Monday, April 28, 2008

Let Me Clear My Throat...


At the risk of sounding silly and unnecessarily cryptic, hip-hop cannot be explained in any concrete sense. The culture is as transient and malleable as our consensus reality, and the only way to really explore it is to consider hip-hop culture as ontology. Yes, folks, emceeing, graf writing, b-boying, DJing, and all of the other attendant aspects of the culture can give us meaning.

In its broadest interpretation, hip-hop is alchemy. It changes poverty into wealth; letters into words, words into lyrics, and lyrics into mind’s eye pictures that—if the lyrics are poignant enough—stay with us. Old music is made new; remixed, filtered, and rearranged, and re-presented in startling fashion. Blank walls are altars on which—with a small sacrifice of paint and time—can act as a bold town crier. Trains carry the gospel of self from city to city. Bodies twist and bend and whirl, pushing beyond typical human capacity—transforming dance into an act of rebellion against physiology.

The culture invites us to participate on all levels: physical, intellectual, emotional, and the metaphysical. Hip-hop’s four elements have one thing in common, they all engage us in our imaginative capacities; but each element intersects with the imagination with its own unique properties:

Graf writing is concerned with the symbiosis of the hand and eye.
B-boying deals with preprioception, physical limits and tolerances.
Emceeing allows us to bring forth the stuff of the subconscious and deliver it with audible passion.
DJing is an empathic pursuit—being open to change, allowing one to be moved by the whims of the crowd.

It’s that deep.

But with what passes for hip-hop today, it is nearly impossible to see how the culture can be worthy of anything, other than derision. As it stands, the public face of hip-hop is a throwback to the coonery and minstrelsy that openly plagued black popular culture from slavery right on up and through the civil rights movement—and exemplified today by the likes of the Flavor of Love, 50 Cent, and I § New York—all of which are vying to send the black public image skipping and singing back to the plantation.

It is so easy to blame the media, but in the case of the negative presentation of hip-hop, the media is at fault. But so are we. Big Media’s main concern is making money. That’s a given, and it is understandable. What isn’t so easily understood is why these media conglomerates whole-heartedly support the lowest common denominator of black cultural output.
An aside: I am fully aware that more than just black folks can claim to ‘be’ hip-hop or be about it, but it is a black art—don’t ever forget that.

I heard a guy say, “Smart black people aren’t good for business. It’s entirely too different. The skin and hair are already a shock, but to add brains…you’re just looking to lose money.” Damn. The sad thing is that his words are true, on a certain level—that level being that most black folks don’t like to see themselves as intellectual.

As to the why of this—that’s an entirely different piece of writing.

So, operating on this crazy premise, Big Media puts out crap, banal, anti-intellectual hip-hop (arguably the most popular youth culture today) and people of all nationalities can imbibe on black ignorance, en masse. What’s worse, the audience (us)—not caring what is being said, as long as the beat is hot—buys song after song, ringtone after ringtone, of pure drivel. And we like it. We like it like a thirsty man in the desert welcomes a glass of water, even though there is dirt in it—the dirty water is all that is available. But what sucks is that there is a clear-watered oasis not more than thirty feet from the thirsty man, but it is obscured by blowing sands and mirages. And it is due to the blowing sands and mirages of so much corporate bullshit, the once powerful art form/cultural expression of hip-hop has as much longevity as an Ikea kitchen table. However, this is not to say that there aren’t pockets of hope, progress, and meaning.

Independent American labels like Rhymesayers Entertainment and Def Jux are engaging us in ways not experienced since the heydays of Public Enemy, NWA, BDP, De La, Tribe, and Rakim. Not just in the arena of “this beat is so ill,” but in the “what did he just say?” and “that was philosophically profound” arenas as well.

Jean Grae has made anguish and despair an aggressively beautiful art form.

Over in the UK, you have Roots Manuva who presents the ethos of a UK black making UK rap in such a unpretentious way—run, not walk, and buy his album Awfully Deep.

In Paris, American expatriate Mike Ladd has done more for the aesthetics and potential of hip-hop than the entire Dipset crew.

Needless to say, these aren’t the only thing’s that recontextualize hip-hop in a better light, but the aforementioned don’t get nearly the exposure they deserve.

But what does all of this have to do with the hip-hop in its ontological capacity?

The culture and its artistic offshoots can act as a compass—showing the way to a better understanding of our world—allowing us to navigate treacherous psycho-social terrain. Whether it is through the ear, hand, eye, heart, mind, voice, or the imagination; this art/culture/cash cow of a culture that I love so dearly (even though I’m approaching thirty-six) can sit shoulder-to-shoulder with the heavy-hitters of philosophy, such as existentialism and epistemology. In fact, I’d argue that hip-hop, in its alchemical form, is the direction that modern philosophical thought and action should be traveling.

As with all meaning-making devices, hip-hop was built on a foundation and then took these constituent parts and created something entirely new. From poverty, racism, hopelessness, and violence, hip-hop was forged as a way to encompass (and transcend) all of the disparate and negative pieces that it is derived from. It became a way of becoming—self-actualization and realization to a drumbeat.

Our rhetorical debates happen in the cipher; our proclamations are displayed on trains and walls; we’ve done away with the false dualism of mind/body; turntables allow us to stay in constant contact with our ancestors, using their ancient wisdom to approach modern problems. Hip-hop is the new ontological beast on the philosophical block. And as the Fugees said on 1996s The Score: “Warn the town, the Beast is loose.”

No comments: