It's Bigger Than Hip Hop: The Rise of the Post-Hip-Hop Generation (29 page)

“So basically, brothas rockin’ State Prop—that’s the Panopticon. Right?” my cousin asked.

“Yeah, exactly, man,” I responded.

“That’s like when I was in the Box, and they watched me all the time. At least that’s what they said,” he explained.

The Box, or Special Housing Unit (SHU), is an especially cruel solitary confinement cell that is designed to keep inmates locked down for twenty-three hours a day for extended periods of time that range from a few months to a few years. More than 10 percent of New York’s inmate population is confined to SHUs, which are electronically monitored, sixty-square-foot cells of concrete and steel that house two inmates each. SHUs prohibit educational and rehabilitation programs and allow just one hour of exercise time per day. Although human rights groups including Amnesty International have condemned SHUs as a measure of torture under international law, the number of newly erected SHUs continues to rise, normalizing this “torture.”

SHUs are first cousins to Panopticons, which dictate behavior even after one is free from its restraints. It is this panoptical effect that, in part, has us—the descendants of enslaved Africans—not just paying for logos of oppression and then wearing them on our sleeves, chests, hats, and asses, but manufacturing them, as well. This is unacceptable. We have options. If our ancestors who were enslaved had options, then we have options. Frederick Douglass, who escaped the shackles of slavery in 1838, defined state property as a power by which the state “exercises and enforces a right of property in the body and soul of another.” Douglass continues:

What is imperative is that we make the connection between the state property (via slavery) Douglass experienced and the clothes symbolic of where my cousin had just come from. The incarceration of more than 1.5 million African-American men, most of whom are poor and poorly educated, is a reinstitution of the institution of enslavement. We must ask the questions: Can ex-prisoners vote? Can they get jobs? As with the case of slavery, today’s institution of state property strips men and women of their rights to citizenry even after they’ve served their time. The State Property clothing line, then, for me, represents a kind of death. An acceptance of one’s condition to the point of promotion. Rockin’ our own despair. State Property is the official clothier of modern-day slavery. Hitler’s Sturmabteilung’s (or Storm Troopers’) ultimate triumph required that the tortured Jewish victim be driven to a point where he could be led to the gallows without protest, neglecting himself to the point where he ceases to affirm his own identity, his own agency as a human being.

This is what Henry Highland Garnet, another Black body born into slavery, alluded to when he said, “They endeavor to make you as much like brutes as possible. When they have blinded the eyes of
your mind—when they have embittered the sweet waters of life—when they have shut out the light which shines from the word of God, then and not till then, has American slavery done its perfect work.”

There is a difference, brothers and sisters, between being stuck in a cell and being imprisoned. “Stone walls do not a prison make, Nor iron bars a cage,” wrote the English poet Richard Lovelace in
To Althea, From Prison
. We can and, in fact, must realize that our conditions are prisonlike, but we mustn’t think of ourselves as perpetual prisoners. We mustn’t think about our position as a fait accompli, as written in stone.

We must divorce the prison mentality if we wish to be free. Assata Shakur, the former Black Panther who escaped to Cuba from a super-maximum-security prison in New Jersey, reminds us that “love is the acid that eats away bars.”

For no matter how they confine our bodies—in chains, shackles, SHUs, Panopticons, ghettos—they can never imprison our souls!

Cayuga Park—hidden beneath
burnt-brown train tracks at the foot of a dead-end street in San Francisco—is an eleven-acre walk-through tribute to mother nature; thick with memorials to its Native American namesake, meticulous gardens of sage and plum, and wood carvings with timely messages engraved upon them. One of the carvings, sculpted by groundskeeper Demetrio Bracero, has a message scrawled in freehand that freezes my stride:

If the oak slab had a bit more space, the next line might read:

In a world that seems obsessed with the right now, sometimes we lose sight of the reality that today is only what today is because of what yesterday was.

Years ago, a hungry reporter—when the teeth of my poems were first growing in—asked me, “Do you ever write poems that are NOT political?”

“Not political?” I posed back at her while, in my mind, I put my response together: “Everything’s political. Everything. And things that seem apolitical are actually very political because they reinforce and maintain the status quo.”

“So see,” I told to the reporter, “I can’t write about, say, flowers.” Today, however, I take pride in writing about and, in fact, believing in flowers. For to believe in flowers is to believe in tomorrow.

The late Tupac Shakur wrote about flowers, too.

“Long live the rose that grew from concrete,” he celebrates in an early poem. Even in his definition of THUG LIFE, Tupac infused the floral/natural element, explaining, “What you feed us as seeds, grows, and blows up in your face—that’s THUG LIFE.”

Tupac went on to create an ancronym from the words that best described his lifestyle; the same words tatted in dark blue-black ink across his chiseled cocoa-colored stomach:
THE HATE YOU GAVE LIL INFANTS FUCKS EVERYBODY
. Tupac’s definition and acronym for “THUG LIFE” verbalize a potent anger that he—a burgeoning flower of the hip-hop generation—felt toward some in his parents’
generation: the planters. Writer, scholar, and death-row inmate Mumia Abu-Jamal, whom Tupac considered one of his “real teachers,” may have articulated this anger best in “Homeland and Hip-Hop.”

Twentieth-century Black thinkers like James Weldon Johnson observed, “The world does not know that a people is great until that people produces great literature and art…. And nothing will do more to change the mental attitude and raise his status than a demonstration of intellectual parity by the Negro through the production of literature and art.” It is because of this that there has always been great attention and criticism given to Black art by Blacks. Both the blues and jazz music were perceived by an older, more church-rooted crowd to be raunchy, hedonistic, and not representative of “decent Black folk.” Zora Neale Hurston once noted that the older generation believed that the “good-for-nothing, trashy Negro is the one the white people judge us all by. They think we’re all just alike. My people! My people!” Throughout our history, this disconnect between generations is heard loudest in the firestorm about the younger generation’s music.

During hip hop’s early years, the strongest opposition to rap came from older Blacks. Aside from those in the Afrocentric and Black Nationalist movements, who initially embraced it as a vital tool for Black
liberation, the consensus among older Blacks was that the music was ignorant and violent and promoted criminality.

I remember wandering into my dad’s office at Temple University where he was chair of the African-American studies program, and being greeted not by him, but by Chuck D, Flavor Flav, Professor Griff, and DJ Lord of Public Enemy. As an Afrocentrist, my father recognized the importance of Public Enemy and their message; however, many of his colleagues didn’t understand the value and saw the group as nothing more than rowdy hooligans rather than revolutionary spark plugs.

Despite hesitance from some elders, many in the hip-hop generation attempted to bridge the gap. One such try was in 1984, during Jesse Jackson’s presidential campaign, when Grandmaster Flash, Melle Mel, and others teamed up to make “Jesse,” a track promoting the civil rights leader’s presidential run. The song’s hook was a poignant analysis of the current state as well as a fraternal embrace of Jackson:

Melle Mel had established himself as an emcee dedicated to addressing serious issues. In “White Lines, Don’t Do It,” Mel addressed the crack problem in the Black community long before it was at the forefront of most of our agendas. In “World War III,” Mel rapped against the prospects of nuclear war. And in “Not Going to Play,” Mel, along with Sun City and Run-D.M.C., addressed apartheid in South Africa. Despite the pentameters of praise delivered in “Jesse,” Jackson opted not to use this song during his campaign. Many in the hip-hop community took that decision as not only a rejection of their music, but, ultimately, of them as well. Moreover, it would be a symbol of things to come. As legendary raptivist KRS-One remembers
about the older generation’s position on the emerging culture, “Our own people prevented our voices from being heard. And that’s the real politics that need to be addressed.”

Although there was an effort by some older Blacks to silence the voice of the rebellious eighties youth, hip hop’s increasing power in the global marketplace—due to the discovery of a huge white base that brought about larger distribution deals—made it practically impossible to quiet the voices of rappers. So instead, the older generation used their voices to condemn the music that, because of its new foray into white America, was becoming increasingly problematic for many Blacks, old and young. The image of civil rights pioneers steamrolling and smashing hundreds of rap CDs was forever imprinted in our collective memories. The late C. Delores Tucker, a lifelong civil rights leader and activist, became known for the rallies and protests she led against what was dubbed “gangster rap.” Tucker was a staunch believer that this subgenre of rap was a form of genocide and was destroying the minds of Black children, exploiting women, and glorifying gang and criminal culture. “It is a crime that we are promoting these kind of messages. The whole gangster rap industry is drug-driven, race-driven, and greed-driven, and it is not healthy for our children,” declared Tucker. Tupac, who was a frequent target of Tucker’s, retaliated through his music. On the album
All Eyez on Me
, Shakur rhymes: “Delores Tucker you’s a motherfucka / Instead of tryna help a nigga you destroy your brotha.” During one interview, Tucker clarified her position, demonstrating an understanding and appreciation for hip hop and explaining that she wasn’t against hip hop.