The Universality of Hip-Hop

INTRODUCTORY

The hip-hop of today embraces all. I must ask of you to lay aside the conservative notions that we need to return to an earlier time in hip-hop or that hip-hop represents the decline of music as such. What is important for the hip-hop generation and for our generation in general to understand is that at no other time in history have we seen such universalism; such integration of culture; such closeness between our work life and our cultural life, and it is hip-hop which is responsible for this. It is not responsible as the cause of this integration, but merely as the form for it.

No earlier music form had either the economic basis or the historical ingredients to draw together American culture the way hip-hop has. I’m going to very briefly try as much as possible to summarize the different aspects of American and modern life that hip-hop is integrating and re-positing in a higher form, but first I need to quickly lay its material basis.

ECONOMIC FOUNDATIONS OF HIP-HOP

To begin with, hip-hop has its economic context in the deindustrialization (the decline of factory jobs) of America and therefore the pushing out of workers from factories into service and commercial work. Along with this is the creation of perpetually unemployed and temporary workers. Prior to this deindustrialization, workers were divided between factory and non-factory clerical/service/commercial work. This in itself has drawn together, if not spiritually at least materially, people who were divided between industries.

This has validity, folks, and not for any intellectual purpose, but merely to understand our relation to hip-hop today. Without seeing how our economic life, our day-to-day activity relates to life outside of work, the place where our life begins and has meaning, we cannot see hip-hop accurately. It is quite possible that if our generation were factory workers, we might still be listening to urban blues, rock, and jazz, but the breakdown of this mode of existence brought into being new forms of creativity and culture. Human beings found new ways in which to express the shift in their economic life.

BREAKIN’ THE RULES

So this is what is happening around the time hip-hop makes its first embryonic movements. In the South Bronx area of New York City in the early 1970s, a post-industrial people, largely black, Puerto Rican, and West Indian (those who were affected the harshest), in a completely spontaneous fashion began breaking with established music styles.

That is not completely accurate. What they were doing was breaking down the rigid categories in which those styles fit and recreated them in a way which expressed the decay, hopelessness, and shift in material life. For example,—and I can’t give too many in the interest of time—Clive Campbell, known throughout the hip-hop world today as “Kool DJ Herc” or “DJ Kool Herc”, a West Indian whose family migrated to the South Bronx, and bringing with him a rich musical heritage began to play popular Disco records around the neighborhood. This in itself was quite revolutionary, because at no other time in American history was there a mobile DJ movement. DJ Flowers was, I think, the first in America to play records outdoors. We were still going to live concerts. But Herc and his infamous “Herculoids” sound system, powered illegally by street lights and which rocked the parks loud enough for Gerald Ford down in the White House to hear, did something which Jamaican DJs were not doing and which only his American experience could serve: needledropping.

Needledropping involved the interdependence of two turntables and two copies of the same record as well as people who liked to disco to his music. Herc would butt his two turntables together and finding the break part of the song which pushed most folks onto the dance floor—ground, really—would loop by means of visual cue the break parts of the song. As one break was winding down on one turntable he would estimate where the break began on the next and drop the needle in, hopefully, the right place.

Grandmaster Flash improved on this crude method by incorporating a stereo mixer and, using his headphones would cue the beginning part of the break on the opposite record. He was a master at mixing records.

THE NEXT STEP TOWARDS INTEGRATION

Many attribute the birth of hip-hop to Herc and while he is undoubtedly a pioneer and he made an important contribution, those historical ingredients I mentioned earlier were still there waiting for someone, some people rather, to cultivate them.

Writing the birth of hip-hop is something which I intend to do, but cannot do right now. Let us return to universality.

As hip-hop progressed it drew on many other diverse arts. Breakdancing for example was, like Herc and DJing, a re-posited form of capoeira, Kung-Fu, acrobatic, etc. It is not a simple combination of the three, and in fact there are countless other influences, but because of the changing circumstances that people were more or less unconscious of, and because they were compelled to give new meaning to American life, they developed a style that broke with an established form of dancing based mainly in clubs and taking place between two people.

Graffiti is another great example and is a much more militant form because of its legal implications, but I cannot go into that.

THE DESIRE FOR INDIVIDUALITY

Hip-hop in the late 1980s and early 1990s became a mass culture. Regardless of whether you were West Indian and lived in the South Bronx, it spoke to the desperation of the American people and the need not for crass individualism, but for individuality in a post-industrial, but yet still more uniform world. This was its basis; a society which trumpets individuality at every beck and call yet drowns any attempt at it in the mundane, monotonous, menial, and melancholy routine of capital economy. In other words, it is hard to find our American individuality when we’re merely pressing keys and dropping fries.

INTELLECTUALS

To a degree, as with all other mass cultures, it was absorbed by the interests of capital and business, but hip-hop will never be what anarchists and unsettled intellectuals like Noam Chomsky situate as “commodity culture” or even as Lewis Diuguid, a columnist who sits on the editorial board of the The Kansas City Star refers to as “self-fulfilling prophecy”. Life will never imitate art. The moment we think in those terms we are seeing the whole process inverted. These intellectuals have lost touch with the masses. They wonder why we do not listen to jazz or classic rock. They question our obsession with sex and violence and relegate it to self-fulfillment of prophecy without seeing the material basis for these things.

They do not understand the material changes and the psychological effects these changes have had on the minds of Americans.

But as with any other time in history, the intellectuals are merely trying to catch up to us, but they think we should catch up to them. Intellectuals will never define hip-hop, mass culture, or mass movements. It is the mass who defines it through self-active discovery.

BLUES, ROCK, AND JAZZ RE-POSITED

Let me proceed to its musical persuasions. While jazz has a place on the historical timeline and it is important to see its contributions and its own influences, it unlike hip-hop has not been able to draw together all earlier American musical styles. From blues, country-western, rock, jazz, funk, soul, etc., hip-hop via sampling and interpolations, is the historical sum total of all these independent music manifestations. And this isn’t simply because of sampling and digital technology which has played a large part, but because of a long historical accumulation which is now bursting at the seams for a culture which synthesizes all the disparate parts of modern culture.

There is no category hip-hop has not broken down and drawn under its wing. Hip-hop is the music to end all musics. I know that probably scares the intellectuals and music conservatives half to death, but they know that hip-hop has defied all of its prophecies for obsolescence and has been able to change and adapt to the times like no other.

When the East signaled no attempt to end the dominant funk theme within hip-hop, the West Coast’s response was G-Funk. A play on P-Funk, the abbreviation for Parliament-Funkadelic, an experimental and eclectic live ensemble which dominated the ears of black listeners throughout the 1970s, G-Funk (Gangsta Funk) was the music of the deindustrialized blacks of California. It was the form which expressed unemployed criminal and gang life, the crack explosion, the rollback in government assistance, Reaganomics, etc. The East again responded with jazz which dominated East Coast influenced hip-hop for ten years or more. Why was Diuguid sleeping?

Quickly moving forward, Crunk, The Snap, Hyphy, all current hip-hop manifestations indicate that hip-hop can and will at all costs remain the primary mode of culture of American society.

THE LEVEL OF UNIVERSALITY TODAY

Simply logging on to half.com and performing a book search will return very interesting results and will indicate the level of universality of hip-hop as it is today. For instance, the search I just performed returned several books including, The Hip-Hop Church: Connecting with the Movement Shaping our Culture by Efrem Smith and Phil Jackson, The Jump Off: 60 Days To A Hip-Hop Hard Body by Jeff O’Connell and Mark Jenkins, Young, Black, Rich, and Famous: The Rise of the NBA, the Hip Hop Invasion, and the Transformation of American Culture by Todd Boyd, From Black Power to Hip Hop: Racism, Nationalism, and Feminism by Patricia Hill Collins, A to Z: The Book of Rap & Hip Hop Slang by Lois Stavsky, etc. etc. etc.

This should be enough to demonstrate the amount of amalgamation, integration, and universality happening to American and modern culture due to hip-hop. Take any seemingly independent thing like fitness and you will find the way hip-hop has made it adapt to its form. Whatever we are considering, whether it be the church, fitness, sports, politics, race, gender, language, fashion, etc. we must always consider the way hip-hop has influenced and drawn these things together.

Many want to compare hip-hop to jazz, blues, rock, soul, funk, etc., but no other music compares because they lacked the ability to integrate society the way hip-hop has. We could never see jazz and sports synonymously. How does that work? How do you talk or dress or exercise or pray or shoot hoops to jazz? That doesn’t even sound right.

How can blues compare to hip-hop with the amount of reality shows like “Making The Band”, radio stations which play exclusively hip-hop (which includes R&B), comic strips like The Boondocks, the countless amount of films, etc.?

STAYING POWER AND ADAPTABILITY

Before concluding I want people to consider everything I have said up until now: the shift in economic life, the continuing need for individuality, the level of universality of modern culture, etc. and consider how hip-hop has managed to weather every other shift in our modes of existence.

At this point in history, there is a hip-hop for every social or sub-social grouping in the country. There is a hip-hop for white, suburban youth, e.g., Anticon, Def Jux, etc., a hip-hop for poor whites in the trailer parks, e.g., ICP, Vanilla Ice, Twiztid, etc., a hip-hop for Southern listeners, e.g. T.I., Webbie, Lil’ Jon, Ludacris, etc., a hip-hop for Bay Area blacks, e.g. the Hyphy sound, E-40, Keak da Sneak, etc., for Bay Area whites, e.g. the Living Legends. And these categories are not rigidly defined and insular. These are general trends, but there is so much intercourse to speak of.

It is obvious that hip-hop “compels all nations on pain of extinction to adopt its mode of production…” Nothing has not remained nor will remain insular in the face of such universalizing culture. It is the spiritual unity which has been missing from our economic unity. Capital and its realignments brought us together a long time ago, but hip-hop has given us a spiritual sense of our commonality.

Let the intellectuals brood, let the hip-hop conservatives continue their dead, antiquated forms and preach their hip-hop feng shui. We, the working class of America and the world will continue to redefine hip-hop as our struggles advance and retreat.