Pause and Affect
Critical Minded > 004 > – Mar 26, 2007 – by Abdul Ali 
1. What is Hip Hop: Looking Back, Looking Forward?
I was stumped, embarrassed even, when she asked me that question. What is hip hop? My supervisor’s voice, a fifty-something year old black woman who came-of-age during the age of Motown, intoned. There I was, a son of the hip hop generation praised for its ability to freestyle, still nothing, not a word. Being born in 1984 puts me on the cusps of the Hip Hop generation, while I was just getting out of diapers I bopped to the hypnotizing beats of Rob Bass, Sugar Hill, Salt-n-Pepa, Run D.M.C, and Public Enemy, Kid-n-Play, Jazzy Jeff, and De La Soul. So, I wasn’t old enough to study what was then, a new music, a movement. But I did feel it. I knew its familiar sound, almost like my mother’s voice, who often emulated the b-girl rappers of the time. At 22, I’m still recovering from the madness: the infusion of sound, poetry, and fevered movements that took the world by storm before I was born, while my parents were teenagers, coming-of-age.
I would stare at my uncle’s photographs of my mother. She rocked a blond bob-cut strutting with a Salt-n-Pepa pose. I recall Hip Hop being a protest art. I recall my mother taking me to see Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing, I recall Public Enemy. I recall, then, Vibe staff writer Joan Morgan who interviewed the Cast of the film Panther. Their soundtrack fused with Hip Hop and Soul, their Freedom Song performed by [Various Artists]. Although the academics say hip hop composed of beats, graffiti, breaking, and b-boying. Hip hop has a very different meaning to me. It’s a sensibility, a pulse, a melding of lyrics and tight beats, an evolution of the blues and jazz, with all of its variations, hence, neo-soul and R&B.
One of the beauties of Hip-Hop is the language that it provides for twenty-something-year-olds to talk culture and politics with their parents and grandparents provided the twenty-something-year-olds study what came before Hip Hop in order to make intelligent comparisons. For instance, I recently had the honor of meeting Nikki Giovanni on campus. I recall her pulling up her arm sleeve revealing a tattoo that read: THUG LIFE. Her getting the tattoo was a nod to not only Tupac Shakur but to the Hip Hop generation. This demonstrated hip hop’s ability to bridge the gap between the civil rights generation and the rest of us.
Because Hip Hop is such a larger-than-life entity, one can refer to texts to uncover its meaning. I’ve read the seminal texts on Hip Hop: Can’t Stop Won’t Stop, The Hip Hop Generation, and When Chickenheads Come Home to Roost to name a few, and still I feel their definitions are too subjective and elusive. So, being the good student of English that I am I opted for a dictionary definition. According to hiphopdictionary.com:
[Hip Hop is] a culture and form of ground breaking music and self expression with elements that consisted of the elements of graffiti art, DJing, MCing, and breaking. Today Hip-Hop is considered to be dead in the mainstream because so-called mainstream Hip-Hop doesn’t have the elements of hip-hop and have no meaning.
I find this definition a bit disturbing, disturbing because it bears light on an unavoidable truth: that Hip Hop has become mainstream, or is mainstream, and therefore out of the hands of those who first created it. With all of its mainstream commercialism, Hip Hop is still very vibrant. A good example of this is a recent book published on Hip Hop titled To the Break of Dawn: A Freestyle on the Hip Hop Aesthetic by William Jelani Cobb. What makes this book so important is that it opens a new vein for talking about Hip Hop. We’ve all heard how Hip Hop has chronicled history from an urban perspective in the past twenty-odd years. Nevertheless, rarely have writers, academics, or even lay people talked about hip hop as an art, as something worthy of a discussion on aesthetics. This book will probably start a new discourse on multiple levels. To quote Dickens, this is the best of times, and the worst of times [for Hip Hop.]
So now that we have the books, the academics, the writers, the students getting degrees in Hip Hop, the magazines, the websites on hip hop—what are we gonna do with it? At the risk of sounding cliché, the roots of Hip Hop were revolutionary, characterized by rapid change reflecting the need to tell the truth about the unsaid happenings in the ghetto. What happened to our standards of Hip Hop? At one point it was revolutionary, sad to say it ain’t no more. Too often, with very few exceptions, when I turn on my radio I hear the same ole lines about blingin’, shaking your ass, or bonin’—a kind of anesthetized hip hop— that has as its focus entertainment rather than issues. Furthermore, how can we operate in an art form that we have surrendered to the deep pockets of Corporate America? If we can no longer control the meaning, can we really say it’s ours, or be surprised by all of the pathologies that also characterize the Hip Hop generation?
William Jelani Cobb suggests that Hip Hop is an extension of the Black Autobiography, if this is true, than our literature needs closer reading in order to gain its full import. Poet Sonia Sanchez writes in her poem “Blk/Rhetoric”:
who’s gonna make all
this beautiful blk/rhetoric
mean something.
In her poem “Blk/Rhetoric,” Sanchez makes the call to her audience of the 1970s to give a deeper meaning to their rhetoric. Similarly, the Hip Hop generation needs to give our lyrics, more depth, more grounding in the revolutionary consciousness that birthed it three decades ago. What does it really mean to say one belongs to the Hip Hop generation? No one questions what it means to belong to the Black Power Movement. I submit to you my definition of Hip Hop: a vehicle with which to pause, think about the lyrics, affecting change.
~Abdul Ali is a senior English major at Howard University. He is a poet, playwright, and essayist residing in Washington, DC area. He’s also the Managing Editor of The Amistad, an online literary journal published by Howard University. He can be reached via e-mail at mdpoet21@yahoo.com
Comments
6 Comments so far
Very good Ali. Not a bad article but I felt the last paragraphs starting with now that we have… were where you really want to make your strongest point. I don’t see today’s hip hop artists as revolutionaries but rather commercial clones trying to cash in on the wave of self-ownership before they become passé. I agree that we have lost the meaning behind the words and now simply posture the look of a wordsmith. Art and commerce all over again but with an emphasis on commerce before art. I never listen to Jay Z and have much more respect for Mos Def. The ability to speak doesn’t imply you have anything worth saying. All art forms require discipline and mastery. Hip hop should be no different.
MD
This brother is speaking realness. One shouldn’t look to/listen to the radio for HIP HOP, radio stopped playing real HIP HOP years ago (or at least what they could play). For me the music represents a “beautiful, gap-bridging struggle” It came out of a time where there was a need to be represented and heard at a time when music television wasn’t doing that, so HIP HOP had to break down the door and do the damn thing! There is a constant discussion of whether or not HIP HOP is dead, alive, real or commercialized, and like most things your views/answers may depend on how you got HIP HOP, HIP HOP’s place in your life and in general what it [HIP HOP] means to you. I will go a step further and say that Mr. Ali, hit the nail on the head with this piece and the sentence:
“Similarly, the Hip Hop generation needs to give our lyrics, more depth, more grounding in the revolutionary consciousness that birthed it three decades ago.”
sums up what I feel HIP HOP is presently in need of and what it may have been to those who started it way back when.
Incredible!!!! SCHEME, ya’ll have done it again!
-K
really appreciated your critical commentary on “looking back forward”. I believe that a number of young people like yourself are engaged in a certain kind of longing for more sustantive messaging in Hip Hop. With a number of recent challenges to the un-checked proliferation of negative messages, it seems like the tide may, in fact, be turning towards a more thoughtful consumption by youth. a recent shift in those contacting me about my own work seems to be a positive indicator. thanks for sharing.
HIP HOP..!!! It’s a Kulture! IT’S BIGGER THAN JUST Rap Music! It’s Bigger Than Hip Hop Music! There is a difference but You don’t seem to understand that. It’s Bigger Than Black! Black. Were a global movement that stood up 37 years ago and we’ve been growing and learning all along the way, never have We been stagnated like you were when the woman asked you what Hip Hop is, and if you were truly with us, You would know this MAAAN! I appreciate your efforts but they aren’t warranted. Leave the defining of a nation to those who have citizenship.
There it is.
In a way, I agree with Governor Slugwell and Ali at the same time. Hip Hop has been co-opted and swallowed up by dominant culture. This is what happens when art forms/revolutions become threatening. Dominant culture finds a way to water it down, suck the life out, and leave it for dead by trivializing the substantive force behind the movement and sensationalizing peripheral characteristics.
Some people may point to BIG and Pac’s passing as points when hip hop started to go wrong, but it started before. While Congress held hearings concerning hip hop’s detrimental effect on society and batted ideas around for censorship, MTV was doing up to the hour NEWS breaks on Pac going to jail or East/West coast beef. The gangsta rap culture was sensationalized and portrayed as the core of hip hop, but it wasn’t. The media set up a paper card house supported by the gangsta rap image record labels were selling, but anyone who listens to Pac knows that for every “Hit Em Up” there was “Dear Mama” or “Brenda’s Got a Baby”. Everything became so heated through media coverage and continuous air time for beef videos that things boiled over. Everyone expected it to end badly, but no one stopped it! Once Pac and BIG died, the house fell apart and hip hop took the heat.
This opened the door for garbage rap. And people like Master P and Puffy came through with a whole gang of garbage sentimental songs like “I Miss My Homies”. No one wanted to hear any drama and companies started selling jiggy music. Mase danced around in retarded astronaut suits and it just blew up until even people like Nelly got a piece. The music became vanilla enough for Middle America to digest and Hip Hop hasn’t been the same since. The art form was thus “tamed”.
While this happened, the problems that real hip hop addressed are STILL HERE. Look at how Katrina was handled, look at who gets sent to war, look at who’s STILL getting pushed further away from the city by Rattner properties!!!! There’s still a 100 to 1 sentencing disparity for crack versus cocaine. Hip hop is the People’s vehicle to address these issues, but if the air waves are dominated by bullshit rap talking about gold daytons, these things stay in the background.
Hip Hop is still hip hop. But those songs that Ali points out as problematic concerning bling bling and shaking ass, simply aren’t hip hop. If we don’t go to clubs that play crap rap and don’t buy the cds and don’t go to the shows, no one will make it. This generation has a greater say in what will be created . We have podcasts, myspace, scheme mag, bars in BK, etc. Use these outlets to make conscious choices about what you listen to and what you don’t. Show love to people who stay true to hip hop and boycott those who don’t. Use your buying power to dictate what is produced. Or even just your voice, why is Timbaland trying to revive Brittney’s career? Why doesn’t he put his skills to use and jump off a REAL hip hop career!!!! It starts with these people we rep and we should expect more from them. If they sell out, you can’t expect those who have nothing to stand strong for the cause.
Look, I listen to my share of crap rap (I have to admit I cop’d Ghetto-D back in the day), but I don’t buy any of it anymore and I don’t pay for garbage shows. If you keep your dollars out of crap rap revenue streams, you can do your part to limit its distribution and creation.
Lastly, here is an interesting article abstract on America’s role in the creation of violent lyrics in hip hop, which mainstream America opposes.
http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0022-2984%28200222%2971%3A3%3C175%3ARMAIVP%3E2.0.CO%3B2-H&size=LARGE
By the way, here’s a list of the Various Artists on “Freedom Song” from the PANTHER soundtrack.
Contributing Artists
Aaliyah
Felicia Adams
May May Ali
MC Lyte
Amel Larrieux
Az-Iz
Blackgirl
Mary J. Blige
Tanya Blount
Brownstone
Casserine
Changing Faces
Tyler Collins
N’Dea Davenport
Da 5 Footaz
E.V.E.
Emage
En Vogue
Eshe & Laurena of Arrested Development
Female
For Real
Penny Ford
Lalah Hathaway
Jade
Jamecia
Jazzyfatnastees
Billy Lawrence
Joi
Brigette McWilliams
Milira
Miss Jones
Cindy Mizelle
Monica
Me’Shell NdegéOcello
Natasha
Nefertiti
Patra
Pebbles
Pure Soul
Raja-Nee
Brenda Russell
SWV
Chantay Savage
Sonja Marie
Tracie Spencer
Sweet Sable
TLC
Terri & Monica
Vybe
Crystal Waters
Caron Wheeler
Karyn White
Vanessa Williams
Xscape
Y?N-Vee
Zhané
The rap only version featured Salt-N-Pepa, Queen Latifah, Lisa ‘Left Eye’ Lopes of TLC, Yo Yo, MC Lyte, Da 5 Footaz, Patra, and Me’Shell Ndegéocello.
Remembering the women by name,
Tara