Democracy and Hip-Hop - How It All Began

The Democracy and Hip-Hop Project launched as a blog on March 23, 2006 with a post I wrote, titled Jack The Rapper, about patriarchy and sexism within hip-hop. Its development, however, began back in late 2002 with a series of exchanges on the forums of a messageboard called Lawrencehiphop.com for Lawrence area hip-hop artists and listeners.

Lawrence is home to the University of Kansas (KU) and is about 45 minutes west of the Kansas City area. As is a tendency among certain strands of underground hip-hop to develop around college towns, Lawrence was no exception.

I was a DJ and a producer at the time for a Kansas City hip-hop group whose main audience was in Lawrence as well as around the Midtown area of KC where the Art Institute is located. I was beginning to become increasingly critical about the lack of people of color at our hip-hop shows and that the white folks themselves where mostly students.

What resulted in this criticism and the exchanges on the above-mentioned messageboards was a pamphlet, a manuscript rather, about hip-hop's "revolutionary" character and about how we might "bring hip-hop back" to people of color. Yes, it was as idiotic as it sounds (I was a Maoist at the time) and this was largely due to the fact that my determinations about hip-hop were extremely anachronistic and categorical (four elements).

Off the back of this pamphlet, a website was constructed called The Economic Foundations of Hip-Hop, later The Foundations of Hip-Hop which was going to be more or less an exposition of my current position on hip-hop then. In addition, it aimed at studying objective economic policies and movements and how they manifested within hip-hop.

Rob then was rapping and we performed on numerous occasions. Not only were we partners musically, but during the same time we had been in several study groups and political organizations which existed as the ideological basis for our position and subsequently the pamphlet and website. Rob was not writing much then, but he is credited for much of what I wrote as we influenced each other tremendously.

We held this line for another year or so until our continual study set in motion an eventual break, particularly with the "four elements" view of hip-hop, which manifested in my one and only 2004 piece on hip-hop now called Hip-Hop is Universal. By then we were both in a different organization and were writing more frequently for the organization's paper about non-hip-hop issues.

In March 2005, I wrote a piece on hip-hop, Hip-Hop and the Modern Workplace, for our organization's newspaper which was still very much of the Economic Foundations tendency, but also contained a burgeoning tendency toward the future politics of the D&HHP. I wrote another piece a month or so later, From Gangsta Rap to Bling-Bling, which attempted to trace the developments of hip-hop's shift from gangsta-oriented rap towards the materialist emphasis of bling-bling.

This piece, or rather its shortcomings, were the first real step towards the creation of D&HHP, as Rob, for the first time, wrote a critique of it which drew out its weaknessess and allowed me to finally put to rest the inadequacies of my then view of hip-hop.

Rob's critique, now called The Dialectics of Hip-Hop, was the cornerstone piece which precipitated this blog's creation. It would be another year before Democracy and Hip-Hop became an entity as we spent that time decategorizing and breaking down our old view.

I have often characterized Rob's critique as the hand which pushed me off the cliff of Understanding, where I daringly stood, and into the depths of Reason. The Dialectics of Hip-Hop is still the best work our relationship has produced and we return to it often for purposes of guidance and simple nostalgia.

I returned to writing prolifically in January 2006 armed with Rob's Dialectics in a critique of hip-hop writer David Drake's piece, The Death of Hip-Hop, and even though I disagreed on serious points with him, his is the second best piece on hip-hop ever. Following that I wrote a brief poem (if that is what you want to call it, I was off that 'Dro), The Totality of Hip-Hop, and a commentary on rapper Paul Wall, Is Paul Wall Good For America? Four days later, I opened an account with Blogger.com.

Rob and I have contributed pieces to Workforce, and myself to KC infoZine, and MVRemix, but D&HHP is now our sole focus.

I want to thank all of you who have supported us and given us love, even when you disagreed, when we were (and still are) completely surrounded in an ocean of hip-hop conservatism. What was a hobby for us to critique, turned out to plague most of the hip-hop intelligentsia. We look forward to another great year and hope that our work makes some worthwhile inroads into creating a viable tendency among upcoming hip-hop intellectuals.