Iam 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.
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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.
Alot more at link
Opinion | Hip-Hop — and America — Are Changing, and Not for the Better
Hip-hop was rooted in politics and social justice and a diversity of voices. But now, at 50, has it become a minstrel show?
www.politico.com
