[Reader-list] greg tate on hip hop

[Vivek Narayanan]

For those of you who love hip hop, and for those who don't-- a very nice 
and nuanced article from the Village Voice that many interested in the 
underground hh community have been reading.

http://www.villagevoice.com/news/0501,tate,59766,2.html has the 
instructive photos by Jamel Shabazz that Tate discusses.

V.

Hiphop Turns 30: Whatcha celebratin' for?

by Greg Tate

We are now winding down the anniversary of hiphop's 30th year of 
existence as a populist art form. Testimonials and televised tributes 
have been airing almost daily, thanks to Viacom and the like. As those 
digitized hiphop shout-outs get packed back into their binary folders, 
however, some among us have been so gauche as to ask, What the heck are 
we celebrating exactly? A right and proper question, that one is, mate. 
One to which my best answer has been: Nothing less, my man, than the 
marriage of heaven and hell, of New World African ingenuity and that 
trick of the devil known as global hyper-capitalism. Hooray.

Given that what we call hiphop is now inseparable from what we call the 
hiphop industry, in which the nouveau riche and the super-rich employers 
get richer, some say there's really nothing to celebrate about hiphop 
right now but the moneyshakers and the moneymakers#who got bank and who 
got more.

Hard to argue with that line of thinking since, hell, globally speaking, 
hiphop is money at this point, a valued form of currency where brothers 
are offered stock options in exchange for letting some corporate entity 
stand next to their fire.

True hiphop headz tend to get mad when you don't separate so-called 
hiphop culture from the commercial rap industry, but at this stage of 
the game that's like trying to separate the culture of urban basketball 
from the NBA, the pro game from the players it puts on the floor.

Hiphop may have begun as a folk culture, defined by its isolation from 
mainstream society, but being that it was formed within the America that 
gave us the coon show, its folksiness was born to be bled once it began 
entertaining the same mainstream that had once excluded its originators. 
And have no doubt, before hiphop had a name it was a folk culture, 
literally visible in the way you see folk in Brooklyn and the South 
Bronx of the '80s, styling, wilding, and profiling in Jamel Shabazz's 
photograph book Back in the Days. But from the moment "Rapper's Delight" 
went platinum, hiphop the folk culture became hiphop the American 
entertainment-industry sideshow.

No doubt it transformed the entertainment industry, and all kinds of 
people's notions of entertainment, style, and politics in the process. 
So let's be real. If hiphop were only some static and rigid folk 
tradition preserved in amber, it would never have been such a site for 
radical change or corporate exploitation in the first place. This being 
America, where as my man A.J.'s basketball coach dad likes to say, "They 
don't pay niggas to sit on the bench," hiphop was never going to not go 
for the gold as more gold got laid out on the table for the goods that 
hiphop brought to the market. Problem today is that where hiphop was 
once a buyer's market in which we, the elite hiphop audience, decided 
what was street legit, it has now become a seller's market, in which 
what does or does not get sold as hiphop to the masses is whatever the 
boardroom approves.

The bitter trick is that hiphop, which may or may not include the NBA, 
is the face of Black America in the world today. It also still 
represents Black culture and Black creative license in unique ways to 
the global marketplace, no matter how commodified it becomes. No doubt, 
there's still more creative autonomy for Black artists and audiences in 
hiphop than in almost any other electronic mass-cultural medium we have. 
You for damn sure can't say that about radio, movies, or television. The 
fact that hiphop does connect so many Black folk worldwide, whatever one 
might think of the product, is what makes it invaluable to anyone coming 
from a Pan-African state of mind. Hiphop's ubiquity has created a common 
ground and a common vernacular for Black folk from 18 to 50 worldwide. 
This is why mainstream hiphop as a capitalist tool, as a market force 
isn't easily discounted: The dialogue it has already set in motion 
between Long Beach and Cape Town is a crucial one, whether Long Beach 
acknowledges it or not. What do we do with that information, that 
communication, that transatlantic mass-Black telepathic link? From the 
looks of things, we ain't about to do a goddamn thing other than send 
more CDs and T-shirts across the water.

But the Negro art form we call hiphop wouldn't even exist if African 
Americans of whatever socioeconomic caste weren't still niggers and not 
just the more benign, congenial "niggas." By which I mean if we weren't 
all understood by the people who run this purple-mountain loony bin as 
both subhuman and superhuman, as sexy beasts on the order of King Kong. 
Or as George Clinton once observed, without the humps there ain't no 
getting over. Meaning that only Africans could have survived slavery in 
America, been branded lazy bums, and decided to overcompensate by 
turning every sporting contest that matters into a glorified battle royal.

Like King Kong had his island, we had the Bronx in the '70s, out of 
which came the only significant artistic movement of the 20th century 
produced by born-and-bred New Yorkers, rather than Southwestern 
transients or Jersey transplants. It's equally significant that hiphop 
came out of New York at the time it did, because hiphop is Black 
America's Ellis Island. It's our Delancey Street and our Fulton Fish 
Market and garment district and Hollywoodian ethnic enclave/empowerment 
zone that has served as a foothold for the poorest among us to get a 
grip on the land of the prosperous.

Only because this convergence of ex-slaves and ch-ching finally happened 
in the '80s because hey, African Americans weren't allowed to function 
in the real economic and educational system of these United States like 
first-generation immigrants until the 1980s#roughly four centuries after 
they first got here, 'case you forgot. Hiphoppers weren't the first 
generation who ever thought of just doing the damn thang 
entreprenurially speaking, they were the first ones with legal remedies 
on the books when it came to getting a cut of the action. And the first 
generation for whom acquiring those legal remedies so they could just do 
the damn thang wasn't a priority requiring the energies of the race's 
best and brightest.

If we woke up tomorrow and there was no hiphop on the radio or on 
television, if there was no money in hiphop, then we could see what kind 
of culture it was, because my bet is that hiphop as we know it would 
cease to exist, except as nostalgia. It might resurrect itself as a 
people's protest music if we were lucky, might actually once again 
reflect a disenchantment with, rather than a reinforcement of, the have 
and have-not status quo we cherish like breast milk here in the land of 
the status-fiending. But I won't be holding my breath waiting to see.

Because the moment hiphop disappeared from the air and marketplace might 
be the moment when we'd discover whether hiphop truly was a cultural 
force or a manufacturing plant, a way of being or a way of selling porn 
DVDs, Crunk juice, and S. Carter signature sneakers, blessed be the 
retired.

That might also be the moment at which poor Black communities began 
contesting the reality of their surroundings, their life opportunities. 
An interesting question arises: If enough folk from the 'hood get rich, 
does that suffice for all the rest who will die tryin'? And where does 
hiphop wealth leave the question of race politics? And racial identity?

Picking up where Amiri Baraka and the Black Arts Movement left off, 
George Clinton realized that anything Black folk do could be abstracted 
and repackaged for capital gain. This has of late led to one mediocre 
comedy after another about Negroes frolicking at hair shows, funerals, 
family reunions, and backyard barbecues, but it has also given us Biz 
Markie and OutKast.

Oh, the selling power of the Black Vernacular. Ralph Ellison only hoped 
we'd translate it in such a way as to gain entry into the hallowed house 
of art. How could he know that Ralph Lauren and the House of Polo would 
one day pray to broker that vernacular's cool marketing prowess into a 
worldwide licensing deal for bedsheets writ large with Jay-Z's John 
Hancock? Or that the vernacular's seductive powers would drive Estée 
Lauder to propose a union with the House of P. Diddy? Or send 
Hewlett-Packard to come knocking under record exec Steve Stoute's 
shingle in search of a hiphop-legit cool marketer?

Hiphop's effervescent and novel place in the global economy is further 
proof of that good old Marxian axiom that under the abstracting powers 
of capitalism, "All that is solid melts into air" (or the Ethernet, as 
the case might be). So that hiphop floats through the virtual 
marketplace of branded icons as another consumable ghost, parasitically 
feeding off the host of the real world's people#urbanized and 
institutionalized#whom it will claim till its dying day to "represent." 
And since those people just might need nothing more from hiphop in their 
geopolitically circumscribed lives than the escapism, glamour, and 
voyeurism of hiphop, why would they ever chasten hiphop for not steady 
ringing the alarm about the African American community's AIDS crisis, or 
for romanticizing incarceration more than attacking the 
prison-industrial complex, or for throwing a lyrical bone at issues of 
intimacy or literacy or, heaven forbid, debt relief in Africa and the 
evils perpetuated by the World Bank and the IMF on the motherland?

All of which is not to say "Vote or Die" wasn't a wonderful attempt to 
at least bring the phantasm of Black politics into the 24-hour nonstop 
booty, blunts, and bling frame that now has the hiphop industry on lock. 
Or to devalue by any degree Russell Simmons's valiant efforts to 
educate, agitate, and organize around the Rockefeller drug-sentencing 
laws. Because at heart, hiphop remains a radical, revolutionary 
enterprise for no other reason than its rendering people of African 
descent anything but invisible, forgettable, and dismissible in the 
consensual hallucination-simulacrum twilight zone of digitized mass 
distractions we call our lives in the matrixized, 
conservative-Christianized, Goebbelsized-by-Fox 21st century. And 
because, for the first time in our lives, race was nowhere to be found 
as a campaign issue in presidential politics and because hiphop is the 
only place we can see large numbers of Black people being anything other 
than sitcom window dressing, it maintains the potential to break out of 
the box at the flip of the next lyrical genius who can articulate her 
people's suffering with the right doses of rhythm and noise to reach the 
bourgeois and still rock the boulevard.

Call me an unreconstructed Pan-African cultural nationalist, 
African-fer-the-Africans-at-home-and-abroad-type rock and roll nigga and 
I won't be mad at ya: I remember the Afrocentric dream of hiphop's 
becoming an agent of social change rather than elevating a few ex-drug 
dealers' bank accounts. Against my better judgment, I still count myself 
among that faithful. To the extent that hiphop was a part of the great 
Black cultural nationalist reawakening of the 1980s and early '90s, it 
was because there was also an anti-apartheid struggle and anti-crack 
struggle, and Minister Louis Farrakhan and Reverend Jesse Jackson were 
at the height of their rhetorical powers, recruitment ambitions, and 
media access, and a generation of Ivy League Black Public Intellectuals 
on both sides of the Atlantic had come to the fore to raise the 
philosophical stakes in African American debate, and speaking locally, 
there were protests organized around the police/White Citizens Council 
lynchings of Bumpurs, Griffiths, Hawkins, Diallo, Dorismond, etc. etc. 
etc. Point being that hiphop wasn't born in a vacuum but as part of a 
political dynamo that seems to have been largely dissipated by the time 
we arrived at the Million Man March, best described by one friend as the 
largest gathering in history of a people come to protest themselves, 
given its bizarre theme of atonement in the face of the goddamn White 
House.

The problem with a politics that theoretically stops thinking at the 
limit of civil rights reform and appeals to white guilt and Black 
consciousness was utterly revealed at that moment#a point underscored by 
the fact that the two most charged and memorable Black political events 
of the 1990s were the MMM and the hollow victory of the O.J. trial. 
Meaning, OK, a page had been turned in the book of African American 
economic and political life#clearly because we showed up in Washington 
en masse demanding absolutely nothing but atonement for our sins#and we 
did victory dances when a doofus ex-athlete turned Hertz spokesmodel 
bought his way out of lethal injection. Put another way, hiphop sucks 
because modern Black populist politics sucks. Ishmael Reed has a poem 
that goes: "I am outside of history . . . it looks hungry . . . I am 
inside of history it's hungrier than I thot." The problem with 
progressive Black political organizing isn't hiphop but that the No. 1 
issue on the table needs to be poverty, and nobody knows how to make 
poverty sexy. Real poverty, that is, as opposed to studio-gangsta 
poverty, newly-inked-MC-with-a-story-to-sell poverty.
You could argue that we're past the days of needing a Black agenda. But 
only if you could argue that we're past the days of there being poor 
Black people and Driving While Black and structural, institutionalized 
poverty. And those who argue that we don't need leaders must mean Bush 
is their leader too, since there are no people on the face of this earth 
who aren't being led by some of their own to hell or high water. People 
who say that mean this: Who needs leadership when you've got 24-hour 
cable and PlayStations. And perhaps they're partly right, since what 
people can name and claim their own leaders when they don't have their 
own nation-state? And maybe in a virtual America like the one we inhabit 
today, the only Black culture that matters is the one that can be 
downloaded and perhaps needs only business leaders at that. Certainly 
it's easier to speak of hiphop hoop dreams than of structural racism and 
poverty, because for hiphop America to not just desire wealth but demand 
power with a capital P would require thinking way outside the idiot box.

Consider, if you will, this "as above, so below" doomsday scenario: 
Twenty years from now we'll be able to tell our grandchildren and 
great-grandchildren how we witnessed cultural genocide: the systematic 
destruction of a people's folkways.

We'll tell them how fools thought they were celebrating the 30th 
anniversary of hiphop the year Bush came back with a gangbang, when they 
were really presiding over a funeral. We'll tell them how once upon a 
time there was this marvelous art form where the Negro could finally say 
in public whatever was on his or her mind in rhyme and how the Negro 
hiphop artist, staring down minimum wage slavery, Iraq, or the freedom 
of the incarcerated chose to take his emancipated motor mouth and stuck 
it up a stripper's ass because it turned out there really was gold in 
them thar hills.

More by Greg Tate
Got Your Sex Raps Here

White Freedom
The angstiest wigga alive exercises privilege, bears cross, rallies 
flock, begs forgiveness
Eminem's Encore

The Resurrection and the Light
Ray Charles compels 12 disciples to tell us just exactly who they are

Apocalypse Now
Janetgate 2004: Black sexuality awaits its Foucault#but three books fill 
the gap for now