It's Bigger Than Hip Hop: The Rise of the Post-Hip-Hop Generation Read online

  All of this is against the ambivalent backdrop of globalization, the fog of an unjust war, the impending consequences of the corporate desecration of mother nature, and the apex of an unprecedented urban crisis. These are problems that hip hop, as art, culture, and community, has failed to respond to, and we are now at a generational tipping point, the moment when a dramatic shift is more than a possibility; it’s a certainty. And while a dramatic shift is certain (and can be felt already), the outcome is not. History teaches us that both action and inaction lead us to dramatic shifts. If the post-hip-hop generation chooses to act, what values, whose ideas, will inform that action? If they choose not to act, not to “wake up,” as it were, whose values and ideas will be imposed upon them?

  The term “post-hip-hop” describes a period of time—right now—of great transition for a new generation in search of a deeper, more encompassing understanding of themselves in a context outside of the corporate hip-hop monopoly. While hip hop may be a part of this new understanding, it will neither dominate nor dictate it, just as one can observe the civil rights generation’s ethos within the hip-hop generation, yet the two remain autonomously connected.

  Post-hip-hop is an assertion of agency that encapsulates this generation’s broad range of abilities, ideals, and ideas, as well as incorporates recent social advances and movements (i.e., the women’s movement, the antiwar movement, gay rights, antiglobalization) that hip hop has either failed or refused to prioritize. How can one, for instance, dialogue progressively about gender issues within a space dominated by sexism and phallocentrism? Or take seriously notions of cooperative or participatory economics within a space that espouses guerilla capitalism? Or talk seriously about the end of war—over there and right here!—within a space that promotes violence? Of course these elements are not exclusive to the hip-hop generation and are mere reflections of American culture on the whole. Saul Williams, in an open letter to Oprah Winfrey, points out that the ideologies that govern hip hop also govern America:

  50 Cent and George Bush have the same birthday (July 6th). For a Hip Hop artist to say “I do what I wanna do/Don’t care if I get caught/The DA could play this mothafukin tape in court/I’ll kill you/I ain’t playin’” epitomizes the confidence and braggadocio we expect and admire from a rapper who claims to represent the lowest denominator. When a world leader [George Bush] with the spirit of a cowboy (the true original gangster of the West: raping, stealing land, and pillaging, as we clapped and cheered) takes the position of doing what he wants to do, regardless of whether the UN or American public would take him to court, then we have witnessed true gangsterism and violent negligence.

  When we consider hip hop’s origins and purpose, we understand it is a revolutionary cultural force that was intended to challenge the status quo and the greater American culture. So, its relegation to reflecting American culture becomes extremely problematic if one considers the radical tradition of African-American social movements—which have never been about mirroring dominant American culture.

  Post-hip-hop is not about the death of rap, but rather the birth of a new movement propelled by a paradigm shift that can be felt in the crowded spoken-word joints in North Philadelphia where poet Gregory “Just Greg” Corbin tells a crowded audience, “So these cats will rhyme about Rick Ross before they talk about African holocaust / rhyme about Pablo Escobar before they talk about how many bodies was lost.” A shift that can be felt at the krump-dance dance-offs in Los Angeles where young pioneer Tight Eyez proclaims, “We’re not gonna be clones of the commercial hip-hop world because that’s been seen for so many years. Somebody’s waitin’ on something different, another generation of kids with morals and values that they won’t need what’s being commercialized or tailor-made for them; custom-made, because I feel that we’re custom-made. And we’re of more value than any piece of jewelry… or any car or any big house that anybody could buy.” And a shift that can be seen on a tattered stoop on the corner of Flatbush Avenue in Brooklyn where Rashard Lloyd, a high school senior and budding community activist, grumbles when I ask him, “What does hip hop mean to you?” After a moment of contemplation, he makes clear, “Hip hop don’t speak to or for me.”

  While Rashard’s attitude may surprise those who mistake the ring tones, reality shows, and glossy advertising campaigns as indicators of hip hop’s dominance, it shouldn’t. Trailblazers of every generation have always sought radical alternatives to what corporate America deems cool. According to “The U.S. Urban Youth Market: Targeting the Trendsetters,” a study conducted by research and analysis firm Packaged Facts, Black youths like Rashard “possess an overriding desire to remain outside of the mainstream.” Claire Madden, vice president of marketing for Market Research, the parent company of Packaged Facts, says that once “there is a perception from urban youth that these manufacturers [companies and artists] are ignoring their origins, they are named sell-outs and it is only a matter of time before they fall.”

  In order to understand the rise of the post-hip-hop generation, it’s imperative to understand the foundations of hip hop. Although West African in its derivation, hip hop emerged in the Bronx in the midseventies as a form of aesthetic and sociopolitical rebellion against the flames of systemic oppression. This rebellion, on one hand, was musical because rap music was a radical alternative to disco, which excluded many Blacks and Latinos in the inner cities. As Kurtis Blow, one of hip hop’s first commercially successful rappers, told me as we drove through the South Bronx on a hip-hop tour bus packed with European tourists, “At that point, everybody everywhere was completely disco crazy. Hip hop was a rebellious mutation of disco that stemmed from the cats in the South Bronx and Harlem who couldn’t afford the bourgeois Midtown discos. Instead, hip hop took to the streets, the parks, the community centers, block parties. Hip hop represented the same freshness of view that drew me to Malcolm X.” It’s critical that Blow links hip hop to Malcolm because it is this connection that represents hip hop’s most potent and dominant sense of rebellion. Put another way, the force that created Malcolm was the same force that created hip hop—a visceral energy aimed at transforming (or at least voicing) the conditions of oppressed people. This was not simply hip hop’s promise, but its reality.

  Its quintessence was epitomized in the late 1980s during hip hop’s Stop the Violence Movement with the anthem “Self Destruction,” a collaborative effort by the era’s most well-known rappers, including KRS-One, who proclaimed: “To crush the stereotype here’s what we did / We got ourselves together / So that you could unite and fight for what’s right.”

  Although hip hop was founded on the principles of rebellion, over the past decade it has been lulled into being a conservative instrument, promoting nothing new or remotely challenging to mainstream cultural ideology. Even in the midst of an illegitimate war in Iraq, rap music remains a stationary vehicle blaring redundant, glossy messages of violence without consequence, misogyny, and conspicuous consumption. As a result, it has betrayed the very people it is supposed to represent; it has betrayed itself.

  Saul Williams, a poet whose musical combination of hip hop, rock, techno, and a cappella Black oration might be called post-hip-hop, asks us, “So what is hip hop? Well, with Public Enemy and KRS-One, hip hop became the language of youth rebellion. But now, commercial hip hop is not youth rebellion, not when the heroes of hip hop like Puffy are taking pictures with Donald Trump and the heroes of capitalism—you know that’s not rebellion. That’s not ‘the street’—that’s Wall Street.” And it is this reality that prompts Chuck D—an emcee that represented the Black youth rebellion in the eighties and nineties—to ask the question today: How You Sell Soul to a Soulless People Who Sold Their Soul?

  The popular commercialism of hip hop, which has resulted in a split from those it’s supposed to represent, is not new. In fact, it goes in part by the same name: hip. Just as the hip-hop generation was charged by rap, the hip era of the fifties and sixties was fueled by jazz. In The Conquest of Cool, a
n exploration of the bond between advertising and counterculture, Thomas Frank describes the co-opting of hip through “hip consumerism” as “a cultural perpetual motion machine in which disgust with the falseness, shoddiness, and everyday oppressions of consumer society could be enlisted to drive the ever-accelerating wheels of consumption.”

  In hip’s case, and the same is true for hip hop, Scott Saul, professor of English at Berkeley, points out that “it [hip] moved from a form of African-American and bohemian dissent to become the very language of the advertising world, which took hip’s promise of authenticity, liberation, and rebellion and attached it to the act of enjoying whatever was on sale at the moment.” Today, young people have been tricked into seeing their acts of consumerism as acts of rebellion.

  No one knows what will be next, or if their generation will sell it. However, the post-hip-hop ethos allows the necessary space for new ideas and expressions to be born free from the minstrel toxins that have polluted modern hip hop.

  Although post-hip-hop is not about music, per se, the music that is and will be created is critical as it is the soul of a new movement, functioning as a soundtrack to a fresh set of attitudes, ideas, and perspectives. All forms of art are fundamental to the post-hip-hop generation, as art possesses the remarkable ability to change not only what we see, but how we see.

  The late Martinican writer Frantz Fanon once said, “Each generation, out of relative obscurity, must discover their destiny and either fulfill or betray it.” The post-hip-hop generation must be brave enough to fully engage in exploration, challenge, and discovery, acts that will ultimately result in a revelation of contemporary truths that will help define us, and, in turn, the world.

  His shadow, so to speak,

  has been more real to him than his personality.

  — ALAIN LOCKE

  The authentic fake.

  —UMBERTO ECO

  It’s a paradox we call reality

  So keeping it real will make you a casualty

  of abnormal normality.

  — TALIB KWELI

  I greet you at the beginning of what I hope is the last round of a great battle; an intense struggle that has raged across the treacherous battlefields of media, with blood spilling into our national imaginations, for centuries. A conflict in which victory is a prerequisite to our collective freedom, but that, unfortunately, we’ve been losing.

  RING ANNOUNCER: In this corner, wearing sheen Black skin crafted by the Most High and manufactured from struggle, standing tall with the weight of her/his people upon her/his broad shoulders, with the ability to solve problems and do the right thing—The Real Black.

  [Crowd boos]

  RING ANNOUNCER: And, in this corner, wearing blackface crafted in the most high-rise board rooms by gray suits at white corporations, standing down and being a weight on her/his people, with the ability to kill niggas for fun, pimp a bitch, shuck, jive, and make lies the truth—The Reel Black.

  [Crowd erupts in cheers]

  I wish, of course, that the above was an effort in fiction, but unfortunately, these images—skillfully spidering into our world and forcing themselves into our lives, our ways of thinking, of seeing—are as real as we believe them to be. “The first step,” a young man from Chicago’s South Side tells me as we build our collective future, “is thinking outside the box, but then that’s hard because the box [TV, mass media] tells us what to think.” Any twenty-first-century discussion of our world, across race, gender, and class lines, must acknowledge and take seriously the notion, the reality, that young people of today derive the bulk of their ideas not from traditional institutions, but from the growing number and more intrusive forms of mass media.

  “He was a nice middle class nigga / but no one knew the evil he’d do when he got a little bigger,” Tupac rhymed in “Shorty Want to Be a Thug” through my sputtering speakers as I drove down a desolate, police tape-furled North Philly neighborhood in search of a tall, chestnut-colored man with thin hair and long facial features.

  I found him.

  “Peace,” I lobbed as I climbed out of my car.

  “ ’Sup, Malo,” he greeted me as I walked into the part-liquor, partbodega, part-Chinese food spot where we agreed to meet. Hearing that name—“Malo”—took me back. Malo, the last part of my middle name Khumalo, was what I preferred to be called in my early teenage years. When people would ask what my name meant, I would ignore the Swahili definition of Khumalo, which means “prince,” and instead offer the Spanish definition of “malo,” which simply means “bad.” I’m reminded of my adolescent confusion every time I snatch a glimpse of my brown bicep where, at fourteen years old, I engraved “MALO” in Old English typeface into my young skin on the day that I was both arrested and expelled from school.

  Our warm embrace was interrupted by the screeching of bicycle wheels.

  “Yo, what’s the deal?” hurled a grown man, his face engulfed in a serrated beard, as he zoomed in on a bright-pink kids’ Huffy.

  “ ’Sup, nigga,” he threw back as the rider pulled up.

  After a three-way dap was exchanged, I watched the two as they told lies to each other; lies about “bitches” that they “fucked” and “bitch-ass niggas” who they “fucked up.” After each lie, they’d laugh and dap again. It was pure performance. But neither of them would ever acknowledge themselves as actors, instead it ended with:

  “Uzi, you’s a real-ass nigga, man. I’m out,” the bearded man said as he peddled off, disappearing around the corner.

  “Uzi?” I turned to him and asked, thinking about the dysfunctional family of submachine assault guns.

  “Yeah—yo, that’s what niggas call me ’round here,” he briefed me.

  Uzi? I’m not callin’ him that, I thought to myself. His mama ain’t name him Uzi.

  In fact, not only did his mama not name him Uzi, but she would adamantly disapprove of the name. I knew this, of course, because she’s my mother, too. Our mother—the soft-spoken Queen from Brooklyn—who asks me, every time my big brother is arrested, every time the police trample her door down in search of her firstborn son, or every time the word “nigga” flies from his blunt-burnt lips, “Where does he get it from?”

  “I don’t know, Mom—not from you, though,” I usually say in assurance, trying to prevent my mother from blaming herself. It’s not her fault, it’s no one’s.

  My brother, whom I hadn’t seen or spoken to in a year because I was away in school and he didn’t have a phone, was my childhood and adolescent hero—a “true thug.” I used to boast about him to my awestruck middle-school crew. That was ten years ago. On this day, our reunion, he was homeless, jobless, and on the run from the police.

  “Let’s go for a ride,” I suggested. I wanted to talk about his performance; to dig deeper into what I remember “Malo” going through as a teenager and what I suspected my brother was still going through. I figured the car ride would be my opportunity.

  “Yeah, c’mon,” I said, as we pulled off.

  Just ask him. Just ask him why he’s frontin’, I urged myself.

  “So, what’s the deal, man?” I asked him.

  “What you mean?”

  “From my heart, don’t take this the wrong way. But sometimes I feel like you’re frontin’. Puttin’ on an act. You know I know the real you,” I explained, putting it all out there.

  After a round of awkward silence: “I’m stuck, man. Trapped. Like this is who I’ve gotta be,” he tells me.

  Interestingly, my brother’s feeling of entrapment (and he’s not alone) supports an idea that writer Alice Walker dubs “prison of image,” whereby society’s stereotypes function not as errors, but rather forms of social control. In my brother’s case, this prison of image led him to multiple stints in prison proper.

  When Black men and women find themselves trapped inside the hellholes of the prison industrial complex, we usually point to poverty, inadequate schools, and/or broken households—all symptoms of institutional racism—as pr
imary antagonists. In my brother’s case (and he’s not alone), his symptoms were different—since he was raised in a middle-class, two-parent household. However, the cancer of racism was the same. This does not mean escaping personal responsibility; however, many in the post-hip-hop generation have recognized that perhaps the most pervasive form of racism, one that is seldom tagged as such but cuts across geographic, gender, age, and class lines, is representation vis-à-vis mass media. Even in the face of relative progress made in electoral politics and education, African-Americans have made hardly any progress on the critical front of representation in mass media. Of course most Black men and women are in the prison system as a result of poverty rather than pop culture; however, the bombardment of negative stereotypes exacerbates an already dire crisis even further and in some cases, like my brother’s, creates crises out of relative stability.

  If one simply (and unfortunately) turns on the TV or radio, images of people of African descent remain virtually unchanged from the racist stereotypes promoted before and during slavery. Although there have been minor updates to the Black shadow cast on screen, the formula has remained fixed. Fixed, for the Black woman, has been Jezebel, the lewd mulatto; Sapphire, the evil, sex-crazed manipulative bitch; and Mammy, the Aunt Jemima nurturer whose sexuality has been so removed that she is best portrayed by Martin Lawrence (Big Momma’s House), Tyler Perry (Diary of a Mad Black Woman), or Eddie Murphy (Norbit). For the Black man, fixed has been Bigger Thomas, the white-woman-crazed brute; Jack Johnson, the hypersexed, hyper-athletic super thug; and Uncle Tom, the asexual sidekick.