by Delma Jackson III
I’ve tried to write this piece multiple times since the election. I don’t know if this is the piece you need right now, reader, but it’s the one I needed to write. If you’re not a fan of hip hop, that’s ok. This is bigger than hip hop. There’s several lyrical references to songs you’re free to check out on your own time. Or not. Everything isn’t for everybody. Either way, thanks for taking the time.
Hip Hop turned 50 last year and if you were raised by the genre and it spoke to you in a way no one else could; If it saved your life like it did mine, then this is especially for you.
“Rappers have been praising Trump for over a decade. And ignoring real heroes. Americans have been excited about those who make money without thinking about the exploitation that may be involved with making that money for ages.It’s just a reflection of our values. We get the leaders we deserve.”
–Saul Williams
“Listen—people be askin’ me all the time, ‘Yo Mos, what’s gettin’ ready to happen with hip-hop?’ (Where do you think hip-hop is goin’?). I tell em’, “You know what’s gonna happen with hip-hop? Whatever’s happening with us. If we smoked out, hip-hop is gonna be smoked out. If we doin’ alright, hip-hop is gonna be doin’ alright. People talk about hip-hop like it’s some giant livin’ in the hillside comin’ down to visit the townspeople. We are hip-hop.”
–Yasiin Bey (fka, Mos Def)
“And even after all my logic and my theory, I add a ‘mutha fucka’ so you ig’nant niggas hear me.”
–Lauryn Hill
The summer before I entered high school was…visceral. At 14, I felt the excitement of taking another step closer to adulthood and its freedoms (sans any sense of its responsibilities). I felt a burgeoning hormonal and constant cultural cry to lose my virginity post-haste, tampered by an exquisite sense of my awkwardness. It was that summer I felt the hot blood of a neighbor on my face as he was gunned down next to me. I felt the helplessness as I waited my turn, and the guilty relief as my turn never came. It was that summer our family reunion was in Atlanta, and it was on their mass transit system that I heard Illmatic for the first time.
Over DJ Premier’s masterful sample of Joe Chambers’ Mind Rain, Nas–a native New Yorker– reflected he’s got “so many rhymes, I don’t think I’m too sane. Life is parallel to hell and I must maintain. And be prosperous. Yo we live dangerous. Cops could just arrest me–blamin’ us. We’re held like hostages.” I heard my sense of home as hellishness given back to me as I watched GM continue to abandon the city of Flint. I heard my commitment to maintain my sense of self, even as the nightmares from the shooting became more frequent. I heard the audacity to strive for something beyond what was immediately in front of me. I heard an updated version of an historical analysis of law enforcement in our communities. I heard the sense of captivity that redlining facilitated.
I heard all that. In 11 seconds.
I felt validated. I felt connection. I felt hope. I felt moved. Most importantly, I felt seen. By directly confronting and artistically rendering death, vitality, hopelessness, and beauty, with depth and clarity, in our communities, I’d been instantly reminded of why I loved this musical genre so much.
I found out years later, he recorded this instant classic, “New York State of Mind,” in one take.
Growing up in an economically sieged, racially segregated community while navigating a predominantly white, Catholic school system for my K-12 education proved to be one of the most impactful dichotomies of my developmental years. The constant comparisons between “us” and “them” without socio-cultural context left me like a discarded dish rag: wrung dry of the potable waters of self-pride only to be saturated in the dirty dish waters of self-hatred rooted in wanting that which I could never become–white.
Left too long under those conditions anyone would grow stagnant, moldy, and only capable of spreading more of the same–first throughout myself, and eventually across everything and everyone I touched. Something was wrong–with all of it. I didn’t know the story and I languished without language until hip hop gave it to me.
I never saw myself depicted in meaningful ways by TV and Hollywood. I would’ve thought it was because I didn’t deserve to be. But you said, “…let’s make our own movies like Spike Lee. ‘Cause the roles being offered don’t strike me. As nothing that the black man could use to earn. Burn Hollywood, burn.”
You made it ok to be me and told me anger was a perfectly acceptable response to one dimensional representation.
When Reaganomics, the Bush years, and the mass-incarceration of the Clinton years co-created the backdrop of racialized urban planning, factory closures, and crack-cocaine, you told me the craziness I saw wasn’t isolated. I wasn’t alone anymore because you were going to describe this world back to me and you took your job seriously:
Despite the made up theme of “Black on Black” crime and the accusations that we ignored violent crime in our cities, you were clearly holding us accountable, reminding us that, “Back in the ’60s, our brothers and sisters were hanged. How could you gang-bang? I never ever ran from the Ku Klux Klan. And I shouldn’t have to run from a black man.”
When my schools made curriculum decisions which ignored the contributions of activists and writers who looked like me, you brought their works to my attention and pointed me back to myself:
Before anyone else spoke to me about the right to choose, you brought it to my attention and instilled me with a sense of responsibility to consider the experience of women:
And while European beauty standards were flooding our collective consciousness via media, you reminded me to ask, “You know what some people put themselves through to look just like you? Dark stocking, high heels, lipstick, alla that” You reminded me we have choices– that we’re not bound by, “…dealin with the European standard of beauty…Turn off the TV, put the magazine away…See the evidence of divine presence.”
You gave me pride AND permission to be awkward. When I was struggling in adolescence and unsure how to express my growing interest in girls, you articulated my awe, overwhelm, frustration, and intimidation and made me feel seen:
Your production made me curious about music outside the genre. So many samples pointing to a musical legacy no one in my school system thought worthy of teaching. I discovered an appreciation for Jazz through a Tribe Called Quest and Digable Planets. I got hip to Roberta Flack through the Fugees. The sheer number of genres you pulled together and braided made me feel responsible for studying music outside of myself. Who DOES that? You were so layered and nuanced–complex and sophisticated.
You were accessible, relatable, funny, courageous, and poignant. You were also ignorant, violent, vain, and obsessed with extolling the virtues of your own toxicity.
In other words, you were whole–you were us at our best and our worst. You were as American as Dutch apple pie.
On one hand you extolled the virtues of freedom even as you too often sought to oppress the voice of Black women. I loved your anger, while also often questioning the direction of your ire. Too often, you asked Black women to accept blatant misogyny as the price for access to the community you created. Too often, black boys severed themselves from their own emotional landscape and died in that hellish environment by the droves trying to fashion an image just like you.
We grew up with each other, and while we’ve both changed since the 80s, I often don’t recognize you anymore. Many of your worst character traits have been exacerbated; brought to the fore; mass produced and distributed by a music industry that has ALWAYS hated you and yours.
This industry has done to you what it has done to your ancestral legacy so many times before, as Jazz, Blues, Rock, and Funk have all succumbed to the insatiable thirst for mass-produced, pre-packaged, easily marketed, sanitized, one-dimensional, reductionist, formulaic, fuck all.
Too often you’re a cliché–a joke that everyone gets but you. You were America–the great “both/and.” You knew how to exist in both the sacred and sacrilegious, and you never lost sight of your audience even as you sought resources we didn’t have.
Now…
There’s no easy way to say this but it needs saying: You’re an uncle tom. You’re a fucking minstrel show. In fact, you’re increasingly indistinguishable from POTUS 45/47:
- Outside of enriching yourselves, you offer only concepts of a plan.
- You both regularly produce meandering, mumbling, meaninglessness for the sake of a crowd.
- The idea of a woman in power utterly terrifies you.
- You define your masculinity by surrounding yourself with women you disparage.
- “Grab em by the p*ssy” is a track you co-wrote.
- I see you at MAGA rallies.
You used to fight the power.
Now you want to be the power.
You inadvertently encourage support for 45/47 because while your paths have been very different, you ended up at the same place. You’d trade your soul for access to power. You’d have men sell out their communities– particularly the sisters, daughters, wives, and mothers, for empty promises of a return to a time and place that never existed for the vast majority of us. You openly encourage comfort over community, ignorance over enlightenment, and violence over vision. You’ve wholly embraced and proactively encouraged MAGA politics. As usual, it is our Black women that sought to save us. As usual, you (we) didn’t listen.
I don’t know. Maybe it was inevitable.
Maybe hip hop was always going to go from being the rebellious, rambunctious, radical teenager to the crazy conspiracy theorist-ic, mid-life crisis corvette cruisin’, conservative, coked-out uncle espousing “christian” values over Christmas dinner. I can’t tell you how many of my peers have the audacity to question the sanity and value of gen z-ers. I have to close my mouth with my hand every time. The same generation who screamed “Fuck the Police” at the top of their lungs is wondering why “these young people” have no “respect.” It’s watching Ice-T go from “Cop Killer” to cop on Law and Order SVU.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m willing to bet my cat (sorry, Nuri) that, by FAR, the Hip Hop community rejected Donald Trump. Like any 50-year-old genre, it’s all subgenres at this point. Black music, like its people, is often discussed as a monolith when we’re anything but. That said, you’ve probably seen the numbers by now and know Black America-as a voting block-rejected 47 by a lot.
I’m picking on hip hop because I feel like a jilted lover. I had expectations on the genre that were never going to be fulfilled. Even as it was saving me, it was harming me. I was too often being inundated with materialism, misogyny, and machismo. Hip hop was our Bob Dylan and our John Wayne. Hip hop was our Gloria Steinam and our Hugh Hefner. It was our Americana.
Countless young men, regardless of race, class, or musical tastes, were raised believing in stereotypes about entire populations. They confused external possessions with measures of internal worth. They confused domination with leadership, and vulnerability with weakness. They were bound to grow from young rebels without a clue to socially conservative, and confused elders. They spent their entire lives chasing and upholding an illusion of masculinity while the world around them began to question the assumptions they’d taken for granted. 47 promised to turn back the clock–to reestablish everything they thought they understood.
Hip Hop didn’t create these issues. Hip Hop is a reflection of them. And as much as I LOVE the the genre, it can neither be patient zero nor the vaccine. Hip hop is us–for better and for worse.
That said…white folks…
W.T.F?!?!
Delma Jackson III has been a senior fellow with CWC since 2012 – he brings an intersectional approach to our work at the intersection of environment and social justice work with an eye for organizational transformation. He invites vulnerability, critical analysis and introspection as a vehicle for liberation. He guides organizational cultures toward greater value-based visioning rooted in dialogue, transparency, grace, humor and compassion.
Rita Molestina for your patient editing.
