The following essay was written when I was just 17. By this time, I had already been thinking and writing about hip-hop for the better part of a year and had identified as a "hip-hopper" for nearly two, although as indicated elsewhere on the blog I had been influenced by hip-hop culture from a very young age.
This was an overly ambitious project that was to be the first chapter in a book called "The Hip Hop Manifesto" which was used for the purposes of building a national hip-hop organization through a website I maintained in the late 90s called "The B-Boy Call E-zine." While I had recruited twenty or so people locally, a few people nationally, and one person from Canada, I didn't have the experience, perspective, or commitment in terms of where to take the organization and how to build and consolidate locals.
I'll expound later in the comments section.
--
Saturday, May 23, 1998
This oppressed culture, established circa 1973, will be a key player in the coming revolution. Before this time we must bring order to Hip Hop by discussing our goals and how we plan to work independently as a nation.
I believe first that we must identify ourselves. Who is a Hip Hopper? How does one become a Hip Hopper? There is no traditional way of officially becoming a follower of Hip Hop. There is no ceremony or prayer that is completed. But if we want order and if we want to progress and exceed beyond the four elements that currently make up this culture, we must adopt some form of ceremony that we must all go through to give each of us a better understanding of the intentions of this culture. If not a ceremony then an acceptance of a basic belief system.
How should this belief system be based then? Well, we must first look at how and why Hip Hop started. It started out of ruins of slave ships, Christ worshiping Aztecs, and English-speaking Native Americans. We were brought together by hate and bloodshed. If there had been no oppression, Hip Hop would have never existed.
What system was this culture founded in and who brought us all together? The capitalist United States of America.
So, we must recognize first that this system that we live under is evil and corrupt. We must also recognize that most and maybe all governments and systems inside this planet Earth exploit the masses of people. As Hip Hoppers we must deny any tie we have to these systems and accept ourselves only as inhabitants of the Earth. Any feelings of nationalism should be left behind as barriers from unification with others and a oneness with the Earth and Universe. And since Hip Hop is a multinational and multiracial culture then we must believe that we are all one nation under a move.
We need to be Humanitarians and take care of each other and the Earth. It is not the Earth itself that is bad, it's the systems within it. We must start thinking and acting as Humanitarians. We are all struggling to better Humanity and the masses. We all have our own philosophies and religions and opinions on God, but we all need to live by these basic principles. Peace, Love, Unity, and Revolution.
Peace because Hip Hop became and outlet from negativity. Instead of gunshots being exchanged between individuals who disliked each other, a battle of skills would take place to be determined by the audience.
We must remain humble and peaceful. We must set an example for the rest of the world to see. We must also have love for each other and the Earth. And in the spiritual revolution, love will be the ammunition used against a hateful system.
Unity is mandatory. Hip Hop became a culture because of the unity among the followers. Us sticking together and cooperation amongst each other is what's going to help us advance as a nation. People ask me all the time how I can promote love and revolution at the same time. But what they don't realize is that this system was founded on hate, so love is a revolutionary act.
With these basic principles, some sort of ceremony should take place. If a person is not inspired to practice an element, he or she should find some other form of expression and add his or her own flavor to the culture. As long as you dedicate yourself and strive to better the culture and use it for good it is not necessary to practice one of the four standard elements. Once a person understands the principles and knows their history of this culture, only then should the ceremony take place. There should also be witnesses participating.
This is not an organization, but we must have some organization within this culture. We need more rallies and events to discuss the current issues within Hip Hop and how we plan to address these issues such as the media's interpretation of Hip Hop and how they compare us to gangsters, hoodlums, radical, vandals, etc. We need to discuss how we will react to these false pretenses.
We must start becoming an active movement because we are a movement. We are revolutionaries and we do have a cause. Our cause is to end oppression and exploitation at all costs. We must break this continual cycle of hate handed down from generation to generation. We must keep from happening the same thing that happened to us. We must give these lost clones feeding off negativity an outlet. We must shed our light. Hip Hop was and is a light within the dark.
Hip Hop is very unorganized currently. With what we have and what we know we must organize and prepare for the future and the shift of the people's consciousness. We must move forward and become active with our knowledge and strength in numbers. We must constantly attract future followers. By all means necessary...prepare.
Saturday, October 17, 2009
How I saw hip-hop at 17.
Tuesday, October 13, 2009
Tupac on Black Struggle
From Advance the Struggle, here comes an old video of Tupac from 1992 talking about the failures of the older generation of black activists and militants, and the new conditions under which black youth must struggle.
Thursday, October 08, 2009
Bastards of the Party
Earlier this week Joaquin Cienfuegos posted a pretty insightful documentary called Bastards of the Party on his blog. In the past D&HHP has discussed some of the basis for gangsta rap, and its political and social significance, so I'm re-posting the documentary here as it adds to that discussion.
Here's a brief description of the film from its website:
BASTARDS OF THE PARTY traces the development of black gangs in Los Angeles from the late 1940s, through the charged atmosphere of the '60s and '70s, to the breakdown of community in the '80s and '90s, and the brief truce between the Crips and Bloods that followed the Rodney King riots in 1992...BASTARDS OF THE PARTY draws its title from this passage in City of Quartz [by Mike Davis]: "The Crips and the Bloods are the bastard offspring of the political parties of the '60s. Most of the gangs were born out of the demise of those parties. Out of the ashes of the Black Panther Party came the Crips and the Bloods and the other gangs."
This is probably the first film I've seen that takes up the development of gangs in the U.S. not as a matter of "senseless violence" or bad parenting or "black pathology." Rather it situates gangs in the context of the development of class and racial tensions and struggles during the course of the 20th century, highlighting the relationship of economic underdevelopment of black communities, the capitalist offensive against the black working class especially since the 1970s, racism within the white working class, the decline of the Black Power movement, and attacks by the state on black political organizations. (For one of the few written pieces I've seen to date that makes similar connections, with a focus on the 1992 L.A. Rebellion, see this)
If I had any discontents with the movie, it would be the following. First, I have to ask where are women in this discussion? As is usually the case, the only times you see women in the film (with one exception - the interview with former Black Panther Erica Huggins) are as the grieving mothers/daughters/sisters of male gang members who have been killed. I'd be interested to see more about the story of women actually involved in gangs, and also a serious discussion of women's relationship to political organization (or lack thereof) in communities of color, how neoliberalism has attacked female workers of color, how women have responded to and fought those attacks, and the other political dynamics raised by the film.
Second, the majority of the film is able to maintain a social analysis, or in other words to look at gangs as a social phenomena and not a question of good or bad individuals. But towards the end of the film when the question of "what next?" comes up, the film resorts to individualistic responses (gang members should be better people, should stop saying nigga, etc.) to what are societal problems. Perhaps that reflects the inability of the director to envision a collective political struggle among people of color to confront and change the social relations and institutions that nurture gang violence. Whatever it reflects, it was a somewhat disappointing end to what was a pretty good documentary overall.
Anyways, for your viewing pleasure.
Tuesday, October 06, 2009
Notes on Hip-Hop, Radio, and Honduras
I apologize in advance for the notes format. I presently don't have the time to work this out in a more presentable form and need to get this up so it can be digested and expanded further. This was off the back of a recent phone conversation with mlove over at Gathering Forces, a blog project I am a part of.
A return to C.L.R.'s American Civilization and a further study of culture and mass communications will be necessary, but that will have to come at a later time.
Hip-hop is reflective of the self-movement of the working class and its myriad particularities and subjectivities (people of color, women, poor white folks, college kids, etc), meaning it moves on by its own logic and not by the force of external factors (bosses, cops, capitalists, repression, climate change, etc.) even if these have influence.
Hip-hop on the radio is only a partial expression of the whole of hip-hop, but it has its own totality and self-movement and the music still found on radio has validity. This much we have said before.
It's partiality is due to the limitations of the radio medium not only technologically, but in its monopolization and standardization--which is, consistent with the growth of capitalism. This is a fact I have not given enough credence to. It was an attempt to guard against conservatism and the "external factors" issue, but it must now be more explicitly acknowledged.
Where the patriarchy and barbarism of hip-hop surface, D&HHP has consistently opposed making those things exceptional to hip-hop, but in opposing we do so as the hip-hop generation and in actual struggle not by calling for non-patriarchal hip-hop. This latter point isn't exactly new. What has been more recent is our more integrated understanding of the complexity of the fight. What we don't do is make synthetic arguments for how hip-hop "used to be."
In the late 80s and early 90s hip-hop was not more balanced, it only appeared as such because of its limitation to traditional mass communication (radio, TV, print). These forms were then able to capture a larger totality, but hip-hop has grown larger and radio has grown thinner (not necessarily proportionately, for radio has its own self-movement). The radio then had not experienced the monopolization it went through ten years later.
The reaction to this change has been conservative: either conclusions are drawn about hip-hop itself; "radio killed hip-hop" (which is not altogether unrelated but a distinct part no less that does have an effect on hip-hop) or about the need to return radio to what it used to be which was, in the real, no more democratic and related to the particular forms of hip-hop then. It's imposing the form (a pre-monopolized radio) separate from the content (a more developed hip-hop).
Typical half-hearted conclusions have meant liberal approaches, (letter-writing, boycotting, picketing with aim of democratizing radio) or establishing "liberated zones" of culture and communication like the Hip-Hop Media Lab folks (who generally have a very sharp and precise perspective on hip-hop as commons, as a social movement, and radio as a worn out, monopolized medium). We've seen some insurrectionary sentiments (usually exaggerated and comic) call for the occupation of radio, or tie up the DJ and play the music the people want to hear (often acted out in hip-hop records since the 80s). On the one hand, some people want to hear what is currently played, on the other hand it stems from a legitimate appraisal of radio's limitations.
The conclusion I have drawn has confounded the problem to some degree. I assumed that when new subjectivities arise, or working class self-activity deepens or generalizes, radio or "popular" (another conflation I'm guilty of) hip-hop will reflect this new activity; that it was profitable to play Ice Cube, Public Enemy, and Arrested Development then, so it would be in the future but with hip-hop in new forms. But this is synthetic cognition. We were right to see hip-hop as moving, but radio has moved too. We can't expect a simple return (even in new form) for two reasons: one, because it is a concrete reality that the radio has been monopolized and its playlists standardized a great deal more than twenty years ago. Two, new mediums have surfaced via Internet that undercut the basis for radio. How many "popular" artists can we think of that are shut outside of that medium? I can think of Charles Hamilton and Asher Roth. There are many more. The Soviet Union didn't restore capitalism as Trotsky predicted, radio won't merely return to playing either a more diverse hip-hop or a more organically and overt political hip-hop as I predicted.
On the other hand, radio can't completely filter out the political character of our generation reflected in hip-hop. The recent "Run this Town" song is a good example. It isn't an explicitly political song even if has explicit political aspects. But radio can't help but narrow it generally. This narrowed hip-hop still reflects contradictions, it can't be free of them, but the contradictions it sends up will still be fragmented, degenerated, and few.
The political hip-hop of the 80s and 90s (as we have said before) wasn't pure. It wasn't free of the contradictions of its time. Ice Cube was called out by Common for "slangin bean pies and St. Ides in the same sentence." On the surface, Cube is a hypocrite, but the truth of the matter is that, as Cube says, "I go where the brothers go." Cube threw up the multitude of tensions flowing through the anti-apartheid/black consciousness/street rebellion of his time. In 2006, Cube said, "I used to be lyrical political, now y'all want it sugar-coated like cereal." Two years later he makes a thoroughly anti-racist political song, "Gangsta Rap Made Me Do It." (I encourage y'all to watch it again) BDP and X-Clan had a feud over black nationalism vs. humanism. These debates were happening on radio because they were happening in real life, at black colleges, in black communities, etc.
What has the situation in Honduras clarified for us? And this where the discussion with mlove was pivotal. That when the state turns to repressive measures, it makes a political monopoly of mass communication (even in private, bourgeois forms, for the Honduran oligarchy "owns" the vast majority of comm enterprises and has shut down the rest.) It raises the question for a mass revolutionary movement to seize and overthrow mass comm institutions AS PART AND PARCEL of a general quest for political power. Honduras is different, a movement has arisen in response to a coup with the green light in Washington, despite its language, but there are still lessons to draw. These measures won't be off the table at a particular historical juncture here in the US. The FBI has just arrested a man who helped coordinate G20 demos in Pittsburgh with twitter and police scanners.
This is where we draw the line between the liberals and the liberated zone "new economy" ideas. We believe that in a general power struggle between workers and the ruling-class, the control and self-management of radio must coincide. Of course, that isn't what's being debated. Usually these conversations happen apart from general political critiques. Yet when these conversations do occur, they are political and they are a segue into talking about monopoly capitalism and political struggle generally.
We can expect the not marginal view that "radio is a limited form for hip-hop" to become more widespread and antagonistic. For now, it has been resolved through the opening of new forms of communication. I was wrong for limiting this critique of radio to hip-hop conservatives and backpackers. These claims have a mass character. There is a need to see the relationship between the situation in Honduras and in other recent rebellions where the seizure of radio was on the table (or a necessary task) and the changing attitude of the hip-hop generation towards traditional communication mediums.
What this means is that we must now shatter the liberal illusions and push the "liberated zones" perspective to an actual power challenge (this would be programmatic and strategic; we shouldn't try to encourage this apart from a general attack on and challenge to the State, obviously).
Posts
