The Social Origins of Hip-Hop
Hip-hop originated in the appalling social conditions facing African American
inner-city youth in the 1970s and 1980s. During those decades, manufacturing industries
left the cities for suburban or foreign locales, where land values were lower and labour
was less expensive. Unemployment among African American youth rose to more than 40
percent. Middle-class blacks left the inner city for the suburbs. This robbed the
remaining young people of successful role models they could emulate. The out-migration
also eroded the taxing capacity of municipal governments, leading to a decline in public
services. Meanwhile, the American public elected conservative governments at the state and
federal levels. They slashed school and welfare budgets, thus deepening the destitution of
ghetto life (Wilson, 1987).
Understandably, young African Americans grew angrier as the conditions of their
existence worsened. With few legitimate prospects for advancement, they turned
increasingly to crime and, in particular, to the drug trade.
In the late 1970s, cocaine was expensive and demand for the drug was flat. So, in the
early 1980s, Colombia's Medellin drug cartel introduced a less expensive form of cocaine
called rock or crack. Crack was not only inexpensive: It offered a quick and intense high,
and it was highly addictive. Crack cocaine offered many people a temporary escape from
hopelessness and soon became wildly popular in the inner city. Turf wars spread as gangs
tried to outgun each other for control of the local traffic. The sale and use of crack
became so widespread it corroded much of what was left of the inner-city African American
community (Davis, 1990).
The shocking conditions described above gave rise to a shocking musical form: hip-hop.
Stridently at odds with the values and tastes of both whites and middle-class African
Americans, hip-hop described and glorified the mean streets of the inner city while
holding the police, the mass media, and other pillars of society in utter contempt.
Furthermore, hip-hop tried to offend middle-class sensibilities, Black and white, by using
highly offensive language. In 1988, more than a decade after its first stirrings, hip-hop
reached its political high point with the release of the CD It Takes a Nation to Hold Us
Back by Chuck D and Public Enemy. In "Don't Believe the Hype," Chuck D accused
the mass media of maliciously distributing lies. In "Black Steel in the Hour of
Chaos," he charged the FBI and the CIA with assassinating the two great leaders of
the African American community in the 1960s, Martin Luther King and Malcolm X. In
"Party for Your Right to Fight" he blamed the federal government for organizing
the fall of the Black Panthers, the radical black nationalist party of the 1960s. Here, it
seemed, was an angry expression of subcultural revolt that could not be mollified.
Hip-Hop Transformed
However, there were elements in hip-hop that soon transformed it (Bayles, 1994:
341--62; Neal, 1999: 144--8). In the first place, early, radical hip-hop was not written
as dance music. It therefore cut itself off from a large audience. Moreover, hip-hop
entered a self-destructive phase with the emergence of Gangsta rap, which extolled
criminal lifestyles, denigrated women, and replaced politics with drugs, guns, and
machismo. The release of Ice T's "Cop Killer" in 1992 provoked strong political
opposition from Republicans and Democrats, white church groups, and Black middle-class
associations. Time/Warner was forced to withdraw the song from circulation. The sense that
hip-hop had reached a dead end, or at least a turning point, grew in 1996, when rapper
Tupac Shakur was murdered in the culmination of a feud between two hip-hop record labels,
Death Row in Los Angeles and Bad Boy in New York (Springhall, 1998: 149--51).
If these events made it seem that hip-hop was self-destructing, the police and
insurance industries helped to speed up its demise. In 1988, a group called Niggas with
Attitude released "Fuck the Police," a critique of police violence against Black
youth. Law enforcement officials in several cities dared the group to perform the song in
public, threatening to detain the performers or shut down their shows. Increasingly
thereafter, ticket holders at rap concerts were searched for drugs and weapons, and
security was tightened. Insurance companies, afraid of violence, substantially raised
insurance rates for hip-hop concerts, making them a financial risk. Soon, the number of
venues willing to sponsor hip-hop concerts dwindled.
While the developments noted above did much to mute the political force of hip-hop, the
seduction of big money did more. As early as 1982, with the release of Grandmaster Flash
and the Furious Five's "The Message," hip-hop began to win acclaim from
mainstream rock music critics. With the success of Public Enemy in the late 1980s, it
became clear there was a big audience for hip-hop. Significantly, much of that audience
was composed of white youths. They "relished ... the subversive 'otherness' that the
music and its purveyors represented" (Neal, 1999: 144). Sensing the opportunity for
profit, major media corporations, such as Time/Warner, Sony, CBS/Columbia, and BMG Entertainment, signed distribution deals with the
small independent recording labels that had formerly been the exclusive distributors of
hip-hop CDs. In 1988, Yo! MTV Raps debuted. The program brought hip-hop to middle America.
Most hip-hop recording artists proved they were more than eager to forego politics for
commerce. For instance, the rap group WU-Tang Clan started a line of clothing called WU
Wear, and, with the help of major hip-hop recording artists, companies as diverse as Tommy
Hilfiger, Timberland, Starter, and Versace began to market clothing influenced by ghetto
styles. By the early 1990s, hip-hop was no longer just a musical form but a commodity with
spinoffs. Rebellion had been turned into mass consumption.
Puff Daddy
No rapper has done a better job of turning rebellion into a commodity than Sean
Combs, better known as Puff Daddy. Puff Daddy seems to promote rebellion. For example, the
liner notes for his 1999 hit CD, Forever, advertise his magazine, Notorious, as follows:
There is a revolution out there. Anyone can do anything. There are no rules. There are
no restrictions. Notorious magazine presents provocative profiles of rebels, rulebreakers
and mavericks -- Notorious people who are changing the world with their unique brand
of individuality.
Our goal is to inform and inspire, to educate and elevate the infinite range of
individual possibility.... In essence, Notorious is for everyone who wants to live a sexy,
daring life -- a life that makes a difference. After all, you can't change the world
without being a little ... Notorious (Combs, 1999).
Although he says he's committed to changing the world, Puff Daddy encourages only
individual acts of rebellion, not collective, political solutions. Puff Daddy's brand of
dissent thus appeals to a broad audience, much of it white and middle class. As his video
director, Martin Weitz, accurately observed in an interview for Elle magazine, Puff
Daddy's market is not the ghetto: "No ghetto kid from Harlem is going to buy Puffy.
They think he sold out. It's more like the 16-year-old white girls in the Hamptons,
baby!" (quoted in Everett-Green, 1999).
It is also important to note that Puff Daddy encourages individual acts of rebellion
only to the degree they enrich him and the media conglomerate he works with.** And rich he
has become. Puff Daddy lives in a US$10 million mansion on Park Avenue in Manhattan and a
US$3 million dollar house in the Hamptons. In 1998, Forbes magazine ranked him fifteenth
among top-earning entertainment figures, with an annual income of US$53.5 million
("Forbes Top...," 1998). Puff Daddy is entirely forthright about his apolitical,
self-enriching aims. In his 1997 song "I Got the Power," Puff Daddy referred to
himself as "that nigga with the gettin money game plan" (Combs and the Lox,
1997). And on Forever, he reminds us: "Nigga get money, that's simply the plan."
From this point of view, Puff Daddy has more in common with Martha Stewart than with Chuck
D and Public Enemy (Everett-Green, 1999).
Pop Culture and the Commodification of Dissent
Hip-hop emerged among poor African American inner-city youth as a counsel of
despair with strong political overtones. It has become an apolitical commodity that
increasingly appeals to a white, middle-class audience. The story of hip-hop is thus
testimony to the capacity of consumer culture to constrain expressions of freedom and
dissent (Frank and Weiland, 1997).
Interestingly, some sociologists play a big role in this process. In Canada, for
example, most of the big public opinion firms (Angus Reid, Goldfarb, and Environics) are
owned and run by sociologists. One of the tasks they have set themselves is to better
understand the popular culture of North American youth. By conducting surveys and
regularly organizing focus groups with young consumers in major North American cities,
they identify new tastes and trends that marketers can then use to sell product. The most
recent report on pop culture produced by Angus Reid is available for $20,000 a copy (Angus
Reid Group, 1999). By producing such reports, public opinion firms help to routinize the
commodification of dissent.
Vladimir Lenin, leader of the Russian Revolution of 1917, once said that capitalists
are so eager to earn profits they will sell the rope from which they themselves will hang.
However, Lenin underestimated his opponents. Savvy entrepreneurs today employ sociologists
and other social scientists to help them discover emerging forms of cultural rebellion.
They take the edge off these dissenting cultural forms, thereby making them more appealing
to a mass market. They then sell them on a wide scale, earning big profits. Young
consumers are fooled into thinking they are buying rope to hang owners of big business,
political authorities, and cultural conservatives. Really, they're just buying rope to
constrain themselves.
Notes
* Scholars
and music buffs disagree about the exact difference and degree of overlap between hip-hop
and rap. They seem to agree, however, that rap refers to a particular tradition of black
rhythmic lyrics while hip-hop refers to a particular black beat (often jerky and offbeat)
mixed with samples of earlier recordings and LP scratches (now largely passé). See
Mink-Cee (2000). In this essay, I use the terms interchangeably.
** Forever is
marketed, manufactured, and distributed by a unit of BMG Entertainment, the US$6.3 billion
entertainment division of Germany's Bertelsmann AG, the third largest media company in the
world.
References
- Angus Reid Group. 1999. "Why Is It Important to Track Pop Culture?" On the
World Wide Web at http://www.angusreid.com/pdf/publicat/
pop.pdf (March 22, 2000).
- Bayles, Martha. 1994. Hole in Our Soul: The Loss of Beauty and Meaning in American
Popular Music. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
- Combs, Sean "Puffy," 1999. Forever. New York: Bad Boy Entertainment (CD).
- Combs, Sean "Puffy" and the Lox. 1997. "I Got the Power." On the
World Wide Web at http://www.ewsonline.com/badboy/lyrpow.html (March 22, 2000).
- Davis, Mike. 1990. City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles. New
York: Verso.
- Everett-Green, Robert. 1999. "Puff Daddy: The Martha Stewart of Hip-Hop." The
Globe and Mail, 4 September, C7.
- "Forbes Top 40 Entertainers." 1998. On the World Wide Web at
http://www.forbes.com/tool/toolbox/entertain/ (March 22, 2000).
- Frank, Thomas, and Matt Weiland, eds. 1997. Commodify Your Dissent: Salvos from the
Baffler. New York: W.W. Norton.
- Mattern, Mark. 1998. Acting in Concert: Music, Community, and Political Action.
New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.
- Mink-Cee. 2000. "Rap vs. Hip-Hop." On the World Wide Web at
http://www.geocities.com/BourbonStreet/9459/rapvshiphop.htm (March 23).
- Neal, Mark Anthony. 1999. What the Music Said: Black Popular Music and Black Public
Culture. New York: Routledge.
- Springhall, John. 1998. Youth, Popular Culture and Moral Panics: Penny Gaffs to
Gangsta-Rap, 1830 -- 1996. New York: Routledge.
- Wilson, William Julius. 1987. The Truly Disadvantaged: The Inner City, the
Underclass, and Public Policy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Source: Copyright Robert J. Brym. Written especially for Society
in Question: Sociological Readings for the 21st Century, 3rd ed. (Toronto: Harcourt
Canada, 2001).
