“New World Water”: The Hydrocentric Imagination of Hip Hop

Water has provided hip hop with a variety of central metaphors by which the genre enriched its poetic terminology flow, denoted spiritual purity, or discussed political and police corruption. Over last two decades, water-related environmental concerns catastrophes have prompted artists to develop more literal approach. This article showcases how selected songs black conscious indigenous rap—Yasiin Bey’s “New World Water” (1999), Common’s “Trouble in (2014), Taboo’s “Stand Up / Stand N Rock” (2016), Supaman’s “Miracle” (2018)—develop hydrocentric perspectives order participate negotiation cultural material meanings water. These discuss relationship between human water working images as “modern water” (Linton), “global water,” “Anthropocene (Neimanis), allows them address nexus racial capitalism, settler colonialism, anthropocentrism, ecological crises. True rap’s agenda socio-political criticism, they not only unravel but also indict anthropocentric, capitalist, settler-colonial ideologies practices pertain They further negotiate alternative cosmological approaches that conceive human/nonhuman interconnected thus unfold “hydrosocial” (Linton). All while, advertise rap music an important aesthetic tool political-environmentalist intervention. becomes particularly evident from fact all are connected specific activist impetus framing.