I am hip-hop. I was born and raised in a ghetto, a now 50-something Black man from one of America’s many inner cities weighted down by racism, poverty, violence, neglect, dreams deferred, desperate survival tactics, ugly police-community dynamics and, on constant repeat, hopelessness. This is why so many Black males across three generations utter these words to any who will listen: Hip-hop saved my life.
Because, quite literally, at least for me, it did. There would be no 16 books, no endless speech invites, no journalism career, no sojourn as a poet, and no traveling America and parts of the world if it were not for hip-hop. It gave me permission to use my voice, to probe why I was Black and straight outta poverty; and hip-hop taught me to strive for something, anything, against all odds. Hip-hop saved my life. It is simply not debatable for a nation of millions of us.
What is debatable is when hip-hop began. Yes, hip-hop can mark Aug. 11, 1973 — 50 years ago this summer — as the day it all jumped off, when West Indian immigrants Cindy Campbell and her brother Clive Campbell, AKA DJ Kool Herc, threw a back-to-school party in the community room of their 1520 Sedgwick Ave. building in the South Bronx, New York City. For years though, some hip-hop heads, me included, believed it was actually November of 1974, up in the Bronx, per the Universal Zulu Nation and another founding figure of hip-hop, Afrika Bambaataa. Later, I’m told, it was Bambaataa who decided, in a closed-door meeting, that the origin story should point toward Herc and Cindy and 1973 instead.
But I believe it is deeper than squabbles over this or that date. In 1967, six years before Sedgwick Avenue, a couple of significant things happened. One, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. broke with the heart and soul of the Civil Rights Movement, and boldly came out against war, declaring that the United States was sending poor Blacks and poor whites to fight poor Asian people in a place called Vietnam, and that America was the greatest purveyor of violence on this earth. The Nobel Peace Prize-winning King was blasted as a traitor and unpatriotic.
And second, Kool Herc arrived from Jamaica that same year, making his way to the Bronx, the anointed and undisputed homeland of hip-hop. One year later King would be dead, assassinated, but not before he began to spread the gospel of a “Poor People’s Campaign,” a crusade for folks like the poor African Americans, West Indians and Puerto Ricans in the Bronx who would later give birth to hip-hop. These were people from the very same class King warned us not to abandon and forget. In other words, what does it matter if you can sit anywhere on the bus, or at a lunch counter, if you have no money to ride the bus, no money to buy a burger?
That means hip-hop, from the very beginning, had one humble definition: Making something from nothing. From its inception, hip-hop was rooted in politics, in social justice, by virtue of the fact that the four core elements of the culture — deejaying, dancing, rapping and graffiti writing — were a middle-finger response to racism and classism, to white flight from urban centers like New York and Compton, to being abandoned, forgotten and erased, just like Black history and Black books, say, are being erased, banned, whitewashed, in states like Ron DeSantis’ Florida in 2023.
I remember what hip-hop made me feel — and think — when I first heard The Sugar Hill Gang’s “Rapper’s Delight” in 1979; or when I first saw graffiti on entire subways; or when I first danced to the beats that were not those of my mother’s Motown or James Brown, but residue of those sounds that we, like mad scientists, broke apart, recycled, chopped, cut and scratched, until we had something that was spectacularly ours. Making something from nothing. I felt free, alive, that in spite of the impoverished conditions under which my single mother and I lived, I finally had music, art forms, a culture that belonged uniquely to me. I tagged graffiti with my Magic Marker. I learned how to pop and lock and break dance, on unfolded cardboard boxes, on unkind concrete. I memorized early rapper rhymes although I never had the audacity to spit them aloud, except when no one was looking. I watched my then-best friend construct his own sound system in his bedroom, intersecting electronics and a hand-made wooden coffin in which to place his two turntables, with his vinyl records to the side. And I wore the hats, the shirts, the pants, the jackets, the coats, the jewelry, and the footwear which have become the uniforms, the mobile fashion shows, generation to generation, of hip-hop.
Yes, I have been a participant, a documentarian, and an activist within and around hip-hop culture for 44 of these 50 years. Hip-hop taught me how to use my voice (Public Enemy’s “Fight The Power”), and hip-hop taught me about Black political and cultural rebels like John Coltrane and Assata Shakur and Nina Simone and Malcolm X. Hip-hop taught me to question police brutality (N.W.A’s “Fuck Tha Police”), and hip-hop gave me delectable snippets of Black history absent from my formal education. Hip-hop instructed me to study jazz (practically anything by A Tribe Called Quest), and hip-hop gave me my first and only full-time job as a writer at Quincy Jones’ Vibe magazine. Hip-hop led me to pen three cover stories for Vibe about the most famous rapper ever, Tupac Shakur, and hip-hop has given me so many words and phrases with which to guide my life to this day.
But as we know, culture, similar to politics, comes in ebbs and flows of astonishing awareness and activity, and bottomless confusion and inertia, and that has been no different with hip-hop. Hip-hop was always party music, with all the good and the not-so-good, that that entails. But there was also a movement of in-your-face Afrocentric and Black radical chic hip-hop from the late 1980s to the 1990s, largely a response to the Reagan Revolution and its awful trickle-down effects on people of color, that included Public Enemy, X Clan and KRS-One’s Boogie Down Productions. But when Dr. Dre’s landmark album The Chronic appeared all over MTV in 1993 and sold about 6 million units, it was not just the end of the Black Power era in hip-hop, but also the beginning of a Hollywood-like reproduction of the same movie over and over again.
Today, in 2023, three decades since The Chronic, we’ve gone from fighting the power to recreating and mass-producing the worst aspects of that hugely successful record: endless use of the n-word for Black people; endless use of the b-word for women; a seemingly endless hatred for queer and transgender people; an intense obsession with guns, with violence in all forms, with drug-selling and drug-taking, with money and material things; and anti-anything that even remotely questions the images and words we put forth.
Scan closely the Billboard pop and hip-hop charts from early 1993 forward and, with a few exceptions, it is the same formula for hip-hop success: across U.S. presidents and technology innovations and generations of us, from Rodney King to George Floyd, from Death Row Records to Tekashi69, from Tupac and Biggie to podcasts and the murder of Pop Smoke: Black self-hatred, hatred of women, destroy, self-destruct, kill or be killed, anything for a dollar, even if it leads to real-life drama, or murder. Gone, for the most part, is the agitating for political change, the diversity of voices; instead, rap’s activist roots have been completely eclipsed by its lowest common denominator: nihilism and greed.
Meanwhile, the few rappers that do get political are frolicking with far-right Republicans like it’s no big deal. We see Ice Cube driving former Fox News Channel anchor Tucker Carlson, who has spread racist conspiracy theories and stoked white fear, around the ‘hood, with nary a care about the optics of the act — the same Ice Cube who co-wrote N.W.A’s “Fuck Tha Police,” and became a megastar as one of those early 1990s rappers speaking out against injustice. We see Kanye West, now known as Ye, wearing a MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN cap and declaring his love for Donald Trump. And we see Kanye running for president and espousing despicable antisemitism, among many other choice, far-right misadventures.
Over the years, hip-hop has spawned a generation of rap-influenced politicians and activists, from Newark, N.J., Mayor Ras Baraka to House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) to Rep. Maxwell Frost (D-Fla.) to Rep. Jamaal Bowman (D-N.Y.) to Rep. Cori Bush (D-Mo.). (And I myself even ran for Congress in Brooklyn, N.Y., unsuccessfully, in 2008 and 2010.) But it pains me that you don’t see that same fight-the-power spirit reflected in today’s music.
It would be a lie to say that hip-hop has not always been a party music, a music supremely popular with young people of every generation since the 1970s, when it has been just that. But it has also seen epic and provocative political statements during that period we call the Golden Era of hip-hop, roughly 1984-1998, from the rise of Run-DMC as hip-hop’s first super group, to the otherworldly success of the album The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill, arguably the most important and enduring hip-hop-inspired record ever.
There was no such thing, not to us within the culture during the Golden Era, as political rap, as gangster rap, as conscious rap, any of that. Much of these were terms coined by certain kinds of media, namely mainstream outlets not rooted in the culture, which is partly why I started writing about hip-hop myself. It was all hip-hop, and just like George Orwell once said everything is political, there was no need for us to separate hip-hop into categories. The very fact that Black and Latinx young people were expressing themselves freely, with their music, dance and visual art, was by its very nature political. Which is why it was not unusual for a wide array of artists, during this Golden Era, to have at least one song per album that waxed poetic about a political or social justice issue, be it Salt-N-Pepa’s “Let’s Talk About Sex” or Queen Latifah’s “U.N.I.T.Y.” or De La Soul’s “Millie Pulled A Pistol On Santa.” Why? Because hip-hop has also always been the voice of the invisible, the unheard, the ignored. And there is simply no way a culture born during the upheavals of post-Civil Rights and post-Vietnam America could be promoting anti-social messages; not a culture that also traveled through the dark periods of crack, AIDS, Reagan and Bush policies, remarkably easy access to guns in our ‘hoods, the bloody eruption of gang warfare and the prison-industrial complex. So, in these highly polarized times, why aren’t we seeing that same political push today?
I believe that hip-hop, beginning with its explosion as the dominant pop art in America, and globally, in the early 1990s, was also co-opted, commodified, turned into something else. I recall vividly Tupac Shakur, during one of our interviews for Vibe, complaining about the record label execs who told him political or socially conscious hip-hop was not selling any longer, that he was essentially wasting his time making that sort of music.
Actually, “that sort of music” sold quite well, as mere months before Dr. Dre’s The Chronic dropped, the politically minded Arrested Development album 3 Years, 5 Months and 2 Days in the Life Of… was released, selling 4 million units. So, who decided that socially conscious rap didn’t sell, and why would someone say that to Tupac Shakur, the son of former Black Panther Party member Afeni Shakur, who named her son after Tupac Amaru, the legendary South American revolutionary? I remember thinking it was, well, odd, that roughly at the beginning of the Bill and Hillary Clinton years in the White House suddenly the politics and social justice messages in the music were gone, mysteriously. Did rappers, including Tupac, methodically become mostly or completely apolitical?
With Tupac, coming from poverty as most of us did, he made a conscious choice: put the politics to the side so he could make real money. But that phase of his career would be short-lived. In 1996, a scant three months after his 25th birthday, the artist was gunned down on the Las Vegas strip, his killer remaining free — and unknown — to this day. As for the others, I believe hip-hop had become dangerous to some, in politics, in corporate America, at record labels, in the media, when rappers began to interrogate the political system, and this country’s warts from uncompromisingly honest angles, when some dared to confront the status quo — as Dr. King had done a generation before.
And not only was that opposition reaching and educating the Black and Latinx young people who founded hip-hop in the first place, but also white young people, Asian young people, Indigenous young people, all young people, who otherwise were not, and still are not, learning much of anything about Black and Latinx folks in their homes, in their communities, in their schools, from the news media. Or, put another way, the erasing of the politics from mainstream hip-hop is not all that different from someone deciding that certain kinds of books, and certain kinds of history lessons, have to be banned, removed from schools, state by state, because of what young people might start to think, and feel, and challenge, and also do. I’ve traveled the world, and I cannot begin to tell you how many people, of all identities, told me it was hip-hop that taught them hard truths about America.
So, alas, and tragically, what hip-hop has been turned into, mostly, post-1998-era Lauryn Hill, has been a modern-day version of America’s long love affair with the minstrel show, that diabolical and inhumane and extremely profitable brand of entertainment that said Black folks were ugly, dumb, lazy, useless, violent, dangerous, overly sexualized, prone to be perpetual children and totally lacking in any morals whatsoever. Minstrelsy was the dominant entertainment in America for about 100 years, with racist stereotypes that did major damage to Black people, and by extension to every nook of America. Just like the past 25-plus years or so of these stereotypical hip-hop lyrics and images on a loop have done major damage to large chunks of the very communities that built hip-hop, and by extension to every nook of America. Ultimately, racism hurts all of us.
If you grew up poor and deprived, as I did, self-hating and self-defeating, as I was, there were no balanced images of you in your education — or, as Lauryn Hill declared, your “miseducation”— no seeing yourself as a whole human being in history, math, science, literature, nowhere at all. And, if, like me, you only get to see yourself in the popular culture of your times, you will, inevitably, see yourself as ugly, vile, worthless, an “other.” And you will come to hate yourself, and hate people who look like you, and believe in your gut, they, we, are nothing more than the n-word and the b-word.
Poor people do not want to be poor, and that definitely includes the poor people who created hip-hop. But as the lucky few — JAY-Z, 50 Cent, Kanye West, Lil Wayne and Drake — have transcended and become global pop and cultural ambassadors, we have to ask at what cost, to them, to Black America, to Black people worldwide? They all readily have used the n-word as if it is a first name, middle name, last name. They all readily thrust themselves headfirst into some of the most vile and sexist lyrical content imaginable. They all readily have rapped about violence in some form, casually tossing around toxic manhood stereotypes as if they were their birthright. They all readily show(ed) off their money, their material assets, even while the majority of the communities from which many of them come continue to struggle financially, just like back in 1973. And they all readily duck and dodge any political or social justice messages in their music, with the exception of a very different Kanye, in the 2000s.
If the JAY-Z we see now — with his massive commemorative