Ketchup and its discontents: A study in cultural imperialism

Hip-hop and I were both born in the Bronx in the late seventies. Yet while I have achieved little more than a masters' degree, hip-hop has successfully conquered the world.

For certain of the globe's player-haters, this has not been a welcome development. They consider the fact that one now hears the latest single by Eminem blaring from car stereos on streets from Naples to Novosibirsk as part of a larger phenomenon of American cultural imperialism — akin to Hollywood's firm grip on the world's fantasies, McDonald's corporate cleansing of the global palate, and so on. Often, this is tied to an attack on American might more generally, with Tom Cruise, Colonel Sanders and Dr. Dre emerging as mere foot soldiers in an colossal conspiracy led by George Bush and Bill Gates to achieve complete global domination of every element of human life.

This alleged cultural imperialism, however, often takes strange and surprising forms. Consider, if you will, the song of the summer throughout Europe and Latin America — a danceable little ditty by the nonsensical name of "Asejeré" by a trio of Spanish sisters calling themselves, of all things American, Las Ketchup. (Their father and svengali calls himself Tomato.)

On a first listen, "Aserejé" sounds like another one of those painfully catchy Spanish dance songs that becomes ridiculously popular worldwide every few years, the Macarena of the new millennium. But while the verses are the Spanish-language story of a guy named Diego who's apparently very popular in the Iberian clubs, the chorus is sheer gibberish. "Aserejé," the perky sisters keep repeating, "ja deje tejebe tude jebere sebiunouba majabi an de bugui an de buididipí." It doesn't take much beyond Spanish 101 to see that "bugui an de buididipí" doesn't mean anything in any known language, Pig Latin included.

Late one night this summer, after one too many Hefeweisens, I found myself surrounded by a group of Spaniards in a Berlin bar trying to figure out the mystery of that unintelligible chorus. In a flash of recognition, a childhood memory came back to me of one of the first hip-hop hits to make it on to the charts — "Rapper's Delight" by the Sugar Hill Gang. Over a beat sampled from Queen, the gang proclaims, "I say-a hip hop, hippie to the hippie, to the hip hip-hop, and you don't stop the rocking, to the bang bang boogie, say up jump the boogie to the rhythm of the boogie, the beat." Las Ketchup had apparently tried to lift their lyrics from these old school rhymes, but without the basic understanding of English which would be required to do so successfully.

Think about the mix of cultures needed to produce the three and a half minutes of rump-shaking pop boogie known as "Aserejé:" Jamaican Kool Herc immigrates to the Bronx and introduces the Caribbean style of toasting over scratched records to an inner city African-American audience. Lifting a beat from a British band, themselves inspired by an earlier tradition of black American music, a gang of Herc's protégés achieve the first commercial success in this new genre. Nearly a quarter century later, a Spanish family creates a new song from this earlier inner-city hit. They name their group after the quintessential American topping for Hamburg-style chopped steak sandwiches and Belgian-style fried potatoes (usually mistaken for French), both of which are marketed under a Scottish name. The sauce itself had been introduced under the name of "ketjap" by Dutch traders returning to New Amsterdam (later Kool Herc's hometown of New York) from Malaysia in the eighteenth century. By the time all these forces came together through the artistic genius of Las Ketchup, however, Mexican-style salsa had recently become the best selling condiment in the United States.

To be sure, America plays a unique role in this rather surreal narrative. But it is only as a sort of meeting-place for cultural material from elsewhere, which gets thrown together with the free-wheeling abandon for which the US is famous and then sent back to the rest of the world for further adaptation. The globalization of culture is real, but insofar as this culture is distinctively American, that is only because America has always been a multicultural society, and hence a microcosm for the globe as a whole.

Or, as Las Ketchup put it so much more eloquently, aserejé ja deje tejebe tude jebere sebiunouba majabi an de bugui an de buididipí. Michael Frazer is a graduate student in the Politics Department. He can be reached at mfrazer@princeton.edu.