I remember being young, and growing up in the projects in the Bronx, and the first time hearing Hip Hop. The feeling the music gave me inside was different from anything I had heard before. Hip-hop was born in the neighborhoods, where young people gathered in parks, on playgrounds, and on street corners, to speak poetry over mechanical sounds and borrowed melodies. I grew up in a society were your parents or authority figures dictated how you should act or express yourself, but to me, Hip Hop gave minorities a voice. Furthermore, hip-hop was fashion: hats, jackets, gold chains, brand sneakers. Hip-hop was graffiti, a new form of expression that employed spray painting on subway walls as the canvas. The police called it vandalism; the we called it art. From the beginning, hip-hop was aggressive and resistant against the norms of our dominant culture, and gave us a break from the musical traditions of Jazz, Rock Roll and Blues.
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| Some of the most influential hip hop artist of our time. |
To me, hip-hop has always had a chip on its shoulder. From the start, the music had been defined by the artist anger. Anger at being poor, black,stereotyped, blamed, mistreated, and ignored. Hip-hop music has been built, too, on the rejection of middle-class values; the refusal to be incorporated into larger (white) society; and an insistent allegiance to the rules of the streets, where we know we have problems, but we find a way to make it, in the “the system.” Of course, hip-hop is often joyful, silly, amusing, and even sexual. But for thirty years, this music has served as the primary mode of artistic expression for poor, urban blacks, and anger has been a major defining feature. The ethnocentrism placed on the culture as a whole, is clear and this is were much of the rebelliousness comes from
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| One of the original pioneers of Gangsta Rap N.W.A |
Many audiences, especially with older generations, disapproved of this new subculture, though their disapproval could not stop hip-hop from spreading around the world. This confrontation to the music grew in the late '80s with the arrival of “gangsta rap.” Gangsta rap was hardcore, no question; rappers talked about drug selling and smoking, sex and prostitution, gang violence and thug life. Most infamously, N.W.A.’s “Fuck tha Police” (1988) drew a lot of attention in the media, which interpreted the songs as encouraging violence against authorities. But N.W.A. and other artists were unapologetic about their music and their messages; in their view, they were being real about life on the streets. Though this was only one strand of the culture, all of hip-hop was stereo typed and ended up being viewed as glorifying violence, drug use, and other behaviors that were thought to encourage youths to rip apart the norms of societies social fabric.In reality, we were becoming the new counterculture.
Hip hop music has never been base on on symbol or sound, and in the early '90s, and most people couldn't tell the difference anyway, all hip hop music was thrown into one big bowl,all you new were the images of angry black men carrying weapons and going against the law. So when hip-hop came to network television, NBC embraced the safest rapper they could find, The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, starring Will Smith. Soon followed with shows such as In Living Color (1990–94), and Russel Simmonds, Def Comedy Jam. Simmonds states, "My whole career has been about cultivating, understanding, and expanding this core audience for hip-hop culture and then watching the impact ripple out to the mainstream.” Soon after its premiere, Def Comedy Jam became the target of criticism for the style of black humor that it showcased. This was by no means the Cosby show, this was hip hop comedy and there weren't any rules or folkways involved. Bill Cosby felt he was seeing black performers playing the fool for white television audiences, a relationship that Cosby and his generation of comedians had spent their lifetimes trying to destroy.
Hip hop is a totally necessary response to our culture and these times we live in. The current state of the nation is a terrifying one, and hip hop is about the only genre of music that is really speaking to that. Mainstream media would love to convince you that it’s all just thugs with guns driving cars on giant rims and women shakin’ they behinds… but it’s not. Hip hop couldn’t be more real, more true, and more necessary, and that’s why they’ll try to convince you that it’s solely worthless thugs who degrade women and promote violence. Hip hop is honest, and that’s what is so hated about it. In the Land of the Free in a country full of lies. It's important that we preserve hip hop and keep it alive for generations to come.
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