Download PDF Version Revolt Magazine, Volume 1 Issue No.4

Another key player in Hip Hop praxis, Jen
Johnson, founded the Hip Hop Debate Institute at
the Institute for Minority Education at Columbia
Teacher’s College. Based on her contentions that
the alienating white male-centric nature of schools
has largely shaped the debate community, Johnson
founded the Hip Hop Debate Institute to create a
platform for students from diverse backgrounds
to embrace debate as an empowering activity and
political toolkit. Johnson explained how the majority
of men and women in congress have a debate
background, which means that in America “debate
is a pipeline to power” that black and latino youth
may not always be granted easy access to within
the traditional school setting. Encouraging her
students to navigate multiple ways of speaking and
being, scholars at the Hip Hop Debate Institute
become proactive and multilingual performative
pedagogues.
As we see scores of educators like Diaz,
Morrell, Sealey-Ruiz and Johnson aggressively
adopting hip hop to teach an array of subjects
including math, science, art, debate, and even
healthy eating habits (Hip Hop H.E.A.L.S.), 7 (http://
www.hiphopheals.com/#home) is there a danger of
the genre becoming ‘pimped’ by yet another
foreign entity? As one Schomburg audience
member pointed out, the nature of hip hop is that
everyone participates. This means that for hip hop
educators, letting the students teach them about
the authenticity of the culture they participate in is
crucial.
And what about the rappers? And the
market? And the pressure to conform to the
ghettocentric models that sell records? As Darlene
Vinicky contends, “a mass-produced culture of
consumption and violence only speaks for and
to a capitalist agenda.” 8 Concerning mainstream
rap, theorist Murray Forman has argued that “the
ghetto” is now the “symbolic center that anchors
the narrative image portrayed.” With a “gangsta
ethos saturating much of its texts,” the current
ghettocentricity of hip hop and black culture in
general “has continually threatened to override
other possible images of lived cultural space
among the hip hop generation.” 9 Interestingly
enough, as the thorough research comprising his
case study concludes, rap’s rogue shift toward
gangsta chic coincides with a period of rapid
commercial growth from 1987-88.
Which is not to say that all gangsta rap
is bad, or mere minstrelsy. As Forman contends,
the practice of identifying Hip Hop’s locus as the
ghetto - as real, imaginary, symbolic and mythic
as this space may be in music - also invigorates a
powerful global counter-discourse or what Nancy
Fraser terms a “‘subaltern counter-public.” 10
Critics such as Davarian L. Baldwin have likewise
articulated how the rise of gangsta rap in the
West Coast single-handedly dismantled New
York City’s monopoly on hip hop and re-opened a
discourse that had become increasingly shaped
by the middle-class-oriented “politically correct
disciplining of black bodies.” According to Baldwin,
gangsta rap broke the spell of orthodox Black
Nationalism which “obscures the daily battles
poor black folk have to wage in contemporary
America.” 11 If Hip Hop is at the heart about
politicizing youth toward a critique of state and
corporate hegemony in an unorthodox manner,
it’s important that we see past false dichotomies
segmenting “conscious” and “unconscious” lyrics
and rappers. Clearly, rappers of all stripes manifest
willful spaces of praxis. What will it take to move
rap’s positive content from margin to center?
In Tanzania, East Africa, for instance, where
swearing is considered unacceptable in public,
leaders of the local hip hop scene, many youth
themselves, act as gatekeepers of rap’s lyrics. Rap
songs must be about important social issues and
avoid the topics of drugs and sex 12 .
The Tanzanian system recalls the recent
vilification of southern rapper Rick Ross whose
rhyme: "Put molly all in her champagne, she ain’t
even know it / I took her home and I enjoyed dat,
she ain’t even know it.” (Rocko, U.O.E.N.O.) clearly
brags about date rape. In the last few days of
women’s history month, Ross became the target
of a media firestorm that almost sunk his entire
career and caused Reebok to pull the plug on his
lucrative endorsement contract (nobody bothered
to mention how Ross also says “I’d die for deez
Reeboks, U.O.E.N.O.” – making him a rapist and
a pawn of corporate America). Although Ross may
not be any more explicit than the majority of crunk/
trap/gangsta rappers out there, his slip indicates
an increased sense of dialogue around artist
accountability in rap made possible largely through
social media. As Jamilah Lemieux writes in Ebony,
Ross’s ratchet rhyme presented “an important
teachable moment for young men, boys and even
some full-grown adults who don’t understand
consent.” 13
Interestingly, periods of enhanced attention
paid to issues of racial equality and the successful
building of multiracial alliances within American
history often coincide with economic depression
such as the increased sensitivity amongst whites
for racial issues in the massive hunger marches
that occurred following the great depression in
1930. 14 In the wake of the recent market collapse,
scores of young people who feel that they are
being ‘skipped over’ by the job market are looking
to rappers as inspirational figures. As Jay Z says
it, “[hip hop] brought the suburbs to the hood.” 15
When I think of racial justice oriented entities such
as the Black Panthers more than leather jackets
and raised fists comes to mind. What comes to
mind immediately rather is the $200 I get in credit
each month I can spend on food because I make
less money than it costs to breath here in New York
City. The Food Stamp program was created by the
American government when they noticed that the
Black Panthers were gaining an inordinate amount
of attention and support simply by offering free
breakfast to inner city children.
In “What is the Current Direction of Hip-
Hop?” 16 a webisode hosted by Dr. Marc Lamont
Hill, hip hop academic Dr. Tricia Rose alongside
emcee Jasiri x and Pharoahe Monch discuss hip
hop’s radical future potential. Says Jasiri X, “We’re
at the best of times and the worst of times. On
one hand you have a hip hop industry that has
been completely corporatized and pushing some
of the most soulless pop music that we’ve ever
heard and on the other hand you have technology
that’s allowed artists like myself to come with a
grassroots perspective, to connect directly to their
audience and get a positive message out.”
For many, technology seems to epitomize
what is both most wrong and most righteous with
regard to today’s rap. While folks like Darlene
Vinicky are pinpointing technology (the internet,
iPods and transnational corporations to be exact)
as the reason hip hop has shifted from a collective,
physical and participatory event into a spectacular
and problematic space that ultimately “lulls us
into complacency and isolation,” 17 the truth is, hip
hop was born of technology. Without repurposed
electronics and the creative appropriation of prerecorded
albums and sounds, there would be no
hip hop. When hip hop went global, it was largely
due to the internet and MTV.
Personally, I like to situate the internet
as a collective type of isolation, a collective postconscious
or super-conscious if you will. And in
the defense of the internet, I’d say that the rapid
dissemination of all dis supafly bangin sh*t we
call hip hop does lead to the formation of real
allegiances and coalitions. It might also be the
case that while American rap is lost in some gilded
cage of a pimp-hoe minefield the rest of the world
has picked up where the real hip hop left off. Says
Jasiri X, “Overseas a lot of times the culture of hip
hop is more respected…and even the revolutionary
aspects of hip hop. You have hip hop artists really
responsible for creating the soundtrack that set
off the Arab Spring and some other movements
around the world.”
According to Bocafloja, an artist largely
responsible for politicizing rap in Mexico, the
gestation point of the global hip hop movement
was a festival that began in Cuba in the early
nineties. Bringing people of color from around the
world together to organize around hip hop as a
social justice platform, Bocafloja says that it was
these festivals, which by their third year were being
funded by Fidel Castro, that cemented important
cross-cultural allegiances still in existence amongst
today’s global raptivist network. 18
There tends to be a sentiment among the
academy that the revolution is always happening
“over there,” which ignores the myriad grassroots
movements here in the States and underestimates
exactly how and why the sheer power of the
American entertainment industry has carried
the torch of hip hop to lands near and far. Either
way let’s face it – hip hop is American. It was and
will always be about enterprise: black jobs, black
owned companies, black commerce. It’s the first
black musical genre to broadly take the power back
from the whitey parent companies. Which doesn’t
excuse the parading of substance abuse as leisure
or violence against women as the norm in rap.
And by identifying hip hop as a black power thang
I also don’t mean to steamroll the multicultural
beginnings of hip hop, particularly it’s early
Nuyorican, Caribbean and Latino influence and
innovators.
Bracketed by three males on Lamont
Hill’s series is Tricia Rose, who basically wrote
the bible of hip hop academia Black Noise. For
Rose, the power of hip hop pedagogy, and black
music in general, is the oral history which speaks
to an African Diasporic experience not recounted
in mainstream narratives. Word up, the pimp-ho
sh*t is about as transgressive as free pancakes at
iHop. As Beth Coleman has hashed out, the pimp
is an age-old figure whose black male iconographic
celebrity in the United States trajectory descends
from the American slave economy: “The male
African got wise, ‘What does he do to you when
you are with him?’ ‘He makes me have sex and
offers gifts like pork chops.’ Being that he was
in a precarious situation, being that we were in
a negative disposition the African at the time
who was a slave, he said, ‘Alright, what you do is
ask him for two pork chops’…and the system of
manipulation began for survival.” 19
Says Rose regarding the most problematic
elements of hip hop’s current commercial
mainstream, “I think we have lost a long historical
value of black music speaking not just to politics
but to the black condition, to what it means to be
African American or part of the black diaspora
that really has been reduced to the kind of BLING
BLING, what I call the hip hop trinity: the gangstapimp-ho
trinity has produced the most money ever
and it continues to drive youth interests. I think
until we unlock that it’s going to be a hard way.”
Rose’s point is really important. I for
one can attest to the fact that as much as I am
seduced by scholarship mythologizing the guerillastyle
collective street renaissance that was early