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Music critics fell over themselves to praise “The Message,” treating it as the poetry of the streets-as the elite media has characterized hip-hop ever since. Thugs, pimps and pushers, and the big money makers. You grow in the ghetto, living second rateĪnd your eyes will sing a song of deep hate. It depicted ghetto life as profoundly desolate: Grandmaster Flash’s ominous 1982 hit, “The Message,” with its chorus, “It’s like a jungle sometimes, it makes me wonder how I keep from going under,” marked the change in sensibility. Now top rappers began to write edgy lyrics celebrating street warfare or drugs and promiscuity. At the time, I assumed it was a harmless craze, certain to run out of steam soon.īut rap took a dark turn in the early 1980s, as this “bubble gum” music gave way to a “gangsta” style that picked up where blaxploitation left off. I said a hip, hop, the hippie, the hippie,Ī string of ebullient raps ensued in the months ahead. Soon, kids across America were rapping along with the nonsense chorus: The first big rap hit, the Sugar Hill Gang’s 1978 “Rapper’s Delight,” featured a catchy bass groove that drove the music forward, as the jolly rapper celebrated himself as a ladies’ man and a great dancer. Observed black historian Lerone Bennett: “There is a certain grim white humor in the fact that the black marches and demonstrations of the 1960s reached artistic fulfillment” with “provocative and ultimately insidious reincarnations of all the Sapphires and Studds of yesteryear.”Įarly rap mostly steered clear of the Sapphires and Studds, beginning not as a growl from below but as happy party music. The memory of whites blatantly stereotyping blacks was too recent for the typecasting in something like Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song not to offend many blacks. Briefly, this militant spirit, embodied above all in the Black Panthers, infused black popular culture, from the plays of LeRoi Jones to “blaxploitation” movies, like Melvin Van Peebles’s Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song, which celebrated the black criminal rebel as a hero.īut blaxploitation and similar genres burned out fast. In the angry new mood, captured by Malcolm X’s upraised fist, many blacks (and many more white liberals) began to view black crime and violence as perfectly natural, even appropriate, responses to the supposed dehumanization and poverty inflicted by a racist society.
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The hip-hop ethos can trace its genealogy to the emergence in that decade of a black ideology that equated black strength and authentic black identity with a militantly adversarial stance toward American society. The venom that suffuses rap had little place in black popular culture-indeed, in black attitudes-before the 1960s. By reinforcing the stereotypes that long hindered blacks, and by teaching young blacks that a thuggish adversarial stance is the properly “authentic” response to a presumptively racist society, rap retards black success. Many writers and thinkers see a kind of informed political engagement, even a revolutionary potential, in rap and hip-hop. Rap was a running decoration in their conversation. A couple of his buddies would then join him. So completely was rap ingrained in their consciousness that every so often, one or another of them would break into cocky, expletive-laden rap lyrics, accompanied by the angular, bellicose gestures typical of rap performance. What struck me most, though, was how fully the boys’ music-hard-edged rap, preaching bone-deep dislike of authority-provided them with a continuing soundtrack to their antisocial behavior. These teens clearly weren’t monsters, but they seemed to consider themselves exempt from public norms of behavior-as if they had begun to check out of mainstream society. Only after she called a male security guard did they start slowly making their way out, tauntingly circling the restaurant before ambling off. After repeatedly warning the boys to stop throwing food and keep quiet, the manager finally told them to leave. They were extremely loud and unruly, tossing food at one another and leaving it on the floor.īlack people ran the restaurant and made up the bulk of the customers, but it was hard to see much healthy “black community” here. Since 1) it was 1:30 on a school day, 2) they were carrying book bags, and 3) they seemed to be in no hurry, I assumed they were skipping school. Not long ago, I was having lunch in a KFC in Harlem, sitting near eight African-American boys, aged about 14.