It's Bigger Than Hip Hop: The Rise of the Post-Hip-Hop Generation (3 page)

The term “post-hip-hop” describes a period of time—
right now—
of great transition for a new generation in search of a deeper, more encompassing understanding of themselves in a context outside of the corporate hip-hop monopoly. While hip hop may be a part of this new understanding, it will neither dominate nor dictate it, just as one can observe the civil rights generation’s ethos within the hip-hop generation, yet the two remain autonomously connected.

Post-hip-hop is an assertion of agency that encapsulates this generation’s broad range of abilities, ideals, and ideas, as well as incorporates recent social advances and movements (i.e., the women’s movement, the antiwar movement, gay rights, antiglobalization) that hip hop has either failed or refused to prioritize. How can one, for instance, dialogue progressively about gender issues within a space dominated by sexism and phallocentrism? Or take seriously notions of cooperative or participatory economics within a space that espouses guerilla capitalism? Or talk seriously about the end of war—over
there
and right
here!
—within a space that promotes violence? Of course these elements are not exclusive to the hip-hop generation and are mere reflections of American culture on the whole. Saul Williams, in an open
letter to Oprah Winfrey, points out that the ideologies that govern hip hop also govern America:

When we consider hip hop’s origins and purpose, we understand it is a revolutionary cultural force that was intended to challenge the status quo and the greater American culture. So, its relegation to reflecting American culture becomes extremely problematic if one considers the radical tradition of African-American social movements—which have never been about mirroring dominant American culture.

Post-hip-hop is not about the death of rap, but rather the birth of a new movement propelled by a paradigm shift that can be felt in the crowded spoken-word joints in North Philadelphia where poet Gregory “Just Greg” Corbin tells a crowded audience, “So these cats will rhyme about Rick Ross before they talk about African holocaust / rhyme about Pablo Escobar before they talk about how many bodies was lost.” A shift that can be felt at the krump-dance dance-offs in Los Angeles where young pioneer Tight Eyez proclaims, “We’re not gonna be clones of the commercial hip-hop world because that’s been seen for so many years. Somebody’s waitin’ on something different,
another generation of kids with morals and values that they won’t need what’s being commercialized or tailor-made for them; custom-made, because I feel that we’re custom-made. And we’re of more value than any piece of jewelry… or any car or any big house that anybody could buy.” And a shift that can be seen on a tattered stoop on the corner of Flatbush Avenue in Brooklyn where Rashard Lloyd, a high school senior and budding community activist, grumbles when I ask him, “What does hip hop mean to you?” After a moment of contemplation, he makes clear, “Hip hop don’t speak
to
or
for
me.”

While Rashard’s attitude may surprise those who mistake the ring tones, reality shows, and glossy advertising campaigns as indicators of hip hop’s dominance, it shouldn’t. Trailblazers of every generation have always sought radical alternatives to what corporate America deems cool. According to “The U.S. Urban Youth Market: Targeting the Trendsetters,” a study conducted by research and analysis firm Packaged Facts, Black youths like Rashard “possess an overriding desire to remain outside of the mainstream.” Claire Madden, vice president of marketing for Market Research, the parent company of Packaged Facts, says that once “there is a perception from urban youth that these manufacturers [companies and artists] are ignoring their origins, they are named sell-outs and it is only a matter of time before they fall.”

In order to understand the rise of the post-hip-hop generation, it’s imperative to understand the foundations of hip hop. Although West African in its derivation, hip hop emerged in the Bronx in the midseventies as a form of aesthetic and sociopolitical rebellion against the flames of systemic oppression. This rebellion, on one hand, was musical because rap music was a radical alternative to disco, which excluded many Blacks and Latinos in the inner cities. As Kurtis Blow, one of hip hop’s first commercially successful rappers, told me as we drove through the South Bronx on a hip-hop tour bus packed with European tourists,
“At that point, everybody everywhere was completely disco crazy. Hip hop was a rebellious mutation of disco that stemmed from the cats in the South Bronx and Harlem who couldn’t afford the bourgeois Midtown discos. Instead, hip hop took to the streets, the parks, the community centers, block parties. Hip hop represented the same freshness of view that drew me to Malcolm X.” It’s critical that Blow links hip hop to Malcolm because it is this connection that represents hip hop’s most potent and dominant sense of rebellion. Put another way, the force that created Malcolm was the same force that created hip hop—a visceral energy aimed at transforming (or at least voicing) the conditions of oppressed people. This was not simply hip hop’s promise, but its reality.

Its quintessence was epitomized in the late 1980s during hip hop’s Stop the Violence Movement with the anthem “Self Destruction,” a collaborative effort by the era’s most well-known rappers, including KRS-One, who proclaimed: “To crush the stereotype here’s what we did / We got ourselves together / So that you could unite and fight for what’s right.”

Although hip hop was founded on the principles of rebellion, over the past decade it has been lulled into being a conservative instrument, promoting nothing new or remotely challenging to mainstream cultural ideology. Even in the midst of an illegitimate war in Iraq, rap music remains a stationary vehicle blaring redundant, glossy messages of violence without consequence, misogyny, and conspicuous consumption. As a result, it has betrayed the very people it is supposed to represent; it has betrayed itself.

Saul Williams, a poet whose musical combination of hip hop, rock, techno, and a cappella Black oration might be called post-hip-hop, asks us, “So what is hip hop? Well, with Public Enemy and KRS-One, hip hop became the language of youth rebellion. But now, commercial hip hop is not youth rebellion, not when the heroes of hip hop like Puffy are taking pictures with Donald Trump and the
heroes of capitalism—you know that’s not rebellion. That’s not ‘the street’—that’s Wall Street.” And it is this reality that prompts Chuck D—an emcee that represented the Black youth rebellion in the eighties and nineties—to ask the question today:
How You Sell Soul to a Soulless People Who Sold Their Soul?

The popular commercialism of hip hop, which has resulted in a split from those it’s supposed to represent, is not new. In fact, it goes in part by the same name: hip. Just as the hip-hop generation was charged by rap, the hip era of the fifties and sixties was fueled by jazz. In
The Conquest of Cool
, an exploration of the bond between advertising and counterculture, Thomas Frank describes the co-opting of hip through “hip consumerism” as “a cultural perpetual motion machine in which disgust with the falseness, shoddiness, and everyday oppressions of consumer society could be enlisted to drive the ever-accelerating wheels of consumption.”

In hip’s case, and the same is true for hip hop, Scott Saul, professor of English at Berkeley, points out that “it [hip] moved from a form of African-American and bohemian dissent to become the very language of the advertising world, which took hip’s promise of authenticity, liberation, and rebellion and attached it to the act of enjoying whatever was on sale at the moment.” Today, young people have been tricked into seeing their acts of consumerism as acts of rebellion.

No one knows what will be next, or if their generation will sell it. However, the post-hip-hop ethos allows the necessary space for new ideas and expressions to be born free from the minstrel toxins that have polluted modern hip hop.

Although post-hip-hop is not about music, per se, the music that is and will be created is critical as it is the soul of a new movement, functioning as a soundtrack to a fresh set of attitudes, ideas, and perspectives. All forms of art are fundamental to the post-hip-hop generation, as art possesses the remarkable ability to change not only what we see, but how we see.

The late Martinican writer Frantz Fanon once said, “Each generation, out of relative obscurity, must discover their destiny and either fulfill or betray it.” The post-hip-hop generation must be brave enough to fully engage in exploration, challenge, and discovery, acts that will ultimately result in a revelation of contemporary truths that will help define us, and, in turn, the world.

I greet you
at the beginning of what I hope is the last round of a great battle; an intense struggle that has raged across the treacherous battlefields of media, with blood spilling into our national imaginations, for centuries. A conflict in which victory is a prerequisite to our collective freedom, but that, unfortunately, we’ve been losing.

I wish, of course, that the above was an effort in fiction, but unfortunately, these images—skillfully spidering into our world and forcing themselves into our lives, our ways of thinking, of seeing—are as real as we believe them to be. “The first step,” a young man from Chicago’s South Side tells me as we build our collective future, “is thinking outside the box, but then that’s hard because the box [TV, mass media] tells us what to think.” Any twenty-first-century discussion of our world, across race, gender, and class lines, must acknowledge and take seriously the notion, the reality, that young people of today derive the bulk of their ideas not from traditional institutions, but from the growing number and more intrusive forms of mass media.

“
He was
a nice middle class nigga / but no one knew the evil he’d do when he got a little bigger,” Tupac rhymed in “Shorty Want to Be a Thug” through my sputtering speakers as I drove down a desolate, police tape-furled North Philly neighborhood in search of a tall, chestnut-colored man with thin hair and long facial features.