He Wasn't Even Ridin' Dirty

It's been a few days since the "not guilty" verdict was announced in the trial of the NY cops who murdered Sean Bell. There's been a host of responses by hip-hop artists and fans, including a few new songs, like "50 Bullets Fired in Queens" and "911 is a Joke" by The Game. David Banner was asked what he thought about the verdict and his response hinted at some of the general sentiments. "I was outraged but I've gotten to the point where I don't get mad anymore. I have to think logically," he said. "With the Sean Bell situation New York is basically saying, 'f*ck n*ggas.'" Like a lot of folks, he didn't seem to hold much hope for an effective organized response to the verdict. "They know that we not gonna do sh*t," he said. "We ain't gonna do sh*t but beef amongst ourselves. Our generation is a bunch of cowards and they know that and that's including me. All of us, we cowards and if you're not a coward then do something about it."

Banner does have a point: today's political situation calls for more than just talking to our friends about being angry. Yet even though no riots broke out like in L.A. after the Rodney King trial, we shouldn't underestimate the anger this is causing and the already-present tensions that it's aggravating. Movements and rebellions often arise after a period of apparent calm. They're the quiet storm brewing, a build-up and eventual explosion of anger, resentment, and rejection of the existing social order. In my mind, the murder of Sean Bell and this verdict should be considered as another notch on the same belt as Katrina and Jena. Depending on how Obama's candidacy moves forward, that could be another decisive notch. Why? Because he carries himself as "beyond" race, as representative of today's supposedly integrated and egalitarian society. The problem is even he can't cover up such egregious offenses as Katrina and Sean Bell.

Essentially, as Banner says, this not guilty verdict was another green light to the NYPD, and police departments all around the country, that they can freely shoot people of color at will. Literally, at will. There's no longer even the pretense that someone has to actually display a weapon or threaten a cop. If someone "looks" suspicious, is hanging out in the "wrong" part of town, if they make the "wrong" move, they can get shot by the cops and the state will do nothing about it. The state and ruling class are so confident in their rule that they no longer even feel compelled to cover up such actions. With this in mind, it makes sense why 20 years after NWA released "Fuck Tha Police", artists like Chamillionaire are still venting about police harassment and violence.




I say this not to be over-dramatic or pessimistic. Yet this is the reality today and it is exactly these experiences, on a national level, that ingrain themselves in people's minds and eventually make people say "Hell no, we won't take no more of this." Emmett Till was the Sean Bell of his time period, albeit in different ways. For young black folks in the 1950s, Emmett Till showed that there was no "peaceful" nor "equal" segregation, and there was no "gradual" desegregation. How are young people today thinking about Sean Bell? Do we think it means black folks are still in the same place as we were in the 1950s? Do we see the contradictions between the U.S. "fighting for freedom" in Iraq, meanwhile mowing down people of color in our own backyard? Are we beginning to conclude that there can be no "peaceful" policing, no "equality" under white supremacy, no "gradual" change?

Most reporters and analysts are clueless as to why there wasn't another L.A. 1992 type response to the verdict. What they don't see is that it's not that people don't want to act or rebel, but rather that the organizing going on right now is being held back by a middle class politics (as publicly embodied by Al Sharpton) that is going nowhere. Sharpton proclaims after the verdict that black folks will take action through "economic withdrawals" -- presumably boycotts? I'm not clear. I wonder, why not a walkout? Why not a citywide strike? Get all the black youth out of school for a day (or longer) or all black adults walk out of work for a day (or longer), and then march on 1 Police Plaza. Have transit workers go on strike; or public school employees or hospital workers, etc., on strike. Don't "hurt" the city, shut the city down. Get organized with the community and keep the cops from even coming into any black communities. Set up roadblocks or whatever else is necessary and physically prevent the police from entering. Set up popular committees in those same communities so black folks can protect their own neighborhoods, rather than trigger-happy cops.

These wouldn't be easy to organize, but there are some folks doing important work to get out from under the confines of the likes of Sharpton. Whatever other possibilities there are for organizing in such a situation, it's important to try to understand how people are making sense of this. Banner is wrong. People aren't cowards; we are not only victims, we are rebels too. We're constantly trying to find ways out of the current social and political impasse. Ultimately, Sean Bell is one more (tragic) seed to the upheaval that must come.

April Fool's Day at FOBBDEEP.COM Leads to Conversation on Origins of Hip-Hop

For D&HHP readers unaware, we hope that soon you'll take the time to visit one of our favored blogs, FOBBDEEP.COM. Wondering what the name means? We'll have to offer you a link explaining its origins but will tell you briefly that it has a double meaning; one rooted in divisive racist attitudes towards immigrants (Fresh off the Boat), the other standing for the obvious (Fear of a Brown Blogger).

Take a look at the recent post at FobbDeep.com on a hoax article about cowboys and the beginnings of hip-hop culture. What is transpiring is a short discussion on its very REAL origins.

The folks at FobbDeep put forward a consistently critical perspective on all things hip-hop from a hip-hop point of view. What's unique is that they are contributing to crashing the model minority myth attached to Americans of Asian descent. This blog is needed not because we need diversity in hip-hop or in the blogosphere, but because we need to be taking up questions of Asian American self-activity (that is, activity independent of the status quo, particularly the model minority) and how this manifests in the larger self-activity of working people expressed through hip-hop.

For a more pointedly political blog on the strivings of Asian Americans check out a young group of Asian folks at Blak Orchid.

The Writing on the Walls

Graffiti has meant many things to many people. For some, it's taking a Sharpie to a school desk to write a diss to a classmate; it's going down alleys at night to tag garage doors and dumpsters; it's throwing up gang signs on corner stores, painting freight trains, marking up the insides of city buses and trains. For many it's art, for others it's a public nuisance. Infused in graffiti -- sometimes explicitly, sometimes implicitly -- is an upheaval of the confines of capitalist property relations, replaced with the creation by regular people of a more democratic forum to express feelings and ideas of all sorts. Not only did graf provide a space where people could speak freely, it made people accountable to what they said. If someone talked shit, they best believe they need to back that up. For the hip-hop generation, graffiti has represented a striving to make free speech an activity, not just a dead symbol.

This takes on many manifestations. Writers bombing the A train in NYC in the 70s and 80s found graffiti an optimal medium for sending shout outs and messages to friends in neighborhoods that segregation, gangs, and poverty wouldn't let them cross into. Taggers hitting the Red line have used graffiti to earn a sense of fame and greatness that is otherwise denied in the day to day alienation of Chicago's southside. Artists in Atlanta find a national platform for their creativity when they paint the old CSX freights that pummel through the city to destinations around the country. No expensive art classes, no easels, no costly paints -- graffiti has been the megaphone for working class youth, and all they need is a can of spray paint and a blank surface (and sometimes not even that).

With time, graffiti has developed into a skilled and specialized art form, finding a captive audience in bourgie art galleries in gentrified neighborhoods. Yet another tendency still exists, still struggles outside the galleries and away from yuppies marveling at the "inner city mind." Graffiti persists as today's soapbox for those who are otherwise told to sit down and shut up.

It's an international soapbox at that, as shown by headlines in the last year about the rise of graffiti among U.S. soldiers in Iraq (with signs from U.S.-based street gangs alongside racist signs from members of neo-Nazi groups). It's also been used by the occupation forces and the Iraqi government, who have commissioned artists for "beautification projects" painting over blast walls that protect military compounds, government buildings, and the likes. As the fifth anniversary of the Iraq war passes, we thought this might be a good opportunity to highlight graffiti from a different angle -- looking at graffiti that celebrates the courageous resistance in Iraq, Palestine and around the globe.

While mainstream press outlets would have us believe that Iraqis either support the U.S. occupation or are "terrorists" and "fundamentalists", the writing on the walls of Iraq and throughout the Middle East demonstrates a much larger variety of political debate, opposition and resistance. One reporter discusses a list kept by an older Iraqi man of all the graffiti he came across in Baghdad. Some of the highlights from his list:

"Raise your head, you are an Iraqi!"
"Saddam is a Pimp, Ask your Sister!"
"Turkey and Iran are a split turd"

On an international scale, there have been numerous pieces thrown up as artists and everyday people alike respond to the U.S. invasion of Iraq. One site contained a few of the images included above, which are from Gaza City where graf writers created a series of pieces in a gesture of solidarity with the people of Iraq. Banksy, self-dubbed the "art terrorist", adorned the Apartheid Wall in the West Bank with a series of images that sent a poetic message.

There's an interesting story about Banksy's work on the Wall. In an interview on British television, Banksy described how a Palestinian man saw him putting up the stencils on the wall and yelled at him to stop. The old man said, "We hate this wall. You are making it beautiful. Go away!" I suppose the man saw the irony of someone adding a touch of beauty to such a repugnant symbol of apartheid, rather than bulldozing that muthaf***a to the ground.

D&HHP and the Vote

In a recent edition of a college publication, an author writes, "Hip-hop has officially embraced Barack Obama, or 'B-Rock as 'Vibe' magazine likes to call him."

There are two fundamental problems with this, the most glaring of these being that hip-hop cannot officially endorse anything. Hip-hop has no official center, no external organizational force that all of the hip-hop generation must conform to. This is precisely its power; it is an autonomous bottom-up expression of the most varied social experiences with an emphasis on working folks of color and the unemployed. Now, perhaps we can say that a few of the more marginal spokespersons (Common, Kweli, et. al) and bankrupt publications like Vibe have thrown their individual hopes behind Obama. But this means just about as much to the hip-hop generation as Rev. Calvin Butts saying he's not against rap, but against thugs. We don't care.

Secondly, an overwhelming majority of people do not vote. And they don't vote out of sheer principle nor because they feel neither potential candidate represents their interests, but because they sense and understand the insolvency of official society in remedying a nation in decay.

They know, even if they can't individually articulate it, that society is beyond repair, that barbarism is a gangrene that is festering and turning our society into a rotting corpse. It must be cut off. Only they can do it by their own attempts to reorganize society on a more human basis.

Implicit within hip-hop, as C.L.R. Odell has indicated elsewhere on the blog, is the saved-up historical experience of the previous generation. Because of this, we know (again, not always consciously) that whatever gains we’ve made in this country has been through our own autonomous activity, activity which has broken away from the bureaucratic elements which have attempted to contain the movement within its institutions.

For the hip-hop generation, the question is not between Obama or Clinton, voting or not voting, but between life or death, socialism or barbarism, the self-organization of working people or the bureaucratic plans of existing and aspiring rulers.

People will always vote if they have the ability, and in the U.S. it is safe to say that with certain fluctuations most will not vote. We are not living by the philosophy of prosperity posed by Emancipation, Reconstruction, and the opening up of the Great West. Society is cannibalizing itself because officialdom is blocking the way of development of ordinary folks' independent capacity for organization of all society's affairs. Only they can organize it on a reasonable basis.

The D&HHP does not endorse any candidate so much as it doesn't attach its hopes for another world on traditional politics. Contrarily, we do not advocate abstention from voting. To encourage people to vote or to abstain is a futile effort and yields nothing. These tensions between the view of official society's permanency and the implicit new society that is found in the resistance of common people on the job will exist as long as the current arrangement prevails.

Towards the new society!

You know the kids gonna act a fool when you
Stop the programs for after school and they
DCFS, some of them dislexic
They favorite 50 cent song 12 Questions we scream
Why 'spose we start?
See now we smart
We ain't retards the way teachers thought
Hold up, hold fast
We make more cash
Now tell my momma I belong in that slow class
It's bad enough we on welfare
You trying to put me on the school bus with the space for the wheel chair
I'm trying to get the car with the chromy wheels here
You trying to cut our lights out like we don't live here
Look at what's handed us
Fathers abandon us
When we get the hammers go and call the ambulance
Sometimes I feel no one in this world understands us
But we dont care what people say

Kanye West, We Don't Care

D&HHP Flyer

In an effort to reach out to some hip-hop events going on in New Orleans, we made a new flyer advertising the blog.

La Haine

Piggy-backing off of our most recent post about French hip-hop, here's a clip from the film La Haine released in 1995 which deals with race, class and hip-hop in French society. It's a great film, both for content and aesthetics, with hip-hop as a co-star (in the background) to the 3 young men whose tensions, anxieties, and struggles the film captures. This particular scene is set in the wreckage and aftermath of major riots around Paris after a young working class kid is killed by the cops.

Hang the MC: Blaming Hip-Hop for Violence

Paris is Burning: Rap and Rioting dans la banlieue

The CBC ran an interesting four-part series awhile back on hip-hop in Canada, the U.S., and France. In this article the author relates the rise and development of hip-hop in France to the onslaught against working class immigrant communities in the low-income banlieues (suburbs), where they face similar economic and political tensions to those being fought against by many people of color in cities across the U.S.

While I'd disagree with some of his conclusions, the author draws an interesting connection between the content of hip-hop music in France to the rebellion that broke out in the banlieues in 2005 following the electrocution of 3 young men who were being chased by the police. Not surprisingly, following the rebellion -- which left nearly 9,000 vehicles destroyed, 126 police officers injured and close to 2,900 people arrested -- French official society accused hip-hop of causing this outbreak of violence. In their words, the dissent expressed in hip-hop lyrics was an "outrage to social decency." (and inadequate housing, police brutality, and unemployment aren't an outrage??)

Yet, one French MP caught the contradiction well enough, and perhaps unknowingly, when he said that hip-hop represented "a real attack on the dignity of France and of the state...everything could just explode when an audience that is already fragile listens to such songs...” In his ignorance he doesn't connect the 1s and 2s of why working people of color are "already fragile" but, then again, it's not really in his interest to do so. A testament yet again to why he and the rest of the French politicians and elite will never solve the fundamental crisis that the violence in 2005 was a rebellion against.

Hip-Hop Might Lose Its Home

Tenants Might Buy Birthplace of Hip-Hop

Some may have seen the headlines over the past few months about the possible sale and flipping of a Bronx, NY, building that was one of hip-hop's birthplaces (yes, plural, cuz it wasn't no overnight delivery). The owners of 1520 Sedgwick, the building where D.J. Kool Herc first started spinning in 1973, will no longer participate in a government-sponsored affordable housing program that kept the building rent-controlled, and there have been offers to purchase the building by known real estate moguls who have (no surprise) little interest in preserving the affordable units that currently house working class families. Props to the tenants for getting organized and trying to fight back and save their homes.

The tension here is that saving one building is a good start but what is needed is a larger strategy that organizes around housing at a citywide level, with connections to similar battles being waged across the country. Because even if the tenants are able to purchase the building and have it declared a historic site, they face the looming gentrification of the surrounding blocks which will drive up living costs and eventually push the families out anyways, leaving little more than a monument to hip-hop but nothing of the communities who helped birth that culture.

This is by no means an anomalous case, nor is it a new one. Jeff Chang described the assault on the working class in a different part of the Bronx in the ‘70s: “Here was the new math: the South Bronx had lost 600,000 manufacturing jobs; 40 percent of the sector disappeared. By the mid-seventies, average per capita income dropped to $2,430, just half of the New York City average and 40 percent of the nationwide average. The official youth unemployment rate hit 60 percent. Youth advocates said that in some neighborhoods the true number was closer to 80 percent. If blues culture had developed under the conditions of oppressive, forced labor, hip-hop culture would arise from the conditions of no work.” [From Can't Stop Won't Stop, p. 13]

NYC, as well as many cities across the country, continues to face a serious crisis in affordable housing (as well as employment), as the city tears units down or real estate developers convert them into condos for the yuppies, while working class families are forced out of the city or pushed to live 2, 3, or more families in one unit. Meanwhile the Wall Street tycoons give themselves million dollar bonuses as a Christmas present. The New York Times ran an article a few months back where one city official summed it up: “The city is caught between publicly claiming everything is fine and the brutal realities of families and their children having nowhere else to go.” Perhaps New Yorkers might take heed from recent New Orleans struggles around public housing, which produced the following flyer in an effort to send a clear message to City Hall: