Marcus Reeves. Crisis. Volume 114, Issue 3, May/June 2007.
In 2004, the cultural movement known as hip-hop celebrated its 30th anniversary. The momentous occasion was marked with a slew of televised retrospectives, the grandest of them all being VH1’s five-part documentary, And You Don’t Stop: 30 Years of Hip-Hop, which takes aficionados and novices alike through the commercial and social evolution of this urban revolution.
The reason for such acknowledgements wasn’t just because hip-hop was still alive and kicking, but because this Black/Brown inner-city movement, despite being shunned by mainstream America over the years, had grown into a global phenomenon. On a national scale, hip-hop culture, particularly its music, has become the face of the economic power, socio-cultural influence and political potential of the generation of Black youth growing up after the Civil Rights and Black Power movements.
By the time of the new millennium, hip-hop’s music had become the top-selling genre on the pop charts, turning this bankable art form into a $2-billion business, according to Black Enterprise, in an article entitled, “Music Masters: A New Generation of Rap Moguls.” Hip-hop affected not only music but also fashion, film, print and television with its cross-cultural, cross-racial and cross-corporate influence.
The culture, especially hip-hop’s music, or more specifically, rap music, had provided to Black and Brown people, and even poor Whites, a platform to speak their minds. However, as the 30-year anniversary celebration came to a close, there were critical questions about the state of hip-hop music as it pertained to the overall commemoration of hip-hop and its overall growth.
“Some among us have been so gauche as to ask, ‘What the heck are we celebrating exactly?'” writer Greg Tate queried in a 2005 article in The Village Voice. Like that of those disturbed by the violent, misogynistic and self-destructive lyrics in hip-hop’s music, Tate’s criticism was of the genre’s voice, which had become more of a vehicle for its corporate sponsors who had co-opted the movement through distribution deals and outright purchases, rather than a balanced voice depicting the lives of its core Black audience. In other words, rap artists had become more concerned with maintaining their wealth gained through their corporate partners selling one-dimensional, often criminal, images of Black urban life. At what cost were rappers sustaining their big-money influence? Indeed, the journey of hip-hop’s music has been a “marriage of heaven and hell, of New World African ingenuity and that trick of the devil known as global hyper-capitalism.” For anyone who has observed the evolution of this movement, hip-hop’s struggle to obtain and maintain power, money and respect has been a dilemma since its inception.
The story of hip-hop begins where Black power and civil rights seemed to wane: the mid-1970s. Amid the recede of the 1960s Black revolution, White flight and industrial retreat from U.S. cities, hip-hop culture emerged out of the gang epidemic and political neglect of the South Bronx. Black and Brown youth turned destructive elements of gangs into a platform of style, self-expression and individuality. Crew names spray-painted on walls transformed into the aerosol art of graffiti. The aggressive, Black urban sound of funk music, which had begun disappearing from Black radio with the coming of disco, was reconfigured into break-beat collages (what would become known as hip-hop music) by way of turntable derring-dos by DJs such as Kool Herc, Grandmaster Flash and former gang member Afrika Bambaataa. Street brawls morphed into an acrobatic dance called breaking or b-boying. The ghosts of Black oral traditions such as the dozens and the epic street poetry known as “toasts,” became the hip-hop verbal art form of rapping or rap music.
Just as the hip-hop culture did not shout down the decrepit conditions of the Bronx of the early 1970s, which resembled a crumbled war zone, rap did not change its environment as much as escape it through fantasy and style.
“Rappers bragged about living the brand-name high life because they didn’t,” author Jeff Chang wrote in a 2003 article in The Nation. “They boasted about getting headlines in the New York Post because they couldn’t.”
When rap, as well as the hip-hop culture in general, moved beyond its New York birthplace, it became the voice of an emerging “post-Civil Rights” generation developing as the federal government, with the election of Ronald Reagan, began recoiling from its role of protecting civil rights and striving to ensure economic equality.
Coincidentally, the first commercial rap record, 1979’s “Rapper’s Delight,” released by Sugar Hill Records, not only appeared as disco was in decline, but also as the election of Ronald Reagan signaled the dismantling of the Great Society programs and War on Poverty initiatives of the Lyndon B. Johnson Administration. By the early 1980s, the Black-owned independent record label Sugar Hill Records, which released “Rapper’s Delight,” had become the powerhouse behind the commercialization of hip-hop music. (Other independent labels invested into rap music also, but none had the impact of Sugar Hill.) With its artist roster filled with New York’s hip-hop pioneers—Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five, Funky Four Plus One More, The Treacherous Three and others—Sugar Hill was the primary source for turning hip-hop music into the new sound (and social message) of Black America. Initially, the label merely packaged hip-hop music in the crowd-pleasing themes of Bronx block parties: rappers bragging about themselves and how they move the crowd. Once the chill effect of Reagan’s policies—proposing major cuts in programs like Medicaid, student aid and the Comprehensive Employment and Training Act—settled in, Sugar Hill turned hip-hop music into the sociopolitical voice of the Black inner-city with Grandmaster Flash and The Furious Five’s platinum song, “The Message” in 1982.
“Most hip-hop aficionados identify … ‘The Message’ as rap’s initial foray into social and political commentary,” explained S. Craig Watkins, author of Hip Hop Matters (Beacon Press, 2005). It “crafted a revealing window into the conditions of urban blight.”
The idea to get the song made was that of Sugar Hill’s co-owner, Sylvia Robinson. A brutal portrait of ghetto life, “The Message” was a testament to the violent and desperate living conditions of America’s Black urban centers, which by 1980 had become, as the National Urban Coalition’s Committee on Cities had predicted in 1971, “Black, Brown and totally bankrupt.”
Heading into the mid-1980s, hip-hop artists picked up where Marvin Gaye left off with “What’s Going On?” Rappers such as Run-DMC, The Fearless Four, The Furious Five’s Melle Mel and Afrika Bambaataa and Soul Sonic Force were becoming young prophets on Black radio’s airwaves, sounding off on a variety of topics, from racism to nuclear proliferation. As the product of independent labels and poor communities, rappers and their messages stood in stark contrast to the pop-friendly, apolitical and crossover sounds of artists like Michael Jackson, Lionel Richie and Prince. Even the optimism engendered by Rev. Jesse Jackson’s run for the presidency in 1988 did little to shed light and perspective on the nihilistic or militant swell growing within Black communities becoming inundated with crack and further divestment. Alongside the rising popularity of leaders like Minister Louis Farrakhan and New York’s anti-racial and antiviolence leader Rev. Al Sharpton, the subject of Black pride and power were championed by rap artists Rakim, X-Clan and Poor Righteous Teachers, who melded the roles of youth leader and entertainer. No one epitomized this phenomenon more than Public Enemy, considered by some fans and critics as “the Black Panthers” of hip-hop music.
Public Enemy—the stars of rap’s newest power label, Def Jam—altered the role of rap artist from street poet to a voice, an instrument for social change. The goal for the group, as stated by its vocalist Chuck D, was to create 5,000 new Black leaders for the Black community. Their platinum sophomore LP in 1988, It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back, ushered in the transition from Reagan to Bush, from racial violence in the South to an upsurge of racial intolerance in New York City. Two of the most disturbing incidents came with the deaths of Michael Griffith and Yusuf Hawkins in Howard Beach and Bensonhurst, respectively. Both died at the hands of White mobs. The latter half of the decade witnessed hip-hop music and its artists (Public Enemy, for example) attempting to rekindle the bygone era of Black Power.
Pro-Black rap diminished as its militancy changed over to the ghetto-centric themes of “gangsta rap,” popularized by Compton, Calif.’s N.W.A (Niggaz With Attitudes). Their 1989 double platinum LP, Straight Outta Compton, is a hip-hop milestone. This hip-hop sub-genre, while also a product of an independent label, found its footing as mainstream and corporate interest in hip-hop music increased. MTV in the early 1980s had not played videos by Black artists until Michael Jackson’s “Billie Jean,” but brought hip-hop music to White suburban youth, en masse with the video show Yo! MTV Raps. With the explosion of N.W.A., gangsta rap turned hardcore Black life into major commerce while also expressing deep-rooted frustrations of some Black Americans. Song’s like “Dopeman” and “F– tha Police” not only articulated the drug-fueled destruction ravaging communities from Compton to Harlem, but also became anthems, while “mandatory minimum” drug laws sent more Black men to prisons than the number of Black men who would enroll in college. Rap artists were now street soldiers reporting from the violent frontlines of America’s ghettos.
For anyone who had doubted the validity behind gangsta rap’s angst, the Los Angeles riots in 1992, provoked by the Rodney King incident, confirmed the music’s message. The West Coast became the new symbol of Black political and social repression as gangsta rap became a cultural lightening rod among conservatives and law enforcement officials. Panther-like militancy expressed in “Cop Killer” by rapper Ice-T’s group, Body Count, brought protest from cops and conservatives to gangsta rap’s growing corporate sponsors dealing in rap music, namely Time Warner, which distributed music for several labels—from Cold Chillin’ to Sire to Tommy Boy. In 1992, the same year William Clinton won the presidency, Dr. Dre released his seminal LP, The Chronic. Dre’s triple-platinum disc that mixed post-L.A. rebellion euphoria with breezy portraits of gangsterdom repackaged gangsta rap as a fashionable lifestyle, “gangsta chic.” This helped to push hard core rap music into American pop culture and reconstituted Black youth culture in the language and attitude of gangsta rap. Consequently, the chorus of White conservatives decrying the popularity of the music was joined by some members of the Black middle class such as civil rights activist C. Delores Tucker and Rev. Calvin Butts, pastor of New York’s Abyssinian Baptist Church.
Rap music’s fascination with thug life wasn’t as destructive in the lives of its listeners, it seems, as it was to some rap artists. The murder of Tupac Shakur and Biggie Smalls toward the end of the 1990s are examples of this. Even so, the music did signify that violence and nihilism in Black youth culture was getting out of hand. Rap in this era signaled the dominance of hip-hop as a pop music commodity and as a force of American pop culture. While country and rock music were on the decline in terms of sales, rap was having record-breaking sales. Diddy, Jay-Z, Master P—even White rapper Eminem—helped rap replace rock music as the vanguard expression of youthful angst and inspiration. These stars owned their own labels (funded by larger, major labels) and were considered symbols of the American dream. Their consummate pursuit of the money and bling in music and in life was the perfect accompaniment to a rising stock market. Hip-hop music became less about mining the creativity of the music than selling stereotypes of Black criminal life and materialism to record companies.
“The bling-bling era in rap wasn’t the message-important era like how Marvin Gaye and them went through in their save-the-world mission,” rap producer Mannie Fresh said in a September 2003 article in Vibe magazine. “Hopefully the next era will be more serious and focus on regular-life stuff.”
The arrival of the new millennium found rap music and its artists at a crossroad: having obtained economic and cultural influence, but having no real boardroom power to bring its generation’s desire for social and political change into being. In 2004, the year before President George W. Bush was sworn in for his second term, some of hip-hop music’s powerbrokers attempted to translate the cultural and economic success of hip-hop into political power for “the hip-hop generation.” Russell Simmons and Sean “Diddy” Combs attempted to organize Black and Brown youth to change who occupied the White House. Simmons co-founded the Hip-Hop Summit Action Network and Diddy founded Citizen Change and launched massive voter registration drives in an effort to get out the vote among Black and Brown youth.
“We believe young people want to get involved within the process of taking responsibility for who represents them,” said Simmons. “We knew if we made it sexy and cool to register and to vote, they would engage in the process.”
In Newark, NJ., community activist Angela Woodson, writer Bakari Kitwana and then-Newark Deputy Mayor Ras Baraka convened the historic National Hip-Hop Political Convention. The convention went on from June 16, 2004—Tupac’s birthday—to June 19, 2004, commemorating Juneteenth. The purpose of the convention was to develop a national political agenda for the generation to unite around during the coming 2004 election and beyond. Hip-hop culture as a mobilizing force ready to seriously make a change (as well as get its share of loot) was an idea whose time had come. Unfortunately, while the platform—solidified by delegates from 14 states across the nation, coveting education, economic justice, health, criminal justice and human rights—was promising, it died with the close of the convention. As is often the case, the efforts to politicize Black and Brown young people during the election had no follow-through.
The effort to organize the hip-hop generation was one of the movement’s most gallant efforts in the last couple of years. However, there needs to be a move to also save the message rap music was birthed to speak—the balanced voice depicting the lives of its core Black audience—so that hip-hop’s effort to march forward will be in step with the words coming from the mouths of its poets.