Historically music has always played a significant role as a liberatory force and has also been a vehicle of social and political activism. Hip-hop, reggae, or rap, for example, have raised awareness about racism, ethnicism, colourism, or genderism across the world.  In recent times, the music industries in South Asia seem to be a fertile ground for hip-hop music and dance. Younger generations of music artists create opportunities to participate in organized social actions and civil resistance through the music genre. They challenge national, religious, political, and varied other forms of ideologies too. This presentation, hence, examines the less researched hip-hop genre in Bangladesh and Nepal to understand how the specific genre of music sustains varied forms of activism through multimodal resources.

We will use the multimodal discourse analytic method (Kress, 2011; Pennycook, 2007) to analyse ten rap music videos and their lyrics (five each from Bangladesh and Nepal) produced between the early 2000s and the early 2020s. The representative sample will be chosen based on the diversity of linguistic resources, semiotic modes, and topics covered. A close analysis of the lyrics and music videos shows that hip-hop artists use English and body gestures and postures associated with hip-hop culture from the Global North to identify themselves with greater hip-hop communities beyond the boundaries of their own nation-states. Taboo expressions, swear words, and provocative body gestures, which generally are socially denigrated, are extensively used in the hip-hop genre to draw attention to the corruption, dishonesty, and unlawful and undemocratic activities in their countries. Likewise, local languages and regional varieties are used to engage with local issues while English plays a vital role in connecting the local with the global and varied times and spaces. Finally, we will discuss the implications of the study for the sociolinguistics of hip-hop.