How Hip-Hop Holds Blacks Back

Not long ago, I was having lunch in a KFC in Harlem, sitting near eight African-American boys, aged about 14. Since 1) it was 1:30 on a school day, 2) they were carrying book bags, and 3) they seemed to be in no hurry, I assumed they were skipping school. They were extremely loud and unruly, tossing food at one another and leaving it on the floor.

Black people ran the restaurant and made up the bulk of the customers, but it was hard to see much healthy “black community” here. After repeatedly warning the boys to stop throwing food and keep quiet, the manager finally told them to leave. The kids ignored her. Only after she called a male security guard did they start slowly making their way out, tauntingly circling the restaurant before ambling off. These teens clearly weren’t monsters, but they seemed to consider themselves exempt from public norms of behavior—as if they had begun to check out of mainstream society.

What struck me most, though, was how fully the boys’ music—hard-edged rap, preaching bone-deep dislike of authority—provided them with a continuing soundtrack to their antisocial behavior. So completely was rap ingrained in their consciousness that every so often, one or another of them would break into cocky, expletive-laden rap lyrics, accompanied by the angular, bellicose gestures typical of rap performance. A couple of his buddies would then join him. Rap was a running decoration in their conversation.

Many writers and thinkers see a kind of informed political engagement, even a revolutionary potential, in rap and hip-hop. They couldn’t be more wrong. By reinforcing the stereotypes that long hindered blacks, and by teaching young blacks that a thuggish adversarial stance is the properly “authentic” response to a presumptively racist society, rap retards black success.

The venom that suffuses rap had little place in black popular culture—indeed, in black attitudes—before the 1960s. The hip-hop ethos can trace its genealogy to the emergence in that decade of a black ideology that equated black strength and authentic black identity with a militantly adversarial stance toward American society. In the angry new mood, captured by Malcolm X’s upraised fist, many blacks (and many more white liberals) began to view black crime and violence as perfectly natural, even appropriate, responses to the supposed dehumanization and poverty inflicted by a racist society. Briefly, this militant spirit, embodied above all in the Black Panthers, infused black popular culture, from the plays of LeRoi Jones to “blaxploitation” movies, like Melvin Van Peebles’s Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song, which celebrated the black criminal rebel as a hero.

But blaxploitation and similar genres burned out fast. The memory of whites blatantly stereotyping blacks was too recent for the typecasting in something like Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song not to offend many blacks. Observed black historian Lerone Bennett: “There is a certain grim white humor in the fact that the black marches and demonstrations of the 1960s reached artistic fulfillment” with “provocative and ultimately insidious reincarnations of all the Sapphires and Studds of yesteryear.”

Early rap mostly steered clear of the Sapphires and Studds, beginning not as a growl from below but as happy party music. The first big rap hit, the Sugar Hill Gang’s 1978 “Rapper’s Delight,” featured a catchy bass groove that drove the music forward, as the jolly rapper celebrated himself as a ladies’ man and a great dancer. Soon, kids across America were rapping along with the nonsense chorus:

I said a hip, hop, the hippie, the hippie,
to the hip-hip hop, ah you don’t stop
the rock it to the bang bang boogie, say
up jump the boogie,
to the rhythm of the boogie, the beat.

A string of ebullient raps ensued in the months ahead. At the time, I assumed it was a harmless craze, certain to run out of steam soon.

But rap took a dark turn in the early 1980s, as this “bubble gum” music gave way to a “gangsta” style that picked up where blaxploitation left off. Now top rappers began to write edgy lyrics celebrating street warfare or drugs and promiscuity. Grandmaster Flash’s ominous 1982 hit, “The Message,” with its chorus, “It’s like a jungle sometimes, it makes me wonder how I keep from going under,” marked the change in sensibility. It depicted ghetto life as profoundly desolate:

You grow in the ghetto, living second rate
And your eyes will sing a song of deep hate.
The places you play and where you stay
Looks like one great big alley way.
You’ll admire all the numberbook takers,
Thugs, pimps and pushers, and the big money makers.

Thanks for mentioning this! I'm black, but I'm a rock and roller and these are my peeps! Now you're talkin' music! : )

My taste in music is rather eclectic. While I obviously enjoy the bands I previously mentioned, I never really cared for Motown or any of the "doo-wop" 50's music. I do like some rap, no cop killer stuff, but early Eazy E & NWA (pre F#@$ tha' Police). I like some Ice Cube (Today was a Good Day), Dre & Snoop (Ain't Nothin' but a G thing). The list goes on. I also like Country, old & new. Some people say I have no taste in music.

It's good to meet others whose musical tastes are as eclectic as my own.

Although I disagree with you about Motown (my favorites being the Temptations, Four Tops, Supremes-with and without Diana Ross, Smokey Robinson, Teena Marie, Rick James and the Jackson Five-before Michael went 'round the bend), I must say that you both are right on the money about how most adolescents eventually outgrow the music they listen to. But sometimes that can also extend into young adulthood as well. I went through a phase during my first years in the Navy listening to Pat Benatar, Blondie, Yes, Journey, Robert Plant (of Led Zepplin, which incidentally, I purchased both the Early Days and Latter Days compilations just last year), the B52s, and Devo, just to name a few. In fact, I owned some of the vinyl versions of their albums. Although I have a few compilations of Rock, the music I enjoy the most is Contemporary or "Smooth" Jazz, as some critics derisively call it. But so what? Everyone has his or her own musical taste.
As for the article itself, Professor McWhorter is actually correct on many of the points he makes throughout the piece. Especially the point in which he talks about how the Black Left often decries the 'stereotypes' of street thugs in television and films, while wanting to canonize these same individuals for their 'creativity', or as they think, "keepin' it real." It's as if they're talking out of both sides of their mouths; in other words, if a Rap artist comes up with the most odious and offensive lyrics one can hear, then he or she gets a free pass. On the other hand, let some White filmaker or television producer have some Black pimp, prostitute, drug dealer, or Welfare mother in a story, and these same people go bananas, crying "RACIST." I can hardly keep track of how many articles I've read on this very subject, as well as on how difficult for Black actors or actresses to find work in Hollywood. The Black Left is never satisfied; damned if you do, damned if you don't.
Although Russell Simmons may not like the "soft" or "sissy" type of music that was done prior to the 1980s, he should at least acknowledge that if it were not for people like Berry Gordy, Leon Gamble and Kenneth Huff, the late Barry White or any other Black music pioneers, he would not be where he is today.

-Regards, T.

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