Inkwell: Authors and Artists

    
We're please to welcome Jeff Chang to the Inkwell to discuss his book
"Total Chaos: The Art and Aesthetics of Hip-Hop".

Jeff Chang has written extensively on race, culture, politics, the
arts, and music.

His first book, Can't Stop Won't Stop, garnered honors including the
American Book Award and the Asian American Literary Award. He has also
edited an anthology entitled Total Chaos: The Art & Aesthetics of
Hip-Hop, released in February 2007.

Jeff was a founding editor of ColorLines magazine, and a Senior
Editor/Director at Russell Simmons' 360hiphop.com. He began writing for
URB and The Bomb Hip-Hop magazines, and has written for the San
Francisco Chronicle, Vibe, The Nation, and Mother Jones, among many
other publications.

In 1993, he co-founded and ran the influential hip-hop indie label,
SoleSides, now Quannum Projects, helping launch the careers of DJ
Shadow, Blackalicious, Lyrics Born and Lateef the Truth Speaker. He has
helped produce over a dozen records, including the "godfathers of
gangsta rap", the Watts Prophets.

He was an organizer of the National Hip-Hop Political Convention and
has served as a board member for several organizations working for
change through youth and community organizing, media justice, culture,
the arts, and hip-hop activism.

Born of Chinese and Native Hawaiian ancestry, Jeff was raised in
Hawai'i where he attended 'Iolani School. He lives in California. He is
a big fan of Japanese curry and poi, but not at the same time. 


Leading the conversation with Jeff is our own Anna Cox.

Anna Cox is a co-host of the Women On the Well conference and a host
of the Psychology conference.  She's a Psychiatric Nurse Practitioner
and practices in Portland, OR.  Psychiatry encompasses both art and
science, and the bottom line is the narrative, from the patient to the
practitioner and back again.  She is also an enthusiastic participant
in popular culture and is looking forward to learning more about hip
hop through this conversation.

Welcome to both of you!
  

    

hi Jeff, great to see you here!  i was at a DJ Shadow show earlier this
year, and it was really great.  

i've been reading Total Chaos with a lot of interest and finding out 
many things i didn't realize before.  forgive me for revealing my ignorance 
here, but i had no idea that there are "four elements" to hip hop: graphitti, 
b-boying/b-girling, DJ and MC.  there is a lot of discussion about how
these elements get included in different aspects of hip hop - the theater,
music, dance, and graphic arts.  do you think that the four elements limits
hip hop unnecessarily, or are they key ingredients, without which hip hop isn't
really hip hop?
  

    
hey anna,

thanks so much for having me here! i'm really looking forward to this
conversation. 

your question about the "four elements" is really a great way to set
this all off. maybe some short history first...

during the 1970s, youth cultural movements began springing up all
around the world against the backdrop of the exhaustion of the 60s
social movements. you can think of the punks emerging from the east
Village in Manhattan or squatters' London, the surfers of the north
shore of Oahu or the Gold Coast of Australia and the skateboarders
carving up the forsaken Santa Monica/Venice beachfront. 

it's as if, with "the revolution" over, young people in abandoned
urban spaces decided they'd just go out and make their own way of
having fun.  they created their own slang, street games, developed
their own musical tastes and dances, all (for the moment) outside the
gaze of authority or the appetites of big money.

hip-hop became the name for the pasttimes the kids in the bronx
invented, what we now call "the four elements", a term invented by
pioneering DJ and Universal Zulu Nation founder Afrika Bambaataa.

DJing, MCing, b-boying/b-girling or breaking (not "breakdancing" as
pundits would later dub it and which lots of pioneers are still mad
about) described the aspects of a typical Bronx party. 

a fourth "element" was the nascent graffiti movement—the art of
spraypainting one's nickname on walls, buses, and subway trains—which
attracted a more racially, geographically, and economically diverse
following, as well as fans who included art gallery curators,
journalists, sociologists, even Norman Mailer. with its roots in
Philadelphia, the graffiti movement, in fact, preceded the Bronx
hip-hop movement, but many of the Bronx partiers were also graffiti
writers, Herc and Bambaataa included. 

by the late 70s hip-hop was in full swing in the black and brown
neighborhoods in the bronx, harlem, spanish harlem, brooklyn, queens,
lower east side manhattan and hell's kitchen and even long island. not
long after, it desegregated the post-disco downtown clubs where white
punkers and new-wavers were exploring new avenues forward. before long,
graf was being shown in high-end galleries, b-boys were working with
ballet companies, and filmmakers were trying to capture the nascent
movement. 

at this point, hip-hop began to transform, to move into genres beyond
"the four elements" into theater, literature, visual arts, and much
much more. i think now it could be said that hip-hop arts is among the
most influential global movements of the past three decades. 

there is a debate over whether a piece of work is hip-hop if it
doesn't have one or more of the elements reflected in it. i take the
more expansive view: the actual practice of the original elements is
less important than the aesthetic implications of those elements. in
other words, just because we use a sans serif font in my book instead
of rendering it in a tag style, it isn't any less hip-hop. 

does that help?
  

    

i agree with your expansive view, plus i think it makes it more accessible
to others less conversant with the elements.  tag style is hard to read!
  

    

i'd like to digress for just a moment here and discuss my own background 
in hip hop.  in the summer of 1981, Double Dutch Bus by Frankie Smith was 
released, and i heard it on the radio.  i was sold.  i was raised in a 
household with classical music, but in my heart, i've always preferred 
music with a beat, something you can *dance* to.  maybe that's what made 
me instantly love that song as much as i did.

since then, i've thrilled to men and women breaking in public, both as 
entertainment and in battle with each other.  listened to a lot of various 
different crews rock the mic - Public Enemy, De La Soul, Tribe Called 
Quest, the Roots, DJ Shadow, Melle Mel and Grandmaster Flash, Afrika 
Bambaataa, Run DMC, Missy Elliot, Eve, and the list goes on.  of course, 
i've also seen a lot of tags and other grafitti, as well as Basquiat 
(which might be called a classical application of tagging).

i missed out on the opportunity for academic exploration of hip hop 
culture, since i was doing other stuff instead, but i do think that this 
exploration is crucial.  such a powerful cultural movement should be 
discussed and examined for it's significance and impact on us all.
  

    
ohhhh! you got your funky bus fare! 

(i'm going to have to resist the temptation to do the rest of this
conversation in pig latin...an aside: if anyone has done a translation
of that breakdown where they're going 'moozi oozle, etc. etc., my
kizzerd!' i'd love to see it...)

i just wanted to note that even where i grew up in honolulu, everyone
seemed to know the words to rapper's delight and double dutch bus. when
the hiphopsploitation flicks like breakin' and beat street came out,
tho, it was like being hit with a ton of bricks. to see young kids at
the time--especially youths of color--just doing what they wanted to do
was just unbelievably empowering. 

and it was fun! one of the things about academic exploration of
hip-hop is trying not to lose this sense of joy and wonder in the
culture. we can talk about that more later...
  

    

i was talking about this topic with a friend of mine, today, and thinking
about how talking about hip hop means talking about touchy things like race,
class, culture, privilege, and money.  then i was marvelling that two such
small words - "hip hop" - carry that much weight.  it's really quite
amazing.

the other amazing thing about hip hop is how accessible it is, on so many
levels - whereever you are, there is an entrance near at hand.  which is 
how it should be, imnsho!  we may choose to fight over - *ahem* - discuss 
the meaning of the artwork, but everyone should be able to access it.

i was reading this article in the NYT today, and it struck me how it 
resonated with Adam Mandesbach's (sp?  don't have book in front of me!)
essay on _Lit Hop_.  in it he discusses how hip hop literature gets dissed
by mainstream critics including those at the NYT Review of Books.  then i
read this (see below) and i thought "hmmm.  maybe this is part of why the
critics seem so dismissive?"  it's not the whole reason, of course, and
one could reasonably argue that the NYT is completely liberal, but there is
a strongly conservative flavor to the critiques put forth by the Times, as
quoted by Mr. Mandesbach.

"They (a graduate student, Jesse Graham, Dr. Haidt) found that people who 
identified themselves as liberals attached great weight to the two moral 
systems protective of individuals - those of not harming others and of doing 
as you would be done by. But liberals assigned much less importance to the 
three moral systems that protect the group, those of loyalty, respect for 
authority and purity.

Conservatives placed value on all five moral systems but they assigned less 
weight than liberals to the moralities protective of individuals. 

Dr. Haidt believes that many political disagreements between liberals and 
conservatives may reflect the different emphasis each places on the five 
moral categories. 

Take attitudes to contemporary art and music. Conservatives fear that 
subversive art will undermine authority, violate the in-group's traditions 
and offend canons of purity and sanctity. Liberals, on the other hand, see 
contemporary art as protecting equality by assailing the establishment, 
especially if the art is by oppressed groups."

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/18/science/18mora.html


5 moral systems
4 elements
3 french hens
2 turtle doves
& a partridge in a pear tree
right?  *wink*
  

    
Hey, Basquiat started as a tagger: he was Samo, and I actually liked
his tagging "art" (various witty texts signed Samo) better than his
paintings. 
  

    
Being a 45 year old geezer, i tend to think of hip hop primarily in
terms of the four elements (DJing, MCing, b-boying/b-girling, breaking)
+ graffitti. That's pretty much how i've thought of  hip hop since i
first experienced it back in high school when i first heard rapper's
delight and the breaks. I tend to focus on music, so i primarily think
of hip hop in music/dance terms with the visual element of graffitti.

I was wondering if you would be willing elaborate a bit on what
characterizes hip hop aesthetics outside of the four+1 elements?  What
makes something hip hop literature, photography, or theater--what are
the hip hop aesthetics that unite them across the different
media/genres?  Is it primarily a matter of demographics or self
identity--that specific artists identify themselves as hip hop artists,
therefore their work (be it literature, photography, or theater) is
considered hip hop or are their characteristics in the work itself that
can be said to constitute some sort of aesthetics of hip hop?
  

    
anna, i saw that same article and it was a head scratcher to me. i
still wonder sometimes what makes a liberal and a conservative? some of
the criticism of hip-hop has to do with what people think of as its
insularity, it's "in-group"-ness, a topic that certainly has not a
little to do with perceptions of racial difference. perhaps it's the
flipside of the notion that hip-hop is somehow more authentic to the
experience of urban youth (read: youth of color). 

this is a digression, but i think an interesting one: a recent
university of chicago study called the black youth project shows that
african american youths do indeed pay attention to hip-hop at up to 3
times the rates of white youths. but many also believe that the
industry is catering, even pandering, nowadays to a white audience.

captward: yes, basquiat was known as the philosopher-tagger--he tended
to put up sayings and then sign his name next to a copyright logo. i
find it interesting these days that the current generation of street
artists employ many of the same techniques--and dealers are sometimes
taking their stuff right off the street and selling them for hundreds
of thousands of dollars. although i don't want to deny the artists'
right to make as much as they need or want to--especially in American
society, where there is no level of public financial support available
at all--i find this turn a little bewildering and more than a little
annoying.

pdl: wow! that's the big question isn't it? so big i'm gonna do
another post here...

 
  

    

just as an aside, check out these two (she's 8, he's 5):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2josUqMTUmE

the next generation of hip hop??
  

    
I first became aware of hip-hop when my sons were young in the 80's.
My first reaction was to flash on the black disk jockies from my youth.
 At that time (late 50's, early 60's) the AM radio was the mega-force
in popular music.  And it was also segregated.  We called it "listening
to the right side of the dial" because all the Spanish and Black r&b
stations were the highest numbers in New York.

I remember Jocko Henderson and the Rocketship Show that came in from
Philly.  Jocko had quite the rhyming, poetry schtik going, transforming
street slang into his long raps.  He interspersed these with the
latest r&b tunes.  When I went away to college in Pittsburgh, there was
a dj named Sir Walter who did the same thing.  It turns out that my
brother's roommate in college knew this station very well.  His dad
owned the station so he filled me in on all the inside stuff about Sir
Walter.

I read some things about the start of hip-hop in the Bronx and the
authors mentioned that a lot of the first dj's were from Jamaican and
other Carribean families.  I knew that within that tradition the
music--calypso and the Jamaican forms--was a type of "newspaper."  The
songs reported local news and happenings *and* there was social
commentary blended into the mix.

Anyway, what do you make of these 2 examples that I bring up?
  

    
hey everyone,

thanks for stopping by! i'm sorry for the day offlist--jena 6, 50 v.
kanye, and most importantly lots of kids stuff happening here in south
berkeley. i'm back daily from here on out. 

thanks too anna for your youtube post. when i was first sent it--by my
friends whom i had djed semi-professionally with in college--my jaw
dropped. my kids were eating breakfast in the other room as it played,
and i looked at my own dusty turntables and mixer here (over the piles
of albums, 12" singles, and 45s) and felt a sharp twinge of guilt, the
way a violinist dad might feel horrible about his kids who hadn't
learned to read music...!

so first, let me go to pdl's question, and then come back to david's
in the next post. 

pdl, you go to the heart of the issue: what makes something hip-hop?

the first thing to say is that hip-hop started off from an urgent
need--for abandoned kids to have fun. no one set out to write a
manifesto back then, a la the turn-of-the-century futurists, who were
manifesto engines. that's probably one of the reasons hip-hop has
spread so far and so deeply.

it's also why it's been so hard to define. i called my anthology total
chaos for that very reason. each entry, whether it's discussing
hip-hop photography, hip-hop journalism, hip-hop in visual arts,
hip-hop in dance, hip-hop in literature, on and on. there are lots of
disagreements, even a debate over whether or not the category is even
useful for artistic production. which only proves--to me--the
movement's vitality. if you have nothing to argue about, it's dead.

what most people will agree with is that hip-hop aesthetics reflects a
certain generational shift. some have called it
"post-multiculturalist", or more controversially, "post-black", some
have called it "urban outsider art". i think there is a certain truth
to some of the labels, but each is inadequate. 

hip-hop arts span a period of the height of the multiculturalism
movement to what comes after--from the 80s when artists were looking to
diversify what they thought of as a white male dominated field to now
where the pop culture feels thoroughly diversified. hip-hop had a hand
in this very process of change. so "post-multiculti" doesn't work. 

"urban outsider art" has been used to describe, say, the new street
art movement, but it seems to pertain to what's happened in dance as
well as hip-hop dancers have formed companies and moved into the
theater. but if they're inside the theater, they're hardly outsiders.
and urban is a funny word for "people of color".

there is now a debate within hip-hop theater whether or not it has to
contain, say, two of the four elements to be considered hip-hop
theater. some say it must. some say it's really about generational
narratives, not the forms a play must utilize. there was much
criticism, for instance, of a group that tried to rewrite shakespearean
plays in ebonics. but a play like rennie harris's amazing "rome and
jewels", which recast "romeo and juliet" (and rethought its update
"west side story") amongst 90s street gangs in philadelphia is thought
of as a cornerstone of hip-hop theater. the difference perhaps is depth
of feeling and intention.

what joins these artists together are a sense of being the first
generation to come of age after civil rights, dealing with the end of
de facto segregation (and now the reality of de facto resegregation),
the politics of abandonment and containment, the emergence of a new
cultural diversity, and the increasing interest of corporations in
youth cultures.

these issues figure in much of the hip-hop arts: "keeping it real vs.
crossing over and culture vs. commerce; how to move the mainstream in
your direction; what is the definition of making it?

re: demographics. there's a constant awareness that this is an arts
movement built on afro-diasporic blackness. at the same time, there is
an openness to a diversity of voices. at its best, hip-hop is
cacophonous, a multitude of voices calling and responding. at its
worst, it looks (paradoxically) like a monoculture. 

i've called 50 cent the high fructose corn syrup of hip-hop--he's
selling "get rich or die trying" not just in cd form, but in the array
of consumer and luxury goods he's hawking. as an artist, he's
marginally interesting to me. as a self-branded center of a lifestyle
economy, he's pretty fascinating...

i digress, but i hope this helps answer the question. 
 
  

    
david, i get goose bumps reading your post. while i was never
privileged enough to be able to hear his on-air work, many
pioneers--including dj kool herc, the father of hip-hop--cite jocko
henderson as a direct and very important influence. cousin brucie and
wolfman jack at wbls were also huge to them. black radio--and now also
"urban radio", which btw was invented by white programmers in the late
80s as a distancing from black radio--remains a central space for
hip-hop culture.

(as an aside, has anyone seen 'talk to me' yet? my friends in the
industry all tell me it's a must-see. my only excuse for not having
seen it yet is that i have kids.)

kool herc was a jamaican immigrant who grew up in the same yard that
bob marley hailed from. he loved the sound systems that would come
through there, and adapted the djing (that's what they call mcing in
jamaica) to his own parties when he began playing. (i talk a lot about
this in can't stop won't stop.) and in time, it makes sense that these
parties become places for folks to talk about what's going on--the same
way carnival music such as soca in trinidad or samba in rio or even
mardi gras in new orleans often reflects back the feel of the time. in
that sense, there's an afrodiasporic tradition of the party itself as a
mode of communication that is revived in the u.s. with hip-hop. 
  

    

thanks so much, Jeff, for these fascinating posts.  this is such
interesting, complex, meaningful stuff to think about and talk about, it's
hard to even get a handle on where to start sometimes.

>the way a violinist dad might feel horrible about his kids who hadn't
>learned to read music...!


ahahaha, the art form may change, but the guilt doesn't...
  

    
(If you're reading this conversation and you're not a member of the
WELL, we'd still love for you to participate.  Send e-mail to
inkwell@well.com and we'll post your question or comment.)
  

    
hey everyone,

for those of you who maybe haven't seen the book in question: total
chaos :: the art and aesthetics of hip-hop, here's the table of
contents... i can't say i'm expert on all of these topics, but i'd be
happy to discuss and point you in the direction of people who may be.
you can find excerpts and all kinds of info on the book at:

http://www.totalchaoshiphop.com


Section 1 ROOTS: PERSPECTIVES ON HISTORY
1 Harry Allen Dreams Of A Final Theory
2 Anthony "Amde" Hamilton of the Watts Prophets Nommo
3 Marc Bamuthi Joseph (Yet Another) Letter To A Young Poet
4 Jorge POPMASTER FABEL Pabon Physical Graffiti: A History Of Hip-Hop
Dance
5 Joe Schloss The Art of Battling: An Interview With Alien Ness
6 Greg Tate, Vijay Prashad, Mark Anthony Neal, Brian Cross Got Next: A
Roundtable on Identity and Aesthetics after Multiculturalism
Roundtable


Section 2 FLIPPING THE SCRIPT: BEYOND THE FOUR ELEMENTS
7 The Pure Movement and the Crooked Line: An Interview with Rennie
Harris
8 Eisa Davis Found In Translation: The Emergence of Hip-Hop Theatre
9 Marc Bamuthi Joseph, Kamilah Forbes, Traci Bartlow, and Javier Reyes
From The Dope Spot To Broadway: A Roundtable on Hip-Hop Theatre,
Dance, and Performance
10 Adam Mansbach On Lit Hop
11 Bill Adler Who Shot Ya: A History of Hip-Hop Photography
12 Cey Adams, Brent Rollins, and Sacha Jenkins Words And Images: A
Roundtable on Graphic Design
13 Lydia Yee, with Nadine Robinson, Sanford Biggers, Luis Gispert, and
Jackie Salloum Between the Studio and the Street: A Roundtable on
Hip-Hop Visual Arts
14 Paul D. Miller The City In Public Vs. Private: Through a Scanner
Darkly


Section 3 THE REAL: IDENTITY IN FLUX
15 Oliver Wang It Was Written: The Aesthetics of Hip-Hop Journalism
16 Kevin Coval "L-vis Is A Pioneer" or Legacy, the VH1 Special
17 Dave Tompkins Burn Rubber on Plastic Bubbles: The Art of Dave
Funkenklein
18 Danyel Smith Black Talk and Hot Sex: Why Street Lit is Literature
19 Juba Kalamka and Tim'm West It's All One: A Conversation
20 Joel Tan Homothugdragsterism
21 robert karimi how I found my inner DJ
22 Joan Morgan and Mark Anthony Neal A Brand New Feminism: A
Conversation


Section 4 WORLDWIDE: HIP-HOP ARTS BEYOND BORDERS
23 Suheir Hammad Brooklyn
24 Staceyann Chin Falling For Bob Marley
25 Eli Jacobs-Fantauzzi Inventos Hip-Hop: An Interview
26 Shaheen Ariefdien and Nazli Abrahams Cape Flats Alchemy
27 Raquel Cepeda Afro-Blue: Incanting Yoruba Gods in Hip-Hop's Isms
28 Cristina Verán with Darryl DLT Thompson, Litefoot, Grant Leigh
Saunders, Mohammed Yunus Rafiq, and JAAS Native Tongues: A Roundtable
on Hip-Hop's Global Indigenous Movement


Section 5 NEXT ELEMENTS: HIP-HOP ARTS AND FUTURE AESTHETICS
29 Walidah Imarisha Untitled Poem
30 Roberta Uno Theatres Crossing The Divide: A Baby Boomer's Defense
of Hip-Hop Aesthetics
31 Eric Arnold, with Rachel Raimist, Kevin Epps, and Michael Wanguhu
Put Your Camera Where My Eyes Can See: A Hip-Hop Film Roundtable
32 Codes And The B-Boy's Stigmata: An Interview with Jeffrey DOZE
Green
33 Revolution: An Interview with Brett Cook-Dizney
34 Rha Goddess Scarcity & Exploitation: The Myth & Reality of the
Struggling Hip-Hop Artist
35 Danny Hoch Towards A Hip-Hop Aesthetic: A Manifesto for the Hip-Hop
Arts Movement
  

    
Wow, that sure covers a lot of territory!

Last year I saw an amazing circus production which seemed to my 
ignorant eye to incorporate a lot of hip-hop choreography.  It was 
stunning.  Quite a few WELLperns went to the performance in S.F. 
together and threw a party for the performers after the event.  

Here's a promo clip they did for that show.  To my eye, here a 
lot of hip-hop movement meets with classical chinese circus 
acrobatics, and these young Montreal performance rebels happily 
scooped it all up and applied their circus discipline.
       http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0RCwvS1gWUk

Years ago a ballet director in San Francisco was one of the first 
to incorporate young kids who could break (adoring critics 
said "break dance" at the time) into a formal ballet production. That 
was loved, but as a blast of fresh air and an anomally.

I'm wondering to what degree this strand of culture is still outside the
"mainstream" (if it is), and what's still cutting edge on the 
choreography side of things now.  
  

    
thanks for that explanation, jeff.  It seems sort of similar to my peanut
gallery take, which is that hip hop is a cultural movement and that hip hop
art in whatever medium is an outgrowth of that movement--as opposed to a
more rigid aesthetic movement that has more definite characteristics.
  

    
To that point, this section jumped out at me, where Mark Anthony Neal
is quoting Tricia Rose:

  "Tricia Rose has this great conversation about the underground of
   hip-hop and the underground of actual people.  The underground of
   actual people don't listen to underground hip-hop. They listen to
   50 Cent. So no matter how much folks castigate mainstream hip-hop
   and discuss the value of the underground, the underground's not
   reaching the folks that need to be reached anyway."

First, that brings up a question for me: if underground hip-hop isn't
reaching the folks that need to be reached, isn't that a failure of
underground hip-hop?

The second question is that Neal is obviously talking about rap music
here; does that division exist in other parts of hip-hop?  Is graffiti
inherently underground? 
  

    
gail--wow, great stuff. some of the street runs seem parkour
influenced. do you know parkour? it's also call free running, and it's
basically an attempt to place one's body into the furthest reaches of
the built environment. it's not coming from hip-hop per se, but it's
certainly related in the way it is an underground movement that is
about reclaiming public space. (it also bears obvious parallels to
skateboard culture, sans skateboards!)

as far as the cutting edge of choreography goes, i love the theatre
work of rennie harris' puremovement and rubberbandance group from
montreal. i don't claim to be an expert but if you have the time,
here's a piece i put together on rennie and the evolution of hip-hop
dance into dance theatre:

www2.colum.edu/center_for_arts_policy/documents/rennie_harrris.pdf

pdl--i can get with that great summation! 

david--the point that mark made in that article is really fascinating
and there are lots of explanations. it goes to the question of what
happens to hip-hop when it moves away from the "core audience", in this
case, read: urban black youths. in fact, i've been speaking with a
writer who is doing a story on the whitening of the underground, a
subject i'm very close to because of the work i've done with dj shadow,
blackalicious, lyrics born, and lateef the truth speaker since the
early 90s.

i think that audiences for the underground have whitened, and the
reasons are complex, mainly having to do with 1) distribution and 2)
how aesthetics get racialized. 

let's take distribution. when we started putting out records in the
early 90s, our audiences were overwhelmingly non-white. but by the late
90s, major labels had signed many of our peers from the
underground--acts like common, mos def, talib kweli, the roots--and
begun crossing them over to white college radio audiences. 

by 2000, national distribution had been completely consolidated into
the majors. independent distribution as we knew it in the early 90s was
very much dead. even if you were an indie label, you would have to
deal with distributors owned by majors.

so the majors began to dictate where records would be sold, and they
determined that "underground" acts belonged in college towns. at first
this wasn't so bad: artists began doing tour circuits that netted them
great advances in largely white college towns, think portland, madison,
seattle, austin, etc.

at the same time, the middle dropped out of the industry, a result of
the larger trend of media consolidation. so the only way to really make
a living if you weren't on a major was to tour. (and the only way to
really make a living if you were on a major was to net product
endorsements--shoes, clothes, etc--but i digress.) the audiences that
could afford to attend these shows were usually wealthier. and the
venues were rarely accessible to the core audiences. in fact, because
of rap's rep for violence, most clubs in most big hip-hop cities
wouldn't book rap acts unless they were "underground", that is, drawing
a decidedly non-core audience.

these days you see it play out this way: rap acts that reach core
audiences don't tour unless they are a part of a superstar arena tour
headlined by someone like jay-z or eminem. rap acts that reach
underground audiences do the tour-van circuit. unlike rock, there is no
in-between any more.  

now the other aspect of this question is the relentless desire for
stylistic change that always runs through hip-hop. at some point,
underground stylists could no longer compete with stylists on major
labels. and to core audiences with short memories, underground acts
began to be seen as the artists catering to a white backpacker kids.
it's a downward, reinforcing spiral that has essentially segregated the
audiences for hip-hop. 

the second question deserves more and i'll try to get to that in
another post. but suffice it to say that nowhere else in hip-hop is the
artform as thoroughly and complexly organized in its commodity form as
rap. and the result of this complexity is divided audiences.

so i don't blame the artists for not reaching the folks they need to
reach. i blame the corporations who have segmented the diversity of rap
with their niche market mentality. 
  

    
Hoo, lots of questions provoked there, but it's too late for me to
form them coherently. Instead I'll ask a somewhat provocative question
-- is 50 cent even hip-hop? Or is that pop music with rapping?  
  

    
The more you write about hip-hop culture , the more it sounds like the
reception bebop got in the late 40's and early 50's.

The social world changed.  Blacks fought in the war; they worked in
the wartime factories; massive migration north and west.  The music
reflected these changes.

At the time swing was the popular music in America--dance music.  The
new stuff started to explode within the big bands.  The modernists
weren't playing for dancing anymore.  Of course, they could if they
wanted to.  The sense of "cool" as a state of being emerged with the
attendant slang, folklore, clothing, gestures etc.

Most of the white audiences and critics were appalled.  The war of
words of bad revues and bronx cheers started up.  Somehow the new
musicians were violating the "covenant" that the audience had with
them.  There was a marked attempt in the media to stamp out this
objectionable music and behavior.

Same shit.  Different time.
  

    
Maybe you can explain a little how you see Basquiat's work as feeding
into what became Hip Hop? Something maybe about the reclaiming of
public spaces?

Back in, um, 1977 or 1978 I overlapped in high school* with Jean-Michel
Basquiat and I totally remember seeing the "Samo" tags in basically
every subway station in New York. I believe that at first there were
maybe three guys doing it, but Jean-Michel just took off with it.

"Samo as an alternative to 9 to 5 living..." and things like that.

Almost always these graffitis** were done on the blank black framed
spaces left by unsold advertising space in the subway stations - which
was an added quality to the art work itself.

*A unique alternative public school that was 100% work-study at that
time:  City As School - http://www.city-as-school.org/

** graffiti may be considered art without permission.
  

    
david--there's an old debate amongst hip-hop fans of a certain age
(roughly folks in their early 40s to those who are just now hitting
their 30s) about what's rap vs. what's hip-hop: the idea being that 
rap is crossover commercialized junk and hip-hop is the real authentic
deal. personally i was big into this (it's sort of the same debate that
came up in punk--like, is green day really punk? and before that, are
the replacements punk if they signed to a major? and before that, are
the clash punk if they signed to a major?) but got cured of it in the
late 90s. 

lots of folks don't like 50 Cent and were rooting for him to lose
against Kanye. i dig kanye, i don't dig 50 as much. but it's pretty
clear to me that it's all rap, it's all hip-hop. there's stuff you like
and stuff you don't.

one of the reasons, frankly, i got to this point was to acknowledge
that people's tastes are always weird. you might like the clash but dig
barry manilow on the side. you know? 

but it was also important to fight the battle in the early 90s because
fans of hip-hop were worried about whether it would be co-opted by big
companies (see vanilla ice, or maybe don't...). but hip-hop arguably
crossed over in the mid-90s while maintaining its "street cred" and
that took a lot of wind out of the argument. 

these days, i hold out hope that artists will get it and move their
work in more socially conscious directions. this was the subtext of the
congressional hearings yesterday, i believe, on both congressman bobby
rush's part, and on the part of hip-hop artists who testified, like
master p and david banner. 

the media actually got it wrong--they framed it in the old free speech
vs. bad speech way. but i thought david banner was the most rational.
he said, look, this is what i rap about, i'm the stephen king of pop
music. i hear you about trying to change the culture, but don't make it
impossible for me to say ugly things. that's about the realest
defense, not just of hip-hop, but of art, that we are likely to hear.

for the record, it's true that david banner has done strip club
anthems like "play" and hardcore songs like "like a pimp", but he's
also rapped very thoughtfully about poverty and racism in mississippi,
where he's from. he's a college grad. and he was perhaps the single
most important person to organize rappers and hip-hop activists in the
south in the wake of hurricane katrina to donate and go down and do
work for the victims on the gulf coast. yet he doesn't brag about this
work. he's the anti-bono.

 
  

    
dlwilson :: i think you're exactly right. that was exactly the
connection that many in hip-hop were making in the late 80s and the
early 90s when hip-hop was still, in a sense, a vanguard movement. some
 sampled monk and coltrane, others drew inspiration for their rhymes
from ornette coleman and sonny rollins. (i'd recommend checking out,
for instance, the freestyle fellowship, a highly influential but
somewhat forgotten l.a. group from that era.) 

it's interesting that now bebop has become canonized to the point of
repertory and ken burns specials. many of us often worry that this is
what has happened to the "underground", that artists there are no
longer pushing aesthetic edges but are in fact trying to remake some
sort of a "golden era". that's not true of all artists who are not on
major labels, but it has also contributed to the sense that the
"underground" has become the wrong kind of insular, rather than the
right kind of insular.