Below is an extract on hip-hop from my forthcoming book (summer, 2011) entitled ''Race', Culture and the Right to the City'
If the Harlem Renaissance belonged to the first half of the 20th century, the moment where the ‘public city’ was beginning to disassemble to become the ‘naked city,’ a further cultural flowering fifty years later belongs to the agonopolis. Perhaps the most important cultural product to emerge from the inner city in the last thirty years is hip-hop. This is a further example of the conviviality and political potency derived from the presence of a multicultural and multi-‘racial’ component within the inner city. The story of hip-hop’s rise from New York City’s South Bronx is a familiar tale, but it needs repeating here. Hip-hop did not spring forth magically (Forman 2002: 41); rather, it emerged from an economically and socially limiting context as a means of negotiating this immediate environment. The ‘city’, encompassing the physical and symbolic city is therefore central to the discussion of ‘race’, space and hip-hop. In the mid-1970s, the period when hip-hop surfaced, no place was held up more consistently as a symbol of America’s pitiful urban condition than the Bronx, particularly its southernmost section: ‘images of burned out buildings […] dominated the media’ (George 1998: 10). The South Bronx was a mythical wasteland that served as a nightmarish contradiction of suburban tranquillity and Manhattan affluence. Tom Wolfe’s novel Bonfire of the Vanities caricatured white New York’s worst fear- getting lost in the Bronx. Hollywood even capitalised on the ‘South Bronx as hell’ image in a number of exploitative films, The Warriors (Walter Hill, 1979) and Fort Apache: The Bronx (Daniel Petrie, 1981). The dominant image of the Bronx, reinforced by photographs or television and movie footage, is one of poverty, disease, violence, and danger, ‘all coded as black’ (Forman 2002: 40). While the physical Bronx may have resembled ruins it was far from a cultural wasteland:
‘Behind the decay and neglect the place was a cauldron of vibrant and quite visionary creativity born of its racial mix and relative isolation. It was within its boundaries that the expressions we associate with hip-hop- graffiti art, break dancing, MCing and mixing- all have roots’ (George 1998: 10).
Hip-hop sprang from the South Bronx, an ill-defined neighbourhood of the mind rather than the map, in the mid-1970s during spontaneous block parties and jams in public parks. In its formative years it truly was a street culture, practised in the public spaces of the city. The music itself was created on the turntables of innovative DJs including the enormously influential Kool Herc, Afrika Bambaataa and Grandmaster Flash, all residents of the ‘boogie down’ Bronx. Through ‘mixing’ old soul, funk and disco records, often repeating just their drum breaks to create a whole new track, these pioneering DJs ‘staked out a loud, scratchy, in-your-face aesthetic that, to this day, still informs the culture […]’ (ibid: xi). Kool Herc employed a friend, Coke La Rock, as his ‘master of ceremonies’- someone to ‘hype’ his live mixes. Several of La Rock’s motivating slogans, such as ‘ya rock and ya don’t stop’ and ‘to the beat y’all’ became hip-hop staples (ibid: 17). In many respects he was the first hip-hop rapper. Afrika Bambaataa supplied extra ‘knowledge’ as a result of his prodigious record collection. He added lots of new breaks and brought a wider range of music, including elements such as Kraftwerk, into the hip-hop canon. Grandmaster Flash on the other hand was a showman; he mixed records and entertained at the same time. Flash also had an on-and-off relationship with a group of young MCs known as the Furious Five (ibid: 19).
It was Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five who, in 1982, had hip-hop’s first great rap hit with ‘The Message’, which would later be regarded as a breakthrough for the whole genre. As Marshall Berman (2007: 28) explains, while the spirit of early raps was bawdy and shallow, ‘The Message’ was heavy, dark and deep. The song features rapper Melle Mel taking us on a tour of his neighbourhood:
‘Myriad horrors are packed into two minutes: aggressive rats, aggressive junkies, nice girls turned into addicts and whores; kids, burned out before the age of ten, who want to grow up to be drug dealers, because they are the only people they know who command respect […]’ (ibid: 28)
Berman (ibid) goes on to ask, so what is the message? His answer is that social disintegration and existential desperation can be sources of life and creative energy. Those growing up in poverty and ghetto isolation may have suffered great losses but they did not lose themselves; rather their suffering had created idealism. Despite the ignominy that came from growing up in ruins of the Bronx, the first hip-hop generation through DJing, MCing, breakdancing and writing graffiti were making a claim on a city that, during the fiscal crisis of the mid-to-late 1970s would rather they did not exist at all (see Austin 2001). Hip-hop announced its presence in the city, or rather of the city, through a variety of media- sound, word, image and motion. It was impossible to ignore and as Marshall Berman would explain to the New York Times (7/4/99), ‘a great burst of creativity emerged from the Bronx’s ruins, and it deserves remembrance and celebration’.
For Rose (1994) the city was much more than a backdrop to hip-hop’s formative years; rather it shaped the cultural terrain, access to space, materials and education for hip-hop’s earliest innovators. Hip-hop artists since the outset veered between realistic portrayals of their neighbourhood and a more knowing exploitation of the semiotic value of the Bronx or other ghettos and their cultural resonance within the public imagination. There is some debate regarding whether hip-hop can be viewed as an African-American musical form (see inter alia Gilroy 1987; Szwed 1999; Perry 2005). As George (1998: xiii) suggests, hip-hop chronicles a generation coming of age at a moment of extreme racial confusion. Although civil rights had won many gains, de facto segregation was increasing and economic marginality for the black working class was intensifying. In the Bronx there was also the important and often overlooked Puerto Rican influence, a result of the fact that a large Puerto-Rican population lived among blacks in the same Bronx neighbourhoods. As Flores (1994: 91) argues,
‘The beginnings of rap are connective not so much because they link black traditions and Puerto Rican traditions, but because they mark off one more step in a long and intricate black-and Puerto Rican tradition of popular culture, based primarily in the long standing black-and Puerto Rican neighbourhoods of New York City.
In this way, hip-hop was not only a way of negotiating and reconfiguring a potentially alienating urban condition, it was also a democratic means with which to articulate complex, fluid and knowingly racialised identities as well as respond to white racism/s. The inner city provided the context from which this was possible; it supplied the materials as well as a stage or forum upon which the distinctive spatial practices of hip-hop could flourish and achieve recognition and eventually, ultimately worldwide acclaim.
If the Harlem Renaissance belonged to the first half of the 20th century, the moment where the ‘public city’ was beginning to disassemble to become the ‘naked city,’ a further cultural flowering fifty years later belongs to the agonopolis. Perhaps the most important cultural product to emerge from the inner city in the last thirty years is hip-hop. This is a further example of the conviviality and political potency derived from the presence of a multicultural and multi-‘racial’ component within the inner city. The story of hip-hop’s rise from New York City’s South Bronx is a familiar tale, but it needs repeating here. Hip-hop did not spring forth magically (Forman 2002: 41); rather, it emerged from an economically and socially limiting context as a means of negotiating this immediate environment. The ‘city’, encompassing the physical and symbolic city is therefore central to the discussion of ‘race’, space and hip-hop. In the mid-1970s, the period when hip-hop surfaced, no place was held up more consistently as a symbol of America’s pitiful urban condition than the Bronx, particularly its southernmost section: ‘images of burned out buildings […] dominated the media’ (George 1998: 10). The South Bronx was a mythical wasteland that served as a nightmarish contradiction of suburban tranquillity and Manhattan affluence. Tom Wolfe’s novel Bonfire of the Vanities caricatured white New York’s worst fear- getting lost in the Bronx. Hollywood even capitalised on the ‘South Bronx as hell’ image in a number of exploitative films, The Warriors (Walter Hill, 1979) and Fort Apache: The Bronx (Daniel Petrie, 1981). The dominant image of the Bronx, reinforced by photographs or television and movie footage, is one of poverty, disease, violence, and danger, ‘all coded as black’ (Forman 2002: 40). While the physical Bronx may have resembled ruins it was far from a cultural wasteland:
‘Behind the decay and neglect the place was a cauldron of vibrant and quite visionary creativity born of its racial mix and relative isolation. It was within its boundaries that the expressions we associate with hip-hop- graffiti art, break dancing, MCing and mixing- all have roots’ (George 1998: 10).
Hip-hop sprang from the South Bronx, an ill-defined neighbourhood of the mind rather than the map, in the mid-1970s during spontaneous block parties and jams in public parks. In its formative years it truly was a street culture, practised in the public spaces of the city. The music itself was created on the turntables of innovative DJs including the enormously influential Kool Herc, Afrika Bambaataa and Grandmaster Flash, all residents of the ‘boogie down’ Bronx. Through ‘mixing’ old soul, funk and disco records, often repeating just their drum breaks to create a whole new track, these pioneering DJs ‘staked out a loud, scratchy, in-your-face aesthetic that, to this day, still informs the culture […]’ (ibid: xi). Kool Herc employed a friend, Coke La Rock, as his ‘master of ceremonies’- someone to ‘hype’ his live mixes. Several of La Rock’s motivating slogans, such as ‘ya rock and ya don’t stop’ and ‘to the beat y’all’ became hip-hop staples (ibid: 17). In many respects he was the first hip-hop rapper. Afrika Bambaataa supplied extra ‘knowledge’ as a result of his prodigious record collection. He added lots of new breaks and brought a wider range of music, including elements such as Kraftwerk, into the hip-hop canon. Grandmaster Flash on the other hand was a showman; he mixed records and entertained at the same time. Flash also had an on-and-off relationship with a group of young MCs known as the Furious Five (ibid: 19).
It was Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five who, in 1982, had hip-hop’s first great rap hit with ‘The Message’, which would later be regarded as a breakthrough for the whole genre. As Marshall Berman (2007: 28) explains, while the spirit of early raps was bawdy and shallow, ‘The Message’ was heavy, dark and deep. The song features rapper Melle Mel taking us on a tour of his neighbourhood:
‘Myriad horrors are packed into two minutes: aggressive rats, aggressive junkies, nice girls turned into addicts and whores; kids, burned out before the age of ten, who want to grow up to be drug dealers, because they are the only people they know who command respect […]’ (ibid: 28)
Berman (ibid) goes on to ask, so what is the message? His answer is that social disintegration and existential desperation can be sources of life and creative energy. Those growing up in poverty and ghetto isolation may have suffered great losses but they did not lose themselves; rather their suffering had created idealism. Despite the ignominy that came from growing up in ruins of the Bronx, the first hip-hop generation through DJing, MCing, breakdancing and writing graffiti were making a claim on a city that, during the fiscal crisis of the mid-to-late 1970s would rather they did not exist at all (see Austin 2001). Hip-hop announced its presence in the city, or rather of the city, through a variety of media- sound, word, image and motion. It was impossible to ignore and as Marshall Berman would explain to the New York Times (7/4/99), ‘a great burst of creativity emerged from the Bronx’s ruins, and it deserves remembrance and celebration’.
For Rose (1994) the city was much more than a backdrop to hip-hop’s formative years; rather it shaped the cultural terrain, access to space, materials and education for hip-hop’s earliest innovators. Hip-hop artists since the outset veered between realistic portrayals of their neighbourhood and a more knowing exploitation of the semiotic value of the Bronx or other ghettos and their cultural resonance within the public imagination. There is some debate regarding whether hip-hop can be viewed as an African-American musical form (see inter alia Gilroy 1987; Szwed 1999; Perry 2005). As George (1998: xiii) suggests, hip-hop chronicles a generation coming of age at a moment of extreme racial confusion. Although civil rights had won many gains, de facto segregation was increasing and economic marginality for the black working class was intensifying. In the Bronx there was also the important and often overlooked Puerto Rican influence, a result of the fact that a large Puerto-Rican population lived among blacks in the same Bronx neighbourhoods. As Flores (1994: 91) argues,
‘The beginnings of rap are connective not so much because they link black traditions and Puerto Rican traditions, but because they mark off one more step in a long and intricate black-and Puerto Rican tradition of popular culture, based primarily in the long standing black-and Puerto Rican neighbourhoods of New York City.
In this way, hip-hop was not only a way of negotiating and reconfiguring a potentially alienating urban condition, it was also a democratic means with which to articulate complex, fluid and knowingly racialised identities as well as respond to white racism/s. The inner city provided the context from which this was possible; it supplied the materials as well as a stage or forum upon which the distinctive spatial practices of hip-hop could flourish and achieve recognition and eventually, ultimately worldwide acclaim.
