“People thinking MC is shorthand for misconception;
Let me meditate, set it straight,”
— “Definition” by Black Star
Talib Kweli has made a life in Hip Hop. He has been a prominent emcee for almost 20 years, first as one-half of Black Star (with Mos Def) and then as a solo artist, recording 10 albums and collaborating with artists such as Kanye West, The Roots and Common.
Kweli has also been an outspoken social activist, organizing the “Hip Hop for Respect” album to raise awareness of police brutality, especially the police killing of Amadou Diallo in New York in 1999. Kweli is also a Hip Hop entrepreneur, having started his own record label, Javotti Media.
So when Gene Simmons of the rock band Kiss was recently quoted as saying that he was “looking forward to the death of rap” and that rap was founded by “gangsters,” Kweli took exception.
And now, Kweli is explaining why these words are harmful, in the hopes that others may reconsider denigrating Hip Hop. The core of this message is that Hip Hop, rather than being merely a form of music, is a broader culture and identity.
And Hip Hop will never die.
I recently spoke with Kweli, and he explained to me why Simmons’ statements got his attention initially. “People have been predicting Hip Hop’s death for over 30 years. There are plenty of rock musicians who’ve said a bunch of nonsense about Hip Hop. But it’s not the prediction of Hip Hop’s death. Music is cyclical, and things wax and wane, based on a lot of different factors. And there’s nothing wrong with saying that,” he said.
“But to come out so strongly against Hip Hop, actually wishing and hoping for Hip Hop’s demise and death and then the generalizing of who does Hip Hop which shows an incredible amount of ignorance, that just didn’t sit right with me,” said Kweli.
There were several reasons why Kweli felt that Simmons’ statements were misguided. Overall, Kweli felt that Simmons was judging Hip Hop from afar rather than being someone who is intimately involved in Hip Hop culture. “I think we can’t underestimate the disconnect between someone who doesn’t participate in Hip Hop culture and someone who does,” Kweli said.
And on a societal level, perhaps it is this same lack of familiarity that results in several misperceptions about Hip Hop culture. First and foremost, by focusing specifically on “rap music,” Simmons was separating rap from the broader context of Hip Hop. Hip Hop consists of “The Five Elements,” which comprise emceeing, deejaying, b-boying, graffiti art and knowledge.
And for those who are a part of Hip Hop culture, Hip Hop is pervasive in every aspect of one’s being. As KRS-One, founder of Boogie Down Productions, has famously explained: “I do not do Hip Hop, I am Hip Hop.”
Kweli personally experienced an immersion in Hip Hop culture even before he became an artist. “I grew up in the Hip Hop era. My start in Hip Hop was growing up in New York City. I was raised equal parts by my city and by my parents,” he explained. “My city thoroughly informed my worldview and how I saw things. Hearing music coming out of beatboxes and out of boomboxes, stepping on crack vials, seeing graffiti in the street. Hip Hop going from the streets to the radio.”
As a result, Hip Hop permeated every aspect of Kweli’s being. “When you watch the movie ‘Rhyme & Reason,’ Tash from Alkoholiks gives a great description. Hip Hop is not just a song or music, it’s everything we do; the way we walk, the way we talk, the way we dress,” Kweli said. “The RZA wrote a book called the ‘Tao of Wu’ where he goes into great detail about how people cuffed their pants or creased their pants or layered their jeans … in certain ways; wore your hat in certain ways.
“If I hand a pen to Xzibit, I’m going to hand it to him in a Hip Hop way.”
Further, referring to the pioneers of Hip Hop as “gangsters” perpetuates an ongoing stereotype of Hip Hop artists. There is a long history of Hip Hop artists being called “gangsters” or “thugs,” regardless of their personal history or the lyrical content of their music. For example, Common, who is generally considered a positive and socially conscious artist, was referred to as a “thug” by Sarah Palin when he was invited to the White House by President Obama.
Kweli feels that when people refer to Hip Hop artists in general as “gangsters,” it is a form of covert racism. “That’s the racial coding. But it’s coming from a place of ‘Hey, kids, get off my lawn;’ a place of racism. A place of not understanding why these black people are doing something that I don’t understand,” he said.
Kweli says this type of stereotyping against Hip Hop artists represents a continuation of a broader picture of racism against black people in this country. In particular, recent evidence has emerged that Richard Nixon’s administration initiated the “War on Drugs” in part as a way to politically fight against black people. This contributed to the problem of mass incarceration in this country as millions of people have had their lives horribly disrupted through harsh laws that incarcerate non-violent drug offenders.
The lives of those convicted and incarcerated are further marginalized as criminal records result in difficulty getting jobs, loss of welfare and other benefits and voting rights. Further, minority groups are disproportionately incarcerated; as an example, African-Americans make up 14 percent of drug users, but 37 percent of those arrested for drug offenses.
“Lee Atwater said the same thing in 1981. I use that a lot when I’m talking about racism. A lot of people don’t understand. There were Southern Dixiecrats in the ’50s who were the party of the Confederacy. They were Democrats. They hated black people,” Kweli said. “Nixon, who was a Republican, needed to win. The Republican strategy was to turn Southern Dixiecrats against black people by painting them as sex-crazed, drug-crazed, violent criminals. This is where the term ‘law and order’ came from.”
Part of the “law and order” initiative included portraying urban youth as criminals. “We’re going to paint a picture of these black people, these people of color, these poor people in these cities as a scourge. And if you don’t vote for Nixon, or if you don’t vote Republican, it’s going to be a problem,” explained Kweli. “That became the strategy for every GOP candidate from Nixon until now. We’re law and order, tough on crime, mass incarceration, prison industrial complex platform. This platform is why policies like affirmative action are getting dismantled in our inner cities.”
Research shows that racism and discrimination result in tangible disparities for its victims, but also it destroys an individual’s very health and self-concept. Racial discrimination has been shown to be associated with a range of mental health issues, such as depression, as well as increases in blood pressure. Further, stereotype threat, or the process of making someone aware of a stereotype about them, has been shown to result in poorer academic performance among black students.
Not only does the attempt to characterize Hip Hop artists as “gangsters” feed into this history of racial discrimination, but also it ignores the evidence that Hip Hop was founded as a positive response to the harmful effects of poverty and discrimination facing urban youth in the late ’70s and early ’80s. “Hip Hop like any good music, including rock ’n’ roll, is not music that you can divorce from struggle,” Kweli said. “Hip Hop was music that was created to fill a cultural void.”
For example, Afrika Bambaataa, who had at one point been in a gang, founded the Universal Zulu Nation as a mechanism for helping urban youth turn away from criminal activity and other forms of unhealthy behavior. Bambaataa, along with other Hip Hop pioneers, such as Kurtis Blow, are now working to develop the Universal Hip Hop Museum to help educate people about the history and positive effects of Hip Hop culture.
For Kweli, Hip Hop comes from a long line of music in the black community that was more than simply entertainment. “What we called the Negro spiritual made the blues or jazz, soul, rhythm and blues, funk — this music is necessary. It’s not art that you just listen to for the sake of listening to. It’s mandatory. You need it for your soul, your spirit, for what you are going through.”
And many people found a life in Hip Hop marked by the spirit of innovation and creativity. Kweli explained, “Kids found a way. The music found a way. They plugged into the lampposts. They took turntables outside. They found the instrumental parts of songs. They found the breaks in the songs and made beats. And they’d have break-beat boys and b-boys who would dance to the beats. They had a fashion to go with it and an art to go with it, which is graffiti. And an emcee would get up and talk about the beat. The DJ was the center of the party. And the emcee would wax poetic about the deejay.”
In fact, Kweli’s personal story represents another challenge to the stereotype that Hip Hop artists are “gangsters.”
“I grew up in a very literate household. Both of my parents were professors, and my mother was a professor of English,” explained Kweli. “I read a lot when I was younger. And I wrote a lot when I was younger. And Hip Hop was a way of turning that skill into a way of being cool or hip when I was in high school.”
Kweli described being attracted to the poetry of several artists, including Run-D.M.C., the Beastie Boys, Public Enemy, Boogie Down Productions and Eric B. and Rakim. “The poetry of it attracted me on the writer’s side. So I started writing lyrics and getting into the rappers I knew. But by the time I got to high school at Brooklyn Tech, I got to know myself well enough to know that I liked to write rhymes,” Kweli said. “And I would go to the lunchroom of Brooklyn Tech and debut the rhymes I’d written the night before. Somebody would beatbox or somebody would bang on the table … I’d be in Washington Square Park just doing the same thing, just rapping.”
And so, wishing for the “death” of Hip Hop, is taking aim at a whole culture, and in fact a whole group of people that have Hip Hop inside of them. Kweli illustrated this point by asking via Twitter how people would have felt if he had called for the “death” of Gene Simmons.
“This tweet that got this whole thing started — I very much on purpose did not wish for his death. That’s not something that I do,” Kweli said. “What I did do was wonder aloud in a public forum on Twitter if that would be fair for me to wish for his death or not? The answer that I would come up with is no. It wouldn’t be fair.”
“But then the reason that I posed the question is to illustrate the seriousness of how people feel about Hip Hop and the fact that Hip Hop is life for a lot of people. It’s not some corporate music video. Hip Hop is not defined by some corporate image you saw glancing at the TV once or twice,” Kweli explained. “And so for him to wish its death and to talk about the practitioners as gangsters — on a lot of levels, not just music — was an inappropriate thing to say … if you’re looking forward to the death of Hip Hop then you’re looking forward to the death of how I feed my family.”
“You’re looking forward to the death of things that are very real — that are organic, that are alive.”
Ultimately, Kweli is optimistic, and not worried about the death of Hip Hop. As he puts it succinctly, “I don’t think that Hip Hop needs my defense at this point.” If anything, the indication is that Hip Hop is not only surviving, but also thriving.
Hip Hop has been described as “the most important youth culture on the planet.” In fact, one study of music over the past 50 years found that Hip Hop music from the late ’80s and early ’90s had perhaps the most profound influence on the structure and style on music than any other form of music in that time period. This resulted in journalists calling Hip Hop “the most important musical development in the last 50 years.”
Kweli is looking forward to Hip Hop soaring to new heights. “We’re in the wild, wild West. We’re in a pioneering time. The traditional music industry’s always been like the songs that are on the top of the radio charts are the same as those on the top of the sales charts. That’s not what it is. Flatbush Zombies out of nowhere dropped an album called ‘3001: Space Odyssey’ — no record label, no nothing. They’re killing it. Chance the Rapper making big, huge records — no record deal. Kendrick Lamar is getting 11 Grammy nominations (and five wins) for making the blackest Hip Hop album all year. J. Cole is selling out Madison Square Garden. Macklemore is doing a song about gay feelings. There are no more gatekeepers. People are creating their own rules.”
But even as Hip Hop grows to enormous heights, Kweli will always keep in mind the true spirit of the genre that will challenge those who attempt to denigrate Hip Hop and its artists.
“Hip Hop is everything. It connects. It’s a natural resource for people who have no resources.”
