Hip Hop America - Brossura

George, Nelson

Brossura

ISBN 10: 0143035150 ISBN 13: 9780143035152

Casa editrice: Penguin Books, 2005

Riassunto

From Nelson George, supervising producer and writer of the hit Netflix series, "The Get Down,  Hip Hop America is the definitive account of the society-altering collision between black youth culture and the mass media.

Su questo libro

L'autore:

Nelson George, supervising producer and writer for the Netflix series "The Get Down," is an award-winning author of both fiction and nonfiction. He has written for Playboy, Billboard, Esquire, the Village Voice, Essence, and many other national magazines, as well as writing and producing television programs and feature films.

Estratto. © Riproduzione autorizzata. Diritti riservati.:

Table of Contents

 

Title Page

Dedication

Copyright Page

Introduction

 

chapter 1 - post-soul

chapter 2 - hip hop wasn’t just another date

chapter 3 - gangsters—real and unreal

chapter 4 - the “i” of me

chapter 5 - black owned?

chapter 8 - the permanent business

chapter 7 - sample this

chapter 8 - where my eyes can see

chapter 9 - new jack swing to ghetto glamour

chapter 10 - national music

chapter 11 - the sound of philadelphia—dunking

chapter 12 - capitalist tool

chapter 13 - too live

chapter 14 - skills to pay the bills

chapter 15 - funk the world

chapter 16 - “da joint!” and beyond

chapter 17 - we ain’t goin’ nowhere: twenty-first-century bling

 

sources / further reading

Acknowledgements

index

FOR MORE WORKS BY NELSON GEORGE, LOOK FOR THE

FOR THE BEST IN PAPERBACKS, LOOK FOR THE

PENGUIN BOOKS

HIP HOP AMERICA

 

Nelson George is the author of ten nonfiction books on African-American culture and of four novels. He has received two ASCAP-Deems Taylor Awards, a Grammy, and two American Book Awards from the Before Columbus Foundation for Hip Hop America and Elevating the Game. Hip Hop America and The Death of Rhythm & Blues were also finalists for the National Book Critics Circle Award. He has written for national magazines, including Playboy, Billboard, Esquire, Spin, Essence, and The Village Voice, and has written and produced several television programs as well as two feature films. His new film Everyday People recently premiered on HBO. He was born in Brooklyn, New York, where he still lives.

for my family

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First published in the United States of America by Viking Penguin, 1998
Published in Penguin Books 1999
This edition published 2005

 

 

Copyright © Nelson George, 1998

All rights reserved

 

George, Nelson.
Hip hop America / by Nelson George.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographic references (p. ) and index

eISBN : 978-1-101-00730-3

1. Rap (music)_History and criticism. 2. Hip-hop_United States. 3. Popular culture_United States. 4. Music and society_United States. I. Title.

ML3531.G46 1998
782.421649_dc21 98-23414

 

 

 

The scanning, uploading and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.

introduction

WE WOULD LIKE TO LIVE AS WE ONCE LIVED, BUT HISTORY WILI NOT PERMIT IT.

 

—PRESIDENT JOHN F. KENNEDY NOVEMBER 1963

 

 

 

 

IN THE ’30s, ON ANY BALMY SUMMER EVENING THROUGHOUT THE rural South, the evening’s entertainment—boxing—would usually begin with a battle royal. This regal name hardly describes the nature of the event. A gang of “colored” youngsters—ranging from adolescent to college age—gathered in a boxing ring for a blindfolded, no-holds-barred brawl. There were no weapons except fists, but the physical damage that ensued in the frenzy was monumental. The last man standing won a nominal prize that hardly compensated for the broken teeth and fractured bones resulting from these gang bangs.

To the (white) audiences who witnessed these battles royal, it was an appetizer for an entire night of manly action. Ernest Hemingway, that definer of all things American and masculine, used to organize battles royal for boxing events he hosted in his beloved Key West, Florida.

For the young black men who pummeled each other in the quest for a bit of spare change, it was a chance to prove their toughness to friends, rivals, and themselves. For the biggest and most brutal participants, it was a way to get paid and, in a weird way, flaunt the physical power that the white viewers otherwise feared in everyday life. For white audiences, the heated bout allowed them to see the blacks as comical figures whose most aggressive urges were neutered for their amusement.

At certain moments, when hip hop is at its most tragically comic, I can imagine it as a ’90s battle royal, where young African Americans step into an arena to verbally, emotionally, and, yes, physically bash each other for the pleasure of predominantly white spectators worldwide. Ralph Ellison’s description of a battle royal in Invisible Man could be a contemporary rap lyric: “I played one group against the other, slipping in and throwing a punch then stepping out of range while pushing the others into the melee to take the blows blindly aimed at me. The smoke was agonizing and there were no rounds, no bells at three minute intervals to relieve our exhaustion. The room spun round me, a swirl of lights, smoke, sweating bodies surrounded by tense white faces.”

But most of the time I know, and I’m grateful, that this is the ‘90s, not the ’30s. Battling may be essential to hip hop’s evolution and the energy that keeps it dynamic, but its manifestations and effects are too complex and often contradictory for a single metaphor, no matter how resonant, to capture its essence. There is the will to battle, but other threads in its fabric involve fun, dance, literature, crime, sex, and politics—too many to simply say that hip hop means any one or even two things.

Think about this post-soul moment: One New York afternoon you’re checking out that funky pop-jazz standard from 1975, “Mr. Magic” by Grover Washington, Jr., on the black oldies station KISS-FM. Then you move a few spots down the dial to the hip hop—oriented Hot 97 and hear the music from “Mr. Magic” sampled to create the backing track on “Candy Rain,” a 1995 techno-R&B hit by a teenage vocal group named Soul for Real, most of whose members weren’t born when “Mr. Magic” first appeared. In the post-soul era, shards of the black past exist in the present at odd and often uncomfortable angles to each other.

At its most elemental level hip hop is a product of post—civil rights era America, a set of cultural forms originally nurtured by African American, Caribbean American, and Latin American youth in and around New York in the ‘70s. Its most popular vehicle for expression has been music, though dance, painting, fashion, video, crime, and commerce are also its playing fields. It’s a postmodern art in that it shamelessly raids older forms of pop culture—kung fu movies, chitlin’ circuit comedy, ’70s funk, and other equally disparate sources—and reshapes the material to fit the personality of an individual artist and the taste of the times.

In 1987, I wrote a book titled The Death of Rhythm and Blues, which looked at the transformation of black music within the white-dominated music industry from the ‘30s to the ’80s. It was about music, but also business, the media, integration, politics, and the intersection of race and economics in contemporary America. It was a different way of telling the story of civil rights and the generation that fought for them on both sides of the color line. I ended the book with some pretty gloomy predictions about the diluting effects of assimilation, but I was able to point to some artists and producers who seemed to be following a different agenda, one more centered around the survival of a black culture. Now we know that rap music, and hip hop style as a whole, has utterly broken through from its ghetto roots to assert a lasting influence on American clothing, magazine publishing, television, language, sexuality, and social policy as well as its obvious presence in records and movies.

Hip Hop America looks at how hip hop’s aesthetic was created, mutated, and affected America (and the world) in the last three decades of the twentieth century. The story goes way beyond the A&R offices of the music industry. It is about the society-altering collision that has taken place during the last two decades between black youth culture and the mass media, about the discovery (and maybe hijacking) of black youths as creators and consumers. It looks explicitly at how advertisers, magazines, MTV, fashion companies, beer and soft drink manufacturers, and multimedia conglomerates like Time-Warner have embraced hip hop as a way to reach not just black young people but all young people. It is an extension of the mid-‘70s record biz concept of crossover, which itself was a by-product of Motown’s ’60s success; at some point Run-D.M.C. became the Supremes. But in the ‘90s, with more sophisticated marketing techniques and more complicated motions across old racial boundaries, the payoffs are bigger than Berry Gordy could cash in on. Soul music in the ’60s, which is so heavily sampled by rap, is literally the foundation that the post-soul generation stands on, yet at the same time, subverts and even ridicules. And like soul, in many ways, hip hop no longer belongs to its very creators. How did that happen—again?

I’m offering no single organizing theory for understanding hip hop because I think its use, and therefore its meaning, has evolved too rapidly since it first appeared on the national radar screen back in 1979. However, I do hope to communicate a sense of its multifaceted, interactive nature. It might be that to truly understand hip hop you need a master’s degree in sociology, a stint in the joint, and an intimate understanding of African rhythm. Whenever I think I know enough, there’s another twist in the saga, another way to see this culture and the country that spawned it.

Hip Hop America is a kind of love-hate story, both between hip hop and America and between hip hop and me. I was in college when I first wrote about hip hop, a skinny kid who wanted to be a rock critic because it seemed like fun. Now there is gray in my beard and I write about music not because it still obsesses me but because I can’t escape it. Every time I read a piece attacking hip hop, its makers, and its audience, no matter how much truth it may contain, I get upset. The attacks, quite often from black people my age, are often indictments full of legitimate and well-articulated anger but no love. It’s as if attacking hip hop is a way to unleash an often despicable racial and generational hatred.

Thinking generationally, it becomes increasingly clear to me why hip hop occupies such contested ground. Born in 1957, I am a late-cycle baby boomer. I missed the civil rights movement except as an elementary school observer, so those momentous events were as much a TV show for me as McHale’s Navy. I was too young for the marches and too old for the demographic construction known as Generation X. Although I share many of hip hop’s interests and have reported on its cultural frontiers for twenty years, it has always been as an affectionate older observer, not quite a peer. Motown 45s and rap 12-inches are both prized parts of my vinyl record collection. Standing in the psychic space between Berry Gordy and Russell Simmons is often a difficult place to be; at times I’ve felt trapped between the two very different visions of African American self-expression that their companies, Motown and Def Jam, epitomize.

So while I love hip hop’s spirit and rhythmic intensity, I often find myself at odds with some of its values and how those values are expressed. Because I did not grow up with hip hop as the dominating pop music of my childhood, I don’t have the unvarnished devotion to it that younger writers do. Not only do I see its warts, I see how it could end as well. The Brits once boasted that the sun never set on the British Empire, but now they live under a perpetual cloud cover. At its peak, every powerful cultural movement feels unassailable, undeniable, and indestructible. And then one day it’s a piece of nostalgia on AM radio.

In its third decade of existence, hip hop’s influence is pervasive. While there are signs of weakness—its overwhelming dependence on major corporations for funding, its occasionally gleeful celebration of antisocial tendencies—it shows no signs of heading for the respirator anytime soon. Hip hop has outlived all its detractors and even surprised most ardent early supporters by always changing, and with each change, expanding its audience. It has outgunned punk, post-punk, New Wave, Rave, House, techno, and every other much-hyped musical form of the age. In 1986, I contributed to a book called Fresh, Hip Hop Don’t Stop. And I don’t see it stopping anytime soon.

Hip Hop America starts “back in the day”—the late ‘70s—when hip hop sprang off the uptown streets of New York City via block parties and jams in public parks, sparked by the innovative moves of a handful of pioneering men. Working under wild monikers, they called themselves “DJs,” but they left in the dust any traces of the AM radio jocks who first popularized that term. On their wheels of steel Kool Here, Afrika Bambaataa, and Grandmaster Flash staked out a loud, scratchy, in-your-face aesthetic that, to this day, still informs the culture. But it didn’t come out of nowhere—no spontaneous generation of this deadly virus. The b-boys—the dancers, graffiti writers, the kids just hanging out—who carried the hip hop attitude forth were reacting to disco, to funk, and to the chaotic world of New York City in the ’70s. These b-boys (and girls) were mostly black and Hispanic. They were hip hop’s first generation. They were America’s first post-soul kids.

By that I mean they came of age in the aftermath of an era when many of the obvious barriers to the American Dream had fallen. Black people now voted wherever and whenever they wanted and attended integrated schools. They moved into new neighborhoods, took new career paths, hurried toward a future with a different set of assumptions from any minority kids in American history. Yeah, the old barriers were down—but new, more subtle ones were waiting in that much-heralded rainbow future.

Post-soul kids grew up with the Vietnam W...

Su questa edizione

• Editore: Penguin Books
• Data di pubblicazione: 2005
• ISBN 10: 0143035150
• ISBN 13: 9780143035152
• Rilegatura: Copertina flessibile
• Numero di pagine: 256