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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
* * * * * 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) |