Abstract
This chapter treats two simultaneous responses to the social changes that accompanied the popularization of rap music: First, “reality rap” was born and gave voice to the newly repressive conditions faced by the marginalized youth who built and embraced Hip Hop culture; in Hegelian terms, this reflects dramatic poetry, which is written to appease a broad and fragmented, rather than specific and unified, audience. Second, organizations like the Zulu Nation and the Temple of Hip Hop emerged and added a fifth, non-aesthetic element to the culture—knowledge, in forms both religious and philosophical—to more explicitly articulate both the essence of the humanity that emancipates itself through art and the need to more directly struggle to overcome the varied forms of its denial.
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Notes
- 1.
All of the quotes in the prologue are either from the lyrics to the song in question or to Hager, Hip Hop, Ch. 6.
- 2.
In “There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack”: The Cultural Politics of Race and Nation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), Paul Gilroy links the record to the general trend towards militant politics in soul music, with which he considers early “message” rap continuous. While remaining one of the best resources for studying the movement of rap music across both the “Back Atlantic” and racial boundaries, as well as the manner in which rap exemplifies “the chronic conflict between black musics and the forms in which the leisure industries have sought to commodify and sell them” (214), he downplays, in my view, the degree to which Brother D. “denounced” rap, and even Hip Hop culture, rather than merely the surrounding culture’s “discos” (183), and thus the tension it raises between aesthetic struggles and more directly political ones. Of course, the guiding thread of this entire book has been that the emancipatory potential of rap music/Hip Hop culture is grounded in the fact that, as Gilroy puts it, the “arts, which […] blacks were allowed instead of freedom, have become a means to make their formal freedom tangible” (215); however, the failure of Brother D. to make an impact in the culture, or to attract true descendants arguably until Public Enemy’s second album nearly a decade later, should, I think, make us re-evaluate the role that art can play in securing political freedoms, at least when not directly tied to local communities. On the import of the local for the future of rap music, see Perry .
- 3.
As he puts it elsewhere, “the real beginning of dramatic poetry must be sought […] where the principle of free individuality makes the completion [Vollendung] of the classical form of art possible for the first time” (1206/III, 535, trans. modified).
- 4.
Purely lyrical poetry, of course, continues to feature strongly in the music, as we see in the imaginative genius of MCs like MF DOOM and GZA, or the tradition of hookless, stream of consciousness raps exemplified by tracks like “Mural” by Lupe Fiasco, “Hot Tub Rhyme Machine” by Kool A.D. (which features the couplet “Sippin” on Faygo/Flippin’ through Hegel”) and the now-legendary Flex freestyle by Black Thought. The introduction of the “hype man”—arguably originating with Public Enemy’s Flavor Flav in the mid-1980s—kept alive the epic celebration of the performers and crowd at a live show. But the genre has come to embrace themes, styles and topics as broad as any other form of literature, and has produced everything from experimental poets (e.g. Aesop Rock, Kool Keith, and Beans) whose linguistic abstractions rival those of the high modernists, to satirists (e.g. Lil B, El-P, and Tyler, the Creator) who recall everything from William S. Burroughs to Paul Krassner to the Church of the Subgenius.
- 5.
The phrase is broadly credited to Chuck D . from Public Enemy.
- 6.
Charnas, 48. A large number of early rap records, in fact, were in the “novelty” category, often created to cash in on pop culture trends (Bobby Robinson from Enjoy Records, e.g. produced “I’m the Packman” in 1982, which was quickly followed by Shawn Brown’s John Wayne parody, “Rappin’ Duke” (“duh-ha, duh-ha”), and Mel Brooks’ film promotion parody “To Be Or Not To Be”, more popularly known as “The Hitler Rap”), but which occasionally formed an avenue for some of the new rap crews to break mainstream, as when Brooklyn’s Disco 3 changed their name and image for their debut, self-titled record The Fat Boys. Moore and Ford would go on to produce more novelty records, like the Rodney Dangerfield-sung parody, “Rappin’ Rodney”.
- 7.
Although it was re-released every Christmas for a decade thereafter and eventually went gold.
- 8.
Philosophy of Mind/Werke 10, §562. All translations from this text are my own.
- 9.
Rutter, 49. While offering one of the most cogent accounts in the literature of Hegel’s assertion that, in comedy, “it is the protagonist’s stubborn subjectivity which is fixed, or necessary, while the objective realm goes free” (223), and correctly noting that, for Hegel, the “comedic protagonist is drawn from the lower classes, and it is the playwright whose generous imagination sets him free” (227), it is somewhat disconcerting that Rutter fails to address the class or racial implications of this claim. I discuss the tendency among Hegel scholars to remain within Hegel’s blind spots in the conclusion.
- 10.
Cornel West, Democracy Matters: Winning the Fight Against Imperialism (New York: Penguin, 2004), 179. While offering one of the most compelling defences of the relationship between Hip Hop’s aesthetic elements and the religious-philosophical-political dimensions of the culture that we will discuss below, West nevertheless follows many in conflating the early and “golden” ages of rap music of the 1980s and early 1990s with the pre-recording pioneers of the Bronx party culture, in order to link Hip Hop’s origins to rap music’s political protest tradition: “The first stages of hip-hop were hot. Coming from the margins of society, the lyrics and rhythms of Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five, Kool Herc, Rakim, Paris, the Poor Righteous Teachers, Afrikaa [sic] Bambaataa, and, above all, KRS-ONE and Public Enemy (Led by Chuck D ) unleased incredible democratic energies” (180); compare, e.g. with Perry and Tayannah Lee McQuillar, When Rap Music Had A Conscience: The Artists, Organizations, and Historic Events that Inspired and Influenced the ‘Golden Age’ of Hip-Hop From 1987–1996 (New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 2007). The vexed story of “The Message”, in my view, deserves far more scholarly investigation and debate.
- 11.
Chang, Can’t Stop, 178. Compare The Adventures of Grandmaster Flash , 157: “nobody in the group liked it […] the shit was way too dark, way too edgy, and way too much of a downer. It was the furthest thing from a party rap anyone could imagine”.
- 12.
While this story is becoming better known, you can still find examples of the song being credited to the singular genius of the foundational Bronx crew. For example, McQuillar credits the song’s fame to “Flash’s unrivaled cutting and scratching skills combined with Melle Mel’s scorching and fear-filled stories” (14), despite the fact the latter had to be coerced into largely reciting a professional songwriter’s lines, and the song lacks any audible DJing technique whatsoever. This is likely typical of both the public confusion made inevitable by the questionable practices of Sugar Hill and other labels and of the drive to anachronistically push “conscious rap” back to the earliest manifestations of the culture. I hope to show that such a link can be made, but through a different pioneering single and arguably “conscious” rap tradition.
- 13.
The Adventures of Grandmaster Flash , 159. As he movingly details in this memoir, he did eventually successfully sue the company over his contract, but tellingly asked for no damages; he only asked for the rights to his name.
- 14.
Etter, 65.
- 15.
Rutter, 223.
- 16.
Chang, Can’t Stop, 178–9. After “The Message ” became a smash, Flash was haunted by being told—by not only his record label, but even some of his crew—that he was “just a DJ” (Cf., The Adventures of Grandmaster Flash, 166–74).
- 17.
Anticipating some of my arguments in the conclusion, I would also note that this is an inversion of the history of Hip Hop culture presented by Bailey : “Hip-hop may have begun as something violently abrasive to the generic Western interests that helped create the climates of poverty in urban communities, but, since its birth, it has grown into the expression of unity, peace, and collective struggle” (66). This reveals the extent to which Bailey , like many scholars, while briefly detailing (in an occasionally questionable narrative) Hip Hop’s Bronx origin, effectively begins with rap music’s so-called Golden Age of post-“Message ” conscious rap poetry, as though both originating in and defining of the broader culture. One sees this in his terse claim that “In 1982, Grandmaster Flash came out with ‘The Message,’ which highlighted this inner-city struggle”, without any comment on the track’s sordid history or its distinction from previous rap and Hip Hop lyrics and music (35). For the record, at the time the song dominated the airwaves, Flash recalls thinking “every time I hear it, I get the same sinking feeling in my gut….I’m losing something here” (The Adventures of Grandmaster Flash , 156), echoing his later realization that “[s]omewhere along the way, the heart and soul of what I had helped create had disappeared” (201) because “The Bronx was my home. The Bronx was where I did my thing. But somehow, the Bronx had been left behind” in rap’s triumph (200). This claim is true both literally, in figures like Caz and Herc who effectively got robbed of their innovations, and figuratively in that the collective spirit of the crew, cypher, and party suddenly became “a story about getting paid” as the primary chance to escape despair (201).
- 18.
This would reach its peak with the hysteria over Ice-T’s manifestly non-rap song “Cop Killer”, recorded by his heavy metal side project Body Count, and Bill Clinton’s craven attack on Public Enemy affiliate Sister Souljah for some decontextualized words. For discussion, see Chang, Can’t Stop, 392–405.
- 19.
Fernandes, ix.
- 20.
Ibid., 4.
- 21.
Ibid., 3.
- 22.
Toop, 124. The story, here, is predictably somewhat complicated, and space considerations obviously don’t allow a complete airing of the tale of its national, then global, spread. While the early records certainly brought it to broad public attention, Hip Hop culture arguably received its first truly national and international exposure through the appearance of the Rock Steady Crew in the movie Flashdance (1983; directed by A. Lyne), kicking off a (very brief) popular obsession with breaking. However, none of the elements beyond rap music were readily monetized, which inevitably limited their appeal to the economic forces that allowed for popular exposure. Thus, in the wake of the success of records like “Rapper’s Delight ” and “The Breaks ”, those seeking either to profit from the elements of culture or to make a living in and through it quickly gravitated to MCing, and “The Message” in many ways set the template for an MC’s “authenticity”.
- 23.
While the tale is obviously fantasy, Ice-T could, of course, write from his experience in the city’s criminal underworld. The aesthetic appeal of blending the authentic and the fantastical in “gangsta” rap is, in many ways, Ice-T’s central and underappreciated contribution to rap poetry.
- 24.
Speaking in The Show, emphasis mine.
- 25.
Flash also claims that “throughout 1986, I could see what Reaganomics was doing in the Bronx […] If anything, the Bronx was getting worse. Worse than it had been in the days of the gangs. Worse than it had been in the summer of ‘77. Worse than ever” (The Adventures of Grandmaster Flash, 214).
- 26.
Fernandes offers an excellent account of the global spread and appeal of the former tendency; for a particular unsavoury—and, due to the later literary achievements of one of its authors, unfortunately broadly read and praised—example of the latter, see David Foster Wallace and Mark Costello, Signifying Rappers (New York: Back Bay Books, 1990). The concern arising from “realistic” portrayals of Black American life in art that, in Gilroy’s terms, a “mass white [audience] might discover deep pleasures in the image of blacks as victims of racism” (Black Atlantic, 153) or that, as Christopher J. Lebron, drawing on the work of Zora Neale Hurston, puts it, “those consuming that testimony are not doing so to genuinely learn anything new about Black Americans. Rather, they already have concluded that their condition is wretched and merely seek confirmation” (The Making of Black Lives Matter: A Brief History of an Idea (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017), 58) should, in my view, be raised far more frequently in the Hip Hop Studies literature, for reasons I will discuss more fully in the conclusion.
- 27.
Watkins , 103. Some of the causes and effects of this trend, particularly as they affect issues of gender and sexuality in rap music, are treated well in Hip-Hop: Beyond Beats and Rhymes (2006; directed by Byron Hurt).
- 28.
Philosophy of Mind/Werke 10, §562.
- 29.
Ibid.
- 30.
Ibid.
- 31.
“Telling the Truth: Systematic Philosophy and the Aufhebung of Poetic and Religious Language,” in Jere O’Neill Surber, ed. Hegel and Language (Albany: SUNY Press, 2006), 127–141 (133).
- 32.
Philosophy of Mind/Werke 10, §562, emphasis added.
- 33.
Ibid., §563.
- 34.
Ibid.
- 35.
Ibid., §562, emphasis added.
- 36.
Ibid., §562. I try to clarify the logic of Hegel’s preference for religions of free self-knowledge, as reflected for him primarily in the Lutheranism of his day, but perhaps now best exemplified by other religions, in “Liberation Theology: Hegel on Why Philosophy Takes Sides in Religious Conflict”, Symposium: Canadian Journal of Continental Philosophy 17:2 (Fall 2013), 141–157.
- 37.
Dudley , 133–4.
- 38.
Philosophy of Mind/Werke 10, §565.
- 39.
Dudley , 135.
- 40.
Ibid., 136.
- 41.
Ibid., 137.
- 42.
Philosophy of Mind, §572, emphasis added.
- 43.
Dudley , 137. Cf., Hegel’s infamous 1805 draft letter to Voss: “Luther made the Bible speak German, and you have done the same for Homer—the greatest gift that can be made to a people. For a people remains barbarian and does not view what is excellent within the range of its acquaintance as its own true property so long as it does not come to know it in its own language. If you will kindly forget these two illustrations, I may say of my endeavor that I wish to try to teach philosophy to speak German” (Hegel: The Letters, trans. Clark Butler and Christiane Seiler, with commentary by Clark Butler (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1984), 107).
- 44.
Bambaataa’s role, I should note, is not unanimously accepted among the players in early Hip Hop’s unification. For example, Martha Cooper, who played a pioneering role in gaining mainstream exposure for the elements, argues that “graffiti and break-dancing would not necessarily have been connected if we, the media people, had not wanted to lump them together. […] Hip-hop was packaged and in a sense we packaged it” (quoted in I. Miller, 152). While there is some controversy regarding the exact timing and origin of the unification of its elements under the moniker Hip Hop, on balance I think the evidence indicates that it was an internal, rather than an external, development and that Bambaataa both popularized the name and initially forwarded its explicit spiritual vision.
- 45.
Brewster and Broughton, The Record Players, 175.
- 46.
Cf., Watkins : “His response to an initial offer to record the music he was helping to create was incredibly naïve: ‘Let’s keep it underground. Nobody outside the Bronx would like this stuff anyway.’ And then he heard the Sugarhill Gang on the radio. […] The success of the record haunted him; he realized that he had missed out on an opportunity to be the first to record the music” (29).
- 47.
Bambaataa in Brewster and Broughton, The Record Players, 198. Unless otherwise marked, all quotes in this paragraph and the next are from this text, 192–3. As with much in Hip Hop’s first decade, there are conflicting accounts of his relation to recording. Hager , for example, suggests that he actively sought a deal early, but was rebuked; I stick with the most commonly told story, here, which primarily echoes Bambaataa’s claim that “When we started seeing the recordings, a lot of us in the Zulu Nation stayed away from that at first because people thought once it got into vinyl we thought it was going to kill the culture” (Fricke and Ahearn, 196). The first attempts he made at recording further soured him on the attempt to shrink the culture down to a 12-inch record.
- 48.
Chang, Can’t Stop, 95.
- 49.
Again, dates as to its founding differ, as do those of when he began the Organization, and in most cases evidence of Bambaataa suggesting a given date at one time or another can be found. Hager claims that even while he was in the Black Spades, he used the group to organize voting registration drives and to raise money for various Black-focused charities (e.g. for sickle-cell anaemia testing). Chang dates “The Organization” roughly from the beginning of the decline of the gangs in 1971, and suggests it became The Zulu Nation between 1974 and 1976, or around the time most commonly suggested for when he formally began DJing; this roughly matches the story told in Beat This, which is a kind of cross between a documentary on Bambaataa’s influence on Hip Hop culture, and a stylized explication of the Zulu spiritual philosophy. But recent research suggests the Organization moniker remained as late as—or perhaps even did not arise until—1975, and one commonly cited date for Bambaataa’s first party is November 12, 1976, with the Zulu name arising subsequent to it. The 1973 date comes from the timeline on the Zulu Nation website at the time of writing, although it isn’t clear if that is meant to reflect the dance-based Zulu Kings and Queens, or the more educational and political institution of the Organization. From Mambo to Hip Hop gives a good sense of how absolutely foundational the Zulu Kings and Queens were in the history of breaking. And my thanks once again to Serouj Aprahamian, whose ongoing work will assuredly help clarify this vital timeline, for sharing his research.
- 50.
1964; directed by Cy Endfield.
- 51.
“I went to Africa […] I was in Ivory Coast, Nigeria, and Guinea Bissau […] That was a big inspiration, seeing black people controlling their own destiny, seeing them get up and go to their own work. Seeing their own farmers and agricultures, it was very interesting, when you were seeing all the negativity that you were seeing as a young cat, and all the stuff just coming out of the ‘60s with the civil rights and human rights, so it was very inspirational seeing this” (Brewster and Broughton, The Record Players, 193).
- 52.
Sha-Rock, with Iesha Brown, Luminary Icon: The Story of the Beginning and End of Hip-Hop’s First Female MC (Sudbury, MA: eBookit.com, 2015); audiobook version.
- 53.
Fricke and Ahearn, 44, emphasis added.
- 54.
“Son of Bambaataa”, Afrika Islam, speaking in Fricke and Ahearn, 55.
- 55.
Ibid.
- 56.
Travis L. Gosa, “The fifth element: knowledge,” in Justin A. Williams, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Hip-Hop (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 56–70 (58).
- 57.
Fricke and Ahearn, 52. As the early tagger DOZE recalls, “I got down with Zulu Nation primarily because of its inclusiveness. […] the Zulu Nation was like, ‘You are poor, you are black, you are brown. We all have something in common with hip-hop. Let’s try to unite, let’s get it together.’ Thank God for the Nation; there were gangs before that and all kinds of crap going on” (quoted in I. Miller, 113).
- 58.
Ibid., 50. The often shifting accounts Bambaataa himself gives have often led the Zulus to be misunderstood, with some claiming it was really just “a collective of rap artists devoted to promoting social and political awareness in their listeners” (Hess, 73). McQuillar captures some of the more robust nature of Nation as Bambaataa’s “movement to preserve hip-hop in its truest artistic form and [thereby to] create-self-awareness” in their audience (43).
- 59.
As he recalls, “Once we started playing downtown, once it started getting towards the late ‘70s early 80s you start seeing the white punk rockers started coming to the black and Latino areas to hear the music. They would come to the Bronx. People were scared at first, you know you had the media said ‘Oh there’s gonna be race violence,’ which we showed them was a bunch of shit” (Brewster and Broughton, DJ Revolutionaries, 198).
- 60.
“I play stuff where people talk about ‘I don’t like Latin,’, so I play a Latin artist, and get them movin’. I’m a play a rock artist, say ‘I ain’t into heavy metal,’ so I play something like Led Zeppelin, or Foghat or something, then move into that” (Ibid., 201); compare Ewodzie, 118. Hager reports that this is the reason Bambaataa was “the only DJ [that Kool Herc] respect[ed] because [Bambaataa] always plays music [Herc] never heard before” (“Pied Piper”); this also would have made his sets more popular with the early graffiti artists, who, coming from an earlier time and a more multi-racial constituency, were often heavily into classic rock and Latin music.
- 61.
Chang, Can’t Stop, 97. Recently asked to look back on what he was most proud of, Bambaataa succinctly and predictably replied, “Bringing people together. Settling their differences and spreading the hip hop culture all around the globe” (Brewster and Broughton, DJ Revolutionaries, 201), which quickly makes the connection between his days as truce-broker among gangs to, as we shall see, his becoming Hip Hop’s first global ambassador.
- 62.
Brewster and Broughton, DJ Revolutionaries, 200.
- 63.
Fricke and Ahearn, 52.
- 64.
Chang, Can’t Stop, 101.
- 65.
Gosa , 64; 58; 65.
- 66.
Ibid., 58.
- 67.
Chang, Can’t Stop, 92.
- 68.
Brewster and Broughton, DJ Revolutionaries, 197; as he puts it here, “I just had a vision. I said we just have to make this move.”
- 69.
Chang, Can’t Stop, 90.
- 70.
As Sha-Rock puts it in Luminary Icon, “Hip Hop began to take on a new form [because t]he world was now seeing the rap side of the culture” on its own, rather than as essentially linked with the other elements and the community which developed them.
- 71.
Ibid.
- 72.
Ibid, emphasis added.
- 73.
Ibid. The most recent Infinity Lessons, along with some of the original documents, are available at http://new.zulunation.com/infinity-lessons/ (accessed May 2017). All citations from the Infinity Lessons and Core Beliefs can be found from their main page.
- 74.
Chang, Can’t Stop, 94, emphasis added.
- 75.
Quoted in Ibid., 106.
- 76.
Aine McGlynn, “The Infinity Lessons of the Zulu Nation,” in Mickey Hess, ed., Icons of Hip-Hop: An Encyclopedia of the Movement, Music, and Culture, vol. 1 (Santa Barbara: ABC-CLO, 2007), 269–70 (269, emphasis added). As she writes of the “infinity” and “universality” of the lessons, “One of the most beautiful and appealing aspects of the lessons is that they are never complete. They can, at any time, by any member, be added to. […] There is, however, a set of fundamental ideas around which they shift and develop. Among them is the focus on coming to know the self” as spiritually “divine” (ibid.).
- 77.
Chang, Can’t Stop, 106.
- 78.
Hip Hop Matters: Politics, Pop Culture, and the Struggle for the Soul of a Movement (Boston: Beacon Press, 2005), 52.
- 79.
Chang, Can’t Stop, 172.
- 80.
Ibid., 170.
- 81.
Fricke and Ahearn, 315. Even the new MCs enlisted for the project, like Pow Wow and G.L.O.B.E., named themselves in honour of this collectivist mission.
- 82.
This was, evidently, a contingency: a nervous Pow Wow dropped his lyric sheet and spontaneously improvised a verse built solely around the sound “zoom”, which would become the song’s most beloved moment.
- 83.
Close to the Edge, 2–3.
- 84.
Chang, Can’t Stop, 173.
- 85.
Watkins, 45.
- 86.
It is worth noting that, despite his critiques of “The Message ” for its inversion of the original, as “reality rap” spread around the globe, Flash became increasingly troubled “that young brothers were using drugs and guns to get by rather than turntables and microphones. [It b]othered me that nobody was talking about it on wax […] it bothered me that nobody was talking about black life in rap music. Now I don’t judge anyone for how they choose to get over […] but it didn’t seem right to me that the place where it came from didn’t have a voice. Right about then, it needed one bad” (The Adventures of Grandmaster Flash, 213–14). And it was precisely the arrival of Public Enemy and KRS-One’s Boogie Down Productions, along with the revolutionary, multisyllabic, and internally dense lyrical rhymes of Rakim, that filled this need—aesthetically and educationally—and thus signalled for Hip Hop’s most important and influential DJ that the spirit of Hip Hop could and indeed would live on in rap music (cf. 215–217).
- 87.
Greg Tate, “Hiphop Turns 30”, Village Voice, Dec. 28, 2004, which also captures the tension between the “conscious” and “reality” variants in Hip Hop’s popular legacy: “Nothing less […] than the marriage of heaven and hell, of New World African ingenuity and that trick of the devil known as global hypercapitalism”.
- 88.
M. Miller, 60.
- 89.
https://thetempleofhiphop.wordpress.com/ (accessed, May 2017). Unless otherwise noted, all citation quotations in this section are from this webpage, which succinctly charts the history of KRS-One’s activities outside of rap music, including his underappreciated Human Education Against Lies (H.E.A.L.) organization.
- 90.
Listen to “Ferocious Soul”, the “hidden” track that opens Public Enemy’s Muse Sick-n-Our Mess Age (1994) for a remarkable prediction of the critical and popular eclipse of “conscious” rap in favour of the most conformist “gangsta” variants.
- 91.
KRS-One, Ruminations, 37.
- 92.
KRS-One, Gospel, 14.
- 93.
He is referring to a then-projected compendium of Hip Hop knowledge to be derived from meetings of the major minds in the culture, but which went on to serve as the foundation for the Gospel and Ruminations.
- 94.
Quoted in Gospel, 508, italics and underscoring used to mark off different aspects of the oral conversation recorded in the book removed for clarity.
- 95.
“KRS-One made a huge impact on my life/from the foods that I choose, every rhyme that I write”, “The Movement”.
- 96.
“Bump KRS for philosophy”, “Special Forces”.
- 97.
Cf., RZA speaking in Something from Nothing: The Art of Rap (2012; directed by Ice-T and Andy Baybutt).
- 98.
https://thetempleofhiphop.wordpress.com/hip-hop-declaration-of-peace/ (accessed May 2017). Among its primary authors were KRS-One, Rock Steady Crew Vice-President and breaking historian Pop Master Fabel, Afrika Bambaataa, and Harry Allen.
- 99.
Lester K. Spence, Stare Into The Darkness: The Limits of Hip-Hop and Black Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 2011), 97. While we will just barely touch on the issue, here, this is an excellent introduction to/analysis of the major efforts to articulate and institutionalize a Hip Hop politics. For further discussion of the possibility of actualizing the spirit of the aesthetic culture in more concrete political forms, see Watkins, Kitwana, and William “Upski” Wimsatt , Please Don’t Bomb The Suburbs: A Midterm Report on My Generation and the Future of Our Super Movement (New York: Atlantic, 2010); for a sceptical view, see John McWhorter, All About The Beat: Why Hip-Hop Can’t Save Black America (New York: Penguin, 2008).
- 100.
Watkins, 155.
- 101.
Spence, 114.
- 102.
Watkins, 158–9. Among other things, attendees had to demonstrate community support by garnering signatures endorsing their attendance from within their local scenes.
- 103.
Spence, 128.
- 104.
105, emphasis added.
- 105.
Against Race, 206, emphasis added; more on this in the conclusion.
- 106.
It would be unjust to complete a book that focuses so much on their contributions to Hip Hop culture without mentioning the disturbing and compelling charges against Bambaataa , as well as the controversies surrounding the responses by both KRS-One and the Zulu Nation ; however, both because the allegations have been denied by Bambaataa and because the responses of his followers have been subject to substantial change and occasional misrepresentation, this troubling episode in the ongoing history of Hip Hop culture will have to remain on the periphery of our analysis. While I would insist that future scholarship should still give both of these pivotal figures and their organizations an even greater voice than they have hitherto received in the literature, for all the reasons outlined above, the unfolding fallout of these events should also form a core aspect of ongoing discussion about the culture’s direction. The same, as I will suggest in the conclusion, is true of the need to both revive what is vital and enduring in Hegel’s thought, and to explicitly confront his deep and serious personal and philosophical flaws.
- 107.
Crazy Legs, Grandmaster Caz , Sha-Rock, and Kool Herc remain among the most dedicated guardians of the first decade’s techniques, principles, and legacy, and many important leaders have emerged from the “conscious” side of rap music. Chuck D ., like KRS-One, has worked in his books, lectures, and activism to forge an essentially Black, but vocally universalist, liberation movement out of his revolutionary MCing, and with his group Public Enemy has tirelessly and successfully worked to force lasting change within the music industry (among other things, they were the first group to record an East/West posse cut; the first group to found their own record label, to launch their own internet radio station and to distribute music via mp3 downloads; the first to defend torrents and downloading in Congress; and the group who finally put Kool Herc on wax). On their fascinating history, see Russell Myrie, Don’t Rhyme for The Sake of Riddlin’: The Authorized Story of Public Enemy (New York: Canongate, 2009). In recent years, the university lecture circuit has included rappers like Talib Kweli and Heems, both of whom have also been extremely active in journalism, music criticism, and municipal politics. But perhaps the most successful efforts to further Hip Hop goals in recent years have found their rap spokesperson in Killer Mike, whose campaign #BankBlack led thousands of people to draw their money out of conglomerate banks, and invest in local, Black-owned credit unions, and who was instrumental in swinging the extremely close 2017 Atlanta mayoral election to a progressive Democrat. While there is no-one more cognizant of the distinction between the original Hip Hop culture and subsequent rap music, or who more vociferously defends even what would appear to be the latter’s most spiritless commercial offerings, when one considers his internal critiques of rap music on tracks like “Rap is Dead”, arena-filling (and, I know from experience, life-changing) work with El-P in Run The Jewels, continuous and highly influential municipal activism in Atlanta, surrogacy for Bernie Sanders’ landmark presidential campaign, inspired journalism on issues related to rap music, censorship and police brutality, and lucidly educational rapping on tracks like “Reagan”, Killer Mike may be the most potent figure bridging the principles of Hip Hop culture with the global reach of rap music active today.
- 108.
Gospel, 100, emphasis added.
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Vernon, J. (2018). Knowledge, or From Art to Religion, Philosophy and Politics. In: Hip Hop, Hegel, and the Art of Emancipation. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-91304-9_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-91304-9_6
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