Back to Beat Street

By Scott Thill, AlterNet. Posted February 11, 2005.

Forget what you've heard or seen, if that's possible. Because though it may seem from the hyperreal videos reliably rotating on MTV and BET that hip hop is reveling in the diamond life of Cristal, Hummers and ten-carat arm charms, that is only half the story – one that the kings of capitalism have carefully created for you. Manufacturing illusion and consent has been the job of mainstream media since its inception, after all, and Gil-Scott Heron's activist adage that the revolution will not be televised still holds true, no matter what they are telling you on CNN or Fox. Which is another way of saying that the globally mediated and consumed hip hop beamed into basic cable households across the world may be a consensual fantasy, but it is still a fantasy nonetheless.

For hip-hop scholar Jeff Chang, the musical movement that has exploded into a full-fledged lifestyle still functions best at its lived, local level, where it can be used to raise consciousness and fists alike to rail against the still-entrenched systems of oppression and racism that all those champagne-soaked videos would you rather forget as they encourage you to have another sip and grab some ass. What gets lost in that curious translation is the roots of hip hop itself, which painfully snake back to an abandoned Bronx leveled by years of Carter's apathy and Reagan's cruelty, to social programs and fire houses left for dead and a borough's population left to sift through the aftermath.

Or, as the first chapter of Chang's brilliant new book, Can't Stop Won't Stop: A History of the Hip-Hop Generation (St. Martin's Press), puts it: "Here was the new math: the South Bronx had lost 600,000 manufacturing jobs; 40 percent of the sector had disappeared. By the mid-seventies, average per capita income dropped to $2,430, just half of the New York City average and 40 percent of the nationwide average. The official youth unemployment rate hit 60 percent. Youth advocates said that in some neighborhoods the true number was closer to 80 percent. If blues culture had developed under the conditions of oppressive, forced labor, hip-hop culture would arise from the conditions of no work."

Chang: "If you look at hip hop on the local level, that's where all the activism is. There is no national concentration for committed hip-hop activism, like there was for the civil rights movement back in the '60s."

Hip hop may have outgrown its impoverished upbringing in some corners of the mediasphere, but the majority of its offspring are nevertheless still struggling to stay alive in an environment teeming with a host of new and time-tested oppressive policies, including rampant media consolidation, racial profiling, police abuse and much more. Those are still the thorny issues of hip hop you will never see tackled on BET and MTV, because they don't sell the fantasy. Which is this: Everything is fine. Keep drinking that 40-oz. And whatever you do, don't organize.

Chang wants to change that, and in the process shed light on the motivated contingencies of American youth who are, like their forebears, using hip hop as a point of departure for their own generational rebellion rather than sitting on the recliner and watching 50 Cent eyeing the ladies.

"It's a matter of scale," the author explains. "Today, hip hop is vastly larger and more influential than it has ever been. The sheer number of rappers, b-boys, DJs, and graffiti artists today is overwhelming compared to 10 or 20 years ago. But if you look at hip hop on the local level, that's where all the activism is. There is no national concentration for committed hip-hop activism, like there was for the civil rights movement back in the '60s. Back then, if you gathered half a million people at the Washington Mall, you could ride that momentum into some real change. There's no chance of that today. Could we pass a comprehensive youth education and protection bill, as opposed to a youth crime bill? No way. These days, politics has shifted to the local level; that's where all the big fights are taking place."

According to Chang, if you crawl beneath the apathetic mainstream, you'll find thousands of determined people and organizations, from The League of Pissed-Off Voters to the National Hip-Hop Political Convention, forwarding progressive platforms on immigration reform, affirmative action, reparations and more – issues that have been conventionally at the heart of hip hop since it first blossomed beneath the boots of the NYPD.

              

Scott Thill runs the online mag Morphizm.com, while finding the time to rant for Salon, XLR8R, All Music Guide, AOL and others. His first novel, The Dangerous Perhaps, should be done by the time the War on Terrorism is over.

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