Time to Elevate: Hip-Hop Resists Terror and War

By Jeff Chang, AlterNet. Posted November 26, 2001.

The biggest news in hip-hop this past summer had to do with beefs, all kinds of them, with feuding artists prepared to serve each other's heads up via freestyle war. Of course, this verbal sparring, this dozens-playing, this oral one-upsmanship is at the core of rap. Yet, after the mid-'90s deaths of Tupac Shakur and Biggie Smalls -- a rhyme rivalry turned fatally violent -- every new feud seems to have promised new danger.

After Sept. 11, all of this seemed kind of silly.

As long-time hip-hop journalist Oliver Wang fumed, "In the wake of the deaths of thousands you realize that, in the big scheme of things, hip-hop doesn't mean shit. Do we really care about Jay Z and Nas' war of words?"

Wang went on to ask how relevant hip-hop artists could be. And for many in the Hip-Hop Generation, it seemed their culture might be unable to take them forward through a time of crisis.

"Now is the time that music and all art should matter, should seek to make a statement, create an effect," Wang wrote. "And if it doesn't, it's a waste of everyone's time."

As he was writing these words, though, hip-hop activists across the country were in motion, organizing teach-ins, speak-outs, solidarity marches and peace demonstrations. The day after the attacks, Bay Area hip-hop activist group STORM and a number of other organizations issued a four-point manifesto. Their call was simple:

1) Oppose terrorism and build people's power.

2) Oppose the narrowing or elimination of the people's democratic rights.

3) Rely on global justice to deter future attacks.

4) Oppose racist bigotry.

They argued, "Increasingly, safety at home will require justice abroad." Their call, disseminated throughout the world via the internet, inspired many other young activists to begin their own organizing.

Hip-hop activism came into its own in 2000, at the Republican and Democratic National Conventions, where youth-led protests attracted both warm intergenerational support and severe police crackdowns. Thousands of young people took courageous stands against the massive profiling and imprisoning of their generation; against the death penalty; for better education; and for stopping gang violence. They linked these issues to global struggles for economic and racial justice.

The promise of the Hip-Hop Generation lies perfectly positioned to bring the politics of the world to the street corner and the politics of the street corner to the world. As a multiracial, polycultural cohort raised in the era of globalization, the Hip-Hop Generation can play a central moral role in the call for peace -- linking peace on the streets where we live to a global peace free from terror.

The history of the Hip-Hop Generation describes why. At one time, elders dissed us by saying that we were privileged, that we had never been tested by war. (This, of course, was before Bush's father's Persian Gulf War.) But the fact is that hip-hop culture was born under the conditions of war. It grew and spread as a global alternative to war.

Before hip-hop, during the early 1970s, Jamaica's bloody political wars fostered a music and culture of defiance in roots, dancehall and dub reggae. This music and culture -- a safe space from the bloody gang runnings on the street -- emigrated to the Bronx -- a space so devastated by deindustrialization and governmental neglect that when Ronald Reagan visited in 1980, he declared it looked like London after World War II. In the Bronx, the Universal Zulu Nation, hip-hop's first institution and organization, literally emerged from a peace forged between racially divided, warring gangs.

As Reagan took office, immigration was rapidly browning the face of America. A "culture war" was declared -- which, among other things, was a way to contain the nation's growing diversity. Culture warriors went after youth in their schools; they fought multiculturalism, ethnic studies and affirmative action. In Congress, they sought to censor movie and music content.

Hip-hop turned out to be everything they detested -- it was real, truth-telling, unapologetic and, worst of all, kids loved it. Imagine how they felt when Chuck D enlistened millions into the opposition by rhyming, "They'll never care for the brothers and sisters cause the country has us up for a war."

In one sense, hip-hop won the culture war. By the end of the '80s, Public Enemy and Spike Lee, John Singleton and N.W.A. and other brothers and sisters had crashed the lily-white pop culture mainstream. Hip-hop became the single most potent global youth force in a generation.

But the culture war had serious political consequences, too. Right-wingers manufactured the conditions, moving drugs and guns into the ghetto via the wars in Central America, causing a resurgence of gang warfare. And they succeeded in stigmatizing inner-city gangs, whose ranks, of course, were swollen with young, poor people of color, as mindlessly, irredeemably violent and evil.

Hip-hop reveled in the young generation's diversity. The culture warriors taught other generations to be afraid of it.

When the '90s came, they warned of a coming wave of juvenile crime, one that would crest with the darkening demographic surge. Their apocalyptic predictions helped foster a dramatic shift in juvenile justice, away from rehabilitation towards incarceration. Forty-eight states made their juvenile crime statutes more punitive. Dozens of cities instituted curfews, anti-cruising laws and "sweep ordinances" (which were ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court but have reappeared in many cities).

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