Who Defines Hip Hop?
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Who Defines Hip- Hop?
The interdisciplinary focus of the paper is authenticity. The paper seeks to establish the entities that defined Hip-hop in a time where Rap has been accused of watering down what the hip-hop cultural movement sought to do with its music; speak about the plight of Black Americans, and encourage them to look forward to a better future that would steer them to their enjoying equal treatment and being treated deserving just like their white counterparts. It features the 10-point program drafted by the Black Panther Party, whose advocacy pointers were in sync with what the hip-hop movement was advocating for was . Hip-hop is a cultural movement that attained its widespread popularity in the 1980s and ’90s. It backs music for rap, which is a musical style that incorporates rhythmic and/or rhyming speech that has since become the Hip-hop movement’s most lasting and influential art form. According to Cant, Stop, Won’t Stop by Chang, there are a number of elements of hip-hop which include deejaying, turntabling, rapping, which is also known as MCing (emceeing) or rhyming, and graffiti painting, which is also known as ‘graf’ or ‘writing’ and break dancing or ‘B-Boying’. The fourth element of hip-hop is one that comprises hip-hop dance, style, and attitude along with what Cornel West described as ‘postural semantics’.
The hip hop movement added flesh and life to the belief system of the Black Panthers. The Black Panthers, also known as the Black Panther Party, was a political organization that was founded in 1966 by Huey Newton and Bobby Seale to advocate against police brutality that was the lead cause of death against the African American community. The party members organized armed citizen patrols of Oakland and other US cities, darning black berets and black leather jackets. At the peak of its influence and operations in 1984, the Black Panther Party had a membership of almost 2,000. The organization, later on, declined as a result of internal tensions, deadly shootouts, and FBI counterintelligence activities that targeted to weaken the organization. In relation to what this essay seeks to achieve, it focuses on the Ten-Point Program, which was a document created by the founders of the Black Panther Party with the joint support of the party’s members. The program established the guiding principles of the Black Panther Party. The Black Panther Party members laid out what they wanted for the African American community and committed themselves to advocating for them and seeing to it that they were achieved. They demanded freedom, which would manifest in the African American communities and other oppressed communities being granted the power to determine their destiny. [1]Their definition of destiny was the ability to control all the institutions that existed within their communities. They also demanded full employment and guaranteed income for African Americans from the federal government, which had the power to determine that which they sought for. Their ultimatum concerning employment was that if African American businessmen failed to give full employment, then it was only just for technology and means of production to be taken away from those businessmen and placed in the Black community to empower them and contribute to improving their living standards. Further, the Black Panther Party advocated for an end to robbery advanced by capitalists and the common victims being Black people and members of other oppressed communities.[2] Other issues that the party advocated for include decent housing, education for Blacks that would empower and promote their survival within, and understanding of the decadent American society, including the true history of Blacks and their position in the current society. Moreover, they advocated for free healthcare, an immediate end to police brutality and the murder of innocent Black people and other people of color, and an end to all wars of aggression, and freedom for Blacks and oppressed persons in jail and prisons across the US and trial by a jury of peers of all persons to ensure that Blacks obtained justice.
In the Opinion article, “ Nicki Minaj Crashes Hip-Hops Boys Club”, the hip-hop movement is presented as having been founded, and the unification of its ideas happened in Bronx during the 1970s and has now spread around the globe.[3] In its spread, it has colonized not only music but also arts, sports, fashion, and every other aspect of popular culture. Currently, there are multiple forms of hip-hop culture that are often described as the varied flavors of Hip-hop. The paper talks about hip-hoppers abroad working underground to produce trenchant political commentary or wielding verse in an actual revolution, while the exact opposite is being experienced when it comes to rap. Rap which hip-hop backs has since been commoditized and the message in relays is one that is determined by its corporate masters. It is to be remembered that hip-hop rose to fame through its speaking about the plight of the Black Community. It spoke against social ills such as discrimination, oppression of Blacks, lack of social amenities such as shelter, denied access to healthcare, lack of affordable healthcare, discrimination in the education system, massive unemployment among young people, and police brutality.
These playlists that were perceived as being of the high concept have vanished, and in their place, rap videos are now propagating pornographic content with majority of the rap celebrities such as Rick Ross singing of self-aggrandizement and showcasing opulence in the form of numerous piles of money and insanely expensive cars. The lifestyle they depict is oblivious to the real-time issues that continue facing members of the Black community in the US. It qualifies as misrepresentation as misuse of creativity as it gravely departs from that which first brought hip-hop to the limelight. Another thing to note that even now that there is a shift in the content, the rap, and hip-hop scene is still dominated by males as opposed to females. Any time that females are featured, they are cast as part of the scenery. The article further delves into its topic, whereby it speaks of Nicki Minaj having steadily risen to the hip-hop limelight and taken the light away from proclaimed hip-hop boys. While it is a fresh breath of air in terms of female representation in the genre, she too fails to talk about the real issues facing members of the Black community and ends up rapping for entertainment purposes with her works pegged on over-sexualization of the female gender.
A similar notion of rap watering down the initial goal of hip hop culture is present in the article, “Rap Disrupted Music First. Now It’s TV and Film.[4] While in recent times, there has been a massive increase in rap-infused shows, movies, and documentaries that convey memories of the old-school era and the mid-1990s and remind viewers of the periods when hip-hop culture mushroomed into a driving force of pop culture, the projects underscore or downplay hip-hop music’s role as a social and political bellwether. Majority of the graphic content points to the involvement of women and the place of violence in hip-hop culture.
Chang talks about there being a stark difference between the founders of hip hop generation and the modern generation when it comes to the message that the genre seeks to convey.[5] The initial objective of the genre was to create positive change in society in terms of advocating for the better treatment of the Black community and harmonizing the races. Modern-day rap, however, has totally deviated from these original objectives and all that it is focused on right now are materialistic themes such as money, fame, influence, the battle of who is of a better ‘spit’ game, and the sexualization and commodification of women despite their new claim to fame in the genre. The change in perspective of what the music seeks to achieve and the death of parties such as Black Panther has continued to set up the Black community to inequality and other grave injustices such as police brutality, lack of opportunities, and marginalization that have existed since time immemorial.
Bibliography
Chang, Jeff. Can’t Stop Won’t Stop: A History of the Hip-Hop Generation. St. Martin’s Press, 2007.
Newton, Huey, P. “The Ten-Point Program.” War Against the Panthers, 1966. https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/workers/black-panthers/1966/10/15.htm.
Staples, Brent. “Nicki Minaj Crashes Hip-Hop’s Boys Club.” The New York Times, July 7, 2012. https://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/08/opinion/sunday/nicki-minaj-crashes-hip-hops-boys-club.html.
Tillet, Salamishah, Questlove, and Caramanica, John. “Rap Disrupted Music First. Now It’s TV and Film.” The New York Times, November 9, 2017. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/09/arts/music/hip-hop-on-tv-questlove-the-roots-the-mayor.html.
[1] P. Newton, Huey, “The Ten-Point Program,” War Against the Panthers, 1966, https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/workers/black-panthers/1966/10/15.htm.
[2] Ibid
[3] Brent Staples, “Nicki Minaj Crashes Hip-Hop’s Boys Club,” The New York Times, July 7, 2012, https://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/08/opinion/sunday/nicki-minaj-crashes-hip-hops-boys-club.html.
[4] John Tillet, Salamishah, Questlove and Caramanica, “Rap Disrupted Music First. Now It’s TV and Film,” The New York Times, November 9, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/09/arts/music/hip-hop-on-tv-questlove-the-roots-the-mayor.html.
[5] Jeff Chang, Can’t Stop Won’t Stop: A History of the Hip-Hop Generation (St. Martin’s Press, 2007).