Jayingee bass drop original song

THaT’S THE

JOInt!

RT9190_C00a_i-xvi 8/5/04 3:20 PM Page ii

ROUTLEDGE New York • London

THaT’S THE

JOInt! The Hip-Hop Studies Reader

Murray Forman & Mark Anthony Neal E D I T O R S

Published in 2004 by Routledge 270 Madison Avenue New York, NY 10016 www.routledge-ny.com

Published in Great Britain by Routledge 2 Park Square Milton Park, Abingdon Oxfordshire OX14 RN www.routledge.co.uk

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group.

© 2004 by Taylor & Francis Books, Inc.

Printed in the United States of America on acid free paper. Typesetting: Jack Donner, BookType.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

That's the joint! : the hip-hop studies reader / edited by Mark Anthony Neal and Murray Forman. p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-415-96918-2 (hardback : alk. paper) — ISBN 0-415-96919-0 (pbk. : alk. paper)

1. Rap (Music)—History and criticism. 2. Rap (Music)—Social aspects. 3. Hip-hop. I. Neal, Mark Anthony. II. Forman, Murray, 1959-

ML3531.T43 2004 782.421649'09—dc22

2004015140

RT9190_C00a_i-xvi 8/5/04 3:20 PM Page iv

Dedicated to the memory of

Jason “Jam Master Jay” Mizzel,

R.I.P.

RT9190_C00a_i-xvi 8/5/04 3:20 PM Page v

RT9190_C00a_i-xvi 8/5/04 3:20 PM Page vi

Foreword xi

Acknowledgments xv

Introduction 1 MURRAY FORMAN

Part I Hip-Hop Ya Don’t Stop: 9 Hip-Hop History and Historiography MURRAY FORMAN

1 Breaking 13 SALLY BANES

2 The Politics of Graffiti 21 CRAIG CASTLEMAN

3 Breaking: The History 31 MICHAEL HOLMAN

4 B-Beats Bombarding Bronx: Mobile DJ Starts Something 41 with Oldie R&B Disks ROBERT FORD, JR.

5 Jive Talking N.Y. DJs Rapping Away in Black Discos 43 ROBERT FORD, JR.

6 Hip-Hop’s Founding Fathers Speak the Truth 45 NELSON GEORGE

vii

Contents

RT9190_C00a_i-xvi 8/5/04 3:20 PM Page vii

Part II No Time for Fake Niggas: Hip-Hop Culture 57 and the Authenticity Debates MARK ANTHONY NEAL

7 The Culture of Hip-Hop 61 MICHAEL ERIC DYSON

8 Puerto Rocks: Rap, Roots, and Amnesia 69 JUAN FLORES

9 It’s a Family Affair 87 PAUL GILROY

10 Hip-Hop Chicano: A Separate but Parallel Story 95 RAEGAN KELLY

11 On the Question of Nigga Authenticity 105 R.A.T. JUDY

12 Looking for the “Real” Nigga: Social Scientists Construct the Ghetto 119 ROBIN D.G. KELLEY

13 About a Salary or Reality?—Rap’s Recurrent Conflict 137 ALAN LIGHT

14 The Rap on Rap: The “Black Music” that Isn’t Either 147 DAVID SAMUELS

Part III Ain’t No Love in the Heart of the City: 155 Hip-Hop, Space, and Place MURRAY FORMAN

15 Black Empires, White Desires: 159 The Spatial Politics of Identity in the Age of Hip-Hop DAVARIAN L. BALDWIN

16 Hip-Hop am Main, Rappin’ on the Tyne: Hip-Hop Culture as a 177 Local Construct in Two European Cities ANDY BENNETT

17 “Represent”: Race, Space, and Place in Rap Music 201 MURRAY FORMAN

18 Rap and Hip-Hop: The New York Connection 223 DICK HEBDIGE

19 Uptown Throwdown 233 DAVID TOOP

viii • CONTENTS

RT9190_C00a_i-xvi 8/5/04 3:20 PM Page viii

Part IV I’ll Be Nina Simone Defecating on Your Microphone: 247 Hip-Hop and Gender MARK ANTHONY NEAL

20 Translating Double-Dutch to Hip-Hop: 251 The Musical Vernacular of Black Girls’ Play KYRA D. GAUNT

21 Empowering Self, Making Choices, Creating Spaces: 265 Black Female Identity via Rap Music Performance CHERYL L. KEYES

22 Hip-Hop Feminist 277 JOAN MORGAN

23 Seeds and Legacies: Tapping the Potential in Hip-Hop 283 GWENDOLYN D. POUGH

24 Never Trust a Big Butt and a Smile 291 TRICIA ROSE

Part V The Message: Rap, Politics, and Resistance 307 MARK ANTHONY NEAL

25 Organizing the Hip-Hop Generation 311 ANGELA ARDS

26 Check Yo Self Before You Wreck Yo Self: 325 The Death of Politics in Rap Music and Popular Culture TODD BOYD

27 The Challenge of Rap Music from Cultural Movement 341 to Political Power BAKARI KITWANA

28 Rap, Race, and Politics 351 CLARENCE LUSANE

29 Postindustrial Soul: Black Popular Music at the Crossroads 363 MARK ANTHONY NEAL

Part VI Looking for the Perfect Beat: 389 Hip-Hop Aesthetics and Technologies of Production MURRAY FORMAN

30 Airshafts, Loudspeakers, and the Hip Hop Sample: 393 Contexts and African American Musical Aesthetics ANDREW BARTLETT

CONTENTS • ix

RT9190_C00a_i-xvi 8/5/04 3:20 PM Page ix

31 Public Enemy Confrontation 407 MARK DERY

32 Hip-Hop: From Live Performance to Mediated Narrative 421 GREG DIMITRIADIS

33 Sample This 437 NELSON GEORGE

34 “This Is a Sampling Sport”: Digital Sampling, 443 Rap Music, and the Law in Cultural Production THOMAS G. SCHUMACHER

35 Challenging Conventions in the Fine Art of Rap 459 RICHARD SHUSTERMAN

36 Hip-Hop and Black Noise: Raising Hell 481 RICKEY VINCENT

Part VII I Used to Love H.E.R.: 493 Hip-Hop in/and the Culture Industries MARK ANTHONY NEAL

37 Commercialization of the Rap Music Youth Subculture 497 M. ELIZABETH BLAIR

38 Dance in Hip-Hop Culture 505 KATRINA HAZZARD-DONALD

39 Wendy Day, Advocate for Rappers 517 NORMAN KELLEY

40 The Business of Rap: Between the Street and the Executive Suite 525 KEITH NEGUS

41 Contracting Rap: An Interview with Carmen Ashhurst-Watson 541 TRICIA ROSE

42 Black Youth and the Ironies of Capitalism 557 S. CRAIG WATKINS

43 Homies in The ’Hood: Rap’s Commodification of Insubordination 579 TED SWEDENBURG

44 An Exploration of Spectacular Consumption: 593 Gangsta Rap as Cultural Commodity ERIC K. WATTS

Permissions 611

Index 615

x • CONTENTS

RT9190_C00a_i-xvi 8/5/04 3:20 PM Page x

“Sir, please turn around and face me,” the airport security employee directed me. As I complied, he continued to methodically search me at the security checkpoint. He reminded me of my son, a tall taffy-faced figure who’d barely left his youth behind. As I caught his eyes when he frisked my outstretched arms, he whispered to me while keeping his professional demeanor.

“Man, I really feel your work on Pac,” he gently stated, referring to my book Holler If You Hear Me: Searching for Tupac Shakur. “Plus, I’ve seen Thug Angel and Tupac Vs.”—two documentaries on the slain rapper in which I’d participated—“and you be puttin’ it down.”

“May I please place my hands on your chest since my detector went off?” he quizzed me more formally without missing a beat. “Sure, no problem,” I replied. “That’s where my suspenders are. And I’m glad you like the work.” “Fo’ sho, fo’ sho’,” he said as he effortlessly slid back into his vernacular voice. “I’m just glad to know that somebody from your generation cares about Pac and hip-hop, and takes the time to listen to what we’re saying.”

“Alright, sir, I’m finished. You’re done. But could you do me a big favor?”“What’s that?” I asked. The young man retreated to a portable booth tucked away at the end of the security line

and fetched a dog-eared paperback copy of my book. “If you don’t mind, please sign this before you go.”

I was moved by his heartfelt compliments. I was even more touched by his eloquent rebuke of the view that his generation is illiterate and wholly fixed on destruction and mindless mate- rialism. We weren’t in school, and he wasn’t reading my book for a good grade or for extra credit. Like the best students, he read for passion, and for the pleasure and pursuit of critical stimulation. It seemed that he was hungry for a sign among intellectuals and older folk that the huge importance of hip-hop hadn’t been smothered by contempt, or just as bad, squandered by undiscriminating enthusiasm. And his delight in me taking Tupac seriously was an unspoken nod to the fierce crosswinds in which hip-hop is presently caught. There are some who dismiss hip-hop as the dead letter of brazen stereotype-mongering among the severely undereducated and their gaggle of learned and over-interpreting defenders. Other critics claim that the deficits of hip-hop are amplified because they blare beyond the borders of ugly art to inspire youth to even uglier behavior. And others protest that, stripped of politics, history, and racial conscience, hip-hop is little more than sonic pathology that blasts away all the achieve- ment of the civil rights struggle.

xi

Foreword

RT9190_C00a_i-xvi 8/5/04 3:20 PM Page xi

The academic study of hip-hop— like hip-hop itself— has been the subject of complaints even from its earliest days. By now, many of the complaints are familiar, even tired. But that hasn’t stopped their being repackaged every so often to track the sensational headlines that trumpet the moral transgressions or violent deaths that rattle the rap world. John McWhorter, who’s made a career in the public arena by twisting anecdotes of perceived black misbehavior into a questionable analysis of contemporary race, eloquently weighs in with lopsided moral- izing in the summer 2003 issue of City Journal. “By reinforcing the stereotypes that long hindered blacks,” McWhorter argues, “and by teaching young blacks that a thuggish adversarial stance is the properly ‘authentic’ response to a presumptively racist society, rap retards black success.” That’s an awfully big burden to carry—the fate of black success—especially for black youth (at least the ones who make a cameo in the anecdote that fronts McWhorter’s essay) who appear to McWhorter to embody the “antisocial behavior” encouraged by hardcore rap that preaches “bone-deep dislike of authority.”

Many critics, including McWhorter, don’t account for the complex ways that some hip-hop artists play with stereotypes to either subvert or reverse them. For instance, amidst all the pimp mythologies and metaphors that weigh heavily on branches of contemporary hip-hop, rappers like Common seize on pimpology’s prominence to poke fun at its pervasiveness. But its critics often fail to acknowledge that hip-hop is neither sociological commentary nor political criti- cism, though it may certainly function in these modes through its artists’ lyrics. Hip-hop is still fundamentally an art form that traffics in hyperbole, parody, kitsch, dramatic license, double entendres, signification, and other literary and artistic conventions to get its points across. By denying its musical and artistic merit, hip-hop’s critics get to have it both ways: they can deny the legitimate artistic standing of rap while seizing on its pervasive influence as an art form to prove what a terrible affect it has on youth. There are few parallels to this heavy- handed wrong-headedness in the criticism of other art forms like films, plays, or visual art, especially when they are authored by non-blacks. These cultural products are often conceded as art—even bad art, useless art, banal art, but art nonetheless—while there is a far greater consensus about hip-hop’s essential artlessness. That cultural bias—and unapologetic igno- rance—informs many assaults on the genre that reinforce the racial gulfs that feed rap’s resent- ment of the status quo.

Of course, not all the barbs aimed at hip-hop are meant exclusively for its artists. Some are directed at the post-civil rights era generation of Black academics who have been prominent in practicing the academic study of hip-hop. Thus, revered intellectuals and writers like Martin Kilson react angrily when they think intellectuals who engage hip-hop don’t embrace the values and styles of the civil rights movement. In an online journal of opinion, The Black Commentator, Kilson points to several articles from the post-civil rights black intelligentsia to prove that they are “tossing poisoned darts at African Americans’ mainline civil rights tradi- tion and its courageous leadership figures.” Kilson’s criticism of the post-civil rights era black intelligentsia includes a section taking me to task for an op-ed piece I wrote for the New York Times about the controversy surrounding the movie Barbershop (in which a character jokes about such civil rights era figures as Martin Luther King, Jr. and Rosa Parks). Kilson was part of that chorus of voices decrying the movie for its perceived “irreverence toward African- American civil rights leadership.”

Kilson’s view that movies like Barbershop—as well as hip-hop more generally—“serve as anti-Black ammunition for conservative opponents of African-Americans’ civil rights agenda.” is not unrepresentative of many older—and truth to be told, younger—black folks’ beliefs about hip-hop and those scholars associated with its defense. Many agree with Kilson that “there’s nothing whatever that’s seriously radical or progressive about hip-hop ideas and

xii • FOREWORD

Au: “every so often” meant?

Au: Not sure what is meant by “engage hip hop”

RT9190_C00a_i-xvi 8/5/04 3:20 PM Page xii

values.” Many support Kilson’s view that hip-hop is politically empty, and is little more “than an updated face on the old-hat, crude, anti-humanistic values of hedonism and materialism.”

Critics of hip-hop like Kilson make a point, of course—and it’s not a point that’s hard to make—that hip-hop is full of problematic expressions. It reeks of materialism; it gorges with stereotypes and offensive language; it spoils with retrogressive views; it is rife with hedonism; and it surely cannot always be said to side with humanistic values. But this argument demands little engagement with hip-hop; these views don’t require much beyond attending to surface symptoms of a culture that offers far more depth and color when it’s taken seriously and crit- icized in proper fashion. It is odd that gifted intellectuals should so resolutely stick to super- fluous observation, as if afraid of the intellectual credibility or complex truths they might find in a comprehensive study of hip-hop. It would be outlandish to comment on, say, metaphysical poetry without interacting critically with its most inspired poets. At least read Donne. And if one were to make hay over the virtues or deficits of nineteenth-century British poetry, or twen- tieth-century Irish poetry, then one should encounter the full range of Tennyson’s or Yeats’s work before jumping, or slouching, to conclusions.

Unfortunately, much of the source material for such a study of hip-hop is diffuse and hard to come by. Instead of meaningful critical inquiry we argue about op-eds—and not books. The major points in my New York Times op-ed on the brouhaha over Barbershop—stirred largely by civil rights leaders—were that films are not scholarly monographs; that folk have the right to express themselves, and if we don’t like it, we can criticize them or make our own films; that one film can’t possibly represent the entire black experience; that recent scholar- ship focused on mass movements in the civil rights era veered toward group dynamics being just as important as charismatic leadership; that civil rights organizations at their worst shut down free speech; that at their best barbershops offered politically incorrect black speech as a bonus of sheared hair; and that art is supposed to get in our faces and not simply soothe or reas- sure us. What critics of hip-hop miss by neglecting to make concrete engagement with hip- hop culture is the complexity of that culture. I’ve written a book on rapper Tupac Shakur and one on Dr. King. I don’t despise civil rights; I take it so seriously that I engage it at fair length, concluding that, despite his faults, King is the greatest American produced on our native soil!

Critics of hip-hop from an earlier generation, like Kilson, often work from an uniformed view of hip-hop culture and its critics—after all, those of us who study and write about hip-hop aren’t just fans. In fact, we sometimes make some of the same criticisms that Kilson and others make, but hopefully from a more informed perspective. What we need are more informed and extended analyses of hip-hop culture, and, for that matter, of civil rights leaders and move- ments. Unfortunately, there is little serious work from the critics of hip-hop that engages hip- hop with intellectual rigor, rather than knee-jerk negativism.

This opposition to the study of hip-hop is shared by other writers like Hugh Pearson, a Brown University graduate who is appalled by the fact that Ivy League schools would dare offer hip-hop courses. Writing in Newsday in the late summer of 2003, Pearson condemns Harvard for housing a hip-hop archive because its scholars deem the art form and culture on which it rests to be an important cultural phenomenon that is worthy of study. Pearson rails at rappers with “a tendency to compose ungrammatical lyrics flowing from the ungrammatical speech patterns that are standard for too many African-Americans.” Unlike earlier funk musicians, who “in those days no one considered . . . worthy of ‘study’ at a serious university,” Pearson is galled that the Ivy League “will now treat hip-hop as respectable.” Pearson has no sense of irony when he pinches a phrase from a man of manifest mediocrity—George W. Bush  who, in accepting the Republican nomination for the presidency at its 2000 convention, spoke of the “soft bigotry of low expectations.” It was an unintended autobiography in précis to be sure.

FOREWORD • xiii

Au: Personal attack appro- priate?

RT9190_C00a_i-xvi 8/5/04 3:20 PM Page xiii

Pearson samples the line to suggest that that’s what studying hip-hop in the academy amounts to, instead of a course of study that “extol[s] the positive elements of the African-American community,” and that, instead of “[raising] cultural standards . . . prefers to make chicken salad out of chicken necks.”

In putting down the study of hip-hop—and African-American Studies as well—critics like Pearson believe that it is simply unworthy of serious examination. But we should be willing to take a scholarly look at hip-hop for no other reason than the art form and culture has grabbed global attention and sparked emulation in countless different countries and among widely varied ethnicities. For example, when I was in Brazil recently and went to the “Black Six,” a hip-hop club in Rio, I might as well have been in Harlem or Philadelphia. We need to study the way that cultures of articulation and representation have traversed international boundaries and been adopted in fascinating manner in the languages and accents indigenous to their regions—this phenomenon alone is a cause of intellectual curiosity. Because they appear to be ashamed of hip-hop—a feeling shared by many blacks and others who decry the sordid images of hip-hop as the detritus of the culture that should be swept away with the garbage—critics of hip-hop culture are incapable of acknowledging just how interesting and insightful the study of rap has proven in various intellectual settings around the world. Pearson’s demand for an exemption from this trend in our nation’s most prestigious universities is an odd cry for remedial provincialism—a return to a climate of academic curiosity where only a narrow range of subjects could be legitimately pursued.

This brief genealogy of conflicts should show just why the book you hold in your hand is so critical. By taking the time to present a feverishly productive intellectual accounting of an equally fertile culture of expression, Murray Forman and Mark Anthony Neal have placed at our disposal some of the most intriguing engagements with hip-hop culture. The writers in this volume don’t shy away from probing the complex varieties of black identity, even those that skirt close to stereotype as they undress its mauling effects. The contributors to this volume dig deep into hip-hop’s rich traditions of expression to generate a criticism equal to the art that inspires it. And these writers have no shame in poring hard and long over hip-hop; assuming its intellectual value without being unduly defensive about its critical status is a shining virtue of the book.

Hip-hop is being studied all over the globe, and the methodologies of its examination are rightfully all over the map. They are multidisciplinary in edifying, exemplary fashion, borrowing from sociology, politics, religion, economics, urban studies, journalism, commu- nications theory, American studies, transatlantic studies, black studies, history, musicology, comparative literature, English, linguistics, and many more disciplines besides. This book makes it plain that hip-hop is no fad, either culturally or intellectually, and that its best artists and intellectuals are as capable of stepping back and critiquing its flows and flaws as the most astute observers and participants in any other genre of musical or critical endeavor. As the academic study of hip-hop enters a new phase—as it matures and expands, as it deepens and opens up even broader avenues of investigation—it needs a summary text, one that captures the many sided features of a dynamic culture that demands rigorous criticism and considera- tion. That’s what you’ve got in your hands. This is an intellectual mix-tape that heads from all over can feel and learn from each time they take a listen and give a read. It has the same features of the best hip-hop: seductive rhythms, throbbing beats, intelligent lyrics, soulful samples, and a sense of joy that is never exhausted in one sitting. So, like the hottest joints, sit down and savor the vibe of this heady and heartfelt compilation.

Michael Eric Dyson

xiv • FOREWORD

Au: “raff” cor- rect word?

Au: Most, not all?

RT9190_C00a_i-xvi 8/5/04 3:20 PM Page xiv

We are grateful to the numerous individuals who expressed their encouragement and offered their assistance in preparing the manuscript for That’s the Joint! In assembling the essays, we have attempted to be as inclusive as possible; our apologies to several authors who offered their permission to include previously published articles but whose work was ultimately excluded due to prohibitive reprint costs. Thanks are due to the authors who, when contacted, went out of their way to personally assist us, or helped in negotiations with their publishers: Andrew Bartlett, Todd Boyd, Mark Dery, Greg Dimitriadis, Juan Flores, Paul Gilroy, Michael Holman, Cheryl Keyes, Bakari Kitwana, Gwendolyn Pough, Tricia Rose, David Toop, and Rickey Vincent.

Shout outs to: Marcyliena Morgan of the Hip-Hop Archive at Harvard University (espe- cially for hosting the symposium “All Eyez on Me: Tupac Shakur and the Search for a Modern Folk Hero,” where several of the authors represented in these pages convened), Knut Aukrust (Oslo, Norway), Michael Eric Dyson (Philadelphia), Emmett Price III (Boston), and Tony Mitchell (holding fort Down Under). “Big Up” to the Northeastern University Hip-Hop Studies Collective: E. P. III, Paul K. Saucier, Geoff Ward, Alan West-Duran, and Nadine Yaver.

The Department of Communication Studies, Northeastern University, provided support in the book’s early stages, and we thank the department chair, P. David Marshall, and the admin- istrative staff and work study students for their assistance in the manuscript’s preparation. Thanks to Amy Rodriguez for editing assistance, and Matt Byrnie and Mark Henderson of Taylor and Francis for shepherding the project through. Special thanks to Zamawa Arenas for her enduring grace.

Murray Forman Boston

xv

Acknowledgments

RT9190_C00a_i-xvi 8/5/04 3:20 PM Page xv

RT9190_C00a_i-xvi 8/5/04 3:20 PM Page xvi

These words we say, we want y’all to hear We’re gonna make a lot of sense—we’re gonna make it clear . . .

. . . We’re gonna rock this record and don’t you forget Ah, that’s the joint

“That’s the Joint” by The Funky Four + One (1980, Sugar Hill Records)

In his 1995 paean “Old School” (1995, Interscope), Tupac Shakur pays tribute to hip-hop’s formative stages and its pioneers with detailed references to everyday teen practices, clothing styles, and a general attitude or way of being as the cultural underpinnings of hip-hop took shape almost twenty years prior. Calling out to New York City’s boroughs, he identifies the locus of hip-hop’s origins, proclaiming gratitude to rap music’s innovators and citing the essential contribution of local radio stations, DJs, or nightclubs. He also explicitly describes the urban perambulation and mobility of subway rides between Brooklyn and Harlem and the social cohesion of neighborhood block parties “in the projects,” noting in his lyrics that early hip-hop was the product of overlapping influences as teens from different neighborhoods moved across the city, mingling in formal and informal urban spaces—literally inhabiting both aboveground and underground environments.

When Shakur intones the phrase “Forget the TV, about to hit the streets and do graffiti / Be careful don’t let the transit cops see me,” he explains that early hip-hop was characterized by public actions that were, in many cases, simultaneously accompanied by risks of varying severity. From this vantage, hip-hop can be seen as a series of practices with an evolved history and the ongoing potential to challenge both social norms and legal stricture; in hip- hop, there are always stakes of crucial importance. The song’s hook, woven throughout the track in the sampled voice of MC Grand Puba of the rap group Brand Nubian from their recording “Dedication,” summarizes the debt and gratitude owed to hip-hop’s creative trailblazers and its early supporters: “What more can I say? I wouldn’t be here today if the old school didn’t pave the way.”

In ways similar to those uttered in Shakur’s “Old School,” contemporary scholars might recognize their own debt to hip-hop’s pioneering authors and cultural critics. Since hip-hop’s

1

Introduction

Murray Forman

RT9190_C00b_1-8 8/5/04 11:52 AM Page 1

inception in the uptown boroughs of New York, there has emerged a considerable body of written work about the cultural practices and informing attitudes that comprise a hip-hop way of life. For example, in 1978, Billboard, the music industry’s main trade magazine, printed a short article about the localized phenomenon of DJ street parties and the growing prestige of pioneer DJ Kool Herc, whose music and performance innovations were generating excite- ment among uptown audiences at the time. Appearing under the title “B-Beats Bombarding Bronx,” Robert Ford, Jr.’s, auspicious article reported that, following Herc’s lead, “other Bronx DJs have picked up the practice and now B-Beats are the rage all over the borough and the practice is spreading rapidly” (1978: 65). Although it took a few more years for academics to catch on, journalists working the culture beat began following this underground music (even before it was known as “rap”) and the attendant cultural practices of break dancing (or B- boying) and graffiti. Attesting to the swift increase of mainstream media coverage, Judy McCoy’s library reference guide Rap Music in the 1980s (1992) provides a date-specific list graphically displaying the proliferation of rap reviews, artist interviews or profile pieces, and industry analysis.

In their writing, journalists charted the entrepreneurial and artistic personalities involved, the rise of a vital and ever-shifting club scene, and rap and hip-hop’s gradual expansion beyond the narrow enclaves of the Bronx and Harlem. The contributions of several of these pioneering authors, including Robert Ford, Jr., Nelson George, Sally Banes, and Michael Holman, are included in That’s the Joint! Today, this trend continues in the writing of, to name but a few, Jon Caramanica, Davey D, Kevin Powell, Kelefa Sanneh, and Toure who write about hip-hop for the daily press, specialty magazines, and dedicated Web sites. Benchmark films such as Charlie Ahearn’s Wild Style and Tony Silver and Henry Chalfant’s Style Wars, both released in 1982, or The Show (1995), directed by Brian Robbins, and Peter Spirer’s Rhyme & Reason (1997), further circulated the images, sounds, and sensibilities of early hip-hop, providing important documentation of the era, as does Doug Pray’s more recent production, Scratch (2002), a documentary about early DJs and contemporary “turntablists.”

The emergence of academically oriented approaches to hip-hop culture is most often traced to the 1984 publication of David Toop’s Rap Attack: African Jive to New York Hip-Hop and Steven Hager’s Hip Hop: The Illustrated History of Break Dancing, Rap Music, and Graffiti. They, and others in rapid succession, presented a focused examination of the cultural contexts within which hip-hop evolved and flourished. Though there was often a limiting sense of analytic scope (with many early writers fixating on the culture’s marginal status, advancing disputable claims about hip-hop’s ostensibly organic roots in a ghetto poverty that were, some argued, disconnected from systems of commerce), these first scholarly forays remain valuable to the contemporary perspective on how hip-hop was viewed at the time and the prevailing sense of its impact and importance in that nascent era. Far from simply seeming outdated, this initial writing on hip-hop still offers historical information that is worth contemplating as today’s scholars and young hip-hop “heads” attempt to appraise the current cultural land- scape and, tentatively, predict hip-hop’s next phase of reinvention.

Paraphrasing Chuck D of Public Enemy, despite relative antagonism and constraint through the 1990s, hip-hop rapidly “bum rushed” the halls of higher education. When, in regard to rap recordings, Paul Gilroy admits, “I don’t think anyone actually knows what the totality of its hyperactivity looks like . . . I can’t keep up with the volume of hip-hop product anymore” (1992: 309), he could just as easily be addressing the contemporary outpouring of articles and books about rap and hip-hop that have circulated into the public sphere through scholarly journals and academic presses. In the eyes of some traditionalists and conservative intellectuals, this new area of study posed a challenge to the hegemony of prevailing academic standards and disrupted disciplinary norms, facilitating comparisons with the far earlier stance of critic Bernard Rosenberg (1957), who cautioned against the worrisome academic

2 • MURRAY FORMAN

RT9190_C00b_1-8 8/5/04 11:52 AM Page 2

incursions of popular culture research in the 1950s, or Allan Bloom, whose 1987 book The Closing of the American Mind focused specifically on what he perceived were the erosive influ- ences of popular music among students. Today, having gained a certain respectability and reputation for analytic rigor—having paid its dues and earned its keep—scholarly work on hip-hop is considerably less marginalized within the university.

The “new black intelligentsia,” of which Todd Boyd, Michael Eric Dyson, Robin D. G. Kelley, Mark Anthony Neal, and Tricia Rose are among the most conspicuous members, demonstrates a clear understanding of, and affinity with hip-hop. In the writing and lectures of a growing number of progressive black thinkers—not all of whom toil in the university system—there is general concurrence that hip-hop represents an extension of specifically African American cultural traditions but, importantly, it also poses challenges and introduces ruptures to prevailing notions of an unbroken cultural continuum; in this context, Boyd’s The New H.N.I.C.: The Death of Civil Rights and the Reign of Hip Hop (2002) is a particularly compelling text. Displaying intellectual dexterity while holding hip-hop itself under a harsh critical light, contemporary scholars across the cultural spectrum frequently employ many of hip-hop’s inherent strategies that include appropriating and reincorporating academic theo- ries and elucidating the contemporary cultural condition in language that is simultaneously learned and hip. A further prominent indicator of the academic embrace of hip-hop may be witnessed in the establishment of various institutes and research centers, including the founding of the Hiphop Archive housed in the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research at Harvard University. Drawing on the institution’s deep resource base to host hip-hop luminaries such as pioneering DJ Afrika Bambaataa and scholars from across the United States, the Harvard-based archive illustrates that hip-hop’s social impact and cultural contributions are far too important for teachers and students to ignore and, moreover, avoiding them would be irresponsible since literally millions of people world wide are influenced by hip-hop on a daily basis.

With That’s the Joint!, we assert that research and writing, whether in journalistic or academic contexts, is absolutely part of the wider hip-hop culture. Analyzing, theorizing, and writing about hip-hop are also forms of cultural labor and should accordingly be regarded as consequen- tial facets of hip-hop. Hip-hop’s first chroniclers were always more than dispassionate objec- tive observers. They were in many cases fully implicated in the emergent culture of hip-hop, circulating within the same social circles as the prime innovators and entrepreneurs, and they counted themselves among the earliest audience members who cohered at both formal and informal events. Many of today’s hip-hop scholars started as journalists, covering hip-hop in their local press, spinning records on campus–community radio stations, writing record reviews, or documenting the proliferating national hip-hop scenes, and many continue to navigate between the media and academia. As a generation of scholars steeped in hip-hop’s cultural influences graduated into tenure track positions, teaching students in their teens and twenties who have never known a world without hip-hop, the dynamic interrelations and productive overlay between academic and nonacademic spaces have become more obvious. That’s the Joint! ideally inhabits this liminal zone where the ’hood and the university converge.

A cursory search of the Internet reveals dozens of undergraduate courses and graduate seminars exclusively focused on hip-hop, and there are scores of single-class modules in a wide range of contexts addressing hip-hop themes and issues. The subtitled reference to “hip- hop studies” in That’s the Joint! is intentional, advanced with full awareness that, although there is not yet an institutionalized subdiscipline called “hip-hop studies,” there is a plethora of hip-hop research across the disciplines and the volume and sophistication of work in various university departments is consistently increasing. Although hip-hop is most frequently analyzed and discussed within the disciplinary contours of African-American studies or popular music studies, it also represents a growing area of research in American studies,

INTRODUCTION • 3

RT9190_C00b_1-8 8/5/04 11:52 AM Page 3

cultural studies, communications and media studies, English, ethnic studies, performance studies, sociology, and women’s studies. Published writing on rap and hip-hop culture consti- tutes the new entrant in these fields, jostling against more conventional works. The majority of essays and articles in That’s the Joint! were selected by surveying references and citations in published hip-hop research in order to gauge the utility of specific essays. This approach was augmented by a review of roughly seventy-five course syllabi and an assessment of readings assigned to students across academic disciplines.

Still, despite its gains in the academy, hip-hop scholarship often remains a peripheral concern among those outside the university—the students enrolled in advanced seminars in “the school of hard knocks”—who tend to experience hip-hop most intensely and who most ardently reproduce the cultural practices and discourses “in the ’hood,” which remains the center of hip-hop’s production and its symbolic source of meaning and value. There is frequently a defensive attitude expressed among the youth of the extended and variegated hip- hop community that is articulated as skepticism for scholarly engagements with hip-hop. For youth who are most explicitly identified with hip-hop’s cultural forms, claims made for and about hip-hop by professors occupying academia’s “ivory towers” or “hallowed halls” are frequently met with suspicion, if not outright derision. It is not rare, for instance, to hear critiques among young constituents of “the hip-hop nation” who are convinced that profes- sors with little or no connection to “the ’hood” and, thus, lacking in “street credibility” in their view, are exploiting the culture in order to identify with something cool, exciting, “fresh,” or “phat.” This viewpoint, inscribed at its worst with a palpable anti-intellectual disdain, suggests that university and college teachers are often most interested in translating hip-hop’s cultural forms and practices into abstract theoretical jargon, building their academic careers on the backs of MCs, DJs, B-boys and graffiti artists who forge the objects of scholarly research.

These criticisms are not always without merit; the main criticism voiced among the self- appointed guardians of hip-hop is that scholars, whether consciously or not, often exert their relative authority when conducting research and publishing their findings, and they are eminently capable of appropriating dimensions of hip-hop according to personal or profes- sional agendas. As hip-hop has evolved as a significant—and lucrative—facet of the enter- tainment industry, emerging as a profoundly influential commercial and cultural force, it has been taken up as a topic of academic inquiry with greater enthusiasm. Yet just as a new gener- ation of artists capitalized on the enhanced value of, for example, rap music or ’hood films in the popular market, so, too, did hip-hop’s journalists and scholarly writers proliferate, attaining social status as hip-hop commentators, cultural critics, and professional experts. Mirroring patterns in the recording and film industries and the magazine publishing sector throughout the 1990s, scholarly research on hip-hop also constituted a growth sector among academic publishers and university presses. Hip-hop scholarship, then, is not simply an unin- vested or benign study of cultural formations and social practices; it cannot be excluded from the commercial corporate systems through which hip-hop has been constructed, projected, or amplified on the local, regional, national, or global scale. As Tupac Shakur’s “Old School” reminds us, hip-hop’s cultural practices are thoroughly traced with stakes of varying conse- quence, and the same holds true for hip-hop scholarship.

The university is surely (and thankfully) not the central site or driving force in contempo- rary hip-hop culture, yet the work that is taking place in its classrooms is not without stakes. As hip-hop evolves as a regular facet of university curricula it is essential to acknowledge and critique the role of academics in shaping public knowledge about hip-hop. Academics and journalists—in their own ways and in their own far-too-disconnected domains—function as gatekeepers of sorts; gatekeepers of knowledge certainly, but also gatekeepers of discourse. This is to concede that, whether aggressively or through more passive forms, boundaries of language and expression within which the world is made meaningful are being circumscribed.

4 • MURRAY FORMAN

RT9190_C00b_1-8 8/5/04 11:52 AM Page 4

As hip-hop passes the first quarter century of existence, it is important to address the ways in which knowledge of the culture is constructed, how the character of hip-hop’s myriad prac- tices are framed and conveyed both to a general public and to a core of deeply invested partic- ipants who, for those working within the academy, are also our students. The articles selected for That’s the Joint! reflect the disparate discursive patterns through which hip-hop has been addressed, presenting ideas and terminology that may converge in a form of dialogue, but that may also collide and conflict.

Another outcome of hip-hop’s academic study is the formation of what might reasonably be termed a “hip-hop canon,” encompassing key written works and dominant research themes that are identified with influential scholars. Rap music is so sufficiently established that few hardcore defenders of hip-hop would dispute that, for example, Eric B and Rakim’s Paid in Full (1987, Island Records) or Public Enemy’s It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back (1988, Def Jam) are hip-hop classics, essential listening, must-have cultural commodities, but it is unlikely that the same would be said of Tricia Rose’s go-to text Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America (1994). The hip-hop “canon” is not a widely discussed topic, but it is emerging in much the same way that rock or jazz studies evolved, with several key texts becoming enshrined in various forms, not least of which includes course syllabi and academic reading lists. Just as the durability and tenacity of hip-hop and rap annoyed and impressed individuals in the culture industries, so, too, has hip-hop endured in relation to the academy. In this context, if hip-hop’s cultural producers and earnest constituents “bring the noise” in a maelstrom of beats and rhymes, then academic writers in corresponding fashion “bring the canons.” This notion of a hip-hop research canon isolates attention on the academic literature that attempts to explain, define, theorize, and culturally locate hip-hop in relation to myriad factors such as industry structures, policy and regula- tions, social practices, and collective and subjective identity formation.

Lillian Robinson writes that the canon “is the set of books that make up the Book. This inclusion has a basis in scholarship, the application of certain standards . . . to a text” (1997: 142). For Henry Louis Gates, Jr., a canon serves a unifying function as “the commonplace book of our shared culture” (1992: 21), although rigorous and sophisticated analytical perspectives must prevail, for as Gates emphasizes, the canon is also structured on a firm foun- dation of intellectual “soundness” (1992: 39). Examples of speculative or anecdotal texts on hip-hop abound, and some of these (Light, 1999; Fricke and Ahearn, 2002) are invaluable sources of information, but there is also a solid research corpus displaying rigor, analytical sophistication, and “intellectual soundness.” These brief definitions of canonicity are impor- tant to hip-hop and the study of its cultural practices because, for whatever else can be said of canon formation, it is a productive enterprise: it produces a sense of history and evolution and it also produces values.

In assembling the articles in That’s the Joint! we have remained mindful of the complexi- ties of adjudicating the “soundness” of hip-hop writing, self-reflexively assessing our own biases in the evaluation of “standards.” This process also reminds us that there are important stakes involved in scholarly writing about hip-hop and in the inclusion of books and articles in course syllabi and curricula, reinforcing the awareness that power is a factor of crucial importance in the “the distribution of cultural capital” and the attendant processes of “exclu- sion” and “selection” (Guillory, 1993: 6). As university and college educators labor over the definition of their own standards of research rigor or, in preparation of course syllabi, they debate the value and utility of one book or article over another, it is imperative that the power and authority infused in this process is not ignored.

The term “hip-hop nation” has emerged as a cultural commonplace, employed in reference to a relatively coherent social entity founded in shared interests or values and collective prac- tices that bind constituents within a symbolic unity. This “nation” is not precisely placed,

INTRODUCTION • 5

RT9190_C00b_1-8 8/5/04 11:52 AM Page 5

lacking agreed-upon boundaries or other demarcating features, but is, in its fuller sense, akin to Benedict Anderson’s (1983) concept of “imagined communities.” In Anderson’s view, national consciousness has been historically related to the rise of “vernacular print markets,” “print capitalism,” and publishing initiatives supporting a sense of shared identification. As he explains, in more recent times educational systems and the mass media have figured promi- nently in the manufacture and circulation of nationalist ideologies, diffusing the dominant ideals of “the nation” and establishing its resonant discourses, symbols, and icons.

If there is to be any more talk of the hip-hop nation, then it might be time to speak also of an emergent national literature and press and the possible—even accidental—formation of a canon within which themes and symbols, the circulation of shared knowledge and tradi- tions, are identified, analyzed, and disseminated. As Stephen Gray explains, there is a process by which a literature “comes into its own”:

not just in terms of a prescribable number of acceptably “great” works, but in terms of the whole nexus that supports a literature—its own publishing industry, including newspapers, magazines, and journals, its own self-referencing use of language, its mutual understanding of a set of enfolded norms and values, its own context of myth about the past and the present, its theoretical wing of evaluators like ourselves, its sense of settling in to keep doing a job that has to be continually done, and—most important of all—its own community of readership or audience, which receives the work and feeds back into it reciprocally. (Gray, 1984: 228)

That’s the Joint! is conceived within this elaborated cultural framework that shapes the thinking and writing about hip-hop. This book is deliberately heterogeneous, reflecting the diverse and complex character of hip-hop culture, and in presenting historical, theoretical, and journalistic assessments, it adheres to themes and patterns that have defined the study and analysis of hip-hop since its inception. By integrating writing from the popular and acad- emic realms, a clearer picture emerges of what hip-hop is and how it is socially meaningful among its active producers and, in the commercial contexts of the culture industries, among its active audiences.

That’s the Joint! includes essays both by authors who are renowned in the area of hip-hop studies and others who, in the early stages of their careers, are lesser known. Some of the work published here is widely acknowledged among hip-hop scholars as groundbreaking research, yet we have also seen fit to reproduce more obscure essays and journalistic reports in order to provide a comprehensive and well-rounded compendium. The articles included in That’s the Joint! fall under two categories: scholarly writing that is frequently cited in hip-hop research, and popular reporting that is exemplary in its capacity to convey the character or contempo- raneous impact of hip-hop practices at particular moments.

The first part of this book simultaneously isolates hip-hop history and its historiography. Encompassing journalistic and historical research, these chapters establish a setting within which to conceive hip-hop’s formative stages and to observe the manner in which early writers approached the emergent culture and its diffuse practices. In the second part, the persistent theme of authenticity in hip-hop is under analysis. As hip-hop has evolved into an important commercial enterprise within the entertainment industries, the authenticity debates have intensified; similarly, as a growing number of individuals identify themselves in and through hip-hop’s customs, the question of cultural rites of passage, commitments, and belonging urgently arise. The issue of authenticity is most often articulated within the discourse of “the real,” a ubiquitous expression that encompasses material and symbolic essences and that is, as these chapters illustrate, primarily traced across the social variables of race, class, and location.

6 • MURRAY FORMAN

RT9190_C00b_1-8 8/5/04 11:52 AM Page 6

The spatial politics of hip-hop are the object of analysis in the third part. Although hip-hop has always displayed a pronounced spatiality, there has been an ongoing process of transfor- mation, particularly as the identification with localized places and the cultural sphere of “the ’hood” have attained greater importance and urgency. As the chapters in this part suggest, urban space and place are inscribed with competing social values and are sharply defined by the expression of power and authority. The manner in which hip-hop’s cultural practitioners portray these cultural spaces and the struggles occurring within them is, thus, a pressing issue in hip-hop scholarship.

Women in hip-hop and the enunciation of gender politics comprise the analytical core of the fourth part. Hip-hop’s masculine expressivity is well documented, constituting the domi- nant voice in the articulation of gender identities. Indeed, the most ferocious attacks on hip- hop often focus on gender issues, with the most vehement opposition targeting rap lyrics and film or video images that feature sexist or misogynist content. The authors in this part adopt an important feminist critique that probes the social characteristics informing black female prac- tices or identities and, through their interrogation of power relations and social structures of male hegemony, they extend the range of perspectives through which hip-hop is rendered meaningful.

The fifth part focuses on the political realities and future political potentials of “the hip-hop generation.” Hip-hop has maintained a striking capacity for political insight and social critique, evident in such rap recordings as the 1980 single “How We Gonna Make the Black Nation Rise?” (Clappers) by Brother D and Collective Effort, Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five’s classic track “The Message” (Sugar Hill) from 1982, or the posse cut “Self- Destruction” (Jive) recorded in 1989 by a fellowship of MCs united under the title The Stop the Violence Movement. Through the 1990s, hip-hop’s political qualities emerged as a major force, influencing youths across racial, spatial, and class boundaries. The chapters in this part isolate the issues of cultural struggle and resistance as they are expressed by the hip-hop gener- ation, exploring the political conflict and collaboration that have, at various times, determined hip-hop’s development.

Hip-hop aesthetics and technology and cultural production are the main themes in parts six and seven, respectively. In the sixth part, the essays explore hip-hop’s creative processes and the various aesthetic considerations influencing rap music production, elaborating on both the kinds of technology employed and the logic of technological appropriation that are fundamental to the sonic construction of rap tracks. In the seventh part hip-hop’s prodigious creative output is associated with the rationalized apparatuses of the culture industries. Through political economic analyses and interviews with key representatives of the enter- tainment industry, these chapters present a thorough assessment of hip-hop as a living culture and as a commodified set of cultural practices, detailing the fundamental issues as hip-hop is incorporated into the global flow of commercial sounds and images.

That’s the Joint! is not the final word on hip-hop scholarship; rather, it is an accumulation of essays and articles that, from the first written words on hip-hop, have addressed its main themes and debates. This book is designed to introduce students to some of the prominent authors in hip-hop studies and to provide a coherent collection of writing that reflects a wide range of issues and the diverse ways of contemplating them. In our efforts to produce a concise, usable text for hip-hop scholars we have attempted to represent the impact of hip-hop on multiple sectors of social life and its significance in multiple academic disciplines.

References

Anderson, Benedict. 1983. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. New York: Verso.

Bloom, Allan. 1987. The Closing of the American Mind. New York: Simon and Schuster.

INTRODUCTION • 7

AU: I don’t see this 1997 ref cited in text—either cite it or delete it

RT9190_C00b_1-8 8/5/04 11:52 AM Page 7

Boyd. Todd. 2002. The New H.N.I.C.: The Death of Civil Rights and the Reign of Hip Hop. New York: New York University Press.

Ford, Robert, Jr. 1978. “B-Beats Bombarding Bronx.” Billboard (July 1): 65. Fricke, Jim, and Charlie Ahearn. 2002. Yes Yes Y’All: The Experience Music Project Oral History of Hip-

Hop’s First Decade. Cambridge, Mass.: Da Capo Press. Gates, Jr., Henry Louis. 1992. Loose Canons: Notes on the Culture Wars. New York: Oxford University

Press. Gilroy, Paul. 1992. “It’s a Family Affair.” In Black Popular Culture, edited by Gina Dent, pp. 303–316.

Seattle: Bay Press. Gray, Stephen. 1984. “A Sense of Place in New Literatures, Particularly South African English.” World

Literature Written in English, 24, no. 2 (Autumn): 224–231. Guillory, John. 1993. Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation. Chicago: University of

Chicago Press. Hager, Steven. 1984. Hip Hop: The Illustrated History of Break Dancing, Rap Music, and Graffiti. New

York: St. Martin’s Press. Light, Alan, ed. 1999. The Vibe History of Hip Hop. New York: Three Rivers Press. McCoy, Judy. 1992. Rap Music in the 1980s: A Reference Guide. Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press. Robinson, Lillian. 1997. In the Canon’s Mouth: Dispatches from the Culture Wars. Bloomington: Indiana

University Press. Rose, Tricia. 1994. Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America. Hanover:

Wesleyan University Press. Rosenberg, Bernard. 1957. “Mass Culture in America” In Mass Culture: The Popular Arts in America,

edited by Bernard Rosenberg and David Manning White, pp. 3–12. New York: Free Press. Toop, David. 1984. The Rap Attack: African Jive to New York Hip-Hop. Boston: South End Press.

8 • MURRAY FORMAN

AU: add page span within this book

RT9190_C00b_1-8 8/5/04 11:52 AM Page 8

“Back in the day” has emerged as a common expression within hip-hop, most frequently employed to describe the past and to mark moments in the evolution of the hip-hop culture. The phrase is often imbued with a certain nostalgia, acknowledging benchmarks, transitional phases, or influential aesthetic innovations realized within general historical contexts. Yet for all of its rhetorical potency and casual utility it remains an inexact expression, like a form of shorthand that communicates information but lacks precision or accuracy. Over the years the phrase has been applied widely and wildly, and it is not rare to hear narratives about 1970s Bronx block parties, the 1982 release of Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five’s “The Message” (Sugar Hill), the 1988 rise of N.W.A., or the 1993 launch of Bad Boy Entertainment, all framed as occurrences from “back in the day,” depending on one’s generational vantage.

Although hip-hop’s formation is the topic of considerable scholarly analysis (Toop, 1984; Hebdige, 1987; Rose, 1994; Forman, 2002) there is significant value in revisiting hip-hop’s histo- riography, including articles published in an industry trade magazine such as Billboard or in the popular press, including The Source (which bills itself as “the magazine of hip-hop music, culture, and politics”). Essays and social commentary written about the New York City hip-hop scene in the late 1970s and early 1980s offer what Mark Anthony Neal describes as “a real time feel,” evoking the crackling energies and broader sensibilities of an emergent cultural sector. Although they may opt for a temporal perspective—positioning the erupting hip-hop phenomena within a historical context—these writings benefit from an immediacy and proximity to events, detailing transitional forces at the instant they occur. They isolate key elements of innovation and sociocultural change, providing insights on the undulating composition of the cultural terrain and identifying the ruptures from which hip-hop’s alternative practices emanated.

The evolution of hip-hop corresponds with cultural theorist Raymond Williams’s observation that the process of “formal innovation” is gradual, and although “residual” cultural practices from prior eras continue, new “emergent” cultural forms and practices may arise that challenge or disrupt the cultural dominant. Hip-hop constitutes an emergent cultural form, but so, too, does early writing about hip-hop, for as Williams explains in reference to innovation and emer- gent cultural forms,

there are always important works which belong to these very early stages of particular forms, and it is easy to miss their formal significance by comparison with preceding or succeeding mature examples.... It is then easy to miss one of the key elements in cultural production: innovation as it is happening; innovation in process. (1981: 200)

9

Part I Hip-Hop Ya Don’t Stop:

Hip-Hop History and Historiography

Murray Forman

RT9190_P01_9-56 8/5/04 11:53 AM Page 9

Though written well before hip-hop’s influence and authority were guaranteed—when the shouted declaration “hip-hop, it don’t stop” expressed a combination of defensiveness and willful optimism—the articles featured here reflect an awareness that change was stirring. They offer a chronicle of an era when hip-hop still constituted an unknown “emergent” force that was being processed and aligned with prevailing cultural experiences and meanings. These arti- cles and essays are, thus, also crucial facets of hip-hop’s emergent cultural practices.

The chapters in this section are written by some of hip-hop’s earliest commentators who observed and participated in its cultural manifestation. They present documentation of hip- hop’s formative moments while reacquainting us with the operative discourses and visual descriptions of hip-hop in its primary stages. This is not abstract history written from secondary sources, but a series of accounts framed by writers and critics whose immediate environments were under radical revision as hip-hop’s style, vernacular, and sensibilities spread, soon informing the lingua franca of an entire generation.

Sally Banes was an early commentator during hip-hop’s formative stages, reporting in the New York press on the rise of breaking and the convergence between B-boying and the related elements of hip-hop including “graffiti” and “verbal dueling” (Banes, 1981: 32). As she observes, breaking began as an articulation of physical presence featuring equal doses of competition and visual display. It was—and remains—an expression of style, which, among its young B-boy leaders, is clearly related to status and social profile. From its beginning, breaking formed a link between the street and the nightclub, and it was a crucial factor in hip-hop’s transition from the underground environment, including subway platforms and neighborhood parks, to the mass-mediated realm of mainstream culture. Breaking rapidly ascended in the popular imagination following a barrage of media exposure, first on the pages of urban news- papers and later in several low-budget Hollywood films (such as Flashdance, 1983; Breakin’, 1984; Breakin’ 2: Electric Boogaloo, 1984; and Beat Street, 1984). Banes also emphasizes the communal character of early B-boy crews and the formation of organized collectives that devel- oped within a coherent system of training, competitions, and show-downs. Arguably faster than any other aspect of hip-hop, breaking acquired a formal infrastructure that was as dynamic as some of the floor moves executed by the young B-boys.

Craig Castleman provides an impressively explicit synopsis of graffiti’s rise and evolution in New York City, commencing with the obscure but ubiquitous tags by “TAKI 183” in 1971. As he explains, graffiti rapidly expanded from a casual urban youth practice to a fully evolved cultural pastime, simultaneously acquiring the status as a point of crisis and moral panic among civic authorities. As graffiti was politicized, its young perpetrators were concurrently demonized, pathologized, and criminalized, leading conservative critic Nathan Glazer to claim:

while I do not find myself consciously making the connection between graffiti-makers and the criminals who occasionally rob, rape, assault, and murder [subway] passengers, the sense that all are part of one world of uncontrollable predators seems inescapable. (1979: 4)

Castleman’s chapter offers a convincing explanation of the processes by which young black and Puerto Rican youths were defensively positioned against state power and, as graffiti evolved, its youth practitioners were increasingly placed under police surveillance and constraint. Indeed, this narrative offers a detailed account of the tensions between New York’s youth and the city’s authority structure that has endured in hip-hop to this day and that has been reproduced throughout the nation and in urban centers around the world wherever hip-hop has taken root. Castleman’s perceptive analysis also links the antigraffiti crusade to a narrow, genteel urban aesthetic and internal administrative agendas involving, among other things, budgetary battles pertaining to New York’s Metropolitan Transit Authority expenditures. The harsh punitive measures targeting mainly blacks and Latinos through much of the 1970s and

10 • MURRAY FORMAN

RT9190_P01_9-56 8/5/04 11:53 AM Page 10

early 1980s, along with the implementation of subway “buffing” and cleaning technologies, altered the cultural climate and eventually ended the “golden age” of subway graffiti in New York.

Offering a concise overview of breaking (or B-boying), Michael Holman’s historical analysis connects the athletic practice to dance styles and cultural traditions spanning several conti- nents and two centuries. He conjoins the global and the local, indicating the ways in which cultural influences flow across borders and are appropriated in highly particularized conditions. Holman, who reported on the early hip-hop scene and promoted performances at the infamous Negril nightclub, was ideally situated to observe the formation of pioneering B-boy crews who reveled in the simultaneous development of new, innovative moves and the opportunities to show them off in aggressive B-boy competitions with other New York crews. Through his words, the image of a complex system of urban movement and participation emerges. Holman also profiles several of the B-boy innovators whose skill and artistry were influential in opening new opportunities for MCs, DJs, graffiti artists, and B-boys throughout New York.

In two brief articles that were among the first reports on hip-hop in the music industry’s primary trade magazine Billboard, Robert “Rocky” Ford, Jr., provides first-person accounts of the nascent DJ scene in the Bronx. The location and character of DJ and MC parties, as well as record stores selling the recorded material underlying the DJ’s work, are locally situated and Ford’s reports reinforce the fact that, in 1978–1979, there already existed a vibrant cultural infra- structure encompassing nightclubs, independent record retail outlets, and audiences. Ford’s articles served notice to the music industry that DJ and MC practices were thriving in New York’s upper boroughs, and although it took almost another five years for the major entertain- ment conglomerates to acknowledge hip-hop’s cultural legitimacy and importance, black entre- preneurs in the Bronx, Harlem, Queens, and elsewhere nurtured an active scene. Ford’s observations reflect the extent to which hip-hop was already part of an entertainment and leisure economy and was, thus, a commercially oriented phenomenon almost from the start. It is also interesting to note how the early MCs did not yet envision rapping as an end in itself but as a bridge to future endeavors in the broadcasting industry.

The Nelson George interview with three of rap music’s originators—Afrika Bambaataa, Kool DJ Herc, and Grandmaster Flash—presents a reflective look at the atmosphere within which hip-hop evolved, while detailing the competitive nature of their relations within localized commercial market conditions. George, who for over twenty years has provided astute journal- istic and cultural analysis of hip-hop, elicits descriptions of urban social change, technolog- ical issues, and aesthetic innovation from hip-hop’s “founding fathers” and, through their words, it is evident that the early hip-hop scene was a fragmented amalgamation of practices, interests, and objectives. Rap is a highly appropriative music, borrowing inventively from myriad sources in the creation of new sonic forms. Moreover, rap music relies on the appropriation and rechanneling of music technologies, especially the turntable, mixer, and vinyl record, which, in the hands of DJ trailblazers, were invested with new meanings and applications. Describing the merging of electronic technologies with new lyrical styles and stage craft, George elicits a valu- able profile of early hip-hop performance and the formation of what are today acknowledged as established hip-hop conventions. In this interview, one of the more resonant features is the emphasis on family and community as nurturing forces that provide an essential foundation for the work and play among hip-hop’s first professional DJs.

REFERENCES Banes, Sally. 1981. “Breaking Is Hard to Do: To the Beat, Y’All.” The Village Voice (April

22–28): 31–33. Forman, Murray. 2002. The ’Hood Comes First: Race, Space, and Place in Rap and Hip-Hop.

Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press. Hebidge, Dick. 1987. Cut ’n’ Mix: Culture, Identity and Caribbean Music. London: Methuen.

HIP-HOP YA DON’T STOP • 11

RT9190_P01_9-56 8/5/04 11:53 AM Page 11

Glazer, Nathan. 1979. “On Subway Graffiti in New York.” Public Interest, no. 54 (Winter): 3–11.

Rose, Tricia. 1994. Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America. Hanover: Wesleyan University Press.

Toop, David. 1984. The Rap Attack: African Jive to New York Hip-Hop. Boston: South End Press.

Williams, Raymond. 1981. Culture. London: Fontana Press.

12 • MURRAY FORMAN

RT9190_P01_9-56 8/5/04 11:53 AM Page 12

Break dancing is a style of competitive, acrobatic, and pantomimic dancing. It began as a kind of game, a friendly contest in which black and Hispanic teenagers outdid one another with outrageous physical contortions, spins, and back flips, wedded to a fluid, syncopated, circling body rock done close to the ground. Breaking once meant only dancing on the floor, but now its definition has widened to include electric boogie, up-rock, aerial gymnastics, and all sorts of other fancy variations.

Although breaking is the newest part of hip-hop culture, it’s the part that has made hip hop a media obsession. Five years ago the only people who had ever heard of breaking were the kids in New York’s ghettos who did it. They didn’t even have a definite name for the form—they sometimes called it “breaking,” but they also referred to it as “rocking down,” “b- boy,” or just “that kind of dancing you do to rap music.” By 1980—when the form had already been around for a few years—they weren’t even very interested in it anymore. This kind of dancing was a passing fad, they felt, that would soon be replaced by roller disco. But history was to prove them wrong. Not since the twist, in the early sixties, has a dance craze so captured the attention of the media.

By 1984 only a hermit could not have known about breaking. It had arrived, not only in the United States but also in Canada, Europe, and Japan. Breaking had been featured in the 1983 Hollywood film Flashdance, the independent hip-hop musical film Wild Style, and the docu- mentary Style Wars (which aired on PBS), served as the inspiration for the 1984 films Breakin’ and Beat Street, and was rumored to be the subject of fifteen forthcoming Hollywood movies. Countless how-to books and videos had hit the market. Breaking had been spotlighted on national news shows, talk shows, and ads for Burger King, Levi’s, Pepsi-Cola, Coca-Cola, and Panasonic. One hundred break dancers heated up the closing ceremonies of the 1984 summer Olympics in Los Angeles. And Michael Jackson had given the form national currency.

Breaking made the cover of Newsweek in 1984. Newspapers all over the country regularly carried stories on its latest ups and downs. The paradox emerged, as you flipped the pages of the Washington Post or the Los Angeles Times, that break dancers who’d come up in the ghetto were banned from city streets and shopping malls for causing disturbances and attracting undesirable crowds, while at the same time middle-class housewives and executives could learn to break dance in their spare time at classes proliferating throughout the suburbs. Doctors added to the form’s acceptability by giving medical advice on how to survive it unbruised. And the New York Times began using breaking as a metaphor even in articles that had nothing to do with hip hop.

13

1 Breaking

Sally Banes

RT9190_P01_9-56 8/5/04 11:53 AM Page 13

By now, break dancing was happening at bar mitzvahs, children’s dance recitals, high- school proms, college dances, in prison talent shows, at ballet galas, and on Broadway, as well as in clubs and discos—and, in a second-generation revival, in city parks and on the streets once again. Even President Reagan was delighted by breaking when he saw the New York City Breakers perform in Washington, D.C., at a Kennedy Center gala.

The media hype about break dancing has changed both its form and its meaning. So to talk about break dancing you have to divide it into two stages: before and after media. Before the media turned breaking into a dazzling entertainment, it was a kind of serious game, a form of urban vernacular dance, a fusion of sports, dancing, and fighting whose performance had urgent social significance for the dancers. After media, participation in break dancing was stratified into two levels: professional and amateur. For the pros, break dancing had become a theatrical art form with a technique and a vocabulary that, like ballet’s, could be refined and expanded. On this level, competition took on new meaning. It was no longer a battle for control of the streets, for neighborhood fame, or to win your opponent’s “colors” (tee-shirt with crew insignia). Now cash prizes, roles in Hollywood movies, and European tours were at stake. For the amateurs, the element of competition had diminished. The appeal was a mixture of getting physically fit, tackling the challenge of breaking’s intricate skills, and even becoming more like street kids, who’ve suddenly become stylish thanks to the meteoric vogue of hip hop.

Breaking first entered media consciousness when Martha Cooper, a photographer who had for years been documenting graffiti, was sent by the New York Post to cover “a riot” and found some kids—members of the High Times Crew, friends and relatives from West 175th Street— who claimed they’d been dancing, not fighting, in a subway station. One kid demonstrated some moves to a policeman, who then called in the others one by one. “Do a head spin,” he commanded as he consulted a clipboard full of notes. “Do the baby.” As each crew member complied, performing on cue as unhesitatingly as a ballet dancer might pirouette across a stage, the police had to admit defeat.

Or so the story goes. But, like ballet and like great battles (it shares elements of both), breaking is wreathed in legends. Since its early history wasn’t documented—the Post never ran Cooper’s photos—it lives on only in memories and has taken on mythological form.

The heroes of these legends are the b-boys, the original break dancers, black and Hispanic teenagers who invented and endlessly elaborate the heady blend of dancing, acrobatics, and warfare that is breaking. Like other forms of ghetto street culture and like the other elements of hip hop, breaking began as a public showcase for the flamboyant triumph of virility, wit, and skill. In short, of style.

The intensity of the dancer’s physicality gives breaking a power and energy even beyond the vitality of graffiti and rapping. If graffiti is a way of “publishing,” of winning fame by spreading your tag all over the city, breaking is a way of claiming the streets with physical pres- ence, using your body to publicly inscribe your identity on the surfaces of the city, to flaunt a unique personal style within a conventional format. The body symbolism makes breaking an extremely powerful version of two favorite forms of street rhetoric—the taunt and the boast. The razzing takes the form of insulting gestures aimed at your opponent, while the bragging is expressed through acrobatic virtuosity. Breaking is a competitive display of physical and imaginative prowess, a highly codified dance form that in its early stages served as an arena for both battles and artistic invention and that allowed for cracking open the code to flaunt personal inventiveness.

The High Times Crew told the cops they were dancing, not fighting, and as breaking captured mainstream attention it was touted in the media as a transfiguration of gang warfare. Breaking may be a stylized, rhythmic, aesthetically framed form of combat—but it still escalates, at times, into

14 • SALLY BANES

RT9190_P01_9-56 8/5/04 11:53 AM Page 14

actual violence. Peace is volatile when honor is at stake, and the physical heat of the form itself makes for situations that are highly combustible, as scenes from both Breakin’ and Beat Street show.

Until breaking became frozen and legitimated by media hype, it was, like much of kids’ culture in our cities, self-generated and nearly invisible to outsiders, especially adults—who just didn’t want to even think about it or know about it, much less watch it. It was both liter- ally and figuratively an underground form, happening in the subways as well as in parks and city playgrounds, but only among those in the know. Its invisibility and elusiveness had to do with the extemporaneous nature of the original form and also with its social context. Breaking jams weren’t scheduled; they happened when the situation arose. You didn’t get advance notice of a breaking “performance”; you had to be in the right place at the right time. In other words, you had to be part of the crew system that provided social order among the kids of the Bronx, Manhattan, and Brooklyn ghettos.

Since May 1981, when Henry Chalfant presented the Rock Steady Crew at Common Ground in SoHo as part of a graffiti rock show, breaking has taken to theatrical presentation like a duck to water. The first article on the form, by Sally Banes with photos by Martha Cooper, appeared in the Village Voice just before the concert, giving breaking instant visibility. By the end of that summer, break dancers had appeared outdoors at Lincoln Center and at other festivals, and endless filming had begun. The Rock Steady Crew signed up for an appear- ance in Flashdance, and kids were already learning to break not from older brothers and cousins on the street, but from watching Rock Steady on TV. Breaking had entered the public eye and left the underground for the mainstream, and this new theatrical context, with a style largely disseminated by the Rock Steady Crew, quickly crystallized the form for spectators.