“Hip-hop both produces and is produced by a cultural context that often thinks differently about questions of language, writing, identity and ownership from the mainstream discourses of the academy. … Hip-hoppers may have very different ideas about what it means for something to be real, how they relate to communities, how language operates. To the extent that this broad cultural movement influences youth in different ways across the world–always appropriated, always locally inflected–it is important that educators take this into account. Inclusion in the curicculum from this point of view, therefore, is not so much a question of using lyrics or discussing issues in popular culture as it is about engaging much more broadly with a cultural movement that has many different inflections across the globe.”

Alastair Pennycook, in Global Englishes and Transcultural Flows (p.150) (2007)