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.