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Rican-structing Rap: Between History, Hip Hop and a Hard Place
Rican-structing Rap: Between History, Hip Hop and a Hard Place
"we are a reflection of our city both the chaos and beauty" - MARE 139
“It started in the Bronx and part a Harlem” – Frosty Freeze
"Nobody want to go to the Bronx River" - Whipper Whip
It wasn't so long ago somewhere in the south, south semi-autonomous zone called home, Hip Hop emerged hollerin' head first fearless with
feeling and funk, a bastard black boricua baby of the blues
be-boppin' Hip Hoppin' and rap rockin' from the rubble of
resentment, racism, riots and rage, runnin' from the plantation
alien-nation during a time when all other avenues of expression for
those who survived the ghettos, gangs and gulags were stripped away
and stolen by the shitstem. How to speak (out) when you have been
systematically silenced, give your self a name and "fame" when you
have been rendered anonymous and faceless, affirm your mere
existence (and your right to exist) in the midst of resistance? The
hardware called Hip Hop culture was born and became an
ill-legitimate lacerated language of life, love and liberation for
the lil' ones from the slums, uptown (up)lift upping the ante of a
new age of agitation, anarchy and enough artistic alchemy to turn
the bottom to the top, the meek to the militant, a magic marker into
an M16, a spray can into shrapnel, a beat into a bomb, a microphone
into a molotav and the ghetto dwellas into a guerrilla army.
Hip Hop was (naturally) birthed by people who had nada but the
necessity and need to turn that nothing into something. Youth in the
ghetto had little money, but much imagination. They would make
(shift) a new kind of music, an outcast outsider art form from spare
parts, bandaged beats, (bad) breaks, and recycled rhymes that would
rip out the heart of racism, stolen samples that smelled like
sedition; they racked records and snatched spray paint that
re-colored the land-mind landscape of the mind. Culture created from
and through chaos by those who lived far below the underground, out
of sight and out of mind, Hip Hop would be a neo (and necessary)
sabotage (in)sight and sound system-less system for a (not yet) sold
out soul salvation. Hip Hop hailed the Harlem hated, brought up the
Bronx belittled, uplifted the uptown untouchables and acknowledged
our need to bash down the barrio's bars of access to
express…Ourselves. If Christ couldn't save us (and he had already
proven he couldn't) then culture would (as it always had before) and
if the system couldn't kill us then nothing could because we were
fearless, furious and fantastic(ly) talented. But before that, the
b-boys (and girls) were only babies, and the Bronx was just another
unknown battle zone, and this story had just begun. MC Rubie Dee of
The Fantastic Five made reference to a now deseparecido aspect of
Hip Hop History and the ricanstructed roots of rap:
Now all you Puerto Ricans you're in for a treat
'cause this Puerto rican can rock a funky beat
if you fall on your butt and you start to bleed
Rubie Dee is what all the Puerto Ricans need
I'm a homeboy to them 'cause I know what to do
'cause Ruby Dee is down with the Black people too.
Once upon a time, some time back in the 1950's and '60s, in the
midst of America's (un)civil rights struggle, indigent armies of
poverty stricken Puerto Ricans and southern-born black folks came to
New York city scratching at the signs of the surface, seeking
survival and a stab at sustenance, were instead dropped/dumped
in(to) the South Bronx by the city welfare department who offered
slumlords above-market rents for accepting these new welfare
clients. In 1960, unemployment New York City wide was 10% for Puerto
Ricans, 7% for African Americans and less then 4% for whites.
Compared to 40% of the white population, only 13 % of Puerto Ricans
twenty-five and older completed high school. By 1968, 54 % of New
York's public school enrollment was Black/Puerto Rican but
fifty-five out of every hundred of these students would drop out
before graduation, and only 13% would graduate with an academic
diploma. In the Hunts Point section of the Bronx alone, where nearly
all the residents were Black/Puerto Rican, there were 11,000 welfare
recipients in 1962, and 53,000 by 1972. Families in the South Bronx
were living well below America (and New York's) poverty level,
grappling with decay, damage, death and destruction every day in any
and every way.
In March of 1964, Puerto Ricans organized a protest to demand real
education be addressed in their schools. The list of demands
included integrated and better educational facilities for Puerto
Rican children, more Puerto Rican teachers, and a Puerto Rican on
the Board of Education. Nearly 2000 people marched across the
Brooklyn Bridge to the Board of Education in what the NY Times
called "the first citywide civil rights demonstration sponsored by
the Puerto Rican community." That same year there were a series of
inner-city uprisings that first broke out during "the long hot
summer" in Harlem, NY when a white policeman shot and killed an
unarmed Black high school student. During this period the drug
addiction rate in Harlem was ten times higher than the NYC average,
and twelve times higher than the u.s. as a whole, and the murder
rate was six times higher than New York's average. That same year,
the "greatest" heavyweight boxer of all time, Muhammad Ali, won his
first world Championship; Puerto Rican (by way of NYC) fighter, Jose
Torres won the Light heavyweight championship the following year.
Time magazine declared, "The aerosol paint can is science's
contribution to the ancient art of public defacement, and the
vacant-minded or vicious are taking to it in ever-increasing
numbers."
In 1967, "racial disorders" rocked more than 160 U.S. cities and
more than 30,000 national guard troops were deployed in 18 separate
cities. That summer, Puerto Ricans rioted in East Harlem after a
police killing, and two more community residents were shot to death
by police in the streets. Meanwhile, in New Haven, Puerto Ricans
rioted after a white restaurant owner killed a Puerto Rican man.
Between the years 1965 to 1971, uprisings that then New York City
Mayor John Lindsay referred to as "local disturbances" broke out in
several Black/Puerto Rican northern ghettos, including Chicago, New
haven and Hartford, CT, Passaic, Camden, and Hoboken, NJ, East
Harlem and the South Bronx, NY.
The Black Panther Party for Self Defense was founded in Oakland, CA
in the mid '60s and by late 1968 the Black Liberation Army was
formed. Armed underground units were organized and trained in
several southern rural areas throughout the u.s., while Black
Panther Party above ground offices were established in Oakland, San
Francisco, Detroit, Chicago, Philadelphia, Ohio, and New York to
create a "political relationship" with the Black masses who were
rising up across the united states.
Simultaneously, 1968 was also the year that the inter-national
anti-war movement and the black power struggle were at their peak,
with students around the world protesting against the American-Viet
Nam war, and athletes Tommy Smith and John Carlos memorably raising
the black fist at the Olympics. It was the year that Martin Luther
King Jr. was assassinated and riots broke out in Chicago, Washington
D.C., and Cincinnati. It was also in 1968 that heroin began to flood
the inner-city streets, when the CIA began colluding with drug lords
in S.E. Asia during the american war in Viet Nam. From 1971 to 1999,
the worlds illegal opium supply grew fivefold, and the inner-city
was in the grips of a protracted drug war against the people.
On June 7, 1969, the Black Panther Party newspaper announced an
alliance called the Rainbow Coalition that included the Black
Panthers and the Young Lords Organization, which was a former
Chicago Puerto Rican street gang turned revolutionary. The Young
Lords Party, which was the New York branch of the Young Lords, was
officially founded in 1969 and immediately began direct action
occupations of vacant land, hospitals, churches and other
institutions to demand better treatment for poor people in New
York's ghettos/barrios. That same year, when a Puerto Rican man from
"Spanish Harlem" was arrested on false charges and abused by police,
the Young Lords gathered in front of the "Peoples Church" (a church
that the Young Lords had occupied in the name of the community) in
East Harlem to declare that:
We will not allow the brutalization of our community to go on
without a response. For every Puerto Rican that is brutalized, there
will be retaliation.
By 1970, over 817,000 Puerto Ricans lived in New York City and at
least 40% lived in the Bronx. The median family income in New York
was $9,682, but in the South Bronx it was only $5,200. One quarter
of the city's reported cases of malnutrition came from this battered
part of the Bronx, the infant mortality rate was 29 in 1,000 births
and "Julio 205" was getting up in the ghetto. And although heroin
was hitting the South Bronx (and Harlem) hard, the budget for the
special narcotics prosecutors office was dropped from $2.4 million
in 1975 to $1.1 by 1977, as a corrupt police force rode shotgun,
hand in hand, with drug dealers.
It was round about this time the Bronx began to burn. The same
slumlords who had previously accepted the poor residents into their
dilapidated death trap housing started setting those same edifices
ablaze (which often sparked fires that decimated entire blocks) to
collect upwards of $10 million in insurance money (as well as any
cash that could be made from stripping the building of its
electrical wiring, plumbing fixtures, and anything else of value to
sell before torching it). It soon became a vicious game of get out
the ghetto while the getting' was still good as it was gonna get, in
a time of fiscal crisis. In the mid '70s, the South Bronx averaged
13,000 fires a year as 40% of the housing was destroyed, leaving
more then 10,000 people homeless and causing 300,000 ghetto dwellers
to flee to other slums sections throughout the New York Shitty city
and throughout the u.s., causing the population of the South Bronx
to fall by 57%. In all, roughly 100,000 housing units were lost to
fires in the South Bronx during that tumultuous time.
In the early 1970s the RAND Corporation (a nonprofit research
company) created a set of computer models that showed how city
services could affect population in a large city. They concluded
that when services like police and fire protection were withdrawn,
the population in that area would decrease. New York Senator, Daniel
Patrick Moynihan saw the study and proposed a policy of "benign
neglect" for the South Bronx to then President Richard Nixon. The
idea was that because most of the fires in poor neighborhoods were
"caused by arson," there was no point in improving fire services to
combat the problem in those areas. Mayor Lindsay declared "The South
Bronx is certain to be one of the areas hardest hit by the
President's decision to impose austerity on domestic programs
presumably in order to pay the brutal costs of a senseless war."
In 1971, prisoners at the Attica Correctional facility in upstate
New York, where 63 percent of the inmates were Black (African
American and Puerto Rican), but all of the 383 guards were white,
rebelled, standing fast for five days before 500 state troopers
attacked the prison compound, firing more than 2,000 rounds of
ammunition in nine minutes. The assault left 39 people dead. That
same year, after a member of the Ghetto Brothers, a South Bronx
based Puerto Rican street gang, was killed while trying to prevent
a fight between two rival gangs, the Ghetto Brothers, who over the
years had become politicized advocates of Puerto Rican nationalism
and had even formed a Latin rock band, chose to organize a truce
among Bronx and other New York-area gangs rather then retaliate. It
was a few years after this truce that was attended by several gangs,
including the Black Spades and one of their fourteen year old
"Lords," Afrika Bambaataa, that gang culture began to recede, and
what would eventually come to be known as "Hip Hop" would begin to
blossom.
Meanwhile, New York City's "master builder" Robert Moses (Chairman
of the Triborough Bridge who also had power over the construction of
all public housing projects in NYC) suggested that the South Bronx
area be turned into a national park in conjunction with the
construction of the Cross Bronx Expressway, because the South Bronx
was, according to Moses "beyond rebuilding." Moses also declared:
Our urban system is based on the theory of taking the peasant and
turning him into an industrial worker. Now there are no industrial
jobs. Why not keep him a peasant?
In 1972, Hugo Martinez formed a writing crew called United Graffiti
Artists, Tracy 168 formed another called Wanted, and SuperKool
invented the fat cap.
In 1973 then mayor John Lindsey stated "the outlook is bleak, for
the South Bronx is dependent on public resources, not just for the
quality of life, but for life itself," but the blighted Black/Brown
Boricua Bronxites had other ideas. The breakbeat was birthed that
year when Jamaican born "father of Hip Hop," Kool Herc, deejayed his
first block party at 1520 Sedgwick Avenue in the Bronx. That same
year, former gang member Afrika Bambaataa founded what would become
the Universal Zulu nation.
In 1974, New York City's Metropolitan Transit Authority officially
began its "war on graffiti," while part of the (in)famous Charlotte
Street in the South Bronx that then president Jimmy Carter would
visit three years later, was removed from the official New York City
map as if it did not exist, and would not reappear until a decade
later. That same year, the FALN (Fuerzas Armadas de Liberacion
Nacional Puertorriquena), a New York/Chicago based Puerto Rican
clandestine armed organization, first surfaced when five large bombs
exploded in New York's Wall Street area, Rockefeller Center, and on
the ritzy Park Avenue in lower Manhattan. The FALN, demanding the
liberation of Puerto Rico, claimed responsibility for these acts,
and would continue bombing attacks and other radical actions through
the '70s and into the 1980s.
1975 would see the high point in "throw ups," as the MTA battled in
vain against prolific street vandals such as IZ, PI, IN, LE, TO, OI,
FI, CY, TEE, PEO, TI 149 and DY 167. In 1976, Housing Commissioner
of New York City, Roger Starr proposed a policy he conceived in
1966, when he gave a speech at the real estate industry lodge of the
B'nai B'rith, suggesting that New York City should "accelerate the
drainage" in what he called the worst parts of the South Bronx
through a policy of "planned shrinkage." He suggested closing subway
stations, firehouses and schools. Since Nueva York was in a deep
financial crisis at the time, Starr proposed that these actions
would be the best way for the city to save money. This process of
willful destruction of a community was pushed forward as services
were discontinued and false fronts were pasted on the windows of
burned-out buildings to camouflage the inner-city blight and flight
as this urban barrio was readied for real-estate developers and
business owners who were waiting to pounce like vultures on a
comunidad's carcass. Graffiti artist Lee (Quinones) began to gain
fame for his full subway car murals.
In 1977, The New York Times commented that the South Bronx was "as
crucial to an understanding of American urban life as Auschwitz is
crucial to an understanding of Nazism." New York City suffered an
electrical blackout during a hot July night where arson, looting and
vandalism engulfed every poor neighborhood in the city. In all,
1,616 stores were reported damaged due to looting and rioting, 1,037
fires were responded to, including 14 multiple-alarm fires and in
the largest mass arrest in NYC history, 3,776 people were arrested.
A Congressional study estimated that the cost of damages from this
one night blackout amounted to a little over $300 million. Disco
Wiz, considered to be Hip Hops first Latino DJ, was quoted as
saying ""that Blackout made a big spark in the Hip Hop revolution."
Also, in the midst of a Graffiti "style reneisance" from crews TDS,
TMT, UA, MAFIA, TS5, CIA, RTW, TMB, TFP, TC5 and TF5, The MTA began
a major "buffing" campaign that would cost them $400,000 annually,
using a chemical mix of petroleum hydroxide, which writers called
Orange Crush after Agent Orange that was used in the American--Viet
Nam war. The Rock Steady crew of breaker B-Boys was formed in echo
park in the Bronx that year and President Carter paid a visit to
Charlotte St. in the Bronx that year too, and declared it "the worse
slum in America."
That same year, Puerto Rican nationalists from New York City seized
the Statue of Liberty and draped a Puerto Rican flag from its crown.
Their demands were independence for Puerto Rico, freedom for all
Puerto Rican political prisoners and an end to discrimination
against Puerto Ricans in the United States. Also in 1977, the FALN
engaged in several more bombings and released a communiqué that
stated plainly:
we want to demonstrate through our actions that the Yanki
Imperialist's attempt at assimilating and annihilating the
Puerto Rican Nation...is not going to be taken sitting down by the
liberation forces. Any attempt to suppress the Puerto Rican
Liberation Movement by the Imperialist forces, the FBI, and the
[Carter] Administration shall be met by revolutionary violence.
As Jimmy Carter said, referring to his visit to Charlotte Street,
the 1970s had been "a very sobering trip." Meanwhile DJs such as
Bam, Disco King Mario, Breakout, Casanova Fly, Disco Wiz, and
Grandmaster Flash continued to ply their tricks of the trade, and
the Rock Steady Crew was formed.
In 1978, Prince Whipper Whip and Dot Rock formed The Fantastic Five
MCs, a group that included Grand Wizard Theodore, Waterbed Kev,
Master Rob and Ruby Dee, and in 1979 two more MC crews were born.
Grand Master Flash and the Furious Five, which consisted of Flash,
Melle Mel, Kidd Creole, Cowboy, Rahiem and Scorpio, and The Cold
Crush Brothers, which consisted of Charlie Chase, Tony Tone, Grand
master Caz, Easy AD, JDL, and Almighty KG. It was also that year
that the Music industry coined the name "rap music."
In 1979, Kurtis Blow became the first "rapper" on a major label, the
first commercial rap record, rappers Delight was released by Sugar
Hill records and The Cold Crush Brothers began performing live
shows. In 1980, presidential candidate Ronald Reagan visited the by
now (in)famous Charlotte Street and declared that he had "not seen
anything that looked like this since London after the blitz." And
finally, in 1981, The Los Angeles Times declared the South Bronx was
"both a place and a scare-word."
With little left in the war (on the poor) torn South Bronx (which
was now expanding to become a synonym for the rest of the
Black/Brown uptown inner-city) besides medical waste transfer
stations, bus depots and crisscrossing expressways which gave the
Bronx worse air quality than any other New York borough, cops began
a battle with street gangs (who had exploded in numbers in the midst
of rampant neglect), scavengers, squatters, survivors and graf
writers, as well as junkies and jesus, for control of this now
chaotic calle community. The Funky 4 plus One More performed on
NBC's Saturday Night Live, in 1981, becoming the first Hip Hop group
to appear on national television. ABC's 20/20 broadcast was the
first national television coverage of the "Rap Phenomenon."
Neglected and rejected for years and allowed by the city and its
power brokers to sink ever deeper into destitution and despair, the
South Bronx had become a semi-autonomous slum scar where the
homeless, helpless and hopeless wandered through graffiti ghost town
ghetto streets and bitter abandoned blocks of nothing but condemned
buildings and garbage strewn sidewalks as they searched for new ways
to negotiate the reality of racism and rejection. Theirs was the
politics of poverty and powerlessness; the marketers of muse found
ways to capitalize on a community's cultural creations.
After the assassinations of Malcolm and Martin in the '60s, and the
decimation and systematic destruction of the Black Panther Party,
The Black liberation Army and The Young Lords in the 1970s, as well
as the Attica prison rebellion, all hope seemed lost. All avenues
and roads leading to the underground railroads/subways of the black
revolution had been blocked off, destroyed. So, with nothing else
left, Hip Hop would be the new Black Power for the powerless. With
no access to musical instruments and inner city public schools
terminating their music programs, young people would obtain (in many
cases liberated during the blackout of '77) microphones and
turntables, and transform them into one (wo)man bands, teaching
themselves to be technique terror wrists, stealing samples and
borrowing beats from their parents' vinyl collection, scratching out
new soul(s) like sound scavengers against the shitstem, shouting
style and sabotage. Reality writers would rack up on spray cans and
makeshift markers, making wild, wild style liberated landscapes and
ghetto galleries in the streets and subways, bombing the Bronx and
manufacturing militant Manhattan museums. Hip Hop, created by a
culture and community that wasn't supposed to make it past the daze
of slavery or the (un)civil rights struggle was inherently
revolutionary. Its very sound was its social statement. Its mere
existence was its racial resistance; its very essence was a ghetto
revolution in the making.
In 1982, Melle Mel of the Furious Five made it plain as Malcolm when
he stated "We are the best as you can see, so eliminate the
possibility that to be an emcee is not a threat to society." The
film Wild Style brought Hip Hop culture to the big screen. In 1983,
a documentary on Graffiti culture, Style Wars, aired on the public
broadcasting station, and that same year NYC police beat to death a
Graffiti writer named Michael Stewart. Moving into the 1980s,
Thirty-eight percent of Puerto Ricans were living in poverty
compared to 19 percent for the rest of the cities population, more
than one-half of all Puerto Rican children under the age of 18 lived
below the poverty level, and between 1985 and 1990, 90,100 Puerto
Ricans left New York City.
Meanwhile the inner-city crack wars and AIDS/SIDA epidemic of the
1980s had arrived. Declassified documents and court testimonies
indicate that the CIA, just as they had done in the 1960s and ‘70s
with heroin, played a major role in bringing cheap cocaine into
Black/brown communities in the u.s. in the early 1980s, which
created the crack epidemic that would go on to devastate the ghettos
of America. Between 1985 and 2000, about 5,000 Bronxites died of
drug overdoses, while 12,460 died of AIDS according to the NYC
health department. A 1998 study by the health Department Office of
AIDS Surveillance recorded a total of 20,094 Bronx adults diagnosed
with AIDS since 1981, and the neighborhoods around Charlotte Street
had 4,000 reported AIDS cases, with 2,428 deaths. Analysis of AIDS
mortality data for New York City for 1981 through 1987 revealed that
Puerto Ricans represent the racial/ethnic group most severely
affected by NYCs AIDS epidemic. AIDS mortality rates among Puerto
Rico-born males are significantly higher (362 per 100,000) than
among whites (182), other so called Hispanic (217) and even so
called black (267) males, and cumulative age-specific mortality
rates for males are highest for the Puerto Rico-born in every adult
age group. AIDS proportional mortality analysis shows that in 1987
the proportion of all deaths due to AIDS was 10% among those Puerto
Rican-born, 6% among blacks, and 2% among whites, and Puerto Rican
women in New York City are at higher risk for AIDS than any other
racial or ethnic group.
Over the last fifteen years the suicide rate for young black males
has tripled, and today New York's Black/Puerto Rican population
still suffer disproportionately from drug addiction. Infant
mortality rates for African Americans is more than double that of
whites at a genocidal rate of 13.7 percent, and at 7.9 percent
Puerto Ricans have a higher percent of infant mortality than any
other so called Latino group, by far exceeding white infant
mortality. A 1990 study reported that 15-year-old black women in
Harlem had a 65% chance of surviving to age 65, which is about the
same as women in India. Black men in Harlem had a 37% chance of
surviving to age 65, about the same as men in Angola, Africa. New
York State's prison population also doubled from almost 35,000
inmates in 1985 to 70,000 in 1995. Currently 10,000 Bronxites are
doing time, which is twice the number incarcerated before the crack
epidemic, which started around 1986 and continued unabated into the
'90s. When president William Clinton visited Charlotte Street in
1997 and proclaimed "If I could have any wish ... I would like for
every single American to see the before and after," the 16th
Congressional District, which includes Charlotte Street, was still
among the poorest in the United States and unemployment was in the
double digits.
In 1990, Time Magazine stated:
The stylized smears born in the South Bronx have spread across the
country, covering buildings, bridges and highways in every urban
center. From Philadelphia to Santa Barbara, Calif., the annual costs
of cleaning up after the underground artists are soaring into the
billions,
which served as a good indication that Hip Hop culture, or at least
certain aspects of it were not dead and, in fact, thriving within an
outlaw(ed) underground that could not be co opted by the corporate
machine and transformed into pop culture pap.
Meanwhile police brutality was still running rampant within
Black/Puerto Rican barrios/ghettos in New York City. According to
Amnesty International, claims filed against the city's police more
than doubled from 977 in 1987 to over 2,000 in 1994. The report
stated that more than two-thirds of the victims in the cases
reviewed were black or Latino, while most of the police officers
involved were white. In 1996, a police officer was acquitted on
charges of negligent homicide in the death of Anthony Baez, a young
Puerto Rican who was choked to death in the Bronx, sparking protests
in New York city, which led to police alerts around the 46th
Precinct, where the police officer who was acquitted was stationed.
After the verdict, Baez's parents stated, "We learned that for
Latinos and Blacks, justice is not equal." Then in 1999 an African
immigrant named Amadou Diallo was killed in a hail of 41 police
bullets in the bronx. Two years later at a vigil for his son,
Amadou's father stated:
I don't see justice anywhere. For me, there is no justice. My son
was gunned down with 41 bullets, and from New York to Albany, from
Albany to Washington, there was no justice.
Those who suffer (and survive) the politricks of others know that
everything is political, from the (polluted) air we (try to) breath,
to the police bullets and black jacks that beat on and blow off our
helpless heads, the drugs dropped on our (bad) brains and the
garbage strewn on our ghetto streets. But when culture gets
colonized the captive continues to create. There's no other choice.
The (brand) new noise raises its voice, chants down Babylon and
brings down the walls of Jericho and jive talk. Ain't no time for
jive, if you wanna stay alive. Back in the day before today, Hip Hop
spoke out (for those without tongues) against all things (or
anything) because for the disenfranchised, the ignored, los sin
rostro, word equals sound equals power and action speaks louder than
a bomb. Black market beats stolen and slung by ghetto desparados
bash down barricades and borders with the best of em. Hip Hop's
message WAS the music, a means to keep from going under. Huh huh huh
huh! But it wasn't escapism, rather an escape from the real (and
imaginary) prisons that we were/are placed in. The originators of
the form knew that you could rap, rage and rock the party, the
bells, the bourgeois, and Babylon all at the same time on time some
time, and hard headed Hip Hop heads knew you could wail without
wallowing, sing while still swinging, and party for your right to
fight while fighting for your right to party… without missing a
beat. And that anything less would be social surrender to the
(white) supremacists status quo that was tryna subjugate and sink
you.
That artistic sub-culture that we now (think we) see daily on our
tell-a-vision screen beamed (for worse and commerce) in (almost)
living color all over the earth, in million dollar videos, in
hollyweird movies, in corporate commercials, in the mainstream news,
is now big azz bizness, man. The system always seeks to color what
it can't create, co-opt what it can't catch, capitalize on what it
can't control, and kill what it can't conquer. So today, Hip Hop and
its history has been hi-jacked by high finance and white washed by
the white man. But it's still one of the few music forms that tells
it like it is (even when ya don’t wanna hear it) and one of the few
cultures that still shouts for the speechless, and its body
(politic) is still hot and can't stop, won't stop a-kicking from the
crates of culture shock ready to rock riddims that blow minds and
move theMasses! Hip Hop is still the CNN (colored news network, that
is) of the blacks and the blues and the final call for/from the last
of the po’ ricans. As someone once said, ghettos are the same all
over the world, so Hip Hop will always have something to say to it’s
constituency from las calles and sub-verses to scream (out) to the
entire Black (and white) planet wherever poverty lives; it’s more
than just words. As Hip Hop falls out of favor and is attacked,
outlawed, banned, banished and beat down, the barrios voz will only
become louder (then a bomb) and so long as there is still the
possibility that an emcee (and a graf writer, and even a b-boy/girl)
can be a threat to society, Hip Hop will continue to rebuild,
regenerate and ricanstruct itself, and will live on and on, until
the break of (a new) dawn.
Hip Hop is Dead, Que Viva Hip Hop!
N4P / www.x-vandals.com
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