How I Understood Hip-Hop at 17

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.

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.

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."

Honduras, Hip-Hop, and the Radio: some notes

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.