Born in fire: a hip-hop odyssey

UNESCO Courier, July, 2000 by Jeff Chang

Jeff Chang [*]

From the Bronx to Los Angeles and beyond, a rough guide to the voice of a generation

During the summer of 1975, the South Bronx was burning. New York City officials admitted that they couldn't battle all the fires, let alone investigate their origins. Chaos reigned. One long hot day in June, 40 fires were set in a three-hour period.

These were not the fires of purifying rage that ignited Watts in 1965, Newark in 1967, or St. Louis and a half dozen other U.S. cities after the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. These were the fires of abandonment.

As hip-hop journalist S.H. Fernando notes, the Bronx had been a borough of promise for African American, Puerto Rican, Irish, Italian and Jewish families after World War II. But as industry moved north to the suburbs during the sixties, housing values collapsed and whites fled, leaving a population overwhelmingly poor and of colour.

So slumlords were employing young thugs to systematically burn the devalued buildings to chase out the poor tenants and collect millions in insurance. Hip-hop, it could be said, was born in fire.

As rapper Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five's "The Message" would describe it, the New York ghettoes that fuelled hip-hop's re-creative project were spaces of state neglect and fading liberal dreams. "Got a bum education," the narrator rhymed, "double-digit inflation, can't take a train to work there's a strike at the station." But these would also be spaces of spiritual and creative renewal.

In an earlier era, say the 1920s and 30s when jazz legends like Charles Mingus grew up, a youth might find an extended web of peers, mentors, patrons, bands and venues through which he or she might master an instrument and find a vocation. But by the late 1970s, such music education was a luxury for most families.

Jamaican connection

The result? Play, as African American author Robin D.G. Kelley has put it, became an alternate form of work for a new generation. Adapting the Jamaican tradition of outdoor dance parties to the grid and grit of New York, young black and Puerto Rican entrepreneurs illegally plugged their stereo systems into street light power supplies, and started the party.

With vinyl grooves as sheet music, and a rig of two turntables, a mixer and an amplifier as instruments, Black Art began reinventing itself in 1974 and 1975. That's when a Jamaican immigrant disc jockey named Kool Herc started gaining a reputation in the Bronx for filling the smoky air with "the breaks"--that portion of the song, often as short as two seconds, where the singer dropped out and let the band immerse itself in the groove.

Punching back and forth between two copies of the same record's breaks, then ratcheting up the excitement by shifting to ever more intense breaks, DJs like Herc and Afrika Bambaataa were creating a new aesthetic, which simultaneously satiated and teased the audience.

Escaping the chaos on the streets

On the one hand, a loop (of beats) became a metaphor for freedom: through movement, dancers stretched within the space sculpted by the break. A new canon of songs--drawn from funk, disco, rock, jazz, Afrobeat and reggae--launched new, athletic forms of dancing, which would become known as breakdancing or b-boying. Rather than being passive spectators, the audience engaged in a real dialogue with the disc jockey.

The New York DJs began employing MCs--masters of ceremony--to affirm the crowd's response to proven breaks, win them over to new breaks, divert them during bad records and generally keep spirits high. In time, the MCs became attractions in their own right. Rocking memorized poems ("writtens") or improvising them on the spot ("freestyles"), the MC became Everyman, the representative of the audience onstage. They reacted to the MC's flow, laughed at his cleverness, cheered his braggadocio, thrilled at his tall-tale spinning, felt his bluesy pain, riding the riddims with words (or "rapping").

The Black Arts poets, the Black Panther messiahs and other revolutionary firebrands sharpened their words into spears to attack. This new generation of rappers let the words flow generously, in search of a moment that might serve as a shield of protection, or a transcendent escape from the chaos on the streets.

Popular culture in America is one space where the trope (expression) of working-class creativity is still firmly lodged. American markets are good at providing poor audiences of colour easy access to goods such as music, video and clothing. In the last three decades, a whole class of middlemen entrepreneurs have made fortunes by charting the rapidly shifting terrain of black and brown ghetto chic.

By the late 70s, black and Jewish record label owners in Harlem noted the popularity of hip-hop and rushed to record leading crews. Basically, these owners were geographically and personally close to the music. When a novelty record by the Sugar Hill Gang, "Rapper's Delight" became a surprise international smash, major labels began sniffing around uptown for the next hit. In 1980, Kurtis Blow released rap's first full-length album on a major label. The stage was set for the ascendance of hip-hop culture into the most powerful international youth culture of the late twentieth century.