What is debatable is when hip-hop began. Yes, hip-hop can mark Aug. 11, 1973 — 50 years ago this summer — as the day it all jumped off, when West Indian immigrants Cindy Campbell and her brother Clive Campbell, AKA DJ Kool Herc, threw a back-to-school party in the community room of their 1520 Sedgwick Ave. building in the South Bronx, New York City. For years though, some hip-hop heads, me included, believed it was actually November of 1974, up in the Bronx, per the Universal Zulu Nation and another founding figure of hip-hop, Afrika Bambaataa. Later, I’m told, it was Bambaataa who decided, in a closed-door meeting, that the origin story should point toward Herc and Cindy and 1973 instead.

But I believe it is deeper than squabbles over this or that date. In 1967, six years before Sedgwick Avenue, a couple of significant things happened. One, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. broke with the heart and soul of the Civil Rights Movement, and boldly came out against war, declaring that the United States was sending poor Blacks and poor whites to fight poor Asian people in a place called Vietnam, and that America was the greatest purveyor of violence on this earth. The Nobel Peace Prize-winning King was blasted as a traitor and unpatriotic.

And second, Kool Herc arrived from Jamaica that same year, making his way to the Bronx, the anointed and undisputed homeland of hip-hop. One year later King would be dead, assassinated, but not before he began to spread the gospel of a “Poor People’s Campaign,” a crusade for folks like the poor African Americans, West Indians and Puerto Ricans in the Bronx who would later give birth to hip-hop. These were people from the very same class King warned us not to abandon and forget. In other words, what does it matter if you can sit anywhere on the bus, or at a lunch counter, if you have no money to ride the bus, no money to buy a burger?

That means hip-hop, from the very beginning, had one humble definition: Making something from nothing. From its inception, hip-hop was rooted in politics, in social justice, by virtue of the fact that the four core elements of the culture — deejaying, dancing, rapping and graffiti writing — were a middle-finger response to racism and classism, to white flight from urban centers like New York and Compton, to being abandoned, forgotten and erased, just like Black history and Black books, say, are being erased, banned, whitewashed, in states like Ron DeSantis’ Florida in 2023.

I remember what hip-hop made me feel — and think — when I first heard The Sugar Hill Gang’s “Rapper’s Delight” in 1979; or when I first saw graffiti on entire subways; or when I first danced to the beats that were not those of my mother’s Motown or James Brown,  but residue of those sounds that we, like mad scientists, broke apart, recycled, chopped, cut and scratched, until we had something that was spectacularly ours. Making something from nothing. I felt free, alive, that in spite of the impoverished conditions under which my single mother and I lived, I finally had music, art forms, a culture that belonged uniquely to me. I tagged graffiti with my Magic Marker. I learned how to pop and lock and break dance, on unfolded cardboard boxes, on unkind concrete. I memorized early rapper rhymes although I never had the audacity to spit them aloud, except when no one was looking. I watched my then-best friend construct his own sound system in his bedroom, intersecting electronics and a hand-made wooden coffin in which to place his two turntables, with his vinyl records to the side. And I wore the hats, the shirts, the pants, the jackets, the coats, the jewelry, and the footwear which have become the uniforms, the mobile fashion shows, generation to generation, of hip-hop.

Yes, I have been a participant, a documentarian, and an activist within and around hip-hop culture for 44 of these 50 years. Hip-hop taught me how to use my voice (Public Enemy’s “Fight The Power”), and hip-hop taught me about Black political and cultural rebels like John Coltrane and Assata Shakur and Nina Simone and Malcolm X. Hip-hop taught me to question police brutality (N.W.A’s “Fuck Tha Police”), and hip-hop gave me delectable snippets of Black history absent from my formal education. Hip-hop instructed me to study jazz (practically anything by A Tribe Called Quest), and hip-hop gave me my first and only full-time job as a writer at Quincy Jones’ Vibe magazine. Hip-hop led me to pen three cover stories for Vibe about the most famous rapper ever, Tupac Shakur, and hip-hop has given me so many words and phrases with which to guide my life to this day.

But as we know, culture, similar to politics, comes in ebbs and flows of astonishing awareness and activity, and bottomless confusion and inertia, and that has been no different with hip-hop. Hip-hop was always party music, with all the good and the not-so-good, that that entails. But there was also a movement of in-your-face Afrocentric and Black radical chic hip-hop from the late 1980s to the 1990s, largely a response to the Reagan Revolution and its awful trickle-down effects on people of color, that included Public Enemy, X Clan and KRS-One’s Boogie Down Productions. But when Dr. Dre’s landmark album The Chronic appeared all over MTV in 1993 and sold about 6 million units, it was not just the end of the Black Power era in hip-hop, but also the beginning of a Hollywood-like reproduction of the same movie over and over again.

Today, in 2023, three decades since The Chronic, we’ve gone from fighting the power to recreating and mass-producing the worst aspects of that hugely successful record: endless use of the n-word for Black people; endless use of the b-word for women; a seemingly endless hatred for queer and transgender people; an intense obsession with guns, with violence in all forms, with drug-selling and drug-taking, with money and material things; and anti-anything that even remotely questions the images and words we put forth.

Scan closely the Billboard pop and hip-hop charts from early 1993 forward and, with a few exceptions, it is the same formula for hip-hop success: across U.S. presidents and technology innovations and generations of us, from Rodney King to George Floyd, from Death Row Records to Tekashi69, from Tupac and Biggie to podcasts and the murder of Pop Smoke: Black self-hatred, hatred of women, destroy, self-destruct, kill or be killed, anything for a dollar, even if it leads to real-life drama, or murder. Gone, for the most part, is the agitating for political change, the diversity of voices; instead, rap’s activist roots have been completely eclipsed by its lowest common denominator: nihilism and greed.

Meanwhile, the few rappers that do get political are frolicking with far-right Republicans like it’s no big deal. We see Ice Cube driving former Fox News Channel anchor Tucker Carlson, who has spread racist conspiracy theories and stoked white fear, around the ‘hood, with nary a care about the optics of the act — the same Ice Cube who co-wrote N.W.A’s “Fuck Tha Police,” and became a megastar as one of those early 1990s rappers speaking out against injustice. We see Kanye West, now known as Ye, wearing a MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN cap and declaring his love for Donald Trump. And we see Kanye running for president and espousing despicable antisemitism, among many other choice, far-right misadventures.

Over the years, hip-hop has spawned a generation of rap-influenced politicians and activists, from Newark, N.J., Mayor Ras Baraka to House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) to Rep. Maxwell Frost (D-Fla.) to Rep. Jamaal Bowman (D-N.Y.) to Rep. Cori Bush (D-Mo.). (And I myself even ran for Congress in Brooklyn, N.Y., unsuccessfully, in 2008 and 2010.) But it pains me that you don’t see that same fight-the-power spirit reflected in today’s music.

Read more at https://www.politico.com