Hip Hop Versus Rap

The Politics of Droppin' Knowledge

Patrick Turner

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9780367371128
• eBook ISBN:
  9781134831692
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Black Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

'What is the real hip hop?'

'To whom does hip hop belong?'

'For what constructive purposes can hip hop be put to use?'

These are three key questions posed by hip hop activists in Hip Hop Versus Rap, which explores the politics of cultural authenticity, ownership, and uplift in London's post-hip hop scene. The book is an ethnographic study of the identity, role, formation, and practices of the organic intellectuals that populate and propagate this 'conscious' hip hop milieu. Turner provides an insightful examination of the work of artists and practitioners who use hip hop 'off-street' in the spheres of youth work, education, and theatre to raise consciousness and to develop artistic and personal skills. Hip Hop Versus Rap seeks to portray how cultural activism, which styles itself grassroots and mature, is framed around a discursive opposition between what is authentic and ethical in hip hop culture and what is counterfeit and corrupt. Turner identifies that this play of difference, framed as an ethical schism, also presents hip hop's organic intellectuals with a narrative that enables them to align their insurgent values with those of policy and to thereby receive institutional support.

This enlightening volume will be of interest to post-graduates and scholars interested in hip hop studies; youth work; critical pedagogy; young people and crime/justice; the politics of race/racism; the politics of youth/education; urban governance; social movement studies; street culture studies; and vernacular studies.

1 Tending the conscious hip hop family

Afrocentricity and consciousness

There are those who argue that hip hop by rights belongs to the racial community that birthed it – the ‘hip hop nation’ (see Taylor, 2005). For these hip hoppers ‘the concept of membership is important for maintaining the racial and cultural identity of hip hop’ (Perry, 2004: 56). Hip hop’s proper social function is to advance the unity and integrity of that community (Decker, 1994; Henderson, 1996). In some hip hop versus rap discourses deliberations on ‘consciousness’ take the form of an internal critique or audit of the hip hop community or ‘family’. In these discursive situations, ‘consciousness’ signifies the primordial essence of pan-African being found in black thought and creative expression ‘from orature to dance’ (Henderson, 1996: 314).¹ Consciousness, so understood, is also the chief cosmological source for hip hop’s so-called fifth-element, ‘knowledge’, a little-known dimension of the culture beyond aficionados. As Perry points out, many hip hoppers construe authentic consciousness/knowledge in romantic, anti-modern terms, seeing its provenance as both pastoral and archaic:

The romantic past as it exists in hip hop is not limited to the civil rights movement or black power era; it might also refer to an Afrocentric pre-enslavement vision of a healthy and essentialised blackness posed in contrast to present dynamics.

(Perry, 2004: 56)

Hip hoppers with consciousness/knowledge are those who manage to evade capture by ‘present dynamics’. Not only have they learnt to resist the depredations of modernity, their critical understanding allows them to ascend to leadership positions (see Eyerman, 2004: 62–63) within the hip hop movement. This qualifies the self-styled ‘raptivist’, ‘edutainer’ or hip hop teacher (see Black Dot, 2005; Simons, 2006; Swiss, 2008) to mediate between different cultural and political spheres. The articulation and translation of ideas for the hip hop family can take the form of academic writing (Asante, 2007; Henderson, 1996), ‘samizdat’ publishing (Black Dot, 2005; Simons, 2006; Swiss, 2008), web blogging, or neighbourhood-based activism/outreach. These various pedagogic activities can function as a tribunal for appraising the race consciousness of named individuals against Afrocentric yardsticks (see Howe, 1999; Moses, 1999). For example, for a black producer or consumer of rap music to give the impression that they have shown blackness in a poor light is to invite the charge that they have taken the name of hip hop in vain. Such black folk are perceived as violators of hip hop’s cultural canons who betray their ancestral birthright. They are guilty, both through action and omission, of selling out the culture bequeathed to them by the sacrifice and struggles of previous generations. Worse, they collude in the ruination of black youth by debased rap music (see Black Dot, 2005; Henderson, 1996; Simons, 2006).

Gilroy tags this brand of cultural activism a nationalism of the mind, ‘stubbornly focused around the reconstitution of individual consciousness rather than around the reconstruction of the black nation in exile or elsewhere’ (2004b: 88). In this and the next chapter I will argue that this ‘nationalism of the mind’ provides vital ideological impetus for the emergence of a post-hip hop alternative public sphere. As evidence for this claim I recount a series of public talks and lectures that I attended in London towards the end of 2008 given by neo-traditionalist British and American hip hop activists.² I show how these individuals appealed, as above, to Afrocentric yardsticks of hip hop ‘knowledge’ to mount an internal appraisal of the state of contemporary hip hop. I explore how the conviction that hip hop and rap can be divided on metaphysical lines served as the organising frame for their pedagogy. I trace the ways in which those who spoke and performed in the public talks invested hip hop culture and rap music with particular properties of consciousness, spirituality, and moral intention. I present this as a project to induce a conscious, racialised hip hop family (Swiss, 2008) and educe those outcast black youth perceived as being under the spell of negative rap music.

Hip hop’s fifth element: knowledge

From my field notes:

When we arrive, my son and I, at the Camden Centre for the ‘Hip Hop v Rap’ event, being held for Black History Month, we find no one around. We go to the rear of the building and a friendly woman with a clipboard instructs us to come back in about twenty minutes, at seven: ‘the organisers are running behind a bit’, she says. The Camden Centre is a blockish grey Edwardian municipal building on Euston Road, opposite St Pancras International Rail Station in Central London. To my knowledge it hosts community and educational events of this sort throughout the year (I have lived in the borough of Camden my whole life). Just after seven we enter a large, high ceilinged chamber with cupola, intricate plasterwork, and proscenium arch stage lit by blue and amber bulbs, to a harshly percussive report of grime emceeing from the speakers. The room is almost empty. There are rows of folding chairs in front of the stage and, forming an arc around these, folding tables. At the far edge of the space women set out Tupperware containers full of what smells like West-Indian food. A few people – no more than half a dozen – sit and wait for things to begin. Despite the sonic onslaught, the atmosphere in the chamber is low-key, almost solemn. This may in part be due to the fact that there are so few people present for an event that has been allocated such a large space. A few stragglers now arrive and seat themselves. I notice that my son and I are the only non-black people either in the audience or amongst the organisers. My son is quiet and looks a little awkward as he sits wrapped in his heavy coat. I sense he regrets the decision to accompany me tonight. I had lured him with the promise of some live b-boy dance and rap. So far none of this has materialized and even if it does, as promised on the flyer, this is not the most congenial atmosphere for a hip hop jam. I see no sign of Jonzi D who was down to host the event.

After about fifteen minutes the music is abruptly cut off and a middle-aged man with short, greying Afro appears on the stage, lifts the microphone, and welcomes us. He states that Jonzi D won’t be able to make it tonight, and then explains why this public talk has been put on as part of Black History Month and what its significance is. Small in stature, casually dressed and smiling, he has the directness, weary demeanour and gentle authority of a community elder. His slightly accentuated patois announces to the group of mostly strangers his and their common cultural heritage and interests. But there is also something political and embattled about his earnest tone and vocal cadences. The blurb for the event makes this explicit:

A contemporary analysis of hip hop and rap music and its links to black history led by Wayne B Chandler. Rap music – a socially destructive force? Hip Hop – the real voice of youth? Chandler will argue that rap is a modern cultural weapon used to weaken the inner spiritual force of black youths and keep violence common in the global black community.

The thought occurs to me: ‘has anyone been called to the defence?’ Before thanking partnership organisations and all the people who have lent help, the man launches into a brief sermon on why it is so important that hip hop culture be debated in public. The gist of his speech, delivered with an emotion and solemnity exaggerated by the slight reverb coming through the speakers, is: ‘what are we the community going to do about what is happening to our youth [meaning black youth] and who and what is influencing them’. The small audience of about a dozen, who murmur and nod assent, receive his fervour with appreciation. There is a kind of familiar ritual feel to this simmering ‘call and response’. We could be in a small Pentecostal church service or in a community meeting convened to address some sort of local crisis. But this is just the warm-up act for the bracing motion that will be put forward over the course of the evening on a number of occasions: ‘we the community must do something about what others are inflicting upon our children with our active collusion’. His words indicate that ‘Hip Hop v Rap’ is meant as a provocation, a wake-up call. It is intended to prompt introspection, dialogue, and decisive action – but most of all solidarity. A second, more imposing man now comes onstage to do some further ‘warm-up’ work with us in preparation for the first speaker. He takes up the microphone and urges us in a throaty voice to ‘come closer to the front, come closer to the front’. We oblige. He then instructs us to get to our feet so as to do some stretching exercises. We are told to shout out ‘yo’ as we extend upwards and then to turn to the person nearest to us and say ‘you look good’. This is then turned into ‘I look much better than you’. I carry out these toe-curling instructions in a state of embarrassment, avoiding proper eye contact with my son as I don’t want to giggle. After some audience applause, the MC explains that tonight’s event will host ‘two well known scholars who work in this area [i.e. hip hop], and our purpose is to ask them to open up a can of worms: ‘hip hop versus rap’. He then asks: ‘and the question is: are you ready?’ To which the small audience responds as one, ‘yes’.

Both the rhetorical force of the ‘Hip Hop v Rap’ statement and its choice of tropes – ‘cultural weapon’, ‘inner spiritual force’, ‘black youth’ – make it an archetype of the functional and committed in conscious hip hop (Dyson, 2007). The substance of the allegation behind the ‘Hip Hop v Rap’ debate above is that sinister powers are at work deploying cultural materials to enervate and demoralise the global black community and its youth; that rap is a fifth columnist presence in these communities wreaking havoc and throttling its ‘real voice’, hip hop (see Kitwana, 1994). Burke observes that ‘different frameworks of interpretations will lead to different conclusions as to what reality is’ (Burke, 1989: 11). The rhetoric of rap as ‘modern cultural weapon’ might seem to imply that the particular ‘framework of interpretation’ here is a kind of sociological reductionism. That is, one where culture is seen essentially ‘as the product of sponsoring institutions, elites, or interests. The quest for profit, power, prestige, or ideological control sits at the core of cultural production. Reception meanwhile is relentlessly determined by social location’ (Alexander, 2003: 20). As I seek to demonstrate, however, the problem of rap music and black youth is being viewed by the speakers in these talks through the other end of the telescope: for the most part being does not determine consciousness, quite the reverse. The terms of the conflict framing this chapter, at least as understood by its subjects, are as much if not more to do with antithetical cosmologies as structural matters of a-symmetric social power. For the speakers below, the conflict is between the cultural hegemony of commercial rap and the authenticity of hip hop culture (see Simons, 2006: 67). To borrow the words of Sherry B Ortner, the subjects of this chapter believe that too many black youth ‘accept the representations that underwrite their own domination’. Those who would save them, therefore, are seeking to ‘preserve alternative “authentic” traditions of belief and value that allow them to see through those representations’ (Ortner, 2006: 52; see Perry, 2004: 49). The first speaker at ‘Hip Hop v Rap’, Wayne B. Chandler, directly addressed this point. From my field notes:

The MC now introduces the first speaker of the night, Wayne B. Chandler, asking us to ‘give im a clap, give im a clap..’. Chandler steps onto the stage, bottom right, a tall, slim light-skinned African-American man somewhere in his fifties, casually dressed, in an elegant, slightly fastidious manner. On his MySpace page he describes himself as a ‘motivator, author and teacher’ who has written a number of Afrocentric scholarly works on the spiritual and cultural achievements of Egypt. He launches straight into a slow and gravely intoned narrative describing his evolving relationship to hip hop. For many years, he tells us, he had dismissed rap music as ‘a degenerate art form’. It was only after a ‘young brother’ had played him some ‘conscious hip hop’ that he could begin to appreciate ‘the possibilities for other types of “delivery”’ and different ‘messages’. It now dawned upon Chandler that rap and hip hop were not necessarily the same thing: ‘One [hip hop culture] spoke to a much higher moral purpose and direction and the other [rap music] spoke to this like really debased and degenerate direction. So after that I did some research and it led me to the world of hip hop. And in looking at it now I began to see that hip hop and what is now referred to as pop rap, commercial rap, are two different, totally different expressions […] Pop rap is not the same as hip hop, pop rap is basically one aspect, its one aspect separated from a consciousness, and bastardised and commercialized by the music industry’.

So what does Chandler mean here by ‘consciousness’? How is it that hip hop speaks to a ‘higher moral purpose and direction’ than rap? First, consciousness, in these talks and lectures was figured throughout as a set of hallowed intellectual and spiritual attributes. The primordial essence of pan-African being that vivifies the thought, expressions, and conduct of some individuals but not others. Second, hip hop was said to derive its ‘higher moral purpose and direction’ (i.e. its consciousness) from the fact that its four artistic elements of rap, dance, DJing, and graffiti, are unified through a fifth organising and reflexive element, ‘knowledge’ (Asante Jr., 2008; Chang, 2007). That is, as understood in Afrocentric terms, knowledge of culture, knowledge of race, knowledge of socio-historical situation, and knowledge of self. One of the key speakers in the Hip Hop History Lectures, Brother Khonsu, claimed that when hip hop first appeared on the streets of the South Bronx in the 1970s it took the revelation of its essential African nature for a budding youth subculture to metamorphose into something of monumental historical significance. It was ‘one man alone’ – Afrikaa Bambaata ‘founder of the hip hop Zulu Nation’ – who, according to Khonsu, had the vision to recognise that the cultural activity he and others were pioneering at the time was the living embodiment of invariant features of African expressivity. Bambaata had an epiphany: the elements of artistic creativity in his midst corresponded to the timeless physical elements of earth (painting), air (music making), water (dance), and fire (voice). By extrapolation these then became the five mutually dependent pillars of hip hop: rap music, turntablism (DJ), b-boy (dance), graffiti, and knowledge. Khonsu:

Why, why do we say knowledge of self? First of all who created these five principals, these five elements of hip hop? It was a man called Afrikaa Bambaata who is the godfather of hip hop. And what he said is that without the five elements hip hop is pretty much like walking with one leg. At the moment we have one element of hip hop that’s dominating everything, it’s called rap.

Chandler and Khonsu each took the view that rap music, through its regrettable separation from hip hop culture, has become cut off from the prime source of its ancestral knowledge/consciousness. Rap, as Khonsu put it, is ‘walking with one leg’, because, in Chandler’s words it has been ‘separated from a consciousness, and bastardised and commercialized by the music industry’. What is more, according to this line of analysis, rap music has actually ended up ‘dominating’ the culture that birthed it. In the popular imagination rap equals/is hip hop. But worse, those with a stake in maintaining the subordination of black people have for a long time deployed rap as a ‘cultural weapon’ against its youth. Another speaker from the ‘Hip Hop v Rap’ talk, MK Asante Jr., claimed that it was only by educating young black people about hip hop’s primordial origins and telos that this tragic state of affairs might be reversed. For this to happen, though, hip hop’s fifth element, knowledge, would first have to be restored to its paramount position within the culture. From my field notes:

After Chandler has departed the stage, the MC returns to give the second speaker of ‘Hip Hop v Rap’, MK Ashante JR., his introductory treatment: ‘Our next speaker is a professor and he’s only twenty five, he’d need a clap for dat [to lots of applause] and he’s written a book, It is Bigger Than Hip Hop [pause]; I think we can learn something from our bredren’. Asante Jr. arrives on stage with a bounce. He’s of medium height, youthful looking, with long dreadlocks hanging down beneath a flat leather beanie cap. In contrast to Chandler, his whole mien is shaggy and ‘boho’, with something of the look of a conscious Rasta man from the 1970s. It’s no surprise to learn that he co...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: journey of the spoken word
• 1. Tending the conscious hip hop family
• 2. Hip hop esoterics: energy and consciousness
• 3. From periphrasis to personal development: a cultural biography of a hip hop poet and teacher
• 4. ‘Life-bars’ for grime prevention
• 5. White boy hip hop suite: hip hop theatre and the colouring of culture
• Conclusion: the politics of hip hop edutainment
• Methodological coda: catching knowledge as it drops
• Index