I see a lot of people have written that hip-hop reinforces negative attitudes within the African-American community and also projects a negative image of the community to the world. I accept to a certain extent that this must be true. I'm not black, I'm not even American, so I can't dispute that because it's something I can't honestly say that I know about or that I have personal life experience of.
But nevertheless I wanted to talk about the impact that hip-hop has made in my personal life, which I think is generally positive. I want to give an example of how just because something contains a lot of negative content, glorifies violence etc., it's on the person who consumes that art form to decide how they are going to react to it and how it will affect their lives. Art belongs just as much to the people who consume it as it does to the people who produce it. Otherwise it's pointless. Nobody makes art just for themselves. You need an audience for it. Otherwise it's like the tree in the woods - if nobody is around to hear the tree fall, then did the tree really fall? In the same way, if there is nobody around to look at your painting or listen to your music, then does it really exist? No.
So the first point is that the way in which any art form has a deeper meaning is entirely on the individual and how we choose to react to it. The artist can use certain techniques to push the audience towards interpreting their work in certain ways, but at the end of the day it's the audience which decides how they are going to react to the art.
When Nietzsche wrote about his philosophy of the Superman, his intention was for everybody to stop being shyt people and to get up and do something amazing with their lives, to live their lives to the fullest and realise all of their potential and live like gods. That was his intention. He never intended for the Superman philosophy to be used as inspiration
by two high school kids in Chicago to kidnap and murder a 14 year old boy. He also never intended for Hitler and the Nazi party to use that same philosophy to regard the German people as a race of Supermen and to justify the Holocaust. But his intentions counted for shyt, because at the end of the day it's the audience's reaction which determines the nature of an artistic (or in this case, intellectual) work.
Let me get back to hip-hop now and the way I react to it. Granted, I don't listen to modern hip-hop: on artistic terms, it's pure garbage, never mind the themes and the content. They could rap about birds and trees instead of whatever it is they do and it would still be garbage. All that mumbling crap. Nobody even bothers to rap on beat anymore, let alone enunciating clearly and having decent writing skills. And the ugly production, the ugly music behind it. It's hideous. I don't understand how anybody can like it. I'm not saying that everything has to be g-funk and boom-bap again, but come on, go back and listen to that shyt and it's actually music. There's actual instruments being played. Piano, violin, saxophone, big old 808 drums, shyt even sine wave synthesizer is a real musical instrument, and that's the entire essence of boom-bap and g-funk. I accept that things change and you can't be on the same stale style forever, but you've got the keep the fundamentals at least - use real musical instruments, value the skill of rapping on the beat, enunciate your words clearly, and spend some effort on the craft of writing lyrics. Hip-hop in 2005 was completely different to 1985 and there was definite stylistic evolution over those twenty years, but it still had those same basic fundamentals I'm talking about, which is why I like it.
So I listen pretty much exclusively to hip-hop from the '80s through to the '00s, and basically nothing from the '10s or '20s. But you can't really say that it's pacifistic hip-hop I listen to. They still talk about murdering people and selling drugs and whatnot. They still drop the n-word three or four times every verse. The themes and the content are not all that different to today's hip-hop. But for me personally, it never did any of the things the people here have complained about. It never made me want to become a criminal or glorified the criminal life to me. And it never gave me a negative impression or image of the African-American community. Far from it.
What those violent, aggressive lyrics glorifying the criminal life etc. did for me is, the hunger resonated with me. It's not about the lifestyle they chose to glorify in their songs, it's the hunger. The hunger for success. This is something universal to all young men. We are all hungry and ambitious, we're all chasing something, chasing a dream. That's the theme that stuck with me. These are songs about making a come up in your life. It's about the dedication you've got to put in if you want to reach the top when you start from very little. Now in the songs the method they talk about for quenching that hunger is guns, drugs, violence. That never moved me. I know I'm not cut out to live like that, and frankly I don't value the type of success that a criminal lifestyle can bring. I don't care about having luxury condos and bad hoes, hopping out the Porsche and jumping in the Lambo. So it was never about the lifestyle in the music which appealed to me, it was always the hunger that I could sense was what really motivated these rappers and the stories and characters that they invented and portrayed on their music.
That's how I as an individual reacted to the art, interpreted it, and engaged with it in my personal life. I use it as fuel to motivate me to succeed in what does matter to me. I'm an academic. That's my life. It's as far removed from the life of crime as anything can be. But that doesn't matter because the hunger for success is the same. Whether you're a criminal or an academic, you're still young men and you can both relate to each other when you talk about your life because of that powerful drive you have deep within you to make a come up in life. Nietzsche called it the Will to Power. Nietzsche wrote: "A living being seeks above all else to discharge its strength. Life itself is will to power." That is what I saw in hip-hop and that is how I was able to relate it to my own personal life and my goals. Today when I sit down and start writing something, when I do my research, I constantly push myself to do as well as I can. I always demand of myself, "this is going to be my Doggystyle;" "this is going to be my Illmatic;" "this is going to be my Reasonable Doubt;" "this is going to be my Me Against the World." Those albums (and many others besides) hold a special place in my heart because they represent the moment that a hungry, ambitious young man got himself noticed on the world stage. They were the moment that he achieved some of his biggest goals. I'm desperate to have my own moment like that. It consumes me.
And more than that, you've got to think about how competitive hip-hop used to be in that era. Everyone desperately wanted to be the best rapper. I think they wanted this over and above being the richest, most flashy, most criminally connected person, etc. They went around calling themselves the king of New York (or demolishing the buildings of New York in their music videos). They meant this as much in terms of their art as they did the life of crime. It's no good being the baddest criminal around if you couldn't rap a lick. They wanted to be the best in the world of art as well as the world of crime. It's that drive that I'm talking about. Wanting to be the best at something. Doesn't matter what it is. For me, I relate just to the wanting to be the best part.
Hip-hop is something special because it is one of the few things I have encountered in the world which has pure Will to Power at its heart. Sport is another one. But there's not a whole lot of others that I can think of, outside of my own immediate life path in academia. Obviously academia is full of it. But it's great for me to feel that energy in a more undiluted and expressive fashion, which is what I get out of hip-hop especially.
So it doesn't have to be negative. It's all on you and how you choose to react to it. You can use it to inspire you to do great things without harming or killing someone else. That depends on who you are as a person. If you are violent and psychotic underneath, then no amount of music one way or the other is going to divert you from a path of crime and doing harm to others. If you are a good person underneath and you want to be constructive, then you can draw inspiration from anything you like to power you towards your goals. For me that happened to be hip-hop.
Let's come now to the second point which was made, that hip-hop promotes negative images of African-Americans to the world. Although I don't dispute this - as I said, I am neither black nor American, so I have no right to comment on that - I would like to add something to the discussion, which is what I learned about the African-American community from hip-hop. What I learned about is how America as a nation has so many structures which are deliberately designed to be harmful and oppressive to your community. I was educated on that. I was more or less completely ignorant about it until I started listening to hip-hop when I was around 10 or 11 years old. But when I listened to KRS-One talking about police brutality and racism on Sound of the Police, when I listened to Ice Cube and Dr. Dre talk about the fundamental causes for the LA riots, that's when I learned. When a whole bunch of rappers talked about the crack epidemic, about the Three Strikes Law, about Broken Windows, about profiling and mass incarceration, that's when I learned about these things. All of it shined a light on how evil America is or can be. If it wasn't for that then I personally would have stayed completely ignorant about all these issues until the BLM movement swept around the world. Now it wouldn't have been possible 20 or 30 years ago because people didn't have cameras on them 24/7 like we do now to expose what was happening. So hip-hop was very much the only way of reaching masses of people all around the world with the truth of what was going on in America.
And let's be honest, yeah there were always activists and academics and stuff who researched and published and demonstrated and protested about all of this. They deserve full credit and commendation for their efforts. But none of that, in my opinion, has the same power to reach people around the world as viscerally as a song or a music video does. Sound of the Police has over 45 million views on Youtube alone. You tell me one academic paper or one activist talking about the same issues KRS-One talks about which reached 45 million views. There isn't one.
So for all the foul shyt that rappers talked about on their songs and continue to talk about today, we must at least acknowledge that they made some positive contribution to their community by documenting the social and political issues pertaining to systematic racism in the US, at a time when there was no other voice to spread this message to the world. If it wasn't for Los Angeles rappers talking about the crack epidemic, the Rampart scandal, and brutality and widespread corruption in the LAPD, then the official government narrative for the LA riots would have been completely unchallenged, and we would not know as we know today that the government and the racist nature of American society was ultimately responsible for what happened. For whatever other bad things they may have done, the rappers deserve a little bit of credit for that.
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