 | |
| Said, from La Haine |
For a few years the Democracy and Hip-Hop Project (D&HHP) was a space for myself, LBoogie, Rob, and others who contributed to think about the relationships of political struggle and organizing to that thing which holds so much fascination for our generation and for which we are indissolubly a part: hip-hop. The result has been a nice collection of notes and thoughts on questions that concern the meaning of hip-hop itself and I encourage others to look over some of it. At its best it was parlayed into student organizing where hip-hop was a form of presentation through flyers as well as a reference point in conversation with folks and how through it they interpret their lives and give expression to their resistance.
I’m currently studying Spanish at Austin Community College. I’m hoping it can help me find decent work as well as allow me to organize with folks who mainly speak Spanish. Spanish speakers have made very fundamental contributions to hip-hop, whether it be the immigrants or descendants of the Caribbean in America’s East or Chicanas and other Latina people on the Left Coast. It would be ideal if Militante de la generación de hip-hop could help facilitate some of that through writing.
I would welcome it, because the last two years I have experienced a disconnect with that part of myself that has shaped so much of who I have become. A lot of that has to do with being a campus organizer at UT-Austin where I have been in isolation from those sections of militant working class youth who took classes at Delgado Community College in New Orleans and where my partner LBoogie and I spent a lot of our time. Don’t get it twisted–the last two years have been the richest organizing experiences of my life. I have grown by leaps and bounds in relationship with some of the most dynamic young organizers I have ever met; folks I have built what I think will be lifelong friendships and many of them I straight-up consider family.
But there is a part of myself that needs expression and that can’t always find an outlet through those specific friendships.
Since there has been a lull in activity at UT around budget cuts and immigration, which I and folks I have organized with have put our collective energies toward, I have a bit more time to think about what it was I missed about Delgado, slow and drab as it was at times.
I miss debating the necessity of queer liberation through the lens of Bounce music, a form of New Orleans hip-hop where openly queer and transgender artists have fought and shed blood to carve out a space for themselves and their identity. I miss talking about the philosophy of Lil Wayne and about black liberation as it was understood by the generation which took part in the L.A. rebellion of 1992. I miss the communication and pedagogy that hip-hop can be. At at time when I wore my own “conscious hip-hop” blinders (which meant hating on other forms) a then-homie of mine corrected me, citing Common Sense, “but black music is black music and it’s all good, I wasn’t salty she was with the boys in the hood.”
I also just had a different relationship with folks at Delgado, not just because I was a student there but because I felt like there were common experiences students shared. I’m not a student at UT nor do I plan to be, but that isn’t the reason why I haven’t felt quite the same toward UT students (not that I think all UT students are inherently backward or middle class).
At UT, a lot of the folks who have been swept up in the struggle against budget cuts and defense of ethnic and gender studies oftentimes understandably base their relationships with hip-hop on specific artists and forms which are consistent with their own codified and systematized politics. And they want a hip-hop which affirms that. But with that comes a major misstep with what most other hip-hop means for folks who don’t think of themselves as political: its profound exposition of the conflicts and tensions within our very society.
This is nothing new and a good section if not the bulk of this blog has been focused toward these questions. I don’t wish to revisit those things–that work has been done. Rather, in my own transitional period into new areas of political work, I’d like to use this space to help me segue back into what I hope will be something more explicitly hip-hop in orientation. I don’t know if that will be a hip-hop community organization as such or if it will mean more informal methods for employing a hip-hop ethos into ostensibly non-hip-hop organizing.
Because being hip-hop isn’t largely about being a DJ or a dancer, it isn’t about being a technician or having a skill. Hip-hop is an activity which can’t be narrowed to someone with a CD with their name on it (although that is a valid part of it)–it is about how folks think and express their very struggles, sometimes open, usually passive or in retreat. As such, it lives with those of us who aren’t skilled or aren’t artists (in the formal sense at least).
But something happens when we consciously put hip-hop toward fighting and destroy white supremacy, patriarchy, and capitalism. It becomes an aid in a critical kind of practice, a practice that critiques itself and improves itself. As I have said before, rarely do I turn to KRS-One for philosophical insight, but someone who thinks as much about hip-hop as he does is bound to get some things right. I’ll close for now with a quote from his song, “Hip-Hop Lives.”
‘Hip’ means to know, it’s a form of intelligence/
To be hip is to be updated and relevant/
Hop is form of movement/
You can’t just observe a hop, you gotta hop up and do it/
Hip and hop is more than music/
Hip is the knowledge, hop is the movement/
Hip and hop is intelligent movement/
0 comments:
Post a Comment