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M.Big KRIT’s 2014 “Mt. Olympus.” I put it on at least every week. I think that’s part of aging in hip-hop. No more listening to something new every season, at least not as a matter of ritual. Instead, you listen to what you loved and what keeps telling you long after the new wears off. I’m a 50 year old black American woman. So hip-hop is her one of the soundtracks of my life. And above all, it has a rolodex of rhymes in its head, and they are triggered at the slightest reference point. It’s a way of marking the country’s geography in art, not just the South. It has little to do with standard professional admiration, but all with mastery of technique and a positive connection between host and host. People, it does it for me. It tells the restrained yet essential story of hip-hop’s origins.
I remember my first hip-hop record, but even the first time I heard “Rapper’s Delight,” it’s the first time I’ve admitted that I started out in the suburbs of art. I wasn’t a New Yorker, and even in his teenage years in the Northeast, I was in Chicago and my hometown of Birmingham, where house music was king. It’s the best season!). —where R&B and soul have been influential for a long time.
But I loved hip-hop from the first time I heard it. Full of both ideas and emotions, the heartbeat of my generation, the children left behind after civil rights were won and lost. And long before I stepped foot in a hip-hop show, I felt it connected with me. , places in the world, and generations. It gave me the language to fall in love with words and writing. Maybe that’s why my first book was about hip-hop. Decades later, my college-age son is taking a course on the history of hip-hop and, as is so often the case, the past is kaleidoscopic in the present. Hip hop is everywhere. And it makes me wonder about the simultaneous sense of deep intimacy and estrangement that has always been, and probably always will be, part of hip-hop for me. Where did that tension come from?
I think I have the answer. It’s about where the music came from and what it’s not called.
Let’s start from the beginning.
W.Those of us who weren’t in New York, especially those of us who were there, heard something new and something we knew at the same time when hip-hop emerged. It was not so easy to do. By the time Kool Herk was collaging sounds he heard on turntables in his native Jamaica, and his best friend Cora La Rock chanting the sounds, many of these black pasts were in New York. It had been thrown away to build a new home. city. The toast ballad originated in the Southeast in the early 20th century and was repeated by black radio DJs across the country, and was the inspiration for Count Machuuki. Macjuki innovated how toast was remixed for the Jamaican dance floor. Toast was also remade into a comedy record by entertainers like Rudy Ray Moore, an Arkansas native who made a career in Los Angeles, and then remixed with immigrants and immigrants to the West Coast. By the time it got to its roots, the standard convention of making fun of country folk had already taken hold. Already in 1948, the great Oklahoma-born and Tuskegee-educated writer Ralph Ellison felt sorry for those of his same national roots who were trying to make their own way in New York. I was.
…in the north he surrenders and does not replace any particular vital support for his persona. Because it has been experienced, and has been shaped by, in fact, in, and by, survival techniques that Faulkner calls ‘endurance’ and Hemingway’s definition of courage, ‘grace under pressure’. A move in an explosive situation that makes it look like a mere swagger.
Years later, this is how the new art form, hip-hop, was seen by many. For them, swagger was seen as having little to do with where their parents or grandparents came from. Even those sent to country homes for the summer were unenthusiastic about claiming their origins. Think about your uncle who says, It’s as if, instead of reminding him that you’d been hearing it all your life, you just said “shoulder” and kept going. It was a refusal of no wisdom markers.
But Countryway crept in and stuck with hip-hop. I am grateful to authors and scholars like Keith Raymond, Regina Bradley, and Zandria Robinson for testifying to this. Consider this article my effort to repeat and rewrite what I tried to say in my 2004 book. Hood’s ProphetIn that sentence, I traced hip-hop’s lineage back to plantation and West African aesthetics, noting the coherence of form and sonic ideals. What I didn’t explain was the role of sensitivity. And that’s the core of what I call country idioms in hip-hop.
debtOr for decades, scholars of black studies have grappled with the concept of retention. This is because it is associated with West African culture. How intact they were after the slave trade, they argued. But I’ve come to think retention is a stripped-down concept. Of course, one clings to the past. Culture is arguably best described as a collective way. It is not born in an instant. Collaged from what people know, learn and feel together. Culture is never static. Rituals change, some habits are abandoned, new habits are introduced, and the way things are done is changed. Yes, some methods are tightly held. Some of that retention is intentional, but most is not. People naturally retain what they need. And that’s part of the reason the country stays in hip-hop.
The words are as clear as bells. Southern plantation storytelling, as anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston (and my mother from Alabama) called “the big lie,” is at the heart of hip-hop. Heroic tales of destructive slaves who turned the tables on the Masterclass with strength and wit were prevalent. I admired those who could change power. In the best stories, they were able to travel and transcend situations.The practice was rooted in an even older grammar. The story of a West African animal trickster has taken on a new world urgency. B’rer Rabbit was neither predator nor powerful, but his resourcefulness gave him the upper hand in the face of adversity. Signifying his monkeys unleashed their wrath by talking shit about big animals elephants and lions while repeating long rhymed ballads. But small, clever creatures were always able to escape harm.
Many expected the transition to mean that these types of stories would fade away. New His Negro in Harlem in the 1920s Alan Locke, who described his renaissance, loved to announce how black folk culture was dying. The old ways will be lost, he wrote. Those who argued that folk culture was indeed intact, such as Zora Neale Hurston and Sterling Brown, seem to have been closer to the right than Locke, but the document was worth it. Whether it’s stories, blues or ballads, the documentation reveals how much remains. Because, as Faulkner said, the past was not the past. All of that travel by train, bus, and boat, all of that search for something new, brought with it the painful truth: captivity crossed borders and territories with different languages and new laws and fewer trees. I followed them.
As many critics have noted, hip-hop emerged at a crucial moment. The 70s were the dawn of mass incarceration and post-industrialization. Ghettoization continued. Caught in captivity again, Big Liar is back full steam ahead. Hip-hop grew up with fantastic tales of beating situations, stories that feed hungry souls. These were the children who witnessed the dream and its postponement. Children who remember hearing They rejoiced in big afro shoes and stacked heels and were told we were moving. rebelled against what had done to his son, and that his father had been locked up, buildings burned down for insurance money, and jobs gone. I got
James Brown’s country hero sound was in the background. Augusta dripped from his mouth. After he crouched and threw the shroud-like cloak of death over his shoulders, he jumped up, knocked the cloak down, and returned to his frenzied physical prowess. He was hotter than cool and was always willing to sweat. He was appropriately theatrical — country folk love to act, but refuse to pose. Brown’s flashy incarnation was deemed inappropriate to imitate by New York children who had adopted learned caution, but they kept him in the background. kept within reach the desperate hopes of just a few years ago, until the country voted against the dream of black freedom before the 1980 presidential election.
If you want to see racism in this country at its most serious, ask people how they remember Reagan.When he announced he was running for president in rural Philadelphia, Mississippi, we knew he was a throwback to three civil rights activists: Andrew Goodman, Michael Schwarner and James. Cheney was murdered in 1964. SNCC veteran Dave Dennis from Dave Dennis Jr.’s book Movements Made Us: A Legacy of Fathers, Sons and Freedom Ridein an effort to restore their bodies, entire graveyards of murdered blacks were pulled out of the water.
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