Hip Hop History and Culture

How Hip Hop Followed in the Footsteps of Malcolm X
Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five and the Origins of Hip Hop
Abstract
This paper examines the manner in which the hip hop grew out of the Civil Rights Movement and became a way for disenfranchised black youths, marginalized by society, to express their thoughts and feelings on a world that did want them to rise up. The history of hip hop and its culture is thus a rich one and a complex one that both celebrates youthful joys and energy while also taking different roads towards instigating a dialogue as well. Some hip hop artists have been thoughtful and have challenged the status quo with lyrics and albums that have provoked discussion in a sober-minded way (such as was the case with Tupac Shakur), while others have been more provocative and have set out to disrupt the status quo through a kind of shock and awe approach (such as with NWA, 2 Live Crew, Beastie Boys, and Snoop Dogg). In the end, hip hop’s history and culture is eclectic, fresh, vital, and representative of a movement rooted in black empowerment but also indicative of the oppression that is universally felt by all people of all races and genders at times in their lives no matter where they live. Its use of sampling tracks from other songs and artists that are not in any way associated with hip hop has enabled the genre of music to reinvent songs and sounds in a way that brings new life and new blood to art form. By sampling other artists hip hop culture has transcended the status quo and incorporated everything that has come before into something that is unique in much the same way African American musicians did in the late 19th and early 20th centuries when they developed the musical genres of jazz and blues by incorporating other musical traditions into their own musical experiences and creating something wholly their own. Hip hop history and culture is thus a blend of the black experience in America that is linked to black identity but not limited to blackness, as white artists and audiences have also gravitated to the genre, inspired by its freshness and meaning.
Hip Hop History and Culture
Hip hop began in the 1970s in New York, where emceeing took place at block parties and people like DJ Kool Herc got a name for themselves running a turntable and creating new sounds by manipulating the beats of records (BBC). One of the most common characteristics of emceeing was that the rhymes and lyrics tended to be confrontational and antagonistic to the authorities, boastful, and sexually provocative. These were lyrics and rhymes designed to effect a reaction from the audience. Hip hop artists that emerged from this scene tended to take a serious stance on social issues, however, and Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five was no exception. As Jon Pareles points out, Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five “proved that hip-hop was more than party music with their 1982 hit ‘The Message,’” which catapulted them to the forefront of the genre with lyrics like: “It's all about money, ain't a damn thing funny You got to have a con in this land of milk and honey” (Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five, “The Message”). This is the same kind of lyric that NWA would be rapping about a decade later on the opposite side of the country. However, what it showed was that hip hop came from the streets and was about the real experiences of black youths who saw the hypocrisy and despair of the American Dream, saw the cruel oppression of modern American life in the faces of the homeless and the marginalized. They were simply rapping about the truth of the world they saw and were not attempting to candy-coat it or put a smiling face on it. They were rapping the truth as a way to free themselves from the propaganda and lies and the “double digit inflation” as Grandmaster Funk pointed out: hip hop was a way to take their passion and monetize and turn it into a way out of the ghetto, a way to rise up out of the streets, a way to get around having to get “an education” in the school system that routinely let them down. Their education came from the school of hard knocks, as Grandmaster Flash, NWA and Tupac all showed. Best and Kellner define hip hop as a genre that focuses on the “experiences and conditions of African-Americans living in a spectrum of marginalized situations ranging from racial stereotyping and stigmatizing to struggle for survival in violent ghetto conditions” (1). This paper will show that hip hop carried on the message of Malcolm X and was the musical torch that all people, no matter their race, could carry in the face of their oppressors.
The need to recognize reality and know oneself was essentially the same kind of education that Malcolm X talked about in his speeches: the exploitation of the Negro race by the white elites who sought to control them and eliminate them from the face of “respectable” society had to be confronted if blacks ever wanted to be able to call themselves free. As E. Michael Jones points out, the plan of the white elitists was always to undermine black culture and to use them for their own purposes, whether it was for testing like in the Tuskegee Experiments or for simply controlling them as a people. Jones makes it very clear that the black population was consistently targeted by the White Anglo Saxon Protestant (WASP) establishment: “On December 26, 1945…John D. Rockefeller III had made a contribution of $2500 to support PP’s Harlem Project, which was ‘to provide an example for other Negro populated communities’ on how to reduce their numbers through the use of contraception…Again, in spite of the war and the bad name Hitler had given eugenics and the name change to evade association with it, Planned Parenthood was still talking the eugenic line” (Jones 288). Malcolm X rejected this kind of treatment and continued to do so even after the Civil Rights Movement, which he viewed as a false victory. He saw that it was the white establishment’s attempt to get blacks to shut up and sit down and fall back in line. Malcolm X was not going to do that, however. He saw that it was about culture and the mind and character—and that is why he was assassinated: he refused to back down. And so he was taken out, and now, as William Julius Wilson points out, “African Americans still have the highest rates of concentrated poverty of all groups in the United States” (58). It is that sense that there is still a war to be waged and a fight to be won that has motivated hip hop artists to use their musical talents to express the sentiment of Malcolm X but in their own words and ways and style.
As Fluker points out, “Rappers often point to Malcolm X’s phrase, ‘no sellout, no sellout, no sellout,’ as the touchstone of a black cultural consciousness intent on preserving the authenticity of black cultural expressions, and as the basis for a true black nationalism” (100). It is this spirit of black nationalism and black pride that has motivated hip hop from the beginning. Even simply the block party emceeing that took place and that still takes place can be seen as an expression of this pride, though it has crossed over cultural and racial borders, with stars like Macklemore and Eminem representing the face of hip hop just as much as other black artists.
Tupac Shakur, however, elevated the genre to a place that few had been able to sustain prior. Jake Brown states that “Tupac Shakur was a holy being—omnipotent in Hip Hop, the ‘Black Jesus.’ He spoke for his people in motion picture, lyrical scripture…in Tupac’s second coming as hip hop’s first prophet, he would raise a generation up on his shoulders and carry them to a promised land…his music was his generation’s heaven…he spoke a universal language” (xv). The message that Tupac communicated, though, was really no different from the message of Grandmaster Flash, who pointed out that America was basically a con job and if one wanted to make it he best get in on the con. Tupac did not see the “con” in ironic terms. He saw it as young smart street youths learning that hustling is an art and that those who hustle are righteous in the eyes of God: “We don’t part the Red Sea, but we walk through the ‘hood without getting shot. We don’t turn water to wine, but we turn dope fiends and dope heads into productive citizens of society. We turn words into money—what greater gift can there be? So I believe God blesses us, I believe God blesses those that hustle. Those that use their minds and those that are overall righteous” (Brown xxi). Tupac was conveying a positive message through hip hop and elevating the consciousness of those he met in the streets, of those who knew him and of those who listened to his music. Tupac’s style differed from that of the more abrasive gangsta rapp groups like NWA—but even NWA was coming from a similar disposition—a place of honesty and anger but a place in which the recognized way out was through the truth.
Ice Cube’s anger stemmed from both his sense of frustration with the white elites and with his own black community. He believed that too many blacks embodied the kind of “nigga mentality” that the white establishment wanted them to have (Decker 53). Instead of lifting themselves up and hustling the way Tupac urged them to do, they perpetuated their own systems of oppression, degraded themselves and their women, and propagated a culture of crassness that undermined their own dreams and visions. Ice Cube and NWA rapped about violence, sex, and life on the streets—because this was the reality they knew—but they also moved onwards from this. For instance, Ice Cube celebrated the Nation of Islam for helping him and other blacks to gain a sense of self-respect that was missing in the black community. Just as Malcolm X had converted to the Nation of Islam and clawed his way out of the gutter where he found himself immersed in drugs and crime, so too did Ice Cube turn to a higher path to escape the waywardness of the street life; while for Malcolm X the path was through speaking, for Ice Cube the path was through hip hop: “Soon as we as a people use our knowledge of self to our advantage we will then be able to become and be called blacks,” Ice Cube argued (Decker. 53). Hip hop was a way for him and others to rise above. The same could be said of Beastie Boys, Snoop Dogg, or even 2 Live Crew, whose lyrics were often seen as sexist and explicit.
2 Live Crew was deliberately antagonizing the moral majority, however, and their explicit lyrics were meant to shock and offend. While they may not have reached the heights that other artists reached, the group did show what could be done by way of sampling music, and sampling became a way for hip hop artists to change the world they found around them into something that they could call their own.
In conclusion, Hip hop was about rejecting the status quo and asserting one’s own take on things, borrowing what had come before and putting a new spin on it. It was also about lifting oneself up and sometimes it was just about being provocative and shocking. In the end, however, hip hop was for everyone who felt that they needed a way out of the dull and oppressive world that surrounded them—and thus it may have originated in black experience, but blacks, whites, Asians and everyone could soon identify with it.
Works Cited
BBC. “The birth of hip hop.” BBC. https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p04s04nk
Best, Steven, and Douglas Kellner. \\\"Rap, black rage, and racial difference.\\\"  Enculturation 2.2 (1999): 1-23.
Brown, Jake. Tupac Shakur, (2-Pac) in the Studio: The Studio Years (1989-1996). Phoenix, AZ: Colossus Books, 2005.
Decker, Jeffrey Louis. \\\"The state of rap: Time and place in hip hop nationalism.\\\" Social Text 34 (1993): 53-84.
Fluker, Walter. The Stones that the Builders Rejected. Harrisburg, PA: Trinity Press International, 1998.
Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five. “The Message.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PobrSpMwKk4
Jones, E. Michael. Libido Dominandi: Sexual Liberation and Political Control. South Bend, IN: St. Augustine’s Press, 2000.
Pareles, Jon. “Hip-Hop Is Rock ’n’ Roll, and Hall of Fame Likes It.” The New York Times, 13 March 2007. https://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/13/arts/music/13hall.html
Wilson, William Julius. More Than Just Race: Being Black and Poor in the Inner City. New York, NY: W.W. Norton & Company, 2009.