Hip-hop’s foundry, the Bronx,...
…fired a worldwide culture straddling the lines between rebellion…
… and capitulation…
… to hyper-consumerism.
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We want ‘poems that kill.’
Assassin poems,
Poems that shoot guns.
Poems that wrestle cops into alleys
And take their weapons.
Amiri
Baraka, U.S. poet (1934-)
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Perhaps all music, even the
newest, is not so much something discovered as something that re-emerges from where
it lay buried in the memory, inaudible as a melody cut in a disc of flesh.
Jean
Genet, French dramatist and author (1910-1986)
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From the Bronx to Los Angeles
and beyond, a rough guide to the voice of a generation
 During
the summer of 1975, the South Bronx was burning. New York City officials admitted
that they couldn’t battle all the fires, let alone investigate their origins. Chaos
reigned. One long hot day in June, 40 fires were set in a three-hour period.
These were not the fires of purifying rage that ignited Watts in 1965, Newark in
1967, or St. Louis and a half dozen other U.S. cities after the assassination of
Martin Luther King, Jr. These were the fires of abandonment.
As hip-hop journalist S.H. Fernando notes, the Bronx had been a borough of promise
for African American, Puerto Rican, Irish, Italian and Jewish families after World
War II. But as industry moved north to the suburbs during the sixties, housing values
collapsed and whites fled, leaving a population overwhelmingly poor and of colour.
So slumlords were employing young thugs to systematically burn the devalued buildings
to chase out the poor tenants and collect millions in insurance. Hip-hop, it could
be said, was born in fire.
As rapper Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five’s “The Message” would describe it,
the New York ghettoes that fuelled hip-hop’s re-creative project were spaces of state
neglect and fading liberal dreams. “Got a bum education,” the narrator rhymed, “double-digit
inflation, can’t take a train to work there’s a strike at the station.” But these
would also be spaces of spiritual and creative renewal.
In an earlier era, say the 1920s and 30s when jazz legends like Charles Mingus grew
up, a youth might find an extended web of peers, mentors, patrons, bands and venues
through which he or she might master an instrument and find a vocation. But by the
late 1970s, such music education was a luxury for most families.
Jamaican
connection
The result?
Play, as African American author Robin D.G. Kelley has put it, became an alternate
form of work for a new generation. Adapting the Jamaican tradition of outdoor dance
parties to the grid and grit of New York, young black and Puerto Rican entrepreneurs
illegally plugged their stereo systems into street light power supplies, and started
the party.
With vinyl grooves as sheet music, and a rig of two turntables, a mixer and an amplifier
as instruments, Black Art began reinventing itself in 1974 and 1975. That’s when
a Jamaican immigrant disc jockey named Kool Herc started gaining a reputation in
the Bronx for filling the smoky air with “the breaks”—that portion of the song, often
as short as two seconds, where the singer dropped out and let the band immerse itself
in the groove.
Punching back and forth between two copies of the same record’s breaks, then ratcheting
up the excitement by shifting to ever more intense breaks, DJs like Herc and Afrika
Bambaataa were creating a new aesthetic, which simultaneously satiated and teased
the audience.
Escaping
the chaos on the streets
On the one
hand, a loop (of beats) became a metaphor for freedom: through movement, dancers
stretched within the space sculpted by the break. A new canon of songs—drawn from
funk, disco, rock, jazz, Afrobeat and reggae—launched new, athletic forms of dancing,
which would become known as breakdancing or b-boying. Rather than being passive spectators,
the audience engaged in a real dialogue with the disc jockey.
The New York DJs began employing MCs—masters of ceremony—to affirm the crowd’s response
to proven breaks, win them over to new breaks, divert them during bad records and
generally keep spirits high. In time, the MCs became attractions in their own right.
Rocking memorized poems (“writtens”) or improvising them on the spot (“freestyles”),
the MC became Everyman, the representative of the audience onstage. They reacted
to the MC’s flow, laughed at his cleverness, cheered his braggadocio, thrilled at
his tall-tale spinning, felt his bluesy pain, riding the riddims with words (or “rapping”).
The Black Arts poets, the Black Panther messiahs and other revolutionary firebrands
sharpened their words into spears to attack. This new generation of rappers let the
words flow generously, in search of a moment that might serve as a shield of protection,
or a transcendent escape from the chaos on the streets.
Popular culture in America is one space where the trope (expression) of working-class
creativity is still firmly lodged. American markets are good at providing poor audiences
of colour easy access to goods such as music, video and clothing. In the last three
decades, a whole class of middlemen entrepreneurs have made fortunes by charting
the rapidly shifting terrain of black and brown ghetto chic.
By the late 70s, black and Jewish record label owners in Harlem noted the popularity
of hip-hop and rushed to record leading crews. Basically, these owners were geographically
and personally close to the music. When a novelty record by the Sugar Hill Gang,
“Rapper’s Delight” became a surprise international smash, major labels began sniffing
around uptown for the next hit. In 1980, Kurtis Blow released rap’s first full-length
album on a major label. The stage was set for the ascendance of hip-hop culture into
the most powerful international youth culture of the late twentieth century.
Until the late 80s, the undisputed centre of this culture was New York. The visual
signifiers were provided by the vibrant graffiti movement, whose young renegade artists
braved electrified razor-wire fences and armed Metropolitan Transit Authority guards
to apply bright spraypaint hieroglyphics onto the city’s subways. Every time a train
pulled into a station, hip-hop was in respectable society’s face, like a middle-finger.
Remember the backdrop to the 1980s: the Reagan administration was launching an attack
on the “welfare state”, wiping out subsidies for the poor, allowing housing agencies
to become dens of corruption while closing down entire categories of government programmes.
Hip-hoppers were on the counter-offensive. As the Furious Five warned: “Don’t push
me ’cause I’m close to the edge. I’m trying not to lose my head. It’s like a jungle
sometimes, it makes me wonder how I keep from going under.”
On the technological front, hip-hoppers racked up one breakthrough after another.
While most rock musicians of the mid-80s were perplexed by new sampling technology,
rap producers were turning their new toys into unrelentingly dense, reflexive grooves.
Then, as the anti-apartheid movement crested in the U.S., groups like Boogie Down
Productions and Public Enemy extended rap’s social realism into broader discussions
of political action.
But the lofty views of revolutionary nationalism and hardrock spiritualism veered
back to the streets in 1989. A group of barely twenty-somethings, who not so ironically
called themselves Niggas With Attitude, released what would become an anthem for
a generation, Gangsta Gangsta. Within six weeks of its release, the album went “gold”,
selling over 500,000 copies. Hip-hop shot itself into the heart of world culture.
The album, Straight Outta Compton, decentered hip-hop from New York to Los Angeles.
By the middle of the Reagan administration, Compton was one of a growing number of
inner-city nexuses where deindustrialization, devolution, the cocaine trade, gang
structures and rivalries, arms profiteering and police brutality combined to destabilize
poor communities. Chaos was settling in for a long stay and gangsta rap would be
the soundtrack. By conflating myth and place, the narratives could take root in every
’hood (neighbourhood). From Portland to Paris, every ’hood could be Compton; everyone
had a story to tell, a cop to fight, a rebellion to launch.
Ironically, gangsta tales populated with drunken, high, rowdy, irresponsible, criminal,
murderous “niggas”—its practitioners likened it to journalism and called it “reality
rap”—seemed to be just what suburbia wanted. As student populations diversified,
youth were increasingly uninterested in whitewashed cultural hand-me-downs. The 1988
advent of the MTV show, “Yo MTV Raps”, made African American, Chicano, and Latino
urban style instantly accessible across the world. With its claims to street authenticity,
its teen rebellion, its extension of urban stereotype and its individualist “get
mine” credo, gangsta rap fit hand-in-glove with a generation weaned on racism and
Reaganism. These were not the old Negro spirituals of the civil rights era. They
were raw, violent, undisciplined, offensive, “niggafied” rhymes, often homophobic,
misogynistic.
Gangsta rap drew new lines in the culture wars. As the music crossed over to whiter,
more affluent communities, gangsta rap inflamed cultural conservatives like Bob Dole
and neoliberals like
C. Delores Tucker into demanding new corporate and state repression. Gangsta rap
was even showing up in presidential debates.
Progressives often speculate that gangsta rap was foisted on a young public by reactionary
record labels. But to a great extent, the rise of these pop-cultural trends was completely
unplanned. Well into the 1990s, major recording labels had no idea what kind of hip-hop
would sell. Unlike rock music, which had long before matured into a stable and culturally
stale economy, hip-hop was like a wild child whose every gesture and motion was a
complete surprise.
In the wake of the Los Angeles riots after the brutal police beating of motorist
Rodney King in 1991, gangsta rap and hip-hop marched toward their greatest commercial
success. Dr. Dre’s album The Chronic topically moved gangsta rap away from ghetto
commentary to druggy hedonism, and, with its polished chrome sound, onto mainstream
radio playlists. As cast by MTV and the expanding hip-hop press, artists such as
the late Tupac Shakur, the son of a Black Panther revolutionary, made rebellion less
a battle in the culture wars, and ever more a mere marker of youth style.
The shrinking music industry also transformed the hip-hop scene. Between the early
to mid-90s, several of the independent record label owners who had been instrumental
in launching the music sold their companies to major labels, which also began consolidating
and reducing the size of their rosters. As a result, grassroots acts no longer went
from the streets to the top of the charts. Management firms guaranteed polished stars
and funded the farm teams that would take those stars’ places in turn. The new hip-hop
sound, crisply digitized and radio-ready, became mainstream pop.
With the massive major label distribution juggernauts behind them, it became routine
for the biggest hip-hop acts to debut with gold (half-million) or more sales. A half-dozen
magazines were launched to take advantage of the new wealth of advertising dollars.
Hollywood’s big money came calling, making multimedia stars of rappers LL Cool J
and Ice Cube. Commercial tie-ins with products such as Sprite or the Gap clothing
proliferated for second-level artists. Producer Russell Simmons began calling the
hip-hop generation “the biggest brand-building generation the world has ever seen”.
The audience had matured into a marketable demographic.
Rebellion
or capitulation?
As U.S. author
Don DeLillo has written, “Capital burns off the nuance in a culture.” To be sure,
hip-hop has transformed popular culture across the world. In Kenya, youngsters wear
Adidas baseball caps, Nike shoes and stage rowdy rap concerts that look like versions
of Bambaataa’s romps in the Bronx of yore. It’s unclear whether such performances
reflect a hybrid youth rebellion or capitulation to global capitalism.
Yet somewhere within the culture lies the key to understanding an entire generation.
This culture forged in fire still keeps its hand near the match. Rap rewards those
who “represent” its audiences’ realities. If this often appears as caving in to baser
impulses, hip-hop’s defense is that it speaks to young people as they are and where
they are.
And yet a growing movement believes that the culture is liberating. In cities across
the world, youths use hip-hop to organise the struggles against racism, police brutality,
and the prison-industrial complex. For them, the culture and the politics are inseparable—they
are all part of a cohesive world-view. Therein finally lies the story: hip-hip, born
of the destructive fires of the 1960s and 70s, has rekindled creative flames of hope
in a new generation. The cleansing fires are still to come.
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