Of course there’s a hiphop scene in Malta, which shouldn’t surprise anyone who’s been in the world in the past few years. Wherever there are young people, there is youth culture, and this is still one of the driving forces of that culture all around the globe. But where at one time there may have been a concentration on the music coming from the U.S., now almost every place has its own styles and trends. The relatively inexpensive means of producing your own music these days, with software that is widely available and pretty easy to use, has made it much more possible for a kid in a small town to make their own records.
The sounds from every place are very distinctive, and hiphop in Malta will necessarily have local flavor that speaks to this particular place. Malta is a place with a very rich tourist scene, where there are plenty of good restaurants and luxury hotels. Malta is well- suited, then, to be a hub of world culture, because so many people pass through here. This means that contemporary trends in the world of music stop by here to do some trading. On the best days, it is an equal exchange, where Maltese musicians can learn some new styles and rhythms, and the visitors get to take some of the local flavor with them. In Malta, this flavor has roots in Northern Africa and Southern Italy, among others.
No Bling Show is spectacularly positions to demonstrate all the diverse roots, and brings them together in a package that’s fresh and very real. There is an attempt to speak to the ongoing conversations in global hiphop culture, but there is also every attempt to maintain a fiercely local identity, and this comes through in the language and the themes. They use the music to communicate possibilities for change, offering systematic critiques of the system in general, and are working to create a critical mass in the culture here that can speak to alternatives to excess.