Work, Politics and the Birth of Hip Hop
Matthew Birkhold

I’m tired of people calling hip hop the child of the civil rights and black power movements.  Everyone from hip hop artists, hip hop activists, hip hop scholars, and regular everyday listeners have called it that and all of them are wrong.  I believe this error is made for two fundamental reasons, as a nation we don’t understand the civil rights or black power movements nor do we understand labor in a capitalist society.

If we did, we would understand that hip hop is the child of unemployment.

If we want to understand the relationship between the civil rights movement, black power, and hip hop we must first understand the civil rights movement as a struggle to grant black people basic citizenship rights.  Basic citizenship rights include the right to vote and the right to have access to public spaces such as parks and busses.  Black power emerged as a critique of the civil rights struggle based on the premise that if black people had basic citizenship rights their lives would not improve because they did not have political and economic power.  Advocates of black power argued that racial equality required a revolution.

Black power advocates typically took one of two positions.  One group argued that before a political revolution could occur, black people had to undergo a cultural revolution to throw off the shackles of internalized white supremacy.  The other group argued that such a cultural revolution was impossible under the political order of the time and therefore argued that a political revolution had to take precedence over culture.  Examples of the second position include the Black Panther Party and the Revolutionary Action Movement.  This latter group also bore the brunt of state repression and many of its activists did time as political prisoners.

The fact that advocates of political revolution were politically imprisoned is important to our understanding of hip hop’s birth.  In the South Bronx, according to author Jeff Chang, street gangs made up what he calls “the other side of the revolution.”  Like political revolutionaries, gang members were often locked up and the victims of violence.  Because both gang members and advocates of political revolution were the older brothers and sisters of the young people who created hip hop, its makes sense to assume that young people believed that choosing to follow their siblings footsteps would get them locked up or killed.

Because of this, young people had to forge a path that was different than what came before them.  Because the black youth unemployment rate was 60% in New York City from 1965 up until the 1980s, getting a formal job was not part of that path.  Because of this, hip hop itself quickly became a source of employment for young blacks in New York.

According to Chang, the first hip hop party was thrown because Kool Herc’s sister wanted to raise money so she could go back to school shopping.  She threw the party, Herc deejayed, and within a couple weeks, Herc had a reputation as the man who was getting money in the Bronx.  These parties quickly created their own economies where entrepreneurial deejays paid graffiti writers to draw flyers and turned gangs into paid security crews.  According to Afrika Bammbatta, “We was young entrepreneurs, when we didn’t even know we was entrepreneurs.”
The economy of hip hop didn’t stop with deejay entrepreneurship.  At parties there were people who sold beverages and food as well as people who recorded deejay sets and began selling mixtapes.

Because the deindustrialization of New York had already begun by the late 1960s, young blacks needed jobs.  Given the circumstances they faced, creating a job using hip hop often seemed like a much more viable option than getting into politics or a gang.  If we don’t take this into account when talking about the birth of hip hop, we aren’t looking at the whole picture.

Matt Birkhold is a Brooklyn based educator and writer.  He can be reached at birkhold (at) gmail (dot) com.  

Spam Sales On The Rise

Sales of Spam, the Hormel canned-ham product, have increased 11 percent in the first quarter of this year. What do you think?

Julie Porter,
Receptionist
“Spam is still a bit too pricey. I’m going to have to settle on Spologna.”

Max Emmerson,
Systems Analyst
“It never left my table.”

Don Hazeltine,
Camp Counselor
“Somebody should make a movie about this.”

Can you believe it’s been been 30 years?

Today’s video of the day comes from Underground Village in New York, where Shaq dissed Kobe HARD in a freestyle. Thoughts?

The Root ’s greatest summer anthems of all time.

Summer Groovin’
By Stephen A. Crockett Jr.
Damn the iPod.

It will not now and nor will it ever be the cassette tape. Sure, it’s fancy and plays music with a clarity that has yet to be surpassed. But a pod-mix just doesn’t sound right. There is an art to making a mixtape, an ebb and flow. The beauty of it is that it makes the common man a composer. It blends the music and forces the listener to find the intended groove and see the musical vision.

My dad made mixes all the time. It wasn’t so much a hobby as a carefully crafted surgical procedure. So this is my ode to the summer mixtape and to cassette tapes everywhere buried in boxes behind old times that spoke of restlessness and resilience. This is for the flowers that grow every year without insistence, and the breeze that moves without command. This is for summers gone by and the summers to come. This is my all-time summer listening list.  Now press Play.

TOP 5 SUMMER RAP JOINTS

1. “Summertime”

D.J. Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince

Summertime (the season) just called me and said this is the official anthem of its life.

(mix with Summer Madness—Kool and the Gang)

2. “Today Was a Good Day”

Ice Cube

Mama cooked the breakfast with no hog…

This is Ice Cube at his best, telling the story of a day where everything just seems to fall into place, which summer, in theory at least, is all about. The potential of summer is one long, endless day when everything works out, when the sun and the shade provide the yin and the yang.

This song holds in it the potential of an endless forever and foreshadows a kinder, gentler Ice Cube who would shift from hardcore gangsta rapper to comedic movie dad.

(mix with “Footsteps in the Dark”—Isley Brothers)

3.  “A Rollerskating Jam Named ‘Saturdays’ “

De La Soul

An ode to roller-skating and the relief of Saturdays after a long work week. It is the carefree playfulness that summer embodies. This song makes you want to dig out your rollerskates (real roller skates, not those ice skates with wheels) and Walkman and go bobbing down the sidewalk.

(Mix with “Bounce, Rock, Skate, Roll” by Vaughn Mason and Crew)

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