Hip-hop as a weapon for change
- October 4th, 2010
- Posted in Analysis
- By djmutiny
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In this article, I put forward the view that hip-hop is, by definition, radical. In its essence, it stands for positive social change, for progress, against oppression and against racism. That is perhaps a controversial view in these days when the rap charts are full of ‘crack music’ and we see a little bit too much of Young Jeezy, 50 Cent, Snoop, Petey Pablo, Li’l Wayne and Ludacris.
Although arguably gangsta rap does have a legitimate place within hip-hop (reflecting as it does the conditions and mindset of many young people living in the ‘fourth world’ ghettoes of the west), I contend that the dominance of gangsta rappers within hip-hop represents an anomaly. Ultimately, a lot of what people think of as hip-hop is really just manufactured urban pop. It’s an MTV/BET-conducted circus; a 21st century minstrel show, portraying a ridiculous caricature of people of African descent that is designed to perpetuate racist prejudices.
We mustn’t let the major record labels define hip-hop for us. Hip-hop, as a major social and cultural movement, represents something very different to the Rick Ross’s lies about getting ‘rich off cocaine’.
As MK Asante Jr points out in his phenomenal book, ‘It’s Bigger Than Hip-hop’, the name ‘hip-hop’ itself gives some interesting clues as to hip-hop’s radical essence.
The word ‘hip’ comes out of the Wolof language, spoken by the Wolof people in Senegal, Gambia and Mauritania. In Wolof, there’s a verb, ‘hipi’, which means “to open one’s eyes and see.” So, hipi is a term of enlightenment.
So the ‘hip’ is all about knowledge and understanding. What about ‘hop’?
‘Hop’ is an Old English word that means “to spring into action.” So what [hip-hop is] about is enlightenment, then action.
Asante goes on to quote the classic KRS-1 lyric from ‘Hip-Hop Lives’:
Hip and hop is more than music
Hip is the knowledge / Hop is the movement
Hip and hop is intelligent movement
When hip-hop started in the 1970s, it was a party movement. Rappers didn’t talk about politics as such, but nonetheless the culture was *implicitly* political because it represented the unity and voice of oppressed people who weren’t supposed to be uniting, who weren’t supposed to be partying, who weren’t supposed to have a voice. As the Palestinians say: existence is resistance.
It was the South Bronx. There were no jobs; the housing was terrible; there were race wars; there were turf wars; there were gang wars. Hip-hop arose out of the different gangs and communities and ethnic groups putting their differences aside. These people were supposed to be fighting amongst each other for scraps; they were supposed to be barely surviving, whilst mainstream America forgot about them. Yet all of a sudden they get together and create the most creative, dynamic, innovative, powerful culture that anyone has seen for decades. Drawing on the rich legacy of African, Latino/a and Caribbean culture in the US, this new culture combined rapping with mutated disco beats, and added the innovations of scratching, breakdancing and graffiti. It was an amazing explosion of creativity.
The people in the forefront of this movement didn’t have newspapers or TV channels, but they created a loud, powerful voice. Soon they were putting that voice to very good effect, letting the world know about what was going on in the US ghetto – probably the most oppressed community in the ‘first world’. People like Public Enemy, Melle Mel, Rakim, KRS-1, Poor Righteous Teachers, Paris, Sister Souljah and the Jungle Brothers did a great job bringing this message.
Nowadays the voice still exists and is louder than ever, in the sense that hip-hop as an art form reaches hundreds of millions of people throughout the world. However, the sad fact is that this voice is increasingly not controlled by, or used in the interests of, working class and oppressed people.
In 1985 Melle Mel was rapping about the dangers of coke and crack:
My white lines go a long way
Either up your nose or through your vein
With nothin to gain except killin your brain
In the same song he makes an important point about comparative sentencing:
A street kid gets arrested, gonna do some time
He got out three years from now just to commit more crime
A businessman is caught with 24 kilos
He’s out on bail, and out of jail and that’s the way it goes
These days we’ve got Young Jeezy:
I’m knee-deep in the game
So when it’s time to re-up I’m knee-deep in the ‘caine.
Or Li’l Wayne, whose routine, apparently, is:
Wake up in the morning, take a sh**, shower, shave
Stand over the stove and whip it like a slave.
So in a single chorus he is both trivialising the history of slavery and the African holocaust, and at the same time glamourising the sale of crack cocaine, the spread of which has been another (state-engineered) disaster for Black and Latino communities. (Incidentally, given that Wayne is a platinum-selling artist, it is extremely unlikely that his daily routine has anything to do with cooking up crack; therefore instead of “keeping it real”, he’s making himself rich off a self-destructive ghetto discourse that promotes maximum personal wealth at the expense of the community’s wellbeing).
Dead Prez break down the current state of hip-hop very clearly:
Hip-hop today is programmed by the ruling class. It is not the voice of African or Latino or oppressed youth. It is a puppet voice for the ruling class that tells us to act like those people who are oppressing us. The schools, the media, capitalism and colonialism are totally responsible for what hip-hop is and what it has become.
How did we get to this point?
It’s simple really. Like with any powerful cultural movement, big corporations wanted to get their piece of the pie. They jumped on hip-hop, and made a whole load of money off acts like Melle Mel, Kurtis Blow, Public Enemy and Rakim. But the music industry became keenly aware of the fact that it was promoting music that pretty clearly wasn’t in the long-term interests of Big Money. So it came up with the perfect solution: carry on milking the cash cow, but put an end to the politics. The strategy: only bring out the monster marketing machine for rappers that talk nonsense and that promote negative, sexist, racist, exploitative images.
The record labels had the power to do that. ‘The Big Four’ – Universal Music Group, Sony BMG, EMI Group and Warner Music Group – account for over 80% of the US music market. Within a couple of years – 1990 to 1992 – it went from Public Enemy being the number one act in hip-hop to political rappers not being able to get the promotion or financial backing they needed to get serious sales.
In Byron Hurt’s excellent documentary ‘Hip Hop Beyond Beats and Rhymes’ there’s a great quote from the former Def Jam president Carmen Ashhurst-Watson:
At the time where we switched to gangster music was the same time the majors brought up all the labels and I don’t think that’s a coincidence. At the time we were able to get a place in the record store and a bigger presence because of this major marketing capacity, the music became less and less conscious. We went to Columbia, and the next thing I know we went from Public Enemy to pushing a group called Bitches With Problems.
Where do we go from here?
The fact of the matter is that we’re not going to win the battle against the MTV/BET-conducted circus any time soon. But that doesn’t mean there aren’t things we can do to improve the situation and to get back to the real ethic of hip-hop.
The first thing is that, obviously, we’ve got to support the people that are making the type of music we want to hear. People like Akala, Lowkey, Immortal Technique, Jasiri X, Dead Prez, Skinnyman, Ms Dynamite, Black the Ripper, Logic, Shadia Mansour, Genesis Elijah, Mos Def, Talib Kweli, Gazateam, Ty, Rodney P, Stormtrap and many others are doing an incredible job and we are extremely lucky to have them. We need to do our bit in terms of pushing them, encouraging them and promoting them, because they don’t have massive corporate machines behind them. Their support base is grassroots, and it relies on word of mouth (and of course the internet).
Also, there are quite a few artists out there who you could characterise as ‘semi-conscious’. They have progressive, anti-racist, anti-exploitation ideas, but they have been led to believe that they can only succeed if they keep those ideas as quiet as possible. Those artists need to be pushed in the right direction; they need to know that there’s a market for conscious, militant music.
In terms of ‘reclaiming the real’, the second thing to remember is that, very simply, we need to fight for our rights, regardless of music. Music by itself is not a movement. It can be part of a movement; it can massively help a movement, but some beautiful lyrics don’t mean a thing if we’re not in the streets demanding our human rights. When James Brown sang ‘Say it Loud, I’m black and I’m proud’, it really resonated because out on the streets there was a massive movement for black people’s rights in the US. By fighting for our rights, we make our music truly relevant.
There are real social, economic, political, cultural problems that the system is not doing anything useful about. Who’s doing anything about unemployment, the lack of good facilities, postcode wars, police harassment of youth, disappearing higher education places, irrelevant and bad quality education, high cost of living, rising prison numbers, the danger of walking from A to B, benefit cutbacks and so on? If we don’t do anything about these things ourselves, we can’t expect anyone else to!
We need to demand that our musicians say something about these issues, but it’s up to all of us to do something about them.
NB. The above article is based on a talk I gave at the excellent Hip-hop History event organised by the Octavia Foundation in August 2010.
So “When hip-hop started in the 1970s, it was a party movement.” But the name proves that it is all about radical politics??
And who says it’s “the most creative, dynamic, innovative, powerful culture that anyone has seen for decades”?
I’m sorry. great as some hip hop is, the idea that it is “by nature” and “in essense” progressive is totally idealistic.
Some of it is very progressive, some of it is dross. Just like lots of other types of music.
And the idea that it’s somehow so much more innovative than lots of other new types of music that have emerged before or since, in the west or elsewhere in the world, is equally flawed.
A great body of work has sprung up glorifying and analysing hip hop – turning it into yet another academic discipline that gives people nice little careers as experts. It’s in their interests to talk about it as if it has some extraordinary life and significance of its own. And it’s all part of the commodification of history and culture – and the pacification of the people who make it.
New genres of music evolve all the time, especially amongst oppressed peoples. This one happens to have crossed over into mainstream western consciousness. Does that make it more innovative than the street culture of Lebanon or Brazil or India?
Yes, progressive people need (and make) progressive culture, but culture is a reflection of aspirations – it’s not a REPLACEMENT for them. The act of making or listening to some good lyrics is not going to bring us a decent, equitable society. ‘Supporting the people that are making the type of music we want to hear’ is not our goal – changing society is our goal!
Call me old-fashioned, but ‘Reclaiming hip hop’ seems to be setting our sights rather low.
We can buy all the ‘real’, ‘true’ hip hop in the world – make some good old consumer choices about it – but that isn’t going to fix the problems of the people listening to the music, any more than chosing ‘fair trade’ does anything more than salve the consciences of the people who happen to have enough money to make that particular consumer choice.
The stuff about the ‘problems of society’ tacked on the end of this article seems to be missing the point rather too:
“Unemployment, the lack of good facilities, postcode wars, police harassment of youth, disappearing higher education places, irrelevant and bad quality education, high cost of living, rising prison numbers, the danger of walking from A to B, benefit cutbacks and so on.”
What’s wrong with pointing out that all these problems – and many more – are caused by CAPITALISM?
“Fighting for our rights” has been the aim of the trade-union movement for over 100 years – but as long as we fight for rights under capitalism they’re only ever granted temporararily. And racism, sexism etc will NEVER be got rid of under capitalism – they are at the heart of how the capitalist ruling class stays in power.
Class society is our enemy and is what we need to organise ourselves to get rid of. If music is going to serve the people, it needs to be one of many ways of helping people to gain that understanding. Otherwise, it’s just one more (perfectly respectable) way to let off a bit of steam.
thanks for the comment. i have several disagreements with it; will find time in the next few days to respond properly.
Regarding the relevance of hip-hop and its radical essence, well, you’re free to disagree. I would think it was uncontroversial to say that there’s a very clear relationship between hip-hop’s social roots (black/brown/oppressed communities in the west in the aftermath of the most vicious repression of the freedom struggles of the 60s and 70s) and its nature as a cultural form. Would you put an equals sign between, say, tech house and Irish rebel music?
My labeling of hip-hop “the most creative, dynamic, innovative, powerful culture that anyone had seen for decades” is US-specific, and on that basis holds true. Arguably reggae and various other cultural forms were just as powerful.
I agree that hip-hop’s spread round the world is strongly related to cultural imperialism and the rise of mass media as a tool for mind control. However, with hip-hop this has a very interesting dialectic – on the one hand, people know about it because it’s what they see on the TV; on the other hand, they relate to it because of precisely that radical essence I discuss in the article. Why would so many Palestinian, Ghanian, South African, Brazilian etc young people be using hip-hop as the means to expose their conditions and to express themselves? Not because of the consumer bullshit of commercial rap, but because of hip-hop’s enduring identification with the oppressed of the world.
You should recognise the power of music/culture to mobilise people. The fact is that people *listen* to music, whereas they’ve learnt to strongly distrust leaflets and papers etc. Just look at the effect Lowkey’s ‘Terrorist?’ video has had – it has got school and college students up and down the country discussing very deep issues about what terrorism and state terrorism are. If you want to change the world, as you claim to, then surely it makes sense to talk in such a way that people will actually listen?
What you write about ‘consumer choice’ etc misses the point. I’m arguing for music that makes people think, that causes them to question society and confront problems. That is not the same as lobbying for fair trade (although, for the record, I do think people should make informed consumer choices where they have the option (ie. money) to do so).
I think your reduction of all social problems to ‘capitalism’ is a simplification, to be honest (it ignores dimensions of neo-liberalism vs social democracy, race, gender, democracy vs repression, that have an existence which is at least to some extent independent). Especially at a time when more and more countries are successfully adopting a mixed economy and when third world developmentalism is making a resurgence, it doesn’t make sense to reduce everything to capitalism.
However, that’s not particularly important in the context of this discussion. The main thing is that young, working class and oppressed people need to be engaged in the struggle for a better future. Without their involvement, that struggle *has* no future. However, those people are completely alienated not just from mainstream politics but also from the left, which is largely middle class; has very little understanding of the real problems faced by people; makes precious little effort to engage working class and oppressed people; does next to nothing in terms of developing grassroots activism; and spends a good deal of its efforts engaged in meaningless sectarian ‘debate’ about things that happened in the past.
You reference the trade union movement. While the trade union movement is important, its problem is that it is addressed almost entirely at the industrial working class – a class which currently has way too much invested in the social and economic status quo. By far the most successful movements of oppressed people in the west have been Irish republicanism and the US Black Power movement – both of which were organised around oppressed communities and social programmes to meet the needs of those communities, not just in the future but *here and now*. I contend that hip-hop can play a part in engaging people in that sort of struggle and in giving that struggle shape. Therefore the article suggests fighting against the subversion of hip-hop and promoting its use as a way of bringing up a new generation of young people to build a thriving movement.