Wednesday, 2/26/97
Hip-hop culture drowning in sea of business, elitism
Protest culture of Old School lost in tangled web of corporate
industry
Imagine a world with no windows, no telecommunications,
substandard housing, little or no education and no economic
opportunities. The rest of society has long since left you behind,
growing and expanding at a rapid rate for people who have the
skills necessary to compete in the job market. Even your neighbors
and friends – who seemed just like you – were able to get out in
time. You remember where the stores, businesses and churches were,
but now they are burned-out ruins.
The only outsiders you see are police officers, social workers
and the people who supply the community with the one economic
opportunity still available – highly addictive narcotics. Groups of
teenage males have formed together to protect their loved ones and
provide the resources necessary for living. Their mothers, who
rarely see the fathers, must either succumb to the groups or never
have knowledge of their own son’s participation. You’re a young
African American male between the ages of 13 and 25. Your
generation is fading fast, and by now half of you are dead or in
prison. Society has turned the other cheek, so what do you do?
The suburbanization of the United States directly after World
War II created many of the situations described above. While the
upper and middle classes moved out of the cities in search of a
better life, the ones unable to leave stayed behind. As the
relationship between whites and minorities came to a public and
violent conflict (as in the Watts riots of 1965) culminating in a
series of riots and demonstrations in the late 1960s, government
pulled out and used urban development action grants and community
development to level the ghettos and displace its residents in
usually high-rise public housing.
After the destruction of the Black Panthers by the FBI in
Oakland, Los Angeles and other parts of the country, former
political organizers went to the street gangs and began to form new
coalitions out of the old groups – the CRIPs (Counter Revolution in
Progress) and the Bloods.
Around the same time in New York, gang activity and graffiti in
the Bronx was peaking, with an estimated 315 groups and 10,000
members in 1973. As violence began to die down in the streets,
clubs and discos – which had been the victims of gang activity – it
reopened to the harsh funk-out-of-the-projects sounds of Kool
Herc.
But what is "hip-hop," and what has happened to its innovative
and creative energy the last few years? Is it a low-cost form of
entertainment for poor youth who can barely muster enough funds for
some records, two turntables and a microphone? Or is it a
glorification of the lifestyle and environment from which these
youth grew up, or claimed to have grown up, in?
Perhaps it’s the frustrated expressions of youth who have no
place in society. Currently, it seems nothing like it was; it’s now
another proliferation of American corporate consumerism.
During the mid-1980s, hip-hop entered the mainstream musical
culture thanks to Russell Simmon’s Def Jam label, who harnessed the
energies and enormous talent of Run-DMC, L.L. Cool J, the Beastie
Boys and the social consciousness of Public Enemy. The genius of
Public Enemy was in its ability to mix politically powerful symbols
and pictures with a high-energy atmosphere preferred by teenage
youth. Through songs like "Fight the Power," "Burn Hollywood Burn"
and "By the Time I Get to Arizona," PE was able to provide the
knowledge to a segment of the population who otherwise might be
ignorant of the pertinent issues of the day affecting
communities.
Along with Boogie Down Productions’ lead rapper KRS-One, A Tribe
Called Quest and others, groups like Public Enemy maintained a
sense of culture, history and social criticism lacking in most of
mainstream African American culture, including most hip-hop music
produced and marketed today. While these artists helped move
hip-hop from the Old School to the New School, the genre referred
to as "gangsta rap" has been the driving vehicle for the most
recent proliferation.
Gangsta rap can first be attributed to the West Coast recordings
of Compton artists Niggaz With Attitude (N.W.A.) in 1988. Their
album "Straight Outta Compton," which included the infamous song
"Fuck tha Police" – a song which prompted an FBI investigation –
went multiplatinum. It skyrocketed the careers of Profile Records
co-owner Eric "Eazy-E" Wright as well as the other founders of the
group: Andre "Dr. Dre" Young and O’Shea "Ice Cube" Jackson. Their
descriptions of daily street life in Los Angeles County concerning
gangs, drugs, prostitution and the brutal Los Angeles Police
Department showed the increasing violence within the minority
communities. In "Fuck tha Police," the frustrations of young black
males were found: "Fuck tha police comin’ straight from the
underground/A young nigga got it bad cause I’m brown/And not the
other color so police think/They have the authority to kill a
minority …"
On this album, as well as on his solo albums, Ice Cube was the
socially minded former member of N.W.A. who predicted the
Korean-African-American tensions prior to the April 1992 uprising
on his sophomore release "Death Certificate" (October 1991).
These artists’ early dominance of the industry led to the
opening of contracts to other rap acts and the development of an
independent distribution of the music. A new African American
industry and elite formed which dominates a good portion of the
music industry today. While hip-hop started in the Old School, it
developed into the New School and has now reached a new
metamorphosis of what might be called the Post School. The hip-hop
music of today greatly differs from these early philosophical and
entrepreneurial beginnings. The conservative economy and music
industry have restricted any new innovations coming into the
limelight, opting to continue and proliferate the money-making
gangsta rap.
What the industry and corporate America in general fail to
understand is that hip-hop did not begin as a business centered
around making money; they ignore its quality and its protest roots.
The music first appeared as a form of protest against oppression by
the general society on this forgotten segment of urban space. This
is not to say that all African Americans live in this general state
of despair, but a high-enough proportion are linked to this
emerging social isolation, to use the words of William Julius
Wilson of the University of Chicago, for a separate "underground"
culture to develop outside the mainstream.
Once the protest culture began to make substantial sums of
money, the corporate music industry began to develop its own acts
to tap this new market. Hip-hop, like other forms of music, became
a victim of the 1980s corporate takeovers, mergers, acquisitions
and short-term projections. This not only destroyed the quality of
companies but the quality of music as well. This is how artists
like MC Hammer, Naughty by Nature and Vanilla Ice (a.k.a. the MTV
rappers) came about. Today, if a group does not conform to the
money-making genre, it is unlikely the album will go gold, let
alone platinum. If a group is not immediately popular, it will
never get recorded, let alone be given the proper publicity
budget.
The controversial nature of hip-hop has destroyed its innovation
and creativity as well. "Cultural" elites like former Education
Secretary William Bennett, Tipper Gore, C. Dolores Tucker, the Rev.
Calvin Butts and Time Warner Inc. have pressured the music industry
to strip hip-hop of its radicalism, freshness and energy. Artists
like the Roots, De La Soul, Digable Planets, and Hiroglyphics (DEL,
Casual and the Souls of Mischief) struggle to maintain a viable
alternative to hard-core, mainstream gangsta rap. There are even
groups within the genre who work to maintain its roots, such as
Wu-Tang Clan, the Lost Boyz and even some Dr. Dre.
Older artists like L.L. Cool J, Ice Cube, Chuck D (formerly of
Public Enemy), Cypress Hill and Dr. Dre, who were once on the
cutting edge of society, have become entirely assimilated into the
mainstream. They may still go platinum, but only at the cost of
losing a sense of culture and values in the struggle against racism
and covert oppression. Capitalism has destroyed any sense of self
for this segment of African-American culture.
Inner-city isolation is increasing. Welfare cuts are bringing us
to the brink of social upheaval. We need to get back to the true
meaning of Old School in hip-hop music and teach the masses the
inherent and sometimes neglected truths about social and spatial
stratification in the United States.Andrew Jon Westall is a
graduate student in the department of urban planning.