“When it comes to people of color, the corporations that own these outlets understand the manipulation and they don’t want to sell us no revolution, because that would be selling us freedom. We are still in a state of apartheid, even in America.” So said Stic Man – one half of legendary hip hop outfit Dead Prez – before the New York launch of Dead Prez: It’s Bigger Than Hip-Hop, a documentary film about the culturally and politically subversive underground movement he believes lies at the heart of hip hop culture.
For artists in the same mould as Stic Man, the music is a vehicle to celebrate and convey the reality of poor, black, urban life. But its purest motive is much simpler. As music commentator Stefan Braid so eloquently put it in his 2004 article in Pop Matters: “You make studio time and instrumental tuition too expensive for me, place me in ghettos I lack any means to escape or improve, cut off the power to my housing block, keep me locked down in a miserable job for pathetic pay and generally treat me as a politically powerless and racially inferior minority? [Then] I will mix records together with no respect for their discrete heritage or creators; set your anthems as backing vocals for the rhymes I’ve spent my fruitless hours of drudgery whetting with pent-up bitterness; paint your greyly hideous constructions wildly, vibrantly beautiful; and funnel the electricity from your streetlights into my decks and speakers, to dance with my peers in new and explosive ways that pay homage to our frantic, cooped-up energy.”
Commenting on the phenomenal growth of Japanese hip hop, Kyle Cleveland, a lecturer in sociology at Temple University of Japan, says: “The reason that rap resonates for young people in Japan today is that it’s cathartic, and it allows them to express themselves in a way that traditional Japanese culture doesn’t do. It allows them to be emotional.”
The fact that its original creators were members of a disenfranchised underclass in America makes hip hop a beacon that offers hope to disenfranchised people everywhere. It started out as music that anyone could do if they were motivated and committed enough to make it happen. You didn’t need expensive music lessons or even need instruments. All you really needed was a voice, maybe someone to keep a beat in the background, and some lyrics. Hip hop is a blueprint people ‘without means’, and from the most unlikely backgrounds, can follow to produce their music.
In an interview with Amelia Thomas in the Christian Science Monitor, Tamer – a young Palestinian rapper, says: “A few years ago, if someone had told me that people from all over the world would be listening to music made by a group of poor young guys from Lod, I wouldn’t have believed them.” Tamer raps about Palestinian identity and the grind of life in an occupied territory, whilst dreaming of a better future. His songs are broadcast around the world via the internet and his group play sell out gigs at home. But Tamer is nevertheless circumspect about his future. “”We take things day to day, just trying to survive. And that’s hip-hop. Hip-hop is about surviving,” he says.
Of course there are many who dismiss hip hop. It appears that many dissenters are white, affluent, or both.
A few years back, Tucson Weekly columnist Tom Danehy said hip-hop “isn’t so much a social movement as a bowel movement.” He also wondered whether “these people” were “ever going to stop getting high and talking about bling-bling long enough to vote?” It was a strange question to ask, albeit rhetorically, for someone who seemed so knowledgeable about hip-hop and rap artists given that this was the time when the Rap the Vote campaign was gaining momentum around the country. Although given that less than 5 percent, around 21,000, of Tucson’s population is black (70 percent is white) it’s possible that Rap the Vote didn’t make much of an impression in Danehy’s backyard.
One of the easiest ways for its detractors to write it off is to say that hip-hop has been overrun by commercial interests and that the most successful rap artists are often the ones who talk least about issues of equality. In this sense hip hop invites criticism as a victim of its own success.
Not everyone associated with hip-hop is interested in struggle – whether it be for freedom, social justice or equal rights.
Henry A. Rhodes of the Yale-New Haven Teachers Institute – an educational partnership between Yale University and the New Haven Public Schools – believes there is no doubt that hip hop, with its ‘ghetto roots’, has struck a chord with young people. But he suspects its underlying success is simply that it has good rhythm. He writes: “I asked a middle school student while I was researching my unit if he always understood all the words in a rap record. He responded no. The student said that the beat of the record determines whether he likes the record or not. Maybe this can help explain why some rap records whose lyrics are racist or so violent in nature can be so popular.”
Any musical genre is the sum of the artists working in it. When it comes to evaluating hip hop and its ability to act as a medium for social change Yvonne Bynoe of Urban Think Tank, Inc. says we shouldn’t have unrealistic expectations.
In a 2004 interview with Cedric Muhammad of BlackElectorate.com, posted on the National Hip Hop Political Convention website, Bynoe states: “I am always careful to separate the “Hip Hop Community” from the “Hip Hop Industry.” Often the Hip Hop Industry, uses free speech … because such a stance allows them to say/manufacture whatever visual or lyrical content that they want, for a presumed profit, without having to be concerned with whatever fall-out that it produces in Black communities. The Hip Hop Community in contrast often uses free speech as a legal protection that allows them to voice political and/or controversial content. Rap artists fall on both sides of the equation, in that some will put out any material to make money, while others are concerned with how their messages affect our communities. Ultimately the public has to be savvy enough to distinguish between the rap artists who are truly concerned about our welfare and which ones are simply exploiters.”
