It's Bigger Than Hip Hop: The Rise of the Post-Hip-Hop Generation
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PRAISE FOR IT’S BIGGER THAN HIP HOP
“This is the book that many of us have been waiting for. The wisdom and understanding he exemplifies in this work will astound the reader as he opens a third eye and breaks it all down. Extremely well researched, well documented, and very well written, this book is well paced and will have no difficulty holding the reader’s attention.”
—Hip Hop Weekly
“Nothing can be said about the young M. K. Asante, Jr. if not that he is a visionary. The twenty-three-year-old professor, poet, and film-maker believes hip hop can save us all. The North Philly native argues that hip hop is a misunderstood weapon of social change in the fight for racial equality, which has been colonized by the corporate media and sold back to Americans as ‘Authentic Black Culture.’”
—Campbell States, Philadelphia City Paper
“Asante brilliantly places hip hop on a continuum of musical creations originating in the rich experience of black Americans…. One of the most striking parts of the book comes when Asante shows how media images have powerfully shaped not only the older generation’s vision of black youth, but black youth’s vision of themselves. In a skillful pun, the author points how the ‘reel’ images—on television and film, in magazines, and on the radio—have replaced the ‘real’ even as those who pretend to be real are only performing for the reel.”
—Markland Walker, The New Agenda
“Asante expertly blends historical information about hip hop and the civil rights movement with personal narrative, interviews with artists, quotations from civil rights leaders, and classic poetry to create an original and daring work.”
—Jennifer Zarr, Library Journal
“M. K. Asante, Jr. takes a bold and extremely engaging step, defining a new era for young Black America in the wake of commercial hip hop’s demise. With It’s Bigger Than Hip Hop, he begins a new, groundbreaking dialogue about what the post-hip-hop generation is fighting against and what direction that group needs to be headed in.”
—Marcus Reeves, author of Somebody Scream! Rap Music’s Rise to Prominence in the Aftershock of Black Power
The Rise
of the
Post-Hip-Hop
Generation
ST. MARTIN’S GRIFFIN NEW YORK
IT’S BIGGER THAN HIP HOP. Copyright © 2008 by M. K. Asante, Jr. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.
www.stmartins.com
The Library of Congress has catalogued the hardcover edition as follows:
Asante, Molefi K., 1981–
It’s bigger than hip hop: the rise of the post-hip-hop generation /
M. K. Asante, Jr.— 1st ed.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-312-37326-9
1. African Americans—Social conditions. 2. African Americans—Intellectual life. 3. African Americans in popular culture. 4. African Americans—Race identity. 5. Popular culture—United States. 6. Hip hop—United States. 7. Rap (Music)—History and criticism. 8. Music—Social aspects—United States. 9. African American youth—Attitudes. I. Title.
E185.61.A725 2008
305.235089’96073—dc22
2008019523
ISBN-978 0-312-59302-5 (pbk.)
First St. Martin’s Griffin Edition: September 2009
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
For My People
CONTENTS
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS—MUCH LOVE
PREFACE—AWAKENING
1. THE POST-HIP-HOP GENERATION
2. KEEPIN’ IT REAL VS. REEL
3. WHAT’S REALLY HOOD? A CONVERSATION WITH THE AFRICAN-AMERICAN GHETTO
4. IT’S BIGGER THAN HIP HOP
5. IT’S BIGGER THAN HIP HOP: TIME LINE (1965–1991)
6. OLD WHITE MEN (or, WHO OWNS HIP HOP?)
7. BEYOND JENA: FREE ’EM ALL
8. FIP
9. UNIVERSAL LANGUAGE
10. TWO SETS OF NOTES
11. BY ANY MEDIUM NECESSARY
12. CHANGE CLOTHES (STATE PROPERTY)
13. CONQUERING THE ÷
14. A LESSON BEFORE DYING: A PHONE INTERVIEW WITH HIP HOP
BIBLOGRAPHY
FILMOGRAPHY
INDEX
To the most high and the ancestors.
To my mother and father for their unshakable love.
To Maya, queen, for her anchored illumination.
To my family all around the world for their support.
To Lawrence Ross, Manie Baron, and Monique Patterson for making this book a reality.
To my teachers and mentors for their wisdom: Maya Angelou, Amiri Baraka, Charles Fuller, Kenny Gamble, Walter Lomax, Mumia Abu-Jamal, Kofi Opoku, Maulana Karenga, Monifa Love Asante, Dolan Hubbard, bell hooks, Haki Madhubuti, Jim Brown, Assata Shakur, Michael Eric Dyson, George Carlin, Haile Gerima, Keith Mehlinger, Cornel West, Lennox Dingle, and Kevin Howie.
To my comrades for their light: Dead Prez, Daahoud Asante, Sunni Patterson, Mos Def, Struggle, Chuck D, Owen ‘Alik Shahadah, Eka Asante, Immortal Technique, Head-Roc, Eshon Burgundy, Black Ice, Greg Corbin, Jared Ball, Jeff Chang, Saul Williams, Davey D, Jon Sistrunk, Jeremy Glick, Joan Morgan, Jamilah Abu-bakare, William Jelani Cobb, Shalana Austin, Dustin Felder, Ben Haaz, Pierce Freelon, Reiland Rabaka, Deen Freelon, Ursula Rucker, Mark Anthony Neal, Kameelah Rasheed, Lauryn Hill, Amy Goodman, Imani Perry, Ahmed Artis, Allissa Hosten, Louba Durand, Kiri Davis, Abraham Osuna, Christina Garces, Zamani-Ra, and Nasir Allen Asante.
To the photographers and visual artists whose work appears in this book: Peter Barry, LaToya Ruby Frazier, Jamal Thorne, Hank Willis Thomas, Theodore A. Harris, Jason Woods, Maya Freelon Asante, Paul D’Amato, Don Ryan, Nathaniel Donnett, Chris Metzger, and Jose Alamillo.
To my students at Morgan State University for teaching me. To researchers Ryan Bowens and Marquita Brown for their assistance.
To the everyday people who inspire me daily.
To the revolutionaries, activists, and organizers who refuse to accept the status quo.
To my brothers and sisters locked down (they can’t imprison your soul!).
To hip-hop.
To you.
When you make an observation, you have an obligation. This is the piece of poetry that I try to live by. It’s what prompted these pages and, last November, motored me through the nothingness of rural Pennsylvania to conduct a writing workshop in prison—the pen.
As I pulled up to the facility—a colorless lump of concrete strangled with jagged concertina wire—rain fell, flickering like old film. Inside, I huddled with a dynamic group of inmates, all young, all black, and all bent on not being broken. After the workshop, I was taken to visit the cell block where they spent the bulk of their days and nights. On my way out, I noticed that Jordan King, a participant in the workshop, was the only one on the block whose bed did not have a mattress.
“No mattress?” I asked, puzzled.
“I have one, but I don’t sleep on it,” he told me.
“What do you sleep on?” I pried.
“The hard floor, the steel frame, anywhere but on this,” he asserted as he hunched beneath the bunk and flashed a flimsy mattress. “See,” he stated, as he reburied the cot, “I can’t sleep on that. It’s too comfortable and I don’t trust comfort in a place like this because it numbs you to the reality of where you really are and why.”
Just as the frigid floor and steel frame told Jordan, in that raspy voice of reality, where he was, this book—by sna
tching the mattresses from beneath our slumbering selves—is about where we are today and where we want to be tomorrow.
Each generation must out of relative obscurity
discover its mission,
fulfill it, or betray it.
— FRANZ FANON
Now, as then, we find ourselves bound, first without,
then within, by the nature of our categorizations.
— JAMES BALDWIN
All the fresh styles always start off
as a good lil’ hood thang;
look at blues, rock, jazz, rap …
By the time it reach Hollywood it’s over,
but it’s cool, we just keep it goin’ make new shit.
— ANDRÉ3000
“The hip-hop generation,” a tag typically rocked by Blacks and browns born after the Civil Rights and Black Power movements, certainly captured the essence of the rebellious, courageous, creative, politically discontent teens and twenty-somethings of the 80s and 90s. But “nah, not today,” says Alton Smith, a nineteen-year-old poet from North Philly who counts himself among a new generation of world-changers that believe—he tells me as our Black bodies climb into the night—“It’s bigger than hip hop.”
With its sands scattered to the winds of the world, hip hop joins scores of other vibrations that are born in the Black community, but that live, thrive, and reproduce all over the world. More than just an integral part of pop culture, hip hop has shaped the perceptions of people, especially young ones, wherever they are. Take, for instance, Planète Rap, a hip-hop clothing store whose front window is tatted with images of a heat-holdin’ 50 Cent, located on the posh Grande Boulevard in Paris. Or the Ghanaian teenager who, as I hoofed through his neighborhood in Accra, greeted me with “What’s good, my nigga?” Although these examples straddle some stereotypes, there are many others—like the marriages between hip-hop groups and grassroots organizations in São Paulo, Brazil, the emergence of revolutionary Palestinian female emcee Sabreena Da Witch, or the East African hip-hop groups Kalamashaka and Kwanza Unit whose raw rhymes routinely expose government corruption in the region—that demonstrate how the adoption of hip hop outside of the U.S. has been collectively constructed.
In its homeland, “hip hop,” says Alton, “empowered my dad’s generation to be better, to stand up, to stop the violence.” He flashes a yellowed Polaroid of his father who, in 1980, eight years before Alton was born, founded a rap group. “But it just don’t do that now.” Alton’s disappointment is amplified by an urban crisis that has recently stolen the life of his seventeen-year-old cousin.
“I stay at a funeral,” he sighs, then roll-calls a few names of the young Black men, boys even, who are among the over four hundred murder victims in Philadelphia in 2007. “But turn on the radio and what do you hear? You hear, ‘I’ll kill you nigga, I’ll kill you nigga,’” he says, trying to shrug off the senselessness. When the murder rate is higher for Blacks in Philadelphia—the city of brotherly love—than it is for U.S. troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, young men like Alton search for ways to interrupt this wretched cycle of death and despair.
Although Alton sees the hip hop of his father’s generation as empowering, he acknowledges that the economic dominance of all things hip hop during his own time has brought many voices into the mainstream that, prior, were barely heard and never listened to in that space.
“Yeah, but at what price?” quizzes Tiffany Coles, a twenty-one-year-old “Seventh Wardian” from New Orleans who, as we motor through the ruins of her desolate city, says that hip hop’s mainstream success reminds her of Rosie Perez’s monologue in White Men Can’t Jump. “Sometimes when you win, you really lose, and sometimes when you lose, you really win, and sometimes when you win or lose, you actually tie, and sometimes when you tie, you actually win or lose.” For Tiffany, hip hop’s dive into the mainstream was a win for the handful of corporations and artists who grew rich, but a significant loss for those who it is supposed to represent.
“I want to be a part of the generation that’s going to rebuild this city and fight against the officials in this city who are trying to keep us out. I love hip hop, but if the hip-hop generation ain’t about doing this kind of work”—she points to a battered home with the word HELP scrawled into the boards that block the windows and doors—“then we need something else.”
Hip hop, like the Black musical oxygen that preceded it—blues, gospel, jazz, soul—cannot be looked at in a vacuum because the artists owe their lives to the context of their births. A discussion of the blues, then, without a discussion of slavery and Black southern life would not just be incomplete, but lame, too. A discussion on hip hop, in the same way, must include what Dr. Jared Ball, hip-hop professor and 2008 Green Party presidential candidate, calls “its proper context of political struggle and repression.” Without this context, we are left, as Fred Hampton trumpeted one balmy Chicago afternoon, with “answers that don’t answer, explanations that don’t explain and conclusions that don’t conclude.”
Putting hip hop in its proper context means understanding the inextricable link between Black music and the politics of Black life. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., reflecting in his autobiography on the role of Black music during the Civil Rights Movement, called the freedom songs the “soul of the movement” and even stressed the overriding importance of the lyrics, the message:
They are more than just incantations of clever phrases designed to invigorate a campaign; they are as old as the history of the Negro in America. They are adaptations of songs the slaves sang—the sorrow songs, the shouts for joy, the battle hymns, and the anthems of our movement. I have heard people talk of their beat and rhythm, but we in the movement are as inspired by their words. “Woke Up This Morning with My Mind Stayed on Freedom” is a sentence that needs no music to make its point. We sing the freedom songs for the same reason the slaves sang them, because we too are in bondage and the songs add hope to our determination that “We shall overcome, Black and white together, We shall overcome someday.” These songs bound us together, gave us courage together, helped us march together.
Going beyond the naïve idea that Black music is simply entertainment helps us to better understand the current crisis. “It seems to me that if the Negro represents, or is symbolic of, something in and about the nature of American culture, this certainly should be revealed by his characteristic music,” is how poet Amiri Baraka (then LeRoi Jones) puts it in Blues People. So, in that way, to observe contemporary hip hop is to observe ourselves; an observation that, for Alton, Tiffany, and others, not only blares problems loud enough to drown out seductive samples or head nod-inspiring bass lines, but turns them toward redefinition.
The current crisis isn’t just that rap music, hip hop’s voice box of values and ideas, has drifted into the shallowest pool of poetic possibilities, or even that most of today’s hip hop betrays the attitudes and ideals that framed it in the same way that, say, the U.S. Patriot Act neglects the principles—at least in theory—espoused by the framers of the constitution. Many young people—myself, age twenty-five, included—who were born into the hip-hop generation feel misrepresented by it and have begun to see the dangers and limitations of being collectively identified by a genre of music that we don’t even own. And it is our lack of ownership that has allowed corporate forces to overrun hip hop with a level of misogyny and Black-on-Black violence that spurs some young folks to disown the label “hip-hop generation.”
The balance, here, as Tiffany measures, is remembering “that the stuff on BET and on the radio, which is mainly negative, is not all of hip hop.” So while Tiffany is skeptical of the label “hip-hop generation,” she embraces the contributions of emcees who, in the triumphant tradition of Black arts, have employed the medium as a means to elevate, uplift, and inspire collective change. At the same time, she realizes that “most people ’round here won’t listen to it if it’s not on the radio.”
Part of the crisis is centered around the distribution mechanism
s for hip hop. Although hip hop is the cultural expression of young Black America, we do not control how the cultural expression is disseminated. Instead, multinational corporations like Viacom, Clear Channel, and Vivendi, through their radio and television outlets, control how most people hear and see hip hop. When I ask my students at Morgan State—an urban, predominantly Black university—about emcees like Immortal Technique, Talib Kweli, and Dead Prez, an overwhelming majority of them reveal that they’ve never even heard of them. This is tragic because the aforesaid emcees are among a select few that address the social and political issues that affect them most. This is partly due to the unfortunate reality that rappers whose lyrics fall into the abyss of negativity are not usually demarcated as “negative” or “ignorant;” however, emcees who rhyme against self-destruction are always marginalized as “conscious,” “alternative,” or “political” rappers, tags that sling them into categorical ghettos and thus help to place them outside the earshot of the masses.
While it is important to acknowledge that mainstream rap is not all of rap, it’s also important to acknowledge the effect that the mainstream has on aspiring emcees. When Alton, for instance, says that the rappers from his neighborhood are rapping about killin’ niggas, they are imitating the models of success that they see on TV and hear on the radio. In that way, the mainstream has a dominating effect and is able to dictate the direction of the culture and art.