Hip Hop CDs

Straight Outta Compton (Priority, 1988)  /  Ghetto Music: The Blueprint Of Hip Hop (Jive, 1989)  /  Get Rich Or Die Tryin’ – Soundtrack (2005)  

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50 Cent CDs   Get Rich Or Die Tryin'  /  The Massacre   / Guess Who's Back  / Power of the Dollar

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Books on Rap & Hip Hop

Todd Boyd, The New H.N.I.C.: The Death of Civil Rights and the Reign of Hip Hop (2003) / Sharif Responds to Todd Boyd / Is Hip Hop Really Dead?

Brian Cross, It's Not About a Salary... Rap, Race and Resistance in Los Angeles: Rap, Race, and Resistance in Los Angeles (1993)

Tricia Rose, Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America (1994)

Russell A. Porter,  Spectacular Vernaculars: Hip-Hop and the Politics of Postmodernism (1995)

Bakari Kitwana, The Hip Hop Generation: Young Blacks and the Crisis in African American Culture (2003)

Imani Perry,  Prophets of the Hood: Politics and Poetics in Hip Hop (2004)

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A Premature Announcement

Rahim-

Peace. Brother X has constructed a penetrating analysis of the demise of the Hip Hop Nation. However, he is premature in ascribing death to the black arts movement. The brother's confusing the death of one thing with another is a mistake often made. The nadir of a movement may or may not foreshadow the death of a thing. But the black arts movement will endure long after the Hip Hop Nation is gone. What Brother X sees is the end of an artistic movement that was based (originally) in the screams and wailing of a generation of children that had been rejected and who themselves rejected the dominant society.

In the past, such movements were connected to some kind of political struggle to change society. Hip Hop degenerated into a hedonistic pursuit of values that were the exact opposite of what was political. By political, I mean a movement that has as its goal the betterment of the masses-black and the working poor of America. The Hip Hop Nation started out political enough with X-clan and other groups. But after big corps like Time Warner got through shaping the movement -- it dropped even the trappings of anything political and became the ranting of psuedo-gangsta millionaries.

My own belief is that movements like the Hip Hop Nation arise when a generation is divorced from its true history. Is it possible for a generation to turn to hedonism when they are rooted in the suffering of their people? If we compare hip hop to be bop -- the Hip Hop Nation to the jazz generation -- we find some compelling similarities and differences.

The jazz generation has, as urban as it was, its roots in the blues. And the blues has its roots in the South. What does the Hip Hop Nation call its predecessor? It can not say that it borrows from the blues, even through the blues is filled with violence. Seems Like Murder Here is a compelling argument by Adam Gussow that violence figured into the blues tradition. But the violence that figured into the blues never became its dominate characteristic.

Jazz the child of the blues is also associated with violence -- the zoot suit riots on the west coast and the hijacking of jazz figures by police and white men in the cities led to all kinds of confrontation. And just as the Hip Hop Nation constructed the word "yo" to designate who was a part of their nation, Lester Young constructed the word "man" to designate who was a part of the jazz generation. Both hip hop "yo" and jazz "man" are anti-heroes in the American tradition. But the figure of the jazz man overshadows the yo as a cultural hero. There is no comparison between the movement of Coltrane, Prez, Holiday, (your hero Armstrong), Miles, and the other cultural geniuses of jazz.

Perhaps, the difference lies in orientation and the times in which they emerged. Jazz began its ascendancy between World Wars, the first and the second. Also it was highly influenced by the intellectual movements within and without America -- the New Negro movement,  the Harlem Arts Movement, civil rights and black power -- all had an influence on  jazz artist from (my hero) Ellington's symphonies to Max Roaches' Freedom Suite. Hip hop should have inherited much of its intellectual power from Bob Marley. He was an urban prophet -- a wailer for justice at home and abroad. But again, Marley was a semi-political figure who towers over any figure of hip hop. As for Coltrane, he makes the heroes of hip  hop appear to be restless children without a sense of the black man's spiritual, ascending nature.

But as faithless as the Hip Hop Nation is to its black legacy, I despite my misgivings must love what is best in them. It is what they can become after their hip hop experience that I love them. They will surely come to question whether hedonism can be a path for human-humane-development. Out of their despair, they still might find the truth. I liken them to the Hebrew under Moses (May God be pleased with him). For nearly forty years, he struggled to reform his people until finally they were delivered to the Promise Land. When the Hip Hop Generation finds it own Moses. And ceases to worship the Golden Calf of hedonism. Then perhaps Brother X's faith will be rekindled.

I wanted to say many other things but time prevents it.

sharif         (2004)

Zombies Live a Life After Death

Sharif, peace and blessings,

I think your analysis is strikingly clear. And like you, I am quite uncertain about Hip Hop’s imminent demise. I will agree indeed that it has lost its cultural vitality. It has long ceased to be an underground moving current of black life and culture. It has become a stagnant pool for the worse kinds of social ills that tragically affect African-American communities -- broken homes, drug distribution and addiction, murder and mayhem. That sort of culture is now far from underground, it is all over TV programming and like basketball and other money-making sports our youth are willing to sell their souls to prove who can do and  let escape from their mouths the most outrageous inanities.

While I was catching the 44 bus yesterday on the way to St. Mary's, last Wednesday, I overheard a conversation between two teenage girls in which they were publicly denouncing their parents in the most vulgar terms -- calling them MFs and other names; and worst, evaluating their parents in monetary and the grossest materialist terms. There was no hint whatsoever of reverence or respect for their parents or any adult person. There were three adults standing or sitting nearby and it was as if we were invisible or non-existent. I had the urge to say something, but remained silent and said nothing.

I am certain such behavior would not have been possible a generation ago. You are absolutely right about the generations of the 40s and the 60s -- that even in their rebellions against the previous generation they retained a measure of respect and deference and understanding that they needed something of the past, of family life on which to build something new and better and more wonderful. But for the so-called Hip Hop Nation or Hip Hop Generation -- there is a cultivation, it seems, of disconnectedness, of relativism (all is valueless) if Benjamins are not there to determine the value. Thus, the lack of respect for parents. Most of our parents are poor and poorly educated by modern standards and thus are out of the loop of having any Benjamins or, for that matter, Lincolns.

My Dear Brother, Hip Hop may indeed be dead. But it's the Walking Dead. Like Zombies, it lives even in its death and there are none strong enough to end its misery and give it the final death blow. For it has been discovered that Hip Hop like drugs can be used for social control, especially to manipulate the poor and the powerless. And Big Money and Big Power will make sure that it continues to molest and make havoc in our communities.

But we have to do more than criticize. We have to come up with cultural alternatives, that which will win the hearts and minds and loyalties of our youth and our communities. We need a music and cultural elements of hope and struggle. The enemies of our communities must be pointed out and at this point they tend to be ourselves. We cannot struggle with the crotches of our pants around our knees; nor can we struggle when our most educated and talented have the basic sentiments of thugs and drug dealers, namely, "What's in it for me?"

Later, Rahim   (2004)