Recorded in a single take and released in 1979, The Sugarhill Gang’s 15-minute song “Rapper’s Delight” was hip-hop’s first commercially popular single, and it helped bring this largely regional music to the wider world. * * * “ Hip-Hop Happens” (Steven Daly, Vanity Fair, November 1, 2005) It’s a good place to start any hip-hop reading list. What The Sugarhill Gang sang in their huge 1979 single “Rapper’s Delight” is also true of the music and its literature today: “Hip hop you don’t stop.” The Sugarhill Gang’s line has been sampled and rephrased in so many different ways. For further reading, you should buy Raquel Cepeda’s And It Don’t Stop: The Best American Hip-Hop Journalism of the Last 25 Years.Ĭash still rules everything around us, as it did when Wu-Tang Clan rapped that in 1993. URB magazine is working to digitize its archive. You can read them in Da Capo’s Best Music Writing anthologies. Some that come to mind are Kris Ex’s 2006 XXL story “The History of Cocaine Rap” and Arye Dworken’s 2006 Flaunt Magazine story “Straight Out of Israel” Flaunt Magazine. Many of that era’s stories remain locked away in print or books, yet to appear online. Hip-hop thrived during the late 80s and 90s, which is the same time print music magazines were thriving and they covered it. There are no stories about Foxy Brown, Gang Starr, Pete Rock, Rakim, Queen Latifah, Fugees, Puffy, Biggie, Tupac, MC Lyte, Lil’ Kim, Ludacris, Public Enemy, The Pharcyde, Da Brat, or Del Tha Funkee Homosapien, Mobb Deep, Bone Thugs-n-Harmony, Jurassic 5, or Biz Markie, but this short list covers a wide range of voices and styles. Here is a sample of stories from the past two decades. No amount of examination or scholarship has institutionalized the culture enough to kill or signify its decline. America has never loved Black people as much as it loves Black culture, as the proliferation of hip-hop and systemic racism attests. Its stories are about Black genius, white appropriation, and interracial collaboration, and about people taking their chance to get what they deserve, in a capitalist nation racked by violent race and class tensions. Its stories include big personalities, triumphs, tragedies, feuds, scandals, inventions, reinvention, and surprises. Since its early days, hip-hop has generated a huge body of literature around it, from histories to profiles to incisive cultural criticism. Verbal and manual dexterity turned kids into stars, and today’s artists grew up listening to the first strains of the musical form.” As Jeff Chang, author of Can’t Stop, Won’t Stop, put it, hip-hop culture is “naturally interdisciplinary” and composed of “mix signifiers, we break everything down to bits and bytes and rebuild something new.” I love the description. Scraps of linoleum and cardboard became dance floors. Playgrounds and parks became nightclubs turntables and records became instruments. Paint cans refitted with oven-cleaner nozzles transformed subway trains into mobile art galleries. In the San Francisco Gate in 2003, Adam Mansbach, author of Go the F**k To Sleep described hip-hop culture as “assembled from spare parts, ingeniously and in public. Like rock and roll in the nineteen-sixties, hip-hop is both a movement and a marketing ploy, and the word is used to describe almost anything that’s supposed to appeal to young people.“īeyond marketing and corporatization, hip-hop culture has always included dance, rap, fashion, design, stretching language, reclaiming public spaces, and its creative, genre-spanning approach has allowed artists to represent their lives in a world that often ignores or misrepresents them. “’Hip-hop,’ once a noun,“ Kelefa Sanneh wrote in The New Yorker, “has become an adjective, constantly invoked, if rarely defined people talk about hip-hop fashion and hip-hop novels, hip-hop movies and hip-hop basketball. Join Longreads and help us to support more writers.Įver since Black and Latino Americans created hip-hop at south Bronx block parties during the 1970s, this highly original, uniquely American music has continued to evolve, while simultaneously taking root in countless countries throughout the world.Īs cultural critic Harry Allen once said: “hip hop is the new jazz.” But like jazz, hip-hop is more than music.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |