Ghetto Music

“Hip-Hop started off on a block that I’ve never been to/ To counteract a struggle that I’ve never even been through/ If I think I understand just because I flow too/ Means I’m not keepin’ it true.”

- Macklemore (2005) “White Privilege”

Hip-Hop began in a specific set of circumstances and those circumstances determined how its identity developed.  A more sociological take on this comes from Tricia Rose (1994):

Hip hop…[has attempted] to negotiate the experiences of marginalization, brutally truncated opportunity, and oppression within the cultural imperatives of African-American and Caribbean history, identity, and community (21). 

In terms of these specific roots, it is understandable that many who have written on rap have concluded that the music’s authenticity relies on the performer representing some version of this urban, and predominantly Black, experience.  Houston Baker (1993) is one example:

[T]he black urbanity of the form seems to demand not only a style most readily accessible to black urban youngsters, but also a representational black urban authenticity of performance. (62).¹⁷

Greg Tate (2003) is another.  He explains that “hip-hop remains as much defined by the representation of Black machismo as by Black aesthetics” (Tate, 8-9).  

It may come as no surprise that some have compared rap to blues—another genre of Black music inextricably tied to the social circumstances from which it developed (Rose, 23-4).  Amiri Baraka, formerly known as LeRoi Jones (1963), articulates the significance of blues as an exclusively Black music:

Blues as an autonomous music had been in a sense inviolable.  There was no clear way into it, i.e., its production…except as concomitant with what seems to me to be the peculiar social, cultural, economic, and emotional experience of a black man in America. The idea of a white blues singer seems an even more violent contradiction of terms than the idea of a middle-class blues singer.  The material of blues were not available to the white American, even though some strange circumstance might prompt him to look for them.  It was as if these materials were secret and obscure, and blues a kind of ethno-historic rite as basic as blood (146-7).

Although a connection between rap and blues seems plausible, there is good reason to question whether the two can so easily be linked.  Drawing attention to the tendency of academics to ignore the polyculturalism of rap music, Gilroy (1993) offers insight:

Here we have to ask how a form which flaunts and glories in its own malleability as well as its transnational character becomes interpreted as an expression of some authentic African-American essence?  How can rap be discussed as if it sprang intact from the entrails of the blues? (34)

As Gilroy explains, the Afro-centric stance on rap—which essentially says ‘rap is a Black thing you wouldn’t understand’—has assumed a strong position in the polarized debate about issues related to the dissemination of Black cultural forms (100).  In terms of how this ties into a discussion of authenticity, this position seems to reject variations of rap that do not fit the original image:

The problem of cultural origins and authenticity…has persisted and assumed an enhanced significance…as original, folk, or local expressions of black culture have been identified as authentic and positively evaluated for that reason, while subsequent hemispheric or global manifestations of the same cultural forms have been dismissed as inauthentic and therefore lacking in cultural or aesthetic value precisely because of their distance (supposed or actual) from a readily identifiable point of origin (Gilroy, 96).

As a brief survey of this first position reveals, the specific origins of Hip-Hop have played a major role in determining a dominant conception of authenticity. The second position in the debate surrounding the dissemination of Black culture criticizes the first position for its “racial essentialism” (100).  Yet the second position also falls short in that we cannot simply ignore Hip-Hop’s roots in seeking to defend the legitimacy of its multiple mutations.  As Gilroy explains, such an approach “moves towards a causal and arrogant deconstruction of blackness while ignoring the appeal of the first position’s powerful, populist affirmation of black culture” (100).  Gilroy’s conclusion is that both positions are inadequate as a means to make sense of any Black cultural form that has migrated from its original location and been transformed.  But what is perhaps the most interesting aspect of this polarized debate is the focus of both positions:

It is ironic, given the importance accorded to music in the habitus of Diaspora blacks, that neither pole in this tense conversation take the music very seriously.  The narcissism which unites both standpoints is revealed by the way that they both forsake discussion of music and its attendant dramaturgy, performance, ritual, and gesture in favour of an obsessive fascination with the bodies of the performers themselves. (Gilroy, 101).

Writer and actor Danny Hoch (2004) also articulates a nuanced take on the question of Hip-Hop’s identity and hybridism.  On the one hand, he sums up Hip-Hop as “the truth, as told by kidnapped Africans with Japanese technology on stolen lands, sent out to poor and rich youth all over the world, disguised as American products.”¹⁸  This passage contrasts with another passage from Hoch’s book, Jails, Hospitals & Hip-Hop (1998):

Hip-Hop is the future of language and culture in the multicultural society.  It crosses all lines of color, race, economics, nationality, and gender, and Hip-Hop still has something to say (Hoch, xvii).

One might read Hoch as, on the one hand, emphasizing the Black roots of Hip-Hop and the loss of authenticity that has occurred during the culture’s commodification as American product, and, on the other hand, suggesting that Hip-Hop’s manifestations may retain authenticity even in bodies, minds and souls that are sometimes different from those in its original context.

Perhaps this contradiction suggests that a more complex analysis is necessary.  Drawing on ideas first articulated by Jones, and then adapting them to a post-contemporary framework, Gilroy (1993) seems to accept the challenge:

The syncretic complexity of black expressive cultures alone supplies powerful reasons for resisting the idea that an untouched, pristine Africanity resides inside these forms, working a powerful magic of alterity in order to trigger repeatedly the perception of absolute identity… I believe it is possible to approach the music as a changing rather than an unchanging same. Today, this involves the difficult task of striving to comprehend the reproduction of cultural traditions not in the unproblematic transmission of a fixed essence through time but in the breaks and interruptions which suggest that the invocation of tradition may itself be a distinct, though covert, response to the destabilising flux of the post-contemporary world (Gilroy, 101).

As we continue on in this discussion, it becomes more and more clear that making sense  of authenticity, even on a purely cultural level, is no easy task.  However, rather than let this complexity discourage us, perhaps there are some compelling reasons to explore Hip-Hop as one of the more exciting prospects of postmodern syncretization.

While Gilroy does not explicitly take the position that ‘distant’ variations of Black culture are indeed authentic, he does suggest that they can represent a positive alteration:

There are many good reasons why black cultures have had great difficulty in seeing that…the developmental processes regarded by conservatives as cultural contamination may actually be enriching or strengthening... (Gilroy, 97-99).

In fact, this idea is not far from Baraka’s (1963) discussion of jazz: 

[J]azz enabled separate and valid emotional expressions to be made… It was a music capable of reflecting not only the Negro and a black America but a white America as well… The result of this cultural ‘breakdown’ was not always mere imitation… jazz had a broadness of emotional meaning that allowed for many separate ways into it, not all of them dependent on the ‘blood ritual’ of blues…(Jones, 148-9)

Perhaps even more interesting is Baraka’s (1963) point regarding the varying styles within jazz that resulted from multi-cultural participation:

But the real point of this breakdown was that it reflected not so much the white American’s increased understanding of the Negro, but rather the fact that the Negro had created a music that offered such a profound reflection of America that it could attract white Americans to want to play it or listen to it for exactly that reason… It made a common cultural ground where black and white America…at their most disparate, proved only to result in different styles, a phenomenon I have always taken to be the whole point (and value) of divergent cultures (Jones, 149-150).

Perhaps a similar breakdown in rap suggests that diverse participation in Hip-Hop is natural, authentic, and even beneficial.  NuSonRize (2005) seems to suggest just this:

A lot of people want to claim Hip-Hop as a black thing.  But I don’t think they’re concerned about preserving the roots of Hip-Hop.  They just want to keep it to themselves.  ‘this is mine – you can’t have none’.  It’s just a way of feeling empowered.  And I think the more people participate in an art form, the more rich it’s going to be, the more it’s going to grow.  You need those outside influences, because the powerful thing about Hip-Hop is that it’s a mindset – it’s a way of expressing yourself – it’s not a specific sound – and many people can fit themselves into that framework.

It is worth noting that, in addition to describing the positive potential of varied participation in the culture, NuSonRize asserts that Hiphop is a mindset.  It is here that we are first introduced to the concept of a collective consciousness in Hiphop.  However, before going into more depth with this, let us turn to Eminem.

Excerpt from "Jails, Hospitals & Hip-Hop" by Danny Hoch
NOTE: Explicit Content

Before listening, you may want to stop the background music by clicking the pause button on the music player above.