Philosophy and Hip-Hop

Ruminations on Postmodern Cultural Form

J. Bailey

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781137429940
• Topic: Philosophie
• Subtopic: Histoire et théorie de la philosophie

This book opens up the philosophical life force that informs the construction of Hip-hop by turning the gaze of the philosopher upon those blind spots that exist within existing scholarship. This book illustrates the abundance of philosophical meaning in the textual and graphic elements of hip hop, placing hip-hop within the philosophical canon.

Rumination 1

Of the Beauty and Wisdom of Hip-Hop

Black history is as rich and dynamic as its subject. Blacks in the United States trace their roots to the African peoples who were abducted by slave merchants and marched to the coast, where they were sold and transported, first to America’s colonies, then to the Republic itself that was immortalized in the nineteenth century as the “land of the free and the home of the brave.” Those words, “land of the free,” they were written almost 50 years before Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation. Even if your roots are untouched by the slave trade, the irony of this is palpable, isn’t it?

Much of the richness and dynamism of American Black history stems from the fact that Africans, like Europeans or Asians, were not a monolithic people. African slaves were captured from a variety of ethnic groups such as the Biafara, Mende, and Jola. African Americans have ties to one or more of 46 different African ethnic groups (Heywood and Thornton, 2007). Because each of these groups was geographically dispersed, because each had its own discrete traditions, mythologies, languages, arts, and so on, African slaves in America had to develop entirely new ways of communicating with each other; within the rough framework provided by the English language, they developed a heavily coded language and cultural jargon, a language they used to communicate with each other, and to protect each other from reprisals from those they referred to as masters (Alves, 2009, p. 25). The existence of distinctly Black jargons, of languages within languages, is therefore not new. It is part of a long and complicated—and mostly unwritten—history. At least in part, Black history belongs to America, but, thanks to its oral transmission, its coded language, and, of course, thanks to the fact that the Black history of America is still being written, it belongs most of all to us, to those of various Ebony shades.

The creeds and ideals of Harriet Tubman, Frederick Douglass, Booker T. Washington, Zora Neale Hurston, Martin Luther King, and Malcolm X are inextricably linked with our cultural and national heritages, and, therefore, they profoundly impact all of our arts, of which music has always been one of the most prominent. Just as our ancestors were liberated by music from the literal chains that bound them (through soulful sounds of spirituals such as “Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child,” “Nearer, My God, to Thee,” “Steal Away Jesus,” and “Wade in the Water”), we, in the present, continue to liberate ourselves from the injustices of our times through our own music.

Soul music, gospel, and other distinctly Black forms of music continue to lift the spirits of Black listeners, but the most recent and certainly the most commercially prominent form of music that has come to liberate its Black listeners in the last 30 years has been hip-hop. Just as Tubman stealthily led thousands of Blacks to freedom in the North, Black musicians and other artists in hip-hop culture continue the long and glorious tradition of liberation, using rich and sometimes coded language to emancipate both themselves and their listeners from the confines of the present.

Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Isabel Wilkerson posits 1915–1970 as the period of Great Migration for African Americans. While the post–Civil War Reconstruction period after 1869 and World War I, both, created the environment for the exodus of African Americans from the south that Wilkerson calls a fever that “rose without warning or much in the way of understanding by those outside its reach” (Warmth of Other Suns, 2013, p. 8), it was a combination of events that led to the relocation of more than 6 million African Americans from the Southern to the Midwestern and Northern regions of the United States during the period that Wilkerson outlines in her book.

Black people were searching for liberty through migration that they didn’t find in the Southern states that were burdened with racism. The injuries of racism were bred by the assault of Jim Crow laws and the massive lynching of Black men and women in these regions of the United States. Those who left the South hoped that within the metropolitan spaces of New York and the disparate landscapes of Chicago and Philadelphia they would begin new lives. Though this “fever” of migration that seemed to go unnoticed at its epic was silent, it impacted “every realm of America, into the words of Ralph Ellison and Toni Morrison, the plays of Lorraine Hansberry and August Wilson, the poetry and music of Langston Hughes and B. B. King and the latter-day generation of Arrested Development and Tupac Shakur” (Wilkerson, 2013, pp. 12–13). It also birthed a creative arts movement in Harlem, New York: The Harlem Renaissance.

Even what Black people called themselves evolved from 1915 to 1970. Wilkerson, in Warmth of Other Suns, presents the guiding principle applicable to my work in this book: “[T]he word coloured . . . is a primary identifier for Black people . . . during the first two-thirds of the twentieth century . . . into the 1960s, it shifts to the use of the term ‘black’ . . . and then to both ‘black’ and ‘African American’ in the current era” (p. 13). Also, when I refer to “Blacks” in this context, I denote Americans who were born in the United States—the descendants of African slaves. For my purposes here, I am most interested in the ways in which former American slaves shaped a distinct facet of the American experience in the twentieth century.

To truly understand the roots of hip-hop, especially its Harlem Renaissance roots, it is crucial to acknowledge that Blackness in America is evolutionary. The very act of enslavement assured that Black people forced ashore first in the East Coast colonies—and later, in larger numbers, to the agriculture-based Southern states—were often comprised of men and women from different African ethnic groups. Their experience and the will to survive envelops the study of their ability to create, sustain, and impact cultural forms in America. They are far from what may seem to some a monolithic group, united by the color of their skin and the circumstances of their enslavement and continued persecution in the United States. The varied diasporic story of Black people is evidenced in its cultural art forms. From West Africa to the United States, Black people bear witness to their human suffering and equity-deficit condition through cultural art. The cultural exchange of Black people in the United States is most obvious in dance, music, and literature.

The Need for Art

In 1926 W. E. B. Du Bois posed a controversial question to an audience in his speech “Criteria for Negro Art” for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). Du Bois was concerned with the formal education of Blacks at the turn of the twentieth century and the 1926 symposium, “The Negro in Art,” was published in The Crisis as his way of considering the question: “What have we, who are slaves and black, to do with art?” Though Black people in the United States had been emancipated from slavery since 1865, Du Bois used the word “slave” to indicate an ongoing mental state of Blacks in the United States who were uneducated and separate from cultivated beauty. He appealed to an innate sense of longing for beauty through creativity in “Criteria of Negro Art” and called for “artists [to] face [their] own pasts as a people” (p. 511) and allow that past to take on “form, color and reality” (511).

Du Bois writes years before hip-hop, and his “Criteria” was controversial even in 1926.¹ The Harlem Renaissance rests on Du Bois’ position of “art as propaganda” to favorably position American Blacks in literature and art. However Du Bois’ directive is agitated during his time by writers such as Langston Hughes, Richard Wright, and Zora Neale Hurston in that the literary genre appeal is twofold: it tells the story of a people, in their harsh realities of daily life behind the veil through the art form, but conversely it appeals to Whites as a monolithic view of Blackness in America. This was far from the truth and beauty of Blackness at the turn of the twentieth century and even further at the turn of the twenty-first century. But what remains the same is the quest for identity found in Du Bois’ controversial speech about Black art. This quest was visible in the various cultural modes of expression of the Harlem Renaissance and can be seen in hip-hop today.

Bearing Witness

The founders of the Harlem Renaissance envisioned the period as one that would cultivate and showcase Black artistic expression. The development of an oral tradition that began during slavery would now become a transformative means of equipoise for Black art combining the oral and the visual. This semiotic linguist transition began while Blacks were still enslaved. Oral consciousness was awakened by the time Blacks are emancipated and a distinctly Black verbiage—both coded and direct—had been honed.

The Germination of Hip-hop

Contrary to what many people may think, hip-hop did not appear suddenly. The rhythms of hip-hop germinated in many places: in the bombastic sounds, expressive of hope and despair, that rose from the slave quarters at Rose Hall Plantation in Montego Bay; in the expansive rhythms of intelligent and beautiful Nubians from the Ivory Coast; in the long and pronounced rhythms of the South’s bayous; and, eventually, in the use of relatively old technologies—microphones and turntables to name a few—to create new sounds in the North’s urban centers. Hip-hop has always been a process, a journey. Its beginnings can be found on New York City blocks, but they can be found elsewhere as well. It is a product of the environment, but it is also—perhaps more crucially—a product of the blood’s flow and pound within the arteries of the body and into the world at large.

In the first half of the twentieth century, Black Jazz and Rhythm & Blues artists gained national audiences. French-speaking Black writers from African and Caribbean colonies living and writing in cultural centers like Paris lyricized their own experiences and bellowed their chorus from across the sea. In the United States, the Harlem Renaissance, which included such literary notables as Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, and Claude McKay, gave expression to the Black experience of America, which had, before the 1920s, lacked a literature per se. Jamaican poet, writer, and scholar Claude McKay penned one of the most popular novels of the time, Home to Harlem (1928). Not only did McKay’s novels, and those of many other talented Black writers emerging in the American Northeast, expose to the reading public the deeply rooted prejudice lurking within American Society, they also spoke to and for Black readers, urging unification for black folks.

In the era of the Civil Rights Movement, Black Americans began to engage in political discourse concerning identity, more forcefully addressing the question “Who am I?” by adopting new ethnic labels (Gallagher and Ashcroft, 2006, p. 59). Negro became Black, Black became Afro-American, Afro-American became African American. After centuries of forced silence, voices, previously timid and fearful of violent reprisals began to whisper, and then speak, and on occasion yell, but ultimately and most powerfully, sing and rhyme. Black Americans, along with West Indian immigrants, and new migrants from Africa, while forming individual communities, also united as one Black America. In venues like the Cotton Club, jazz shimmied and shook its way deep into American consciousness. White and Black artists alike contributed to the development of jazz as a genre, but the first massive celebrities of jazz were almost all Black. The sound of the big bands, Count Basie and Duke Ellington chief among them, made way for the explosion of individual acts in the second half of the century. Improvisation became one of the hallmarks of the jazz sound, and the free range granted to musicians to pursue their own distinct sounds gave artists like Nina Simone, John Coltrane, Miles Davis, Thelonious Monk, and countless others a platform—no less than Carnegie Hall—from which they could expose Black music to an appreciative listening public that quickly spread the sound around the world. Just as the Harlem Renaissance had used the art forms of the novel, the poem, and the drama to address both their own community and a sympathetic reading public, so jazz artists, especially singers (with songs like Billie Holiday’s “Strange Fruit,” and Nina Simone’s “Why? The King of Love Is Dead,” so powerfully delivered in a concert three days after Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination²) used powerful lyrics and musical arrangement to strike a chord in the heart of both Black and White America.

Hip-hop, with its elevation of improvisation into a paralleled art form, and its use as a vehicle for powerful social protest, is a clear descendent of jazz. Jazz records, along with funk, soul, reggae, and other distinctly Black forms of music, provided the musical texture for hip-hop’s birth. Even the sartorial and physical style of jazz was appropriated by hip-hop artists. The sway of men in the Jazz Age dressed in seersucker suits evolved into the swagger of hip-hop men and women in jeans, polos, and dress shirts. In her book, The Music of Black Americans, Eileen Southern states that hip-hop “was the direct heir of R&B, soul, and funk” (1997, p. 598), which would make hip-hop a younger phenomenon with a gestation period lasting only three decades at most. I push the roots of hip-hop back much further than this, back to the 1920s as an expression of an urban, musical poetic that has prevailed since at least the Harlem Renaissance.³ Somewhat overlooked is the genre of Jamaican Dub, which represents yet another musical parent to the modern movement that ushered in the cultural phenomenon known as hip-hop (Chang, 2005; Forman and Neal, 2011; Ogbar, 2007).

The mid-1970s brought with it the rumblings of something that would come to pervade every corner of the world. Legendary sociocultural educators like the Last Poets moved beyond musings on the country’s military engagements to begin the work of motivating a new cadre of freedom soldiers and heroes. Outside of the high-rises of Sedgwick Avenue, and in the streets of 163rd, prophets and MCs directed throngs in rallies. Musical instruments and amplifiers helped to enhance and modulate the voices of the new statesmen in their native “Black and Proud,” “Black is Beautiful” tongue. Artists such as DJ Kool Herc introduced a new form of deejaying while performing at parties on Sedgewick Avenue. Serendipitously, he discovered a way of “breaking” the beat on a record to isolate it and then use two turn tables to extend the beat. He helped to give birth to three very important aspects of hip-hop culture by way of deejaying. First of all, the art of deejaying has itself been a constant presence in the hip-hop scene. It continues to expand in new directions, birthing countless genres and subgenres both within and outside of hip-hop. More important to the emergence of hip-hop as an art form with the power to express forcefully and directly the malaise of the ghetto was the blending of the art of the deejay and the spoken word of the crowd-crowd thrilling street poet, the MC. The break, the beat, later the scratch and the loop as well, all gave a new avenue through which the tradition of oral poetry—a tradition that extended back to long before the slave trade began—could express itself in stunningly modern ways. The break beat became the identifying characteristic of hip-hop music. It inspired breakdancing. “Using “breaks” (two break silence for every eight bars) in the music, expanding the music with two turntables and double copies of a record to mix music, and light rhyming, the DJs and dancers who called themselves B-boys and B-girls (with the “B” standing for break) would entertain a street crowd. The syncopated staccato of the break led to the third branch of hip-hop: Breaking, B-boying, or Breakdancing.

Showing their power by whipping through the air on the strength of one arm, dancers would seemingly manipulate gravity, freezing in midair. Whether it was dizzying head spins or windmills and fancy footwork, this form of movement and performance became something that allowed for healthy competition, and skilled dance crews emerged around this new form of dance. Practitioners spent hours rehearsing and devising new dance moves in order to elevate their craft to ever higher levels. Breakdancing as distinctive cultural phenomena became a focus of belonging. It became a part of identity. Through it, dancers and spectators could become agents for positive change, empowered and mobilized for greater action and good deeds. The dancers developed different body tricks like spinning on their heads, contorting their bodies into pretzel-like forms, twirling around on their backs, doing the “uprock” and other athletic moves.”⁴ Breakdance troupes soon began to emulate gang violence in their dance dramatizations. In these simulated confrontations, or dance battles, “B-boys” and “B-girls” would compete for dominance and popularity. The artistic basis of West Side Story—rival gangs dancing through the streets of New York—was suddenly realized in actual life, though with rather different music than Leonard Bernstein’s popular score.

Among the new hip-hop generation, graffiti, which had been around since the ancient Egyptians used hieroglyphics as a means to say I am here, was adopted as a means of visual expression by youth who often didn’t have the luxury of expensive art supplies. Through graffiti, public space became a forum in which the artists announced to the world I’m here, too. Ohio-ba...