By Elana Berkowitz
For those underwhelmed by the Hennessy-promoting, bling-sporting ways of much current mainstream hip-hop, Jeff Chang’s new book Can’t Stop Won’t Stop is a refreshing change as it tackles the cultural, social and political history of the hip-hop generation. Chang, who has been covering hip-hop for over a decade, takes on racism, inner-city decay, and corporate music monoliths in his highly researched, sophisticated and critical love letter to the musical movement he has been a part of since he was a kid. The book includes original interviews with legends like Afrika Bambaataa and DJ Kool Herc along with an assortment of DJs, graffiti writers, activists and gang members who witnessed the birth of hip-hop.
A long-time political activist who recalls fighting against apartheid during his student days at UC Berkley with “hip-hop as the soundtrack,” Chang believes in the possibility for the music to work as a powerful social force to raise awareness, mobilize communities and politically engage young folk. Chang sat down with Campus Progress to talk about Laura Bush in the hood, Jay-Z, the ‘burbs, and political distrust in the hip-hop generation.
CP: Most histories of hip-hop start in the 70s; yours starts in 1968. Why?
JC: I wanted it to be a history of the hip-hop generation, not necessarily a history of hip-hop music. My interest was in making an argument about generation difference. So I was looking at hip-hop as the big idea of our time. And obviously, 1968 was a key, crucial year in the baby boom generation, a lot of noise, a lot of folks in the street, and a lot of protest and a generation coming of age and making their presence known. Of course, at the same time, the story is really different in the Bronx. Things are ruined and completely abandoned, there aren’t folks in the streets, it was silent. The Bronx was the exception to the ’68 mythology – but it became the rule for the next three decades. That’s where hip-hop was born. So I started there.
CP: What was the political situation like in the Bronx then?
JC: In the Bronx in 1968 you have gangs coming back and heroin coming back and it was an interesting relationship between the two. A lot of the gangs got started to fight off heroin junkies and some of the gangs were all heroin junkies. Money and government are pulling out and schools are closing – people are using arson for profit. All of this was happening between ‘68 and ‘71 and escalating and then in 1971 you had a massive gang peace treaty and you will never see this in any official history of New York City, but we’re still feeling the effects of this gang peace treaty three decades later around the globe.
CP: Even though so much of the history of hip-hop was born in the cities, part of the huge success of hip-hop is its popularity in the suburbs. How does that dichotomy play itself out?
JC: That’s one of the greatest accomplishment of hip-hop, is that it was able to take these conditions of these forgotten kids, these abandoned kids and bring that story to the rest of the world and especially middle- and upper-class America, middle-class white America. And at the same time because it’s become a commodity and an object to be consumed there’s some really problematic things happening.
But one interesting thing is that a lot of the new centers of hip-hop are in these sort of inner-ring suburbs like, for instance, Fairfield, CA, where there is this group called The Federation that became one of the biggest west coast hits. It’s a little town that used to only have an Anheuser-Busch plant, but now as cities become more expensive, people are getting pushed out to suburbs like that.
CP: After the election in November, there was a noticeable drive in the hip-hop community to get out the vote. Many were disappointed by the results. Did you think it was successful?
JC: Last year was a real amazing year in many respects.… There was a lot of substantial grassroots activity. The youth turned out and we were able to shift a lot of the militantly skeptical column to the “fuck it I’ll vote” column and to me that was huge victory in itself because a lot of people think young people are apathetic. No, they’re not apathetic, they’re militantly skeptical. A lot of hip-hop kids are like, “prove to me that this shit is going to make a difference in my life.” And after two decades of Reagan-Bush and the pseudo-moderates in the Democratic Party, you know, there’s not much faith that it will be like 1963 and a million of them can gather on the mall in Washington and move something similar to, our generation’s equivalent to a civil rights act or a voting act. Being able to move those folks in the militantly skeptical column to the “fuck it I’ll vote” column was a really big deal. I am hoping over the next few years that the people working on the celebrity activism level and the folks on the grassroots level will be able to converge and start making things happen.
CP: You write a lot about great, political hip-hop artists who still have only a very small share of the market. It seems like what is much more prevalent is this hyper-brand-conscious, money-focused music. Do you feel like that is something new?
JC: Some of this has always been a part of hip-hop. You always had a certain brand-consciousness. Think about Run-DMC holding up their Adidas, and soon everyone had to have them. But now people have realized that hip-hop can be a lifestyle, a style engine, and it can be marketed as a lifestyle with lots of goods that you can sell. Global media monopolies have figured out how to capitalize on it and make it work to their advantage. Back in the day it was about making a name for yourself within your scene and community, now it’s more about branding. It used to be about Jay-Z in Brooklyn, now it’s about Jay-Z as worldwide brand. The game is changed, now it’s about selling a basket of goods.
CP: Is there a place for alternative and more political voices in hip-hop’s lucrative mainstream? Can these different pieces of hip-hop be assimilated?
JC: I’m not the kind of person who’s like, shut down gangsta rap or whatever – I used to be, but I’ve shifted to a position where there can be a spectrum of voices in the hip-hop community. These conscious rappers do get pigeonholed into a sub-genre, which is instructive about how money has totally distorted hip-hop and emphasized certain voices and excluded others – including many fewer women’s voices or progressive voices then were out there 10 or 15 years ago. We don’t need media conglomerates speaking down to us, we need to reverse roles – it is our job as a critical community and critical consumers to turn it around and say we want to take whatever they give us but no, this is our culture and we’re going to take it back.
CP: In recent years, a lot of politicians have loved talking about hip-hop music and denigrating its cultural influence. Why does hip-hop in particular so inflame people?
JC: This kind of thing has been going on for a while. In the ‘70s, during the war on graffiti, you have this thing with youth of color being demonized as wild and out of control uncivilized barbarian criminals. Nathan Glazer described them as “uncontrollable predators” and compared them to rapists and murderers.
You even saw former civil rights leaders, black folk, coming out in the mid-’90s and saying, you’re right, these guys are out of control and we’ve given up on them and we have to wipe out everything they’re about, including hip-hop. And its not just about race anymore, it’s about generation too. So after being abandoned in the inner city in the ‘60s and 7’0s, by the mid-’90s, kids were being contained and locked up – like here in Chicago with these anti-loitering ordinances locking up tens of thousands of young folks in under a year and put their names in these gang databases – a lot of this stuff has since been ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court. So, the argument I am trying to make is that all of this is part of a larger theme of trying to contain young people, especially young people of color, and the generation gap results in some really really horrible public policy.
CP: What kind of political power can hip-hop and hip-hop culture have?
JC: There are a lot of hip-hop generation organizations across the U.S. that are building and networking like the League of Young Voters or the Ella Baker Center or the 21st Century Youth Leadership. We would all like to see hip-hop become a real force to re-establish a progressive majority in this country. And it can be, it speaks to the disenfranchised and marginalized and it reveals the effects of the republicrat agenda. It’s been a voice for truth and speaking truth to power. I am hopeful that we will be able to get our shit together and create this majority rooted in a moral force and that begins with the “least of us.”
CP: How did you respond to Laura Bush’s new gang initiative announced during the State of the Union address?
JC: What is really interesting is that the right has tried the politics of abandonment, which we saw in the South Bronx back in the day, and the politics of containment, like with all the censorship and lockups, and now they are trying the politics of assimilation. Now we have Bush saying he is going to send Laura into the inner cities and she is going to lead these inner-city youth, particularly our men and boys, away from the path of violence. I could talk for days about how bizarre this is. Their message is appealing to our higher moral selves – don’t you want to be positive and have a better life? This is stuff that organizations like community gang violence prevention workers have been doing for years, but the left hasn’t been good enough at taking people to the moral high ground. The right only needs to get a sliver of the hip-hop generation to maintain their hold on the country – and that should scare the hell out of us.
Check out an excerpt from Can’t Stop Won’t Stop.
Download Exclusive MP3 mix tracks from the Can’t Stop Won’t Stop compilation