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T.There’s very little hip-hop in the first episode of BBC Two’s new four-part documentary on the genre. Grandmaster Flash and Furious Five only drop The Message for his final five minutes. Instead, you’re given his hour-long history lesson on New York City in the ’60s and his ’70s. This is the decades leading up to the birth of hip-hop.
But it’s the right approach and shows that Fight the Power treats its subject matter with the respect and rigor it deserves.Public Enemy’s Chuck D is executive producer and one of the main interviewees. With the ambition to inform as well as entertain people, music documentaries are a trade-off between sociology and musicology. For hip-hop, the scene was more a direct response to the political situation than any popular music before it, and the situation of black citizens marginalized by racist authorities extends beyond the United States to his 20th-century life. It is echoing beyond.
Go back to 1960. John F. Kennedy promised to improve life possibilities for black Americans. By the end of the decade, their leaders had been assassinated or imprisoned, their political movements infiltrated and undermined, their families drafted into the U.S. Army and killed in Vietnam, and their protests viciously suppressed. it was done. Fight the Power Namecheck Say It Loud – I’m Black and I’m Proud by James Brown, Is It because I’m Black by Syl Johnson, Seize the Time (future Black Panther leader Elaine Brown) 1969 release record .
The 1970s began with The Last Poets and Gil Scott-Heron foreshadowing hip-hop by speaking, not singing, about black power on records with “revolution” in the title. Fight the Power’s outstanding contributors – KRS-One, Grandmaster Caz, Melle Mel, Run-DMC’s Darryl McDaniels, and indeed his Abiodun Oyewole of The Last Poets – were boosted by Shirley Chisholm’s run, It harkens back to his decade of growing black awareness. In the 1972 presidential election, under the slogan “Don’t be bribed, don’t be the boss,” the reaction was stronger to administrative repression than to overt government violence. The documentary cites the phrase “period of benign neglect” used by one of Richard Nixon’s advisers in a January 1970 memo to the president, in which social programs It has been taken as a summary of the period when the South Bronx was cut in two by a lack of funds. New highways that seemed designed to hasten the city’s decline allowed wealthier New Yorkers to escape the city’s astronomical crime rate, leaving poor blacks and Hispanics there.
Fight the Power’s main take is that hip-hop comes from abandoned communities. The New York Police Department, no longer willing to intervene in poor neighborhoods, happily allowed hundreds of working-class youth to attend block parties. With two turntables set up, I was able to connect a funky horn motif on one record with a tight drum break on another. This documentary points out that one of hip-hop’s most important influences was non-musical. A sea of ​​protest and propaganda, incomprehensible to some observers but indispensable as a form of expression for artists and activists who have no other outlet.
In other words, graffiti is exactly what hip-hop lyrics quickly became, and alongside rap, breakdance, and DJing, it was brought to life by DJ Kool Haak, who is recognized here as one of hip-hop’s great pioneers. One of four phenomena. Then, as the 80s began, Ronald Reagan traveled to the Bronx to campaign for president. He is seen engaging in a verbal joust with an irate inhabitant in the rubble. Also, before he took power, he promised more federal aid and instead initiated a further systematic redistribution of wealth from the poor. Be rich. As Chuck D explains, the conditions were perfect for an intense new genre of music to take hold.
And then we got to 1982’s The Message. Its lyrics are eerily modern (“Poorly educated, double-digit inflation / Can’t take the train to work, there’s a strike at the train station”). The story of hip-hop itself, some of the greatest American pop music of all time, begins next week. Ready.
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