—Sister Souljah
“It’s AFTER the end of the world…don’t you know that yet?”—Sun Ra
“Armageddon is already in effect—go get a late pass!”
—Public Enemy
“All important art is self-taught.”
—Amiri Baraka
“Language is the only homeland.”
—Czeslaw Milosz
“Nothing is absolutely dead: every meaning will someday have its homecoming festival.”
—Mikhail Bakhtin
“Write what you know or write what you don’t know--like everybody else.”
—Miles Davis
I. Pre/Face & Early History: “Mommy, Where Does HIP HOP Come From?
The rise of HIP HOP from the streets and other public spaces in the South Bronx, Brooklyn and Harlem, NY in the late l970s was initiated by the generation of African and Latino American youth born and raised during the tumultuous political and cultural upheaval of the l960s and early l970s. In the historical aftermath of the demise of the Civil Rights Movement, the corresponding national rise of the Black Power and Black Arts movements and the subsequent systematic destruction of black revolutionary organizations, student groups and political activists by the U.S. federal government, the FBI, and the CIA (all well documented by the official release of the COINTELPRO files and other surveillance materials as required by the FREEDOM OF INFORMATION legislation passed in l975-76), the African Americans was left to deal with the ravages of a national white backlash that soon resulted in a rapidly declining emphasis on the economic and social welfare and development of urban centers throughout the United States. The stagnation caused by the Watergate scandal, the so-called Energy Crisis, the defeat of the U.S. in Vietnam in l975, and subsequent widespread recession (reaching depression-era levels of unemployment in black communities in the late 1970s and early 1980s), as well as spiraling inflation led to the beginning of massive deindustrialization and downsizing brought on by gigantic corporate mergers and rampant criminal speculation and expansion on Wall Street; this in turn led to a devastating breakdown in social services and economic and technological infrastructure deeply affecting education, housing, health care, labor unionization and political support for major cities.
It was in this wildly chaotic and destructive cultural and social context that the first wave of rappers, graffiti artists, breakdancers and DJs began to emerge during the first term of the notoriously reactionary Republican President Ronald Wilson Reagan in the l980-l984 period. This deeply conservative era of an openly right-wing government and a supine democratic congress, rapidly abandoning any pretense of a commitment to a liberal or progressive social agenda or public policy stance resulted in the generation born during the sixties becoming deeply alienated, and quickly disillusioned by, an increasingly racist society that often expressed open hostility, fear, and contempt for black and Latino youth in major American cities. The cultural and social fallout from this dire situation was an explosive rise in the number of physical, intellectual and verbal attacks on these youth in academia (particularly at predominately white colleges and universities where there were literally thousands of reported violent racial incidents throughout the l980s), the national news media, and in the streets by the police and other official representatives of the criminal justice system. In fact years before riots broke out in Los Angeles, Miami, New York, and many other cities during the early l990s rappers had been predicting that the volatile mix of police brutality, intolerable living conditions, poverty, drugs and racist attacks against ordinary African American citizens would lead to the endless tragedies that continue to plague these communities.
All this was augmented by a federal government that made it resoundingly clear that it was adamantly opposed to improving employment, educational, and economic opportunities for black people in general and black youth in particular.
Thus with the inevitably large cutbacks in educational programs of urban public school systems throughout the country, an entire generation of poor, working-class, and lower middle class youth were simply left to their own devices as music and art curriculums were eliminated and declining spaces for creative expression in these communities (disdainfully and rather condescendingly called ‘inner cities’ now that the middle-class white folks—and some black ones—have fled places that were once called Detroit, Chicago, St. Louis, Pittsburgh etc. when they lived there) compelled these youth to seek and create their own alternatives. It was out of this turmoil and pervasive need for cultural assertion and resistance that HIP HOP was born. This multicultural and soon multinational youth movement incorporated aspects of the traditional arts of music, poetry, dance, painting, theater, and writing but in an entirely new and different (postmodern) aesthetic context that simultaneously includes and appropriates the technology of computers, sampling, and digital programming in order to synthesize and extend, revise and subvert, transgress and recontextualize the form and content of language use and sound projections in any given cultural environment.
The first wave of HIP HOP artists to arrive in a commercial (and thus commodified) context were “rappers” (also known as MCs), DJs, graffiti writers and breakdancers who began to appear on recordings, in film, video, and television and in public art spaces in museums, galleries, clubs, libraries, theaters, and site-specific installations during the l980-l985 period. This was the heady era of the meteoric rise of such soon to be world famous figures as Fred Braithwaite (better known as Fab Five Freddy), Rammelzee, Afrika Bambaataa, Kurtis Blow, Grandmaster Flash & the Furious Five, Run DMC and Jean-Michel Basquiat. Right on the heels of this group came the cultural explosion over the next five years (or King Raygun’s second term and the Bushwacker’s first) from l985-l990, which saw a massive increase in aesthetic participation by youth throughout the country, media fascination, interest, hype (and exploitation), political activism, and widespread economic profiteering and excess (the inevitable capitalist expropriation of recording companies, the Hollywood film industry, and television). Nevertheless this was truly the first ‘golden age’ of the still nascent cultural movement. During this five year period the following artists emerged: LL COOL J, KOOL MOE DEE, DOUG E. FRESH, PUBLIC ENEMY, BIG DADDY KANE, ULTRAMAGNETIC MCs, ERIC B & RAKIM, DE LA SOUL, N.W.A., ICE -T, MC LYTE, SALT ‘N PEPA, KRS-ONE (Boogie Down Productions), QUEEN LATIFAH, EPMD, SLICK RICK, THE JUNGLE BROTHERS, HEAVY D, THE BEASTIE BOYS, ICE CUBE, 3rd BASS, BIZ MARKIE, A TRIBE CALLED QUEST and PARIS. These artists and others arrived to stun and soon dominate American popular culture while selling over l00 million CDs and EPs, which led them to capturing an astonishing 20% of the total music market in the U.S. alone (not to mention the untold millions being generated by underground “bootleg” sales). Even more was distributed and sold abroad where in Europe, Asia, Africa, the Caribbean, the Pacific Islands, and Australia, rap groups, graffiti writers, and breakdancers also began to emerge—easily fulfilling Marshall McLuhan’s predictions of the l960s that a new global cultural village would arise, and new movements toward retribalization would assert themselves in the artistic sphere.
Speaking of the always problematic category of ‘aesthetics’ (clearly a culturally and historically specific, even over-determined ideological concept—though many theorists and artists won’t admit it or are simply ignorant), HIP HOP expressed ideas, values, attitudes subject-positions, and identities that refused to be defined by conventional notions of what “art” was or was “supposed to be.” This intense resistance to, and refusal of, so-called high-brow or canonical conceptions has contributed to an increased respect for the self-taught lessons of cultural and intellectual independence, spontaneity, and creative invention. Thus like the extraordinary stylistic forms that have preceded it in the African American tradition—Jazz, Blues, R & B, Rock ‘n’ Roll, and Funk, etc.—HIP HOP has always rooted itself in the vernacular styles of language use, music, dance, and visual expression. “Home-grown” is what ‘the folk’ are!
This fact highlights why the vernacular is such a powerful and effective tool in African American culture. In terms of language, the vernacular mode does not separate meaning from form. The manner in which one talks or writes or plays is as important to the structure of what is being written or spoken as the words themselves. This goes a long way toward explaining why rappers today are so aware of , and involved in, consciously synthesizing the elements of music, sound, scientific technology, and semiotics in their raps. What results is a fascinating collage-of-effects that enables the speaker/writer/performer to play against, and comment upon, the juxtapositions of language, sound, rhythm and technology that is ‘framing’ what is being said as it is in the process of being expressed (much as we find in the improvisational principle of Jazz and the best of R & B, Rock, Blues and Funk—see S. Rollins, T. Monk, C. Parker, J. Hendrix, J. Brown, S. Stone, R. Johnson, Sun Ra, and G. Clinton for starters). What the listener/viewer/reader experiences is thus ‘more’ than just the words being said at any given time. That is, the dynamic totality of meanings that are being transmitted is dependent on the whole environment of effects and techniques that the rapper is using.
This explains why RAP as a “form” can’t possibly be reduced to either the historically received or given categories of ‘music’ or ‘poetry.’ It would be more accurate to say that the great majority of raps are neither totally one or the other. Metamusic and metapoetics would be more like it. In fact, like Jazz and blues in the early 1920s, or ‘Rock ‘n Roll’ (or Rhythm and Blues) in the 1940s and ‘50s, RAP represents an entirely new and different conceptual idea about what ‘aesthetics’ mean in terms of the established conventions of what is called “music,” “poetry” or “performance art” (an avant-garde convention since the early 1900s—see DADA). The corresponding fact that RAP is but a subset of a much wider cultural aesthetic called HIP HOP only serves to clarify the reasons for RAP’s ascendancy as a popular and “academic” art form. Since no one can deny its obvious cultural existence or relevancy to the people who created and nurtured its growth, RAP can’t be dismissed on the spurious basis that it is “simply not like what already exists or is considered legitimate.” In the 20th century virtually every major art form to emerge has been at one time or another denounced or attacked as “not like traditional ideas of what is considered art.” Certainly painting, music, literature, dance, and theater have been revolutionized by this century’s innovations; not to mention the unprecedented arrival of such forms as cinema (another highly syncretic and hybrid aesthetic) and radio.
With the advent of television, video, computers, and microchip programming, we now have a richly enhanced environment for the transmission and creative expression of information and desires that simply did not exist before. The notable link between vernacular language and technology (and its profound implications for a clear understanding of what RAP is in American culture) is uncannily stated in one of the most subtle and insightful books ever written in American cultural studies, The Beer Can by the Highway (1961) by the late cultural critic and theorist John A. Kouwenhoven:
“It is my conviction that the society we live in marks a really new epoch, but that it is shaped not by technology and science alone, but by a unique combination of forces, a compound of scientific technology and the spirit of democracy. Some years ago I tried to suggest that these twin forces had been revolutionizing man’s conception of his relations to nature, his fellow man, and his gods, for more than a century, and that the elements of the emergent environments produced by these twin forces were for many years shaped not by our artists but by untutored citizens working without any “artistic” pretensions. It is the patterns and forms these people evolved which the artists of our time must arrange (and have begun to arrange) in patterns and forms satisfactorily expressing the values and attitudes appropriate to the new epoch…” 1 [italics mine]
What distinguished the artists of the 1970s and ‘80s was a precise attention to the specific details of black vernacular conceptions as practiced and experienced in the period since 1945. That is, what the rappers of this time zone were concerned about was bringing back to the national black community, (through such African diasporic forms as rhythm & blues, reggae, ska, and ‘dub’ poetry), what were considered the ‘endangered’ arts of orality and folklore. The ironic fact about all this, however, was that it was now being done through the high technology of the mass media. Thus the most crucial and relevant aspect of Marshall McLuhan’s visionary edict that the “medium was the message” was being realized by those sectors of the national culture in the United States that were perceived as the most marginal, but were actually the most central to its identity. The accomplishment of this by citizens who were not only not “professional artists” but also not classical “intellectuals” only made Kouwenhoven’s analysis seem more prophetic when he states that:
“Vernacular forms, whose elements are the materials and processes of technology and the attitudes and interests of democracy, will continue to be improvised wherever technology and democracy make themselves felt…They will of course be modified in each region by physical and social actualities and by the local cultural heritage which becomes part of the fabric of what we build. But they will share the quality of immediate responsiveness to the driving energies of the new epoch…”2
In the cultural work of such “professional artists” as Public Enemy, KRS-One, MC Lyte, and Eric B and Rakim, we find a conscious attempt to incorporate the observations, ideas, values, attitudes, experiences and perceptions of mass cultural sources like “the folk” in their public performances and aesthetic practice. What emerged from this dialogical engagement with popular culture at the level of materiality and philosophy was a new epistemological approach to the principle of improvisation—one of the most fundamental methods of vernacular expression. For it is in the nature of improvisatory activity to immediately revise, augment and transform whatever it comes into contact with or engages in the world. In this sense RAP fulfills Kouwenhoven’s observation that new or innovative approaches to form and content in art are often generated by the merging of the vernacular process with new technologies. This enables a larger number of people to democratically participate in the creation of art products, and at the same time, make it possible for fresh ideas and values to enter the realm of knowledge production.
Because improvisation sees all life as open-ended possibility and as the indeterminate play of contradictions, oppositions, ruptures, and juxtapositions, it is not interested in identity so much as becoming—the verb rather than the noun. Closure, definition, the fixed (and thus finite) are not the purpose or function of artistic activity or expression. What matters is the endless possibilities that are afforded us by the dynamics and pleasures (and risks) of “playing.” Thus RAP is perceived as just another means of liberating oneself (and one’s community, however that is defined) from the fetters and strictures of one’s own fetishized attachment to an aesthetic “goal” as a site of location. What RAP seeks is the (Kenneth) Burkean state of consciousness that allows “burdens [to become] a basis of insights.” This accounts for the critical emphasis in RAP’s theoretical and practical activity on “negative” information and analysis as a method for tackling controversial or taboo subject matter in the areas of politics, sexuality, morality, and human psychology...
V. Postscript: What is HIP HOP? And How Do We Know It? Spring 1997
What is HIP HOP?
HIP HOP is a culture, which means that it is subject to, and contains, all the strengths, liabilities, fears, anxieties, hatreds, loves, desires, beauty, ugliness, joys, sorrows, triumphs, failures, glories, delusions, knowledge, ignorance, clarity, confusion, sadness, unity, divisions, greatness, banality, good, evil, naïve, cynical, heroic and tragic elements and qualities that any other culture anywhere in the world has.
Like all cultures everywhere it is conflicted, contradictory, and in a perpetual state of contestation. This alone keeps it real and viable in spite of (and because of itself). Besides it wouldn’t be worth paying any attention to at all if it weren’t for its inherent ability to make mistakes and learn something valuable and necessary from them.
HIP HOP is extremely complex because the people who make it and represent it as well as the cultural, social, economic, spiritual, and political traditions that inform it are extremely complex. Thus the various reasons why it appeals to so many people not only in the U.S. but throughout the world is not difficult to figure out nor is it difficult to understand why so many others fear, misunderstand, despise, oppose, or are indifferent to it. HIP HOP contains within its aesthetic, social, and historical identity all of the major issues facing American and world culture today: racism, sexism, poverty, class conflict, gender relations, sexual difference and identity, social and psychological violence, economic and political exploitation, oppression and inequality, media representations, crime, materialism and spiritual alienation, and emptiness. The materiality of this culture lies in its unceasing confrontation with the most fundamental ideological values and conceptions ruling our consciousness of present day structural and institutional realities in the areas of political economy, quotidian existence and aesthetic expression.
As a result, the on-going conflict between those who must embrace the discursive complexities of the rhetorical, gestural, visual, and acoustic innovations of HIP HOP artists, and those who routinely criticize and disdain its most severe limitations, stupidities, reductionisms, weaknesses, and blind spots is a reflection of what both sides see as the culture’s most salient characteristics and sources of identity. However, these dialectical forces are not mutually exclusive nor do they encompass all of what can be said about its uses, dead ends, and potentialities at the level of cultural and intellectual reality or the tensions of the economic and social marketplace.
In fact, any truly dynamic and accurate rendering of HIP HOP’s place in our lives in the late 20th century as we go flying headlong into the next millennium must take full theoretical and critical account of the inseparable relationship between the so-called “positive” and “negative” aspects or poles of the culture’s identity if we are to make any sense of what HIP HOP is and means. Just as a dry cell battery cannot do without either its “positive” or “negative” charges in order to function, one’s critical awareness of HIP HOP’s unavoidable immersion in the totality of contextual conditions and relations that it is also a constituent part of, is absolutely necessary to any worthwhile or accurate critical analysis of it.
So what is HIP HOP? HIP HOP, like all cultures everywhere, is Life...
DEFEAT FASCISM BEFORE FASCISM DEFEATS YOU..
THE CORRUPTION OF HIPHOP:
"Hip-hop is more about attaining wealth. People respect success. They respect big. They don't even have to like your music. If you're big enough, people are drawn to you."—Jay Z, 2017
"What's Past is Prologue…"
“...I’m offended by that because first of all, and this is going to sound arrogant, but my presence is charity,” Jay Z responded in an interview with Rap Radar. “Just who I am. Like Obama’s is.”
The comparison to President Barack Obama is proof that Jay Z’s arrogance may come close to matching that of his longtime best friend Kanye West.
He went on to suggest that recent criticisms of the president are out of line as well, but not for the reasons most people were offering.
The “Open Letter” rapper stated that as long as the president speaks on a topic, he has done enough and the same rules apply to him as well.
“Obama provides hope,” he continued. “Whether he does anything, the hope that he provides for a nation and outside of America is enough. Just being who he is. You’re the first black president. If he speaks on any issue or anything, he should be left alone.”
So is this a part of the new rules? Is the black community supposed to simply grab a position of power and then become lazy and complacent? Is the African-American culture supposed to slowly but surely wither away at the feet of pseudo-equality as we promote our mere being and speech as a solution and push action to the wayside?…"
--Taylor Gordon, "Jay Z Slammed For Arrogance in Harry Belafonte Feud": ‘My Presence is Charity’, Atlanta Black Star, July 20, 2013
“What’s Past is Prologue…"
https://atlantablackstar.com/2013/07/30/jay-z-slammed-for-arrogance-in-harry-belafonte-feud-my-presence-is-charity/
Editor's Picks
Entertainment
Jay Z Slammed For Arrogance in Harry Belafonte Feud: ‘My Presence is Charity’
by Taylor Gordon
July 30, 2013
Atlanta Black Star
Jay Z has been heavily criticized by social activist Harry Belafonte and other prominent figures in the black community for what they believe is a lack of social responsibility, but according to Jay Z, his very presence is charity.
Jay Z and Beyonce were voted as one of the most influential celebrity couples, but after exchanging words with Belafonte through the media, one can only hope that Jay Z’s influence isn’t as strong as it used to be.
Many activists have been urging their communities to do more than just voice their opinions, they need to fight for action and change in peaceful but powerful ways. Change won’t happen until the community demands it instead of asking for it.
That was the point Belafonte was making when he said that he felt that Jay Z and Beyonce weren’t as socially responsible as they should be. And now that HOV is speaking out against the remarks, it seems as if he may be proving Belafonte right.
“I’m offended by that because first of all, and this is going to sound arrogant, but my presence is charity,” Jay Z responded in an interview with Rap Radar. “Just who I am. Like Obama’s is.”
The comparison to President Barack Obama is proof that Jay Z’s arrogance may come close to matching that of his longtime best friend Kanye West.
He went on to suggest that recent criticisms of the president are out of line as well, but not for the reasons most people were offering.
The “Open Letter” rapper stated that as long as the president speaks on a topic, he has done enough and the same rules apply to him as well.
“Obama provides hope,” he continued. “Whether he does anything, the hope that he provides for a nation and outside of America is enough. Just being who he is. You’re the first black president. If he speaks on any issue or anything, he should be left alone.”
So is this a part of the new rules? Is the black community supposed to simply grab a position of power and then become lazy and complacent? Is the African-American culture supposed to slowly but surely wither away at the feet of pseudo-equality as we promote our mere being and speech as a solution and push action to the wayside?
THE POWER OF HIPHOP?: A 21st Century poem
by Kofi Natambu
(From the forthcoming book: There's A Paddle For Every Ass In The Universe: New & Selected Poems)
(Dedicated to the following Cowardly Corporate House Kneegrow MCs masquerading as 'HIP HOP ARTISTS': Kanye, Ice Cube, 50 Cent, Jay-Z, and Lil Wayne)
[AN IMPORTANT NOTE TO THE READER OF THE FOLLOWING POEM]:
PLEASE PAY CLOSE ATTENTION TO THE FACT THAT THE PHRASE “IN STEAD” IS TWO WORDS AND NOT ONE (i.e. “instead”). THIS SMALL LINGUISTIC DISTINCTION IS CRUCIAL TO ‘GRASPING’ AND ‘UNDERSTANDING' THE VARIOUS MEANINGS OF THE POEM IN BOTH A CREATIVE AND MOST IMPORTANTLY CRITICAL SENSE…
AS ‘THEY’ ALWAYS SAY: ONE MAN’S IRONY IS ANOTHER MAN’S IDENTITY, ALTHOUGH I WOULD LIKE TO MAKE IT VERY CLEAR UPFRONT THAT EYE FOR ONE WOULD NEVER SAY THAT-- EITHER ‘INSIDE' OR ‘OUTSIDE' THIS POEM…
In stead of time we got hiphop
in stead of space we got hiphop
in stead of pain we got hiphop
in stead of joy we got hiphop
in stead of thought we got hiphop
in stead of feeling we got hiphop
in stead of anger we got hiphop
in stead of irony we got hiphop
in stead of experience we got hiphop
in stead of history we got hiphop
in stead of water we got hiphop
in stead of fire we got hiphop
in stead of chaos we got hiphop
in stead of science we got hiphop
in stead of art we got hiphop
in stead of revolution we got hiphop
in stead of criticism we got hiphop
in stead of desire we got hiphop
in stead of memory we got hiphop
in stead of literature we got hiphop
in stead of music we got hiphop
in stead of philosophy we got hiphop
in stead of civil or human rights we got hiphop
in stead of freedom we got hiphop
in stead of discipline we got hiphop
in stead of the blues we got hiphop
in stead of Jazz we got hiphop
in stead of love we got hiphop
in stead of food we got hiphop
in stead of drugs we got hiphop
in stead of loneliness we got hiphop
in stead of yesterday we got hiphop
in stead of tomorrow we got hiphop
in stead of today we got hiphop
in stead of community we got hiphop
in stead of consciousness we got hiphop
in stead of sex we got hiphop
in stead of reality we got hiphop
in stead of imagination we got hiphop
in stead of dissent we got hiphop
in stead of argument we got hiphop
in stead of the sun we got hiphop
in stead of land we got hiphop
in stead of knowledge we got hiphop
in stead of songs we got hiphop
in stead of dance we got hiphop
in stead of jobs we got hiphop
in stead of justice we got hiphop
in stead of money we got hiphop
in stead of education we got hiphop
in stead of self determination we got hiphop
in stead of these words we got hiphop
in stead of these words we got hiphop
in stead of these words we got hiphop
in stead of these words we got hiphop
hiphop hiphop hiphop hiphop hiphop
So yo yo yo everybody do not despair (at least not yet)
‘cause in stead of this poem we got hiphop
we got hiphop
we got hiphop
we got hiphop
“The Cult of Personality"
from the album VIVID
Columbia label, 1988
by Living Colour
Songwriters: William Calhoun / Corey Glover / Vernon Alphonsus Reid / Muzz Skillings--Living Colour 1988
VIDEO:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7xxgRUyzgs0
LYRICS:
[Intro: Malcolm X]:
(“...And during the few moments that we have left, we want to talk, right down to earth, in a language that everybody here can easily understand…”)
Look in my eyes, what do you see?
The cult of personality
I know your anger, I know your dreams
I've been everything you wanna be ohhh
I'm the cult of personality
Like Mussolini and Kennedy
I'm the cult of personality
The cult of personality
The cult of personality
Neon lights, Nobel Prize
When a mirror speaks, the reflection lies
You won't have to follow me
Only you can set me free
I sell the things you need to be
I'm the smiling face from your T.V. ohh
I'm the cult of personality
I exploit you; still you love me
I tell you one and one makes three ohh
I'm the cult of personality
Like Joseph Stalin and Gandhi, ohh
I'm the cult of personality
The cult of personality
The cult of personality
Neon lights, Nobel Prize
When a leader speaks, that leader dies
You won't have to follow me
Only you can set you free
You gave me fortune, you gave me fame
You gave me power, in your God's name
I'm every person you need to be, ohh
I'm, the, cult, of, per, son, al, ity
I am the cult of
I am the cult of
I am the cult of
I am the cult of
I am the cult of
I am the cult of
I am the cult of
I am the cult of
Personality
[Outro:
John F. Kennedy and Franklin D. Roosevelt]:
("Ask not what your country can do for you…")
("The only thing we have to fear, is fear itself…")
