It's Bigger Than Hip Hop: The Rise of the Post-Hip-Hop Generation (2 page)

When you make an observation, you have an obligation
.
This is the piece of poetry that I try to live by. It’s what prompted these pages and, last November, motored me through the nothingness of rural Pennsylvania to conduct a writing workshop in prison—the pen.

As I pulled up to the facility—a colorless lump of concrete strangled with jagged concertina wire—rain fell, flickering like old film. Inside, I huddled with a dynamic group of inmates, all young, all black, and all bent on not being broken. After the workshop, I was taken to visit the cell block where they spent the bulk of their days and nights. On my way out, I noticed that Jordan King, a participant in the workshop, was the only one on the block whose bed did not have a mattress.

“No mattress?” I asked, puzzled.

“I have one, but I don’t sleep on it,” he told me.

“What do you sleep on?” I pried.

“The hard floor, the steel frame, anywhere but on this,” he asserted
as he hunched beneath the bunk and flashed a flimsy mattress. “See,” he stated, as he reburied the cot, “I can’t sleep on that. It’s too comfortable and I don’t trust comfort in a place like this because it numbs you to the reality of where you really are and why.”

Just as the frigid floor and steel frame told Jordan, in that raspy voice of reality, where he was, this book—by snatching the mattresses from beneath our slumbering selves—is about where we are today and where we want to be tomorrow.

“The hip-hop generation,”
a tag typically rocked by Blacks and browns born after the Civil Rights and Black Power movements, certainly captured the essence of the rebellious, courageous, creative, politically discontent teens and twenty-somethings of the 80s and 90s. But “nah, not today,” says Alton Smith, a nineteen-year-old poet from North Philly who counts himself among a new generation of world-changers that believe—he tells me as our Black bodies climb into the night—“It’s bigger than hip hop.”

With its sands scattered to the winds of the world, hip hop joins
scores of other vibrations that are born in the Black community, but that live, thrive, and reproduce all over the world. More than just an integral part of pop culture, hip hop has shaped the perceptions of people, especially young ones, wherever they are. Take, for instance, Planète Rap, a hip-hop clothing store whose front window is tatted with images of a heat-holdin’ 50 Cent, located on the posh Grande Boulevard in Paris. Or the Ghanaian teenager who, as I hoofed through his neighborhood in Accra, greeted me with “What’s good, my nigga?” Although these examples straddle some stereotypes, there are many others—like the marriages between hip-hop groups and grassroots organizations in São Paulo, Brazil, the emergence of revolutionary Palestinian female emcee Sabreena Da Witch, or the East African hip-hop groups Kalamashaka and Kwanza Unit whose raw rhymes routinely expose government corruption in the region—that
demonstrate how the adoption of hip hop outside of the U.S. has been collectively constructed.

In its homeland, “hip hop,” says Alton, “empowered my dad’s generation to be better, to stand up, to stop the violence.” He flashes a yellowed Polaroid of his father who, in 1980, eight years before Alton was born, founded a rap group. “But it just don’t do that now.” Alton’s disappointment is amplified by an urban crisis that has recently stolen the life of his seventeen-year-old cousin.

“I stay at a funeral,” he sighs, then roll-calls a few names of the young Black men, boys even, who are among the over four hundred murder victims in Philadelphia in 2007. “But turn on the radio and what do you hear? You hear, ‘I’ll kill you nigga, I’ll kill you nigga,’” he says, trying to shrug off the senselessness. When the murder rate is higher for Blacks in Philadelphia—the city of brotherly love—than it is for U.S. troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, young men like Alton search for ways to interrupt this wretched cycle of death and despair.

Although Alton sees the hip hop of his father’s generation as empowering, he acknowledges that the economic dominance of all things hip hop during his own time has brought many voices into the mainstream that, prior, were barely heard and never listened to in that space.

“Yeah, but at what price?” quizzes Tiffany Coles, a twenty-one-year-old “Seventh Wardian” from New Orleans who, as we motor through the ruins of her desolate city, says that hip hop’s mainstream success reminds her of Rosie Perez’s monologue in
White Men Can’t Jump
. “Sometimes when you win, you really lose, and sometimes when you lose, you really win, and sometimes when you win or lose, you actually tie, and sometimes when you tie, you actually win or lose.” For Tiffany, hip hop’s dive into the mainstream was a win for the handful of corporations and artists who grew rich, but a significant loss for those who it is supposed to represent.

“I want to be a part of the generation that’s going to rebuild this city and fight against the officials in this city who are trying to keep us out. I love hip hop, but if the hip-hop generation ain’t about doing this kind of work”—she points to a battered home with the word
HELP
scrawled into the boards that block the windows and doors—“then we need something else.”

Hip hop, like the Black musical oxygen that preceded it—blues, gospel, jazz, soul—cannot be looked at in a vacuum because the artists owe their lives to the context of their births. A discussion of the blues, then, without a discussion of slavery and Black southern life would not just be incomplete, but lame, too. A discussion on hip hop, in the same way, must include what Dr. Jared Ball, hip-hop professor and 2008 Green Party presidential candidate, calls “its proper context of political struggle and repression.” Without this context, we are left, as Fred Hampton trumpeted one balmy Chicago afternoon, with “answers that don’t answer, explanations that don’t explain and conclusions that don’t conclude.”

Putting hip hop in its proper context means understanding the inextricable link between Black music and the politics of Black life. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., reflecting in his autobiography on the role of Black music during the Civil Rights Movement, called the freedom songs the “soul of the movement” and even stressed the overriding importance of the lyrics, the message:

Going beyond the naïve idea that Black music is simply entertainment helps us to better understand the current crisis. “It seems to me that if the Negro represents, or is symbolic of, something in and about the nature of American culture, this certainly should be revealed by his characteristic music,” is how poet Amiri Baraka (then LeRoi Jones) puts it in
Blues People
. So, in that way, to observe contemporary hip hop is to observe ourselves; an observation that, for Alton, Tiffany, and others, not only blares problems loud enough to drown out seductive samples or head nod-inspiring bass lines, but turns them toward redefinition.

The current crisis isn’t just that rap music, hip hop’s voice box of values and ideas, has drifted into the shallowest pool of poetic possibilities, or even that most of today’s hip hop betrays the attitudes and ideals that framed it in the same way that, say, the U.S. Patriot Act neglects the principles—
at least in theory
—espoused by the framers of the constitution. Many young people—myself, age twenty-five, included—who were born into the hip-hop generation feel misrepresented by it and have begun to see the dangers and limitations of being collectively identified by a genre of music that we don’t even own. And it is our lack of ownership that has allowed corporate forces to overrun hip hop with a level of misogyny and Black-on-Black violence that spurs some young folks to disown the label “hip-hop generation.”

The balance, here, as Tiffany measures, is remembering “that the stuff on BET and on the radio, which is mainly negative, is not all of hip hop.” So while Tiffany is skeptical of the label “hip-hop
generation,” she embraces the contributions of emcees who, in the triumphant tradition of Black arts, have employed the medium as a means to elevate, uplift, and inspire collective change. At the same time, she realizes that “most people ’round here won’t listen to it if it’s not on the radio.”

Part of the crisis is centered around the distribution mechanisms for hip hop. Although hip hop is the cultural expression of young Black America, we do not control how the cultural expression is disseminated. Instead, multinational corporations like Viacom, Clear Channel, and Vivendi, through their radio and television outlets, control how most people hear and see hip hop. When I ask my students at Morgan State—an urban, predominantly Black university—about emcees like Immortal Technique, Talib Kweli, and Dead Prez, an overwhelming majority of them reveal that they’ve never even heard of them. This is tragic because the aforesaid emcees are among a select few that address the social and political issues that affect them most. This is partly due to the unfortunate reality that rappers whose lyrics fall into the abyss of negativity are not usually demarcated as “negative” or “ignorant;” however, emcees who rhyme against self-destruction are always marginalized as “conscious,” “alternative,” or “political” rappers, tags that sling them into categorical ghettos and thus help to place them outside the earshot of the masses.

While it is important to acknowledge that mainstream rap is not all of rap, it’s also important to acknowledge the effect that the mainstream has on aspiring emcees. When Alton, for instance, says that the rappers from his neighborhood are rapping about killin’ niggas, they are imitating the models of success that they see on TV and hear on the radio. In that way, the mainstream has a dominating effect and is able to dictate the direction of the culture and art.

All of this is against the ambivalent backdrop of globalization, the
fog of an unjust war, the impending consequences of the corporate desecration of mother nature, and the apex of an unprecedented urban crisis. These are problems that hip hop, as art, culture, and community, has failed to respond to, and we are now at a generational tipping point, the moment when a dramatic shift is more than a possibility; it’s a certainty. And while a dramatic shift is certain (and can be felt already), the outcome is not. History teaches us that both action and inaction lead us to dramatic shifts. If the post-hip-hop generation chooses to act, what values, whose ideas, will inform that action? If they choose not to act, not to “wake up,” as it were, whose values and ideas will be imposed upon them?