and record producer. He would know. It was his song “Good Times,” with the band Chic, that was recreated to form the basis for “Rapper’s Delight” all those years ago.

“The impact that it’s had on the world, it really can’t be quantified,” Rodgers said. “You can find someone in a village that you’ve never been to, a country that you’ve never been to, and all of a sudden you hear its own local hip-hop. And you don’t even know who these people are, but they’ve adopted it and have made it their own.”
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Lebanon is considering banning the “Barbie” movie because the culture minister said the film “promotes homosexuality” and contradicts religious values, in a move that some experts say underscores the poor state of free speech and gay rights in the country and throughout the Middle East. 

Mohammad Mortada, Lebanon’s culture minister, moved to ban “Barbie” Wednesday, saying it was discovered to “promote homosexuality and sexual transformation” and “contradicts values of faith and morality” by disparaging the significance of the family unit.

Kuwait soon followed suit, with the state news agency, KUNA, reporting Thursday that the government had banned “Barbie” and the supernatural horror film “Talk to Me” in order to protect “public ethics and social traditions.”

Experts on human rights and free speech in Lebanon said the potential “Barbie” ban is a symptom of Beirut’s broader efforts to degrade free expression and LGBTQ rights in the country.

“It’s ridiculous and deadly serious at the same time,” said Justin Shilad, an expert on press freedom in the Middle East for the advocacy group PEN America.

Shilad said it may seem almost comical for Lebanon to consider banning Barbie, which brings to life the iconic child’s doll and follows her on her journey of self-discovery after an identity crisis. But, he said, it comes within the context of government officials increasingly restricting free speech, targeting critical journalists and amplifying anti-LGBTQ rhetoric.

“It speaks to this increasing willingness of all different power centers in Lebanon to crack down on dissent, crack down on those who are different, to increasingly ostracize an already marginalized community as part of this overall move to increasingly crack down on free expression,” Shilad told VOA from New York.

Based on Mortada’s move, Interior Minister Bassam Mawlawi then asked the general security’s censorship committee — which falls under the interior ministry and is usually responsible for censorship decisions — to review the film and give its recommendation.

Meanwhile in Kuwait, Undersecretary of the Ministry for Press and Publication Lafy Al-Subei’e said both “Barbie” and “Talk to Me” were banned because they “promulgate ideas and beliefs that are alien to Kuwaiti society and public order.”

The bans in Lebanon and Kuwait underscore the prevalence of censorship throughout the region as well, according to Shilad.

“It also speaks to a larger trend in Lebanon, where free expression and the free exchange of ideas is increasingly becoming contested,” Shilad said. “This is also indicative of a larger regionwide phenomenon.”

Shilad believes Kuwait’s reasoning about banning the films was intentionally vague.

“It’s this very vague nod to stability, or moral or cultural values,” Shilad said. “And the reason why it’s so vague and so ill-defined is because under that umbrella, you can crack down on a broad range of speech and suppress a broad range of expression.”

Kuwait’s Washington embassy did not reply to VOA’s email requesting comment.

In response to a request for comment, Lebanon’s Washington embassy directed VOA to the country’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Emigrants, which did not reply to VOA’s email requesting comment.

This isn’t the first time the film has proven surprisingly controversial on the global stage. In early July, the Vietnamese government banned the film due to its perceived inclusion of Beijing’s controversial nine-dash line in a map. 

Lebanon was once held up as a relatively safe haven for the LGBTQ community in the Middle East. In 2017, it became the first Arab country to host a gay pride week.

In 2018, a court ruled that same-sex conduct is not illegal, but since that decision, the situation for the country’s LGBTQ community has grown more and more worrisome. For example, last year, Lebanon’s Interior Ministry banned any events aimed at “promoting sexual perversion,” referencing gatherings of LGBTQ people.

“Politicians are increasingly targeting vulnerable populations, such as LGBT[Q] people in Lebanon,” said Ramzi Kaiss, who researches Lebanon at Human Rights Watch.

Kaiss and Shilad think Lebanese lawmakers are ramping up their use of anti-LGBTQ rhetoric to distract the public’s attention from more pressing issues — like the struggling economy, government corruption and the status of the investigation into the devastating 2020 Port of Beirut explosion.

“Instead, they’re busy cracking down on freedom of expression and LGBT[Q] rights and banning the Barbie movie,” Kaiss told VOA from Beirut. “I think it’s outrageous that this is the main priority for the government, while there is a range of other actions that need to be taken.”
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