Theses on Hip-Hop

Preface to the Second Edition

The following position is an attempt to refine some basic assumptions about the character of hip-hop music and culture today. The original statement was co-written with C.L.R. Odell and published in November of 2006, prior to his departure from the blog. The past nine months have seen a number of significant changes in my own categories, enough that an updated statement is required.

I've kept some of Odell's original wording and I still attribute a great deal of my own development to his contributions, despite our personal differences.

If anyone is interested in a reading of C.L.R. Odell's other pieces just click his name under the "Where Y'at" sidebar.


Krisna C. Best
Democracy and Hip-Hop Project
July 19, 2007

Introduction

Recently the question was raised as to what this project is really about and why there is so much non-hip-hop content on a blog that claims to be hip-hop oriented.

Our point of departure comes from a more general place than merely hip-hop and is based in an ongoing study of the struggles of working people. Additionally, we posit a way of thinking about things that brings out their necessary interconnections and which allows us to trace their logical development over time. As indicated elsewhere on the site, the singular most influential personality to the Democracy and Hip-Hop Project has been the Caribbean Marxist C.L.R. James.

The D&HHP begins from two simple premises:

1) that over the course of the last 2000 years (basically since the Greek city-states) the movement of history has been based on one simple fact; that whenever great masses of people were presented with an opportunity, they have sought to establish a society based on equality, democracy, and self-management. This concept of what democracy actually is has changed, grown, and developed with time, but it has only found new content with every new effort by the masses to institute their desire for peace and equality.

2) that all culture is a reflection; a gauge; an indicator of the stage of consciousness reached by people in their historical movement to institute this democratic society. It reflects the current stage and foreshadows the next. It expresses those peoples' hopes, dreams, desires, fears, anxieties, prejudices, etc. In short, it tells us who they are and who they are striving to become, and the more people that participate in a culture movement, the more accurate the reflection will be.

This cannot be confused with the ways in which people practically express their resistance to the old capitalist society and their struggle for a new, more directly democratic and socialist society which is mainly exemplified in our numerous places of work. We spend much of our time discussing such material striving in the blog as well, but our point above is not that hip-hop is this practical means, but its cultural reflection.

With those simple, if contentious, premises accepted then we conclude that hip-hop, as a form of culture with literally millions of participants here and across the globe, is the best cultural indication; the best aesthetic gauge of the consciousness of the masses of people throughout the world and it expresses not only all that is ugly about them, but all that is beautiful and all that yearns to be free. It gives the best approximation of where they are and where they are going, of the present stage in their historical movement to institute a free and democratic society.

That is why a piece about the Universality of Hip-hop or on the expression of that universality in a review of Kelis's newest album fits right alongside a piece on the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 or on the immigration debate of today; because they all express in their own way the general course of the movement described above.

But above all this blog is concerned with the present state of that movement and hip-hop provides the best raw material for study. So we focus much of our time on that cultural movement that we have come to know as the hip-hop generation.

In order to better give our small and limited readership a basic overview of our position on hip-hop, we will attempt to summarize it with a few points. These points are not final and, like hip-hop itself, should be considered constantly in motion. The following points are not a prescription, a remedy, or a ten commandments to which all should conform, but merely a beginning with which to explain hip-hop as it exists currently.

Theses on Hip-Hop

1. Movement. Hip-hop cannot under any circumstances be understood through old and incompatible categories, whether these categories consist of the "four elements", "underground vs. mainstream", "rap vs. hip-hop", "rapper vs. MC", "hip-pop", "hip-hop is dead", "gangsta rap", "boom bap", etc. In order to understand a thing we cannot begin with preconceived notions about it, but by its own movements and activity. While we can never locate those "necessary interconnections" unless we correctly categorize things, the danger is staying within these finite categories that inevitably lead us back to simple and crude perceptions.

2. Democracy. Hip-hop is an inherently democratic organism. While hip-hop finds expression in a variety of communities, anyone, regardless of skin color, gender, or locality is able to participate within it and to offer it new dimension. This is evidenced by the fact that hip-hop is not only a national, but a worldwide phenomenon and has literally left no country, race, or social group untouched.

In addition to hip-hop's global existence, it is also breaking down traditional categories of identity, whether of race or nationality, and it is becoming more difficult to speak in terms of a "Black" or "White" culture.

3. Intelligentsia. The hip-hop intellectual of today (that is, the writers, authors, and historians, many of them pioneers and former artists) is plagued with conservatism and generally stands in opposition to the predominant forms that hip-hop assumes today. Instead of seeing the content of hip-hop as always changing, as stated in point one, the intellectual departs from outmoded determinations and, hence, arrives at a partial and incomplete definition or notion. This divorce between the thinkers and the actors, so to speak, is part of a larger divide rooted in existing social relations and which indicates the general rift between intellectual and manual labor. We assert that no intellectual or group of intellectuals will ever be able to understand the way common people experience hip-hop and its contemporary forms.

4. Superstructure. Hip-hop is a cultural and aesthetic superstructure, that is, an artistic expression of our social organization and therefore should be understood as the artistic consequence, not the cause, of all that is in society. It merely reflects the day-to-day experiences, ideas, and institutions of common people. Hip-hop does indeed exaggerate, embellish, and in some ways distort reality as all art does. It would not be art otherwise.

While it is argued by protagonists and opponents alike that hip-hop, for better or worse, influences us, we argue that it merely gives all the form, not the basis, to express our pre-existing feelings and ideas. Therefore, if someone is so compelled to take up the gun and commit crimes or to raise a hand to dominant a woman, it is not because hip-hop imbued them with such ideas, but that it served as the outward appearance, the expressive manifestation of larger social impulses independent of hip-hop.

5. Dogmatism. Hip-hop has no rules; it never has nor will it ever. Whenever at any moment throughout hip-hop's more than thirty year history an individual or group of individuals has attempted to institute or inject a type of formalism and doctrinism within hip-hop, it has been hip-hop's intrinsic nature to reject such formalism, as it is the nature of all things to reject permanent and constricting determinations. While for purposes of categorization it is necessary to find a common denominator within certain things, the dogmatist stretches these commonalities into senseless rules which are only broken by the movement of hip-hop itself.

6. Foundation. The material and economic foundation of hip-hop is imperialism (or monopoly capitalism) which can be best understood in our instance through one of its most defining features: the export of capital. In the export of capital to other nations, the United States, like all imperialist nations, has become isolated from production. Since imperialism plays a peculiar white nationalist role in the United States, the Black community has always taken the hardest blows in any economic shifts. In this case, it meant a loss in production-based jobs.

With the demise of industrial work came the surge in service and commercial work. This is the dominant mode in which people in the U.S. work today and it should serve as a guiding factor in examining how people express this new reality via hip-hop.

Hip-hop's other more general foundation is unemployment and crime which is relative to each economic period, but has been a running theme throughout its existence. White nationalism plays a vital role in the maintenance of unemployment and crime as it relates to Black people and is subsequently a predominating theme in the culture.

7. Socialism. Hip-hop provides a glimpse into the everyday person's vision for the future social organization of humanity. It should be noted that this has nothing to do with the misogyny, violence, or materialistic desire for money and things that are prevalent within much of the culture. Those characteristics express the present social organization and can be found in countless other art forms across many different genres. Hip-hop rather contains unique characteristics that point towards a more harmonious democratic kind of society.

As C.L.R. James has stated about modern popular culture, hip-hop also represents an uncompromising hostility to the values of totalitarianism and to official American society. While certain aspects of hip-hop have been absorbed and re-posited by capital, they do not have to be conspiratorially injected from above into popular culture. In fact, these capitalist or wage-earner values are an organic expression of class society which exist side-by-side with values that reveal the potential of working people to be self-governing producers.

8. Universality. Hip-hop is the music to end all music. This does not imply that there will be no further music forms beyond hip-hop or that the hip-hop of today will remain the same, but that it is compelling all other music forms, on pain of extinction, to adopt its mode of expression. In addition, it has re-posited all previous music forms into ones consistent with hip-hop's general method.

For example, Rock artists nowadays perform a combination of singing and rhyming and Rock bands have incorporated DJs into their group, R&B music is essentially a rap or hip-hop beat that is sung to, and artists in Country videos walk with a swagger and sing with an attitude influenced by the hip-hop generation. When speaking of hip-hop music in proper, we see how, via sampling and interpolations, artists have re-posited and amalgamated previous forms of music into a fashion consistent with hip-hop. There are incalculable other examples in which to show how music in general, and this is based precisely in the political struggles of contemporary society, is reaching for a higher Universal.

9. Contradiction. Hip-hop, once and for all, is inherently contradictory and it is the totality of all these contradictions that comprises modern hip-hop. There is no thing, phenomena, or subject which is an exception to this rule. Contradiction is the identity and essential unity of opposites that challenges all things to new stages of development.

The ideological contradictions existing within hip-hop are a reflection of the prevailing values within larger society. Hip-hop moves by its own contradictions as a global culture, a local development, an individual participant, and as a single verse.

10. Mythology. Despite the various attempts by the intellectuals at painting the history of hip-hop in mythological terms and in a "moral", "positive", or "Leftist" fashion, hip-hop can only be understood in its real world context and by its relation to class life, race, gender, and the struggles encompassing such categories. Furthermore, hip-hop's history is often deliberately distorted in order to advance a sectarian agenda or to dismiss the popular styles it assumes today. But simply a cursory look at past hip-hop will extol a continuity with our current trends.

11. Happiness. Hip-hop is about our modern struggles for life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness and how this 200-year-old vision has been a process of unfolding and never static. We are in a life and death struggle to locate happiness in a world plagued by barbarism and decay and hip-hop serves as the most universal form to express the dislocation and routinization or our lives under capitalism and about the potential for working people to create a more humane social organization.