Born in fire: a hip-hop odyssey

UNESCO Courier, July, 2000 by Jeff Chang

Until the late 80s, the undisputed centre of this culture was New York. The visual signifiers were provided by the vibrant graffiti movement, whose young renegade artists braved electrified razor-wire fences and armed Metropolitan Transit Authority guards to apply bright spraypaint hieroglyphics onto the city's subways. Every time a train pulled into a station, hip-hop was in respectable society's face, like a middle-finger.

Remember the backdrop to the 1980s: the Reagan administration was launching an attack on the "welfare state", wiping out subsidies for the poor, allowing housing agencies to become dens of corruption while closing down entire categories of government programmes. Hip-hoppers were on the counter-offensive. As the Furious Five warned: "Don't push me 'cause I'm close to the edge. I'm trying not to lose my head. It's like a jungle sometimes, it makes me wonder howl keep from going under."

On the technological front, hip-hoppers racked up one breakthrough after another. While most rock musicians of the mid-80s were perplexed by new sampling technology, rap producers were turning their new toys into unrelentingly dense, reflexive grooves. Then, as the anti-apartheid movement crested in the U.S., groups like Boogie Down Productions and Public Enemy extended rap's social realism into broader discussions of political action.

But the lofty views of revolutionary nationalism and hardrock spiritualism veered back to the streets in 1989. A group of barely twenty-somethings, who not so ironically called themselves Niggas With Attitude, released what would become an anthem for a generation, Gangsta Gangsta. Within six weeks of its release, the album went "gold", selling over 500,000 copies. Hip-hop shot itself into the heart of world culture.

The album, Straight Outta Compton, decentered hip-hop from New York to Los Angeles. By the middle of the Reagan administration, Compton was one of a growing number of inner-city nexuses where deindustrialization, devolution, the cocaine trade, gang structures and rivalries, arms profiteering and police brutality combined to destabilize poor communities. Chaos was settling in for a long stay and gangsta rap would be the soundtrack. By conflating myth and place, the narratives could take root in every 'hood (neighbourhood). From Portland to Paris, every 'hood could be Compton; everyone had a story to tell, a cop to fight, a rebellion to launch.

Ironically, gangsta tales populated with drunken, high, rowdy, irresponsible, criminal, murderous "niggas"--its practitioners likened it to journalism and called it "reality rap"--seemed to be just what suburbia wanted. As student populations diversified, youth were increasingly uninterested in whitewashed cultural hand-me-downs. The 1988 advent of the MTV show, "Yo MTV Raps", made African American, Chicano, and Latino urban style instantly accessible across the world. With its claims to street authenticity, its teen rebellion, its extension of urban stereotype and its individualist "get mine" credo, gangsta rap fit hand-in-glove with a generation weaned on racism and Reaganism. These were not the old Negro spirituals of the civil rights era. They were raw, violent, undisciplined, offensive, "niggafied" rhymes, often homophobic, misogynistic.