Seneca Turner’s Thoughts upon revisiting Hip Hop:A rejoinder beyond either/or thinking
By Professor Floyd W. Hayes, III**
If (Black) music can be seen to be the result of certain attitudes, certain specific ways of thinking about the world (and only ultimately about the ways in which music can be made), then the basic hypothesis of this book is understood. The (Blacks’) music changed as (they) changed, reflecting shifting attitudes or (and this is equally important) consistent attitudes within changed contexts. (Amiri Baraka) LeRoi Jones, Blues People.
Gospel in church and blues in juke joints.... Public oratory and the dirty dozens. Motown and the rougher, funkier Stax. The division between the respectable and funky stuff has existed throughout African American history. Most Americans rooted in African American cultural experience have sophisticated relationships with both the sacred and the profane in black culture—or with their secular corollaries, the respectable and the rough.
Imani Perry, Prophets of the Hood: Politics and Poetics in Hip Hop
Back in the day, were we napping when Oscar Brown, Jr., Gil Scott-Heron, and the Last Poets were rapping? Were we caught off guard when hip-hop culture and rap music exploded on the USA’s politico-cultural scene in the late-1970 and then spread around the world in the years thereafter? The “we” to whom I refer are those of us Black American elders who grew to womanhood and manhood in the 1950s and 1960s, or before. As Seneca Turner says, we listened to “the cool cerebral sounds of Bird Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Milt Jackson, along with Sarah Vaughn, Ella Fitzgerald, the Motown sounds and others….” I surely was caught off guard!
Here again was the process of intergenerational disconnect taking place full speed. In its inception, hip-hop culture and rap music represented a new generation of cultural and political critics, speaking on behalf of unwanted urban residents suffering continuing crises of economic exploitation, political oppression, and cultural domination. Significantly different from past socio-economic conditions when class dynamics were more fluid, the emerging postindustrial-managerial economy of the 1970s seemed to be witnessing a growing permanency of impoverished class conditions. The new Black popular culture, which was a combination of Black American and Caribbean cultural contributions (forged in the flames of Bronx, New York, and Kingston, Jamaica), reflected these changing circumstances on the urban scene. But the irreverent tone, language, and image almost seemed to overshadow rap artists’ linguistic dexterity and critical messages. To many of us who had grown up fighting for Black liberation in the late-1950s and 1960s, the new sound seemed different, yet familiar—attractive, yet repellent. Initially, it was difficult to grasp the meaning of this emerging generational sound; therefore, many of us dismissed it. We denied its significance. But that disposition had to change. It had to change because the new contained vestiges of the old. Didn’t hip-hop and rap rise from the ashes of the 1960s?
Sometime in the late-1970s and early-1980s, I discovered the new irreverent popular cultural expression that young urban Black folks referred to as hip hop. I began to notice their strange-looking dance moves called break dancing. Simultaneously, it seems, I became aware of all kinds of writing and drawing on unusual (and often illegal) surfaces and places, such as homes, grocery stores, professional buildings, bridges, trains, and sidewalks. Here outlaw artists used aerosol spray to inscribe their rebellious graffiti messages. And there were young urban musical technologists, who used worn out turntables and records to scratch out a new sound. Calling it “sampling,” many rappers recorded their verses over old-school music. As in the past, the dialectic between old and new remained constant.
Accompanying the new sound were new urban poets from the Caribbean and the USA who, like Gil Scott-Heron, Oscar Brown, Jr., and the Last Poets, spit out thought-provoking rhymes on subjects like “Fight the Power” and “Cop Killer.” The new groups of rappers had outlaw/outsider names like Public Enemy, or Niggaz with Attitude—and later, Coup and Immortal Technique. Gradually, I became aware of this new generation of creative and rebellious artists, who were rappers like Afrika Bambataa, Grandmaster Flash, KRS-One, and DJ Kool Herc. But what was I supposed to make of monikers like RUN-DMC, DMX, Ice-T, Ice-Cube, LL Cool J, Snoop Dog, De La Soul, Sister Souljah, Fugees, TLC, Lil’ Kim, Queen Latifah, Salt-N-Pepa, or MC Lyte? But I could understand such names as Mary J. Blige, Lauryn Hill, and Erykah Badu.
No longer were there recognizable (to me and many in my generation) group names like Jazz Messengers, Modern Jazz Quartet, Temptations, Supremes, Impressions, Martha and the Vandellas, Smokey Robinson and the Miracles, Isley Brothers, or O’Jays. No familiar individual names like Billie Holiday, Joe Williams, Nina Simone, Horace Silver, Sam Cooke, Otis Redding, Marvin Gaye, Aretha Franklin, or Chaka Khan. No Ohio Players, Kool and the Gang, Funkadelic, or Prince. Not even Earth, Wind, and Fire! Yet, it is important to remember that many old-school musicians selected new names, such as Ahmad Jamal, Yusef Abdul Lateef and Sun Ra; and there was a Duke, a Count, and a Pharaoh. Hence, creative group names and individual name changes are not fundamentally new cultural phenomena within the Black artistic tradition.
Significantly, what initially and uncritically appeared as intergenerational disconnect, in many ways, represented/represents the modernist problem of either/or thinking. However, hip-hop culture and rap music symbolized/symbolize Black expression of postmodern popular culture that exists beyond the confines of the either/or dialectic; rather, the postmodern moment embodies cultural and intellectual complexities, ambiguities, and uncertainties of the both/and dynamic.
As I became increasingly familiar with hip-hop cultural and rap music in the mid-1980s, I heard the voices of bourgeois Black folks, screaming about rap’s harsh language and misogynistic lyrics. Rappers spit out bitter and raunchy rhymes. But are they fundamentally different from the raunchy lyrics that blues women and men sang back in the 1920s and afterwards? That music differed from the Black church’s gospel music, and religious people back then labeled urban blues the devil’s music. We all know this! Back in the 1950s, when I was in junior high school, several of us would sneak over to a friend’s home when parents were absent and listen to records that contained the profane jokes of Pig Meat Markham or Redd Foxx. We also played the dozens on the playground. We became verbally dexterous! Yet, by the 1980s, many critics of hip hop culture and rap music seemed to have forgotten the days when they ran free as youths. When they listened to and expressed their own forms of raunchy discourse; many elders still think they can rap. But the contradictions between Black sacred and secular music—that is, between respectable and raunchy cultural expressions—have long existed in the USA, as the above-quote by Imani Perry indicates.
What initially caught my attention was rap music’s critical and irreverent political critique of America’s culture of domination. Pieces like “Fight the Power” and “Cop Killer” resonated strongly with my social and political outlook. Urban cops, as agents of the local state, kill Blacks at will, knowing that there will be few, if any, consequences. Indeed, I always have deeply resented cops and the (il) legal order of urban community terrorism they enforce (see my essay, “Urban Police and the Order of Community Terrorism”). Therefore, I saw early rap artists as courageous young critics of the sorry urban conditions in which they and others had to live. But rap music also portrayed few images of romantic love than past Black musical expressions. Both female and male rappers depicted images of near mutual pain, conflict, and even hatred. Additionally, the music expressed Black anger, rage, and resentment of youth that seemed to go beyond that articulated by the Black Power generation of the late-1960s. Hip-hop and rap represented the mean streets, and resulting anguished existence, of urban Black America.
With the onset of the 1980s and the rise of the Reagan regime, hip-hop culture and rap music seemed to shift from critical political perspective to the projection of capitalist greed and underworld criminality. What many critics of hip hop and rap overlooked was that the transition in Black popular culture modeled the gangster Reagan regime’s shift to ultra-right wing politics of capitalist greed and criminality, as the Iran-Contra conflagration resulted in the US government’s involvement in the urban drug epidemic of crack cocaine, as the late award-winning journalist Gary Webb exposed in a series of articles in the San Jose Mercury News (see his important book, Dark Alliance: The CIA, the Contras, and the Crack Cocaine Explosion). This is not a cause-and-effect perspective, but I am arguing that there clearly was a complex interaction between the imposition of Reaganism (public philosophy) and Reaganomics (economic policies) and the explosion of gangsta rap with its symbolic emphasis on “bling bling” and mad consumerism, misogyny and the exploitation of women, underworld criminality and thug life, and crack cocaine and other drugs. Perhaps it is proper to argue that hip-hop’s outlaw cultural image was co-opted by and reflected the larger society’s rogue culture.
Significantly, the drive toward a political economy of mega-profits continued into the 21st century, as hip-hop culture invaded America’s high culture: the movie industry, together with the high fashion and urban clothing industries. Mass media and marketing, professional sports and athletic culture, educational culture and public intellectuals, television programming and pulp fiction, and political management and policy entrepreneurship—all of these institutions have been overtaken by the hip-hop aesthetic. Several hip-hop cultural figures became financial moguls in the ongoing Age of Reagan. Indeed, a number of rap artists even emerged as right-wing political conservatives. However, the politics of capitalist greed and unbridled self-interest began to falter as scandals like the fall of Enron in 2001, presaged the capitalist crisis that would come less than a decade later during the disastrous reign of George W. Bush—the worst president in US history.
What does the Obama election suggest about the Black popular culture of hip-hop? Clearly, the hip-hop generation also is a high-tech generation, born into the Digital Age of computers, e-mail, cell phones, Blackberries, ipods, etc. This is the generation of You Tube, Facebook, Myspace, eBay, Wikipedia, Twitter, etc. (see John Palfrey and Urs Gasser, Born Digital: Understanding the First Generation of Digital Natives). There is no doubt that the political activism of young Blacks (along with young people of other nationalities) constituted a major driving force that put Obama in office. Even though many older people questioned this possibility, the hip-hop generation became politically active! With Obama’s messages and image exploding all over the Internet, the new generation employed the new technology in order to organize and galvanize the youth vote. To be sure, the new president has maintained the use of his Blackberry. In the contested and changing terrain that hip-hop culture inhabits in America, in cyberspace, and throughout the world, Barack Obama has become the first high-tech US president.
**Professor F. W. Hayes, III is a senior lecturer in the Department of Political Science at the John Hopkins University.