The culture and origin of hip hop and rap

Here's an excerpt on a paper on hip hop and rap I wrote in 1999 while researching on culture in New York city, after a visit to the Nuyorican Poets Cafe:

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Some would argue that music is an “essential” element in understanding the culture of subgroups. If so, what is hip hop and how does it help us understand about the populations from which this artistic expression originates? According to our guest speakers, and the readings, what is one of the current struggles faced by the hip hop community and how does this struggle reflect a broader issue in Black/Latino communities?

Hip hop can be defined as “Black and Latino manifestation of oppressed creativity” and claimed to be a culture in itself which originate two decades ago in Harlem, New York City and one which has undergone transformations and reinterpretations as well as a tug-of-war between “old and new” schools. The cultural producers and self-proclaimed originators cautioned us to differentiate between hip hop and rap of which the latter is a “white manifestation of hip hop to package and sell”. In hip hop contains the cultural manifestations of dancing, emcee-ing, deejay-ing, and graffiti drawing. From it evolves a temple, a high priest in the making perhaps, disciples, documentation of history, distinctness of language, and the construction of the principles of ethics and virtues to be passe down to followers, and all other elements which will, I believe, be produced and reproduced. Hip hop, in essence, is claiming itself to be a musically-based culture which is aspiring from a subaltern voice of inner city living to be channeled into the mainstream with the help of agencies of socialization predominantly such as print and electronic media technology.

Looking at hip hop from a post-industrial tribalistic point of view, this cultural manifestation can help us understand that the socio-economic condition and the alienation the inner city Black and Latino subgroups is preconditioned into is needing of such expression as a form of rediscovering of self-esteem and as a form of political recognition. “Political” here is meant in the broadest sense “the constitutional and unconstitutional arrangement of power relations” and in hip hop, power means the push for visibility so that the dispossessed younger members of the targeted Black and Latino youth can be attracted to this new culture so that a kind of “enlightenment” project can be carried out. It is claimed that the hip hop culture has an essentialist core acronymed as SILVER – self, intelligence, love, vision, evolution, and revolution. It should then be interesting to follow the development of the progress of such a cultural transmission project from a culture “given birth” circa 1970s.

Just as words such as “race”, “ethnicity”, and “culture” can be interchangeably perceived because of their subjective nature and cross-breeding tendency in their utilization, I must say that “hip hop” and “rap” as musical forms is in that category of linguistic complimentarity because of the elusiveness of their meaning. In Chapter Two of Black Noise hip hop is defined as:

a cultural form that attempts to negotiate the experiences of marginalization, brutally truncated opportunity, and oppression within the cultural imperatives of African-American and Caribbean history, identity and community. It is the tension between the cultural fractures produced by post-industrial oppression and binding ties of Black cultural expressivity that sets the critical frame for the development of hip hop. (p.21)

If we compare the above with the definition of rap music, we may see the close link between both forms in which rap music,

[i]s a Black cultural expression that prioritizes Black voices from the margins of urban America. Rap music is a form of rhymed storytelling accompanied by a highly rhythmic, electronically-based music. It began in the mid-1970s in the South Bronx in the city of New York City as part of hip hop, an Afro-Caribbean youth culture composed of graffiti, breakdancing, and rap music.

We can say that the slight difference in the definition and how hip hop and rap have progressed are also a cause for struggle by the hip hop community. It is a question of “cultural appropriation” in that the hip hoppers claimed that the huge global success of rappers are partly due to the adulteration of the noble values hip hoppers originally plan to propagate, which instead has worked to the benefit of rap music industry. This is an issue faced by cultural originators from the Black and Latino community which can be at the mercy of recording companies and electronic cultural producers which see more value in marketing messages of violence, gangsterism, anti-family, irrational hedonism, eroticism, sexual perversion, foul language use, and the like through rap groups living and breathing images of destructive counter-culturalism. The hip hop community believes in “reforming its wayward child” – rap – and propagate the message of positive self-esteem, love, intelligence, and respect, with regard to the building of a more progressive Black and Latino community.

The issue of old versus new culture in the hip hop – rap continuum of claims to cultural originality reflects the broader issue of liberation in Black and Latino community. As mentioned earlier, through hip hop, what is programmed to be achieved is a pride in the self and community of which has been lost through marginalization and all forms of structural violence over the years of existing as immigrant subgroups. In Black Noise and Welcome to Terrordome for example, the struggles are well narrated and what grew out of these is hip hop and rap which attempt to raise the younger generation’s level of social consciousness and praxis through such as postmodern genre of musical-artistic expression.

Although artistes like the essentialist-socialist Harry Belafonte would see rap and hip hop as nonsensical and devastatingly oppressive, and as a consciousness clouding form of cultural perversion, the progressivist-capitalist Hunter Gault applauds its existence as a creative form of expression which must be channeled positively so that the younger generations can continue to do newer things and be happy at doing them.

Thus, through hip hop and rap as an interesting post-modern tribalistic phenomena of cultural expression with global manifestations, they can provide contemporary sociologists the opportunity to look at culture of subgroups and also help political economists understand the inner-workings of culture industry on a global imperialistic scale with its fashion, language, and lifestyle ‘lock, stock, and barrel” becoming the message and the medium all at once transmitted to the four corners of the free world made safer for “democracy”.

VIVA HIP HOP!