To the Break of Dawn. William Jelani Cobb
that of cultural pariah to hip hop epicenter. For a good bloc of the music’s history, between “King of Rock” and KRS-One’s loathsome drive-by “The Bridge Is Over,” Queens was officially running shit. These cats helped make it (slightly) safer to be from the city’s largest borough and represent at hip hop shows. That Run, D, and the late scratch technician Jam Master Jay—the first legitimate superstars of the new music—would straight up claim Hollis, Queens, on wax all but reversed the previous borough-pecking order. These are small things in the grand flow of life and history, but they held import at the time. These were our battles until time and life delivered more weighty concerns onto our shoulders and then the music would reflect those new realities too.
Before we arrive at the mandatory Fanon quote, let us state the obvious: hip hop has, in the course of three decades, become the dominant form of youth culture on earth. It has ridden a tidal wave of American hegemony to the farthest expanses of the globe, carrying with it the complex, incomplete, and contradictory visions of those who created it as simultaneously the richest class of exploited people in world. Hip hop is culture. Hip hop is politics. Hip hop is economics. And it is something additional and unnamed. And now the Fanon: Each generation must, from relative obscurity, discover its mission. It will either fulfill it or betray it.
Hip hop is so central to the development of the post-civil rights generation of black people that it’s nearly impossible to separate the music from our politics, economic realities, gains, and collective shortcomings. When I first heard Public Enemy’s insurrection theme song “Black Steel in the Hour of Chaos” I literally did not know it was legal to speak such words on the radio. The distant echoes of the Nation of Millions album have been reverberating ever since. It was partly responsible for my dawning interest in the history of black peoples scattered throughout the world wholesale between the fifteenth and nineteenth centuries.
Each generation is imbued with its own unique moments of collective understanding, moments frozen in history when a sprawling set of people watched an iota, a fragment, or a vast chunk of their innocence slip away. In the case of those of us in the so-deemed “hip hop generation,” our where-were-you moments were almost universally framed by hip hop narrative. The Rodney King beating and subsequent Los Angeles Riots—all but predicted and pre-narrated by Ice Cube’s warning on Amerikkka’s Most Wanted that the LAPD’s role was “to serve, protect and break a nigga’s neck.” The horrors of September 11 bore an eerie resemblance to Rakim’s Nostradamus-like tale of urban terrorism on “Casualties of War.” The deaths of cornerstone artists Tupac Shakur and Notorious B.I.G. stole away a different kind of innocence from a generation that already been deemed cynical and lacking in idealism. That their deaths came to be seen in some quarters as “assassinations” on par with those of Malcolm or King illustrated not only how blurred the definitions of celebrity and leadership have become since the civil rights era, but also how few imaginative leaders have been cultivated since then. In their wake, charismatic artists were mistaken for political leadership. For me, the murders of musicians placed the sad dilemmas of black America in high relief: after a century that witnessed the rise of Jim Crow, lynching, black migration, slumification, Vietnam, incarceration, dissolving families, crack, and AIDS, African Americans—on the verge of a new millennium—were now killing each other over poetry.
That reckoning led me to stop listening to hip hop for almost four years believing it to be what I called “the soundtrack to self-inflicted genocide.” The music that first articulated my understanding of the world around me had gone from obscure to ubiquitous; it had simultaneously become powerful and useless. I understood what Common had been metaphorically lamenting on “I Used to Love H.E.R” when he rhymed
I see her in commercials She’s universal She used to only kick it With the inner city circle
That remained the state of affairs until I was dragged to a Roots concert in late 2000. The dense crowd that had committed entire albums to memory, the hoodies and baseball caps, the antiseptically white Nikes, the freon cool, the absolutely kinetic vibe and the unrelenting heat of the performance that night. This was hip hop. This was truth. Over the course of that two-hour set, I came to remember hip hop had once been affirming, that it had once actually been real and hadn’t needed to obsess over insecure cliches like “keeping it real.” In the end, it was the pure lyrical genius of figures like Black Thought, Mos Def, Talib Kweli, Pharoahe Monch, and Common that led me to re-engage with hip hop on the level of art—even as my evolving humanist politics put me at odds with much of the form’s content. To cut to the quick, it was a gradual understanding that hip hop was both an aesthetic statement and a political one, that the music was, in Mos Def’s terms, Black on Both Sides.
Dig through the volumes of writing about hip hop and what emerges is one black side. The growing literature on hip hop features a thousand different spins on the theme of music as a social politic. And for good reason. In the space of a single generation, hip hop has evolved from the shunned expressions of disposable people into the dominant cultural idiom of youth globally. Rappers have literally gone from being maligned street poets to being A-list Hollywood stars, recording industry executives, film producers, and running up the score on their opponents in the culture wars. Hip hop has highlighted the black impulse toward verbal and musical invention and, at the same time, turned the most problematic, despair-riddled elements of American life into purchasable entertainment. The hip hop industry is largely responsible for the global re-dispersal of stereotypical visions of black sexuality, criminality, material-obsession, violence, and social detachment. That one can fly halfway around the world and be greeted in the Czech Republic by young men who speak no English, but regard you with a high-five and say “What up, Nigga?” is a bitterly ironic testament to the power and appeal of African American culture in the age of high capitalism.
But at the same time, hip hop is not fundamentally a political movement—no matter how many political implications the music and its mass marketing have. In 1926 Langston Hughes, as he rebelled against the artistic strictures prescribed by official black leadership, wrote the essay “Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain,” in which he pointed out that art and politics have had a notoriously rocky marriage. Hip hop is many things, but most prominently it is a musical movement corner-stoned by a tradition of verbal creativity. That is to say that hip hop is not only a contribution to black music, but also black language arts. Future anthologies of black literature will need hip hop citations and future students will (if they haven’t already) turn in term papers with titles like “Metaphor and Simile in the Works of Lauryn Hill and Langston Hughes.”
And on this last point, we have to be clear. Much has been made of the multiculturalization of hip hop in the years since it first rumbled out of the Bronx. On one level, this is historically inaccurate in that hip hop began as a multicultural movement. It represented the artistic communion between young Latinos, West Indians, and post-migration African Americans. In the 1970s the South Bronx became to this diverse collection of peoples what Paris was in the 1930s to the diverse body of peoples who had been colonized by the French and who eventually created the Negritude Movement. It was to these people what London was to the body of Caribbean and African intellectuals who met and organized the anticolonial movements of the 1940s. And it was what Harlem had been in the 1920s, when a similar group of peoples—West Indians like Claude McKay, Southern migrants like Zora Neale Hurston, and Latinos like Arthur Schomburg—created the artistic movement that came to known as the Harlem Renaissance.
But this new multiculturalism is global and international and also refers obliquely to the vast numbers of white Americans who now participate in the culture. Hip hop, we are told, has gone universal. And yet, my references to this as a black art form are intentional. Seventy-eight years ago, at the height of the Harlem Renaissance, the sage W. E. B. Du Bois remarked that “As soon as true Negro art emerges, it is said ’That person did this because he is an American, not because he is a Negro; as a matter of fact there is no such thing as a Negro.” Such is the case with the ongoing perceptions of jazz and blues as quintessentially “American” artforms—decreasingly owing their existence to the social quarantine of Jim Crow and the aesthetic laboratories that generations of Negro artists created within it. By this logic, Rakim, Jay-Z, MC Lyte, KRS-One, Lauryn Hill, OutKast, Scarface, Ice