Dead? 'Hip-hop culture has been murdered'

I am hip-hop. I was mesmerized by MC and DJ "crews" at block parties in my native Jersey City, near New York City, where hip-hop was born. I breakdanced on cardboard. I tagged my graffiti name, "kepol," with multicolored markers. I jammed at New York hip-hop clubs like Union Square. I organized concerts and rallies that featured leading rappers. I was a founding staff member at Quincy Jones' Vibe, where I interviewed the late Tupac Shakur several times. I was curator of the first hip-hop exhibit, at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. And I now lecture on hip-hop at colleges nationwide.

I am not speaking as an outsider. I am speaking as a hip-hop lifer. So is hip-hop dead? My answer is an emphatic yes because hiphop culture has been murdered by what I call the hip-hop industry.

Hip-hop culture, formed on the coattails of the Civil Rights Movement by working-class African-Americans, West Indians and Latinos, is a male-centered urban folk art with five core elements, according to Afrika Bambaataa, one of its pioneers: the DJ, the MC or rapper, the dance, the graffiti, and the knowledge. Hip-hop culture has always been about diverse expressions, some socially relevant, some not. And up until the early 1990s, as corporate America, via video networks and giant radio and record label conglomerates, was realizing the huge profits to be made from hip-hop, there was genius on par with soul, rock and roll, jazz, spirituals and the blues.

That began to shift with the mainstream embrace of Dr. Dre's The Chronic album in 1992--a classic hip-hop CD, no doubt, which introduced Snoop Dogg. The Chronic also contained traits that have come to represent hip-hop for the past decade and a half: excessively foul language, gratuitous violence, numerous references to alcohol and drugs (the chronic is marijuana, after all), and an incredible disdain for Black women (the B word) and Black America (the N word). There is nothing wrong with ghetto-centric narratives. But there is something wrong when that reality is co-opted and commercialized for global consumption, without any balance, nor any contextualization.

And there we have the blueprint for the hip-hop industry since the early 1990s: pornographic music videos; extreme materialism, individualism, and anti-intellectualism; bloated boasts of arrests, incarcerations, and shootings. But hip-hop culture is often confused with the hip-hop industry, and the consequences have been catastrophic for my generation and the generation directly behind me.

In other words, hip-hop culture has been assassinated by the hip-hop industry's desire to make money by any means necessary. The hip-hop industry is not only the multinational corporations that essentially control everything hip-hop. It's the record and radio execs, the network producers, the publicists, the handlers, and the magazine writers and editors, of all persuasions, who push these images with no conscience whatsoever. And without understanding that while the hip-hop industry certainly did not erect Black self-hatred, sexism, poverty, ignorance, and mayhem, a steady diet of these things will absolutely reinforce deadly behaviors and scenarios. Indeed, what better way to destroy a culture than to take an art created to save lives, point it toward death, and market it to the children and grandchildren of its originators?

And while planet hip-hop, today, belongs to humans everywhere, the faces and bodies of the hip-hop industry remain, mostly Black males and Black females. As it was Black faces and bodies being depicted as oversexed, violent, immoral, and dangerous in those lucrative minstrel shows. As it was in the cartoons of American newspapers at the turn of the 20th century. AS it was in D.W. Griffith's film Birth of a Nation. And as it was in the Blaxploitation era.

The difference nowadays is that there is virtually nothing countering these destructive lyrics and images. Plus, there is a mass failure to see that the hip-hop industry has become the latest hustle for rappers, execs, video producers, publicists, handlers, writers and editors, sort of like the drug game on another level, where anything goes as long as money and celebrity are attached. Yes, hip-hop is dead and, sadly, many Blacks have been participating in the slaying of hip-hop and, by extension, of the souls of [Black] folk, without even realizing it.

COPYRIGHT 2007 Johnson Publishing Co.
COPYRIGHT 2008 Gale, Cengage Learning