Democracy and Hip-Hop - Our Line
From the Democracy and Hip-Hop Project
11.04.2006
by Rob Odell aka "C.L.R. Odell" and Krisna Best aka "General Baker"
The following is an analysis of modern hip-hop and a critique of the hip-hop intelligentsia. Just so no one is unclear about who we are; we are nobodies. We are two non-degree holding, white workers from Kansas City who grew up with hip-hop as MCs, DJs, producers, and dancers and which later developed into thinking and writing. Our influences are vast and broad, but on a hip-hop level consist of Michael Eric Dyson, Greg Tate, bell hooks, Bakari Kitwana, Kevin Powell, Davey D, Robin D.G. Kelley, etc. etc.
While we have incorporated much of the above named intellectuals into our work, we see some fundamental flaws of logic and criticism. We hope that the following is a solid contribution to the larger dialogue about hip-hop and if most of you violently disagree, at the very least we can all come to a better understanding through exchange and discourse.
This is a project for all. This is a project for hip-hop.
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Given that this project began over six months ago, a post on our position on hip-hop is probably long overdue. Perhaps it just took us this long to figure out exactly what it is that we are proposing to do here at D&HHP. Recently the question was raised as to what this project is really about and why there is so much non-hip-hop content on a blog that claims to be hip-hop oriented. Well, let us tell you.
Our point of departure comes from a more general place than merely hip-hop; we share a worldview based on an ongoing study of history, politics, economics, philosophy, art and culture, and just about anything else we can find the time for. Not only that, but we share a methodology; a way of thinking about things that brings out their necessary interconnections and which allows us to trace their logical development over time.
We begin from two simple premises:
1) that over the course of the last 500 years the movement of history has been based on one simple fact; that whenever great masses of people were presented with an opportunity, they have sought to establish a society based on equality and democracy. This concept of what democracy actually is has changed, grown, and developed with time, but it has only found new content with every new effort by the masses to institute their desire for peace and equality.
2) that all culture is a reflection; a gauge; an indicator of the stage of consciousness reached by people in their historical movement to institute this democratic society. It reflects the current stage and foreshadows the next. It expresses those peoples’ hopes, dreams, desires, fears, anxieties, prejudices, etc. In short, it tells us who they are and who they are striving to become, and the more people that participate in a culture movement, the more accurate the reflection will be.
With those simple, if contentious, premises accepted then we conclude that hip-hop, as a form of culture with literally millions of participants here and across the globe, is the best indicator; the best gauge of the consciousness of the masses of people throughout the world and it expresses not only all that is ugly about them, but all that is beautiful and all that yearns to be free. It gives the best approximation of where they are and where they are going, of the present stage in their historical movement to institute a free and democratic society.
That is why a piece by General Baker on the Universality of Hip-hop or on the expression of that universality in a review of Kelis’s new album fits right alongside a piece by C.L.R. Odell on the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 or on the immigration debate of today; because they all express in their own way the general course of the movement described above.
But above all we are concerned here with the present state of that movement and hip-hop provides the best raw material for study. So we focus much of our time on that cultural movement that we have come to know as the hip-hop generation.
In order to better give our small and limited readership a basic overview of our position (General Baker and C.L.R. Odell) on hip-hop, we will attempt to summarize it with a few points. These points are not final and, like hip-hop itself, should be considered constantly in motion.
The following points are not a prescription, a remedy, or a ten commandments to which all should conform, but merely a beginning with which to explain hip-hop as it exists currently.
1. Movement. Hip-hop cannot under any circumstances be understood through old and incompatible categories, whether these categories consist of the "four elements", "underground vs. mainstream", "rap vs. hip-hop", "rapper vs. MC", "hip-pop", "hip-hop is dead", “gangsta rap”, “boom bap”, etc. In order to understand a thing we cannot begin with preconceived notions about it, but by its own movements and activity. Our task, the task of the hip-hop intellectual, is to start out from the fact that hip-hop simply is.
2. Democracy. Hip-hop is an inherently democratic organism. Anyone, regardless of race, age, gender, location, or economic status is able to participate within it and to offer it new dimension. This is evidenced by the fact that hip-hop is not only a national, but a worldwide phenomenon and has literally left no country, race, or social group untouched.
In addition to hip-hop’s global existence, it is also breaking down traditional categories of identity, whether of race or nationality, and of what people can become.
3. Intelligentsia. The hip-hop intellectual of today (that is, the writers, authors, and historians, many of them pioneers and former artists) is plagued with conservatism and generally stands in opposition to the predominant forms that hip-hop assumes today. Instead of seeing the content of hip-hop as always changing, as stated in point one, the intellectual departs from outmoded categories and, hence, arrives at a partial and incomplete definition or notion.
It is quite the contradiction that the hip-hop of today poses so many possibilities and yet its own intelligentsia, or class of intellectuals, refuses to see or cannot see these possibilities. This divorce between the thinkers and the actors, so to speak, has left wide open the place for the new hip-hop intellectual to explain and articulate what the old cannot.
4. Superstructure. Hip-hop is a cultural and aesthetic superstructure and therefore should be understood as the artistic consequence, not the cause, of all that is in society. It merely expresses the day-to-day experiences, ideas, and institutions of common people. Hip-hop does indeed exaggerate, embellish, and in some ways distort reality as all art does. It would not be art otherwise.
It is argued by protagonists and opponents alike that hip-hop compels people to certain ideas and actions. This is nonsense. Hip-hop merely gives all the form, not the basis, to express their pre-existing feelings and ideas.
5. Dogmatism. Hip-hop has no rules. Whenever, at any moment throughout hip-hop’s thirty year history, an individual or group of individuals has attempted to institute or inject a type of formalism and doctrinism within hip-hop, it has been hip-hop’s intrinsic nature to reject such formalism.
6. Foundation. Hip-hop’s economic foundation is rooted in the deindustrialization (the decline of factory jobs) of black America in particular and America in general. This economic shift has laid the initial basis for real, material unity between black and white workers and workers of previously different industrial sections because they were no longer divided by the types of work that they were employed in.
In other words they were presented with an opportunity to form new relations with those around them and those they formed were markedly more democratic than the old ones. Hip-hop, as an reflection of consciousness, is the ideal expression of this new material relation.
7. Socialism. Hip-hop provides a glimpse into the everyday person’s vision for the future social organization of humanity. It should be noted that this has nothing to do with the misogyny, violence, or materialistic desire for money and things that are prevalent within much of the culture. Those characteristics express the present social organization and can be found in countless other art forms across many different genres. Hip-hop rather contains unique characteristics that point towards a more harmonious democratic kind of society.
As C.L.R. James has stated about popular culture today, hip-hop also represents an uncompromising hostility to the values of totalitarianism and to official American society. While certain aspects of hip-hop have been absorbed and reined in by capital, it would cease to be a mass culture had it not sought to break down such restraints.
8. Method. Hip-hop is the music to end all music. This does not imply that there will be no further music forms beyond hip-hop or that the hip-hop of today will remain the same, but that it is compelling all other music forms, on pain of extinction, to adopt its mode of expression. In addition, it has re-posited all previous music forms into ones consistent with hip-hop’s general method.
For example, nowadays country artists sing duets with rappers and their music is filled with drums that are very hip-hop inspired, a rock band subsumes DJs into their group, and an R&B artist sings with an attitude that could only be the result of hip-hop.
9. Universality. No other American artistic movement has reached the level of universality that hip-hop has. By universality we mean its ability to penetrate and permeate every aspect of our work life, spiritual life, and cultural life to an extent not seen previously. Nothing has drawn these formerly disparate threads of material life together the way hip-hop has.
Take any classical music form and see how hip-hop has incorporated it, via sampling and interpolations, into a larger universality. Sampling aside, all historical music movements have saved up their experience which only hip-hop can lay hold of and reconstruct into a higher, more acceptable form.
All music and art reaches for universality and in so doing achieves at least a level of it but none has done so more than hip-hop. Of course it has been aided in this by the level of universality reached in our global community. The internet and other forms of digital communication have connected us in ways that have never been possible before.
10. Contradiction. Hip-hop, once and for all, is inherently contradictory and it is the totality of all these contradictions that comprises modern hip-hop. There is no thing, phenomena, or subject which is an exception to this rule. Contradiction is the identity and essential unity of opposites that challenges all things to new stages of development.
The ideological contradictions existing within hip-hop are a reflection of the prevailing values within larger society. Hip-hop moves by its own contradictions as a global culture, a local development, an individual participant, and as a single verse.
11. Morality. Hip-hop, as a mass culture, has never posited a "moral", "positive", or "Leftist" agenda or was the result of such. It is this type of mythologizing by hip-hop intellectuals and conservatives alike that prevent us from arriving at a more complete history. The hip-hop of then moved by the same contradictions as the hip-hop of today. Any attempts to divorce positive themes from a certain type of hip-hop or certain era from its necessarily negative aspects is not only a revision of history, but a retreat from all Reason.
12. Happiness. Hip-hop is only hip-hop because it is a truly mass phenomenon. As stated in the introduction, it is the best reflection, the best gauge, the best measure, the best indicator, of our struggles for life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness and our ideas about who we are, where we came from, where we are headed, and the possibilities of what we can become.
