Hip Hop as Politics

By Crispin Sartwell

 

 

    The February 8 release of Sage Francisπs record ≥A Healthy Distrust≤ ≠ a landmark of hip hop autobiography, politics, and poetry - is a good moment to meditate on the centrality of hip hop music in world aesthetic and political life.

    A large white man from Boston, Francis had a breakthrough in October 2001 with the song ≥Makeshift Patriot.≤ He described and mourned the events of September 11, and with clarity he foretold the use of these events to compromise civil liberties, stifle dissent, and wage war: ≥Changes need to be made; racial profiling will continue with less bitching. We're unified over who to kill. So remember: our God is bigger, stronger, smarter, and much wealthier. Wave those flags with pride, especially the white part.≤ Then, with typically serious verbal play, he finished with this: ≥The flag shop is out of stock; I hang myself at half mast.≤

    Much of the sharpest and most convincing political commentary being written today appears not on op-ed pages but on hip hop records.

      That may appear absurd if your acquaintance with the genre is limited to what you find on the radio or on BET: the thugpop of 50 Cent, for instance, or the latest fluff from Beyonce and whatever guest-MC she may be hosting this week. Nor am I talking about P Diddyπs get out the vote campaign, or MTVπs labored attempts to convey trite political ideas.

      Iπm talking instead about  ≥underground≤ hip hop, like that made by Francis and Mr. Lif in Boston, Atmosphere and Brother Ali in Minneapolis, Bahamadia and Last Emperor in Philadelphia, Aceyalone and Murs in LA, and a hundred other compelling artists from every city in America.

    Nor is the phenomenon limited to the US. The Basque nationalist group Negu Gorriak raps in the difficult and perhaps dying Basque language: their best-known song is ≥We are all Malcolm X.≤

     Wherever there is racial or ethnic oppression and, in response, separatism and linguistic nationalism, there seems to be hip hop: in Kurdistan,, for example, in Liberia, in Ireland. And in each case, artists have found a fit between their culture and the form, a way to drive the rhythm into language.

     With the possible exception of opera, hip hop is the most text-heavy musical form in human history. Under its auspices, the way language is produced and disseminated is undergoing a shift comparable to Gutenberg: not the printed word, but the human voice ≠ now as reproducible as written text ≠ is quickly becoming the object of publication. 

    This gives the text more immediacy and power as the expression of the writer, and so greater capacity to connect with and move audiences.

    One use of this power has always been political. Hip hop founder Afrika Bambaataa formed the a group he called the Zulu Nation in the late seventies to give New York kids constructive alternatives to gangs. In the late eighties, people like Public Enemy, Kool Moe D, and KRS-One were using the form to disseminate ≥knowledge of self≤:  African and African-American history and activism.  The feminism of Queen Latifah or Sister Souljah constituted a reply to the misogyny of some male rappers, and of the culture at large.

    The only anti-war pop hit so far produced with regard to Iraq is Eminemπs ≥Mosh.≤

     I assert seriously that artists such as Sage Francis and Atmosphere produce works of literature: confessional or parodic, realistic or fantastic, creating characters and conveying ideas with tremendous creativity.

   Though their work is never profane or violent in the simplistic, exploitative manner of 50 Cent, it is sometimes profane and violent. But then so is literature. So is politics. So is life.

     Sageπs lyrics for ≥A Healthy Distrust≤ are subtle and disturbing: they are well worth reading. But reading is not the best way to experience them. Press play and hear them chanted, sung, and spoken by the voice of the man that made them.

    That makes more intimate and intense the connection between artist and listener, writer and reader. And within that connection, Sage and the kind of music he makes have a lot to teach us about himself and ourselves, about politics, about war, about truth.

 

Crrispin Sartwell teaches a course on hip hop and politics at Dickinson College in Carlisle, PA.