hip-hop’s emergence as a cultural force. In reading about the music’s history, one often gets the impression that given the social, cultural, and economic circumstances in which it arose, hip-hop was inevitable; that if none of hip-hop’s innovators had been born, a different group of poor black youth from the Bronx would have developed hip-hop in exactly the same way.
Although he is intentionally overstating his case for literary effect, Robert Farris Thompson exemplifies this approach when he writes that “in the Bronx at least, it seems the young men and women of that much-misunderstood borough had to invent hip hop to regain the voice that had been denied them through media indifference or manipulation” (Thompson 1996: 213; emphasis in original). Or, as Jon Michael Spencer puts it,
The current emergence of rap is a by-product of the emergency of black. This emergency still involves the dilemma of the racial “color-line,” but it is complicated by the threat of racial genocide: the obliteration of all-black institutions, the political separation of the black elite from the black working class, and the benign decimation of the “ghetto poor,” who are perceived as nonproductive and therefore dispensable….
Both the rapper and the engaged scholar seek to provide the black community with a Wisdom [sic] that can serve as the critical ingredient for empowering the black community to propel itself toward existential salvation, that can overcome disempowering, genocidal, hell-bent existence. (Spencer 1991, v; emphasis in original)
In short, Thompson and Spencer are saying that hip-hop developed primarily as a form of collective resistance to oppression. While I certainly agree that the dire factors Spencer cites were significant in the lives of the individuals who developed hip-hop, I question whether their existence constitutes a sufficient explanation for the emergence of hip-hop’s specific musical characteristics.
In fact, as the historian Robin D. G. Kelley has pointed out, the unquestioned association of oppression with creativity is endemic to writing about African American art, in general:
[W]hen social scientists explore “expressive” cultural forms or what has been called “popular culture” (such as language, music, and style), most reduce it to expressions of pathology, compensatory behavior, or creative “coping mechanisms” to deal with racism and poverty. While some aspects of black expressive cultures certainly help inner-city residents deal with and even resist ghetto conditions, most of the literature ignores what these cultural forms mean for the practitioners. Few scholars acknowledge that what might also be at stake here are aesthetics, style, and pleasure. (Kelley 1997: 16–17)
Moreover, I would argue that, in addition to the misdirected focus that Kelley criticizes, such analyses may also promote several specific deterministic misconceptions.
The first of these is that a culture can exist outside individual human experience. Hip-hop was not created by African American culture; it was created by African American people, each of whom had volition, creativity, and choice as to how to proceed. This becomes apparent when one remembers that hip-hop did not emerge fully formed. Like all musical developments, it grew through a series of small innovations that were later retroactively defined as foundational. GrandWizzard Theodore, for example, was not forced by his oppressive environment to invent scratching when he deejayed in the mid-1970s; it was a technique that he discovered by accident, liked, and chose to incorporate into his performances. And if he hadn’t, there is little realistic reason to assume that someone else would have. While his sociocultural environment nurtured and embraced his innovation, it did not create it.
In addition to cultural determinism, there is also a great deal of class determinism evident in the scholarly discourse of hip-hop. Although certain elements of hip-hop culture, such as b-boying or b-girling, graffiti writing, and emceeing may well be the products of economic adversity, other aspects, particularly deejaying and producing, are not: they require substantial capital investment. This, in and of itself, is not particularly significant, except to the degree that it contradicts the narratives of those who would characterize hip-hop as the voice of a dispossessed lumpenproletariat, a musical hodge-podge cobbled together from the discarded scraps of the majority culture. David Toop, for example, writes:
Competition was at the heart of hip hop. Not only did it help displace violence and the refuge of destructive drugs like heroin, but it also fostered an attitude of creating from limited materials. Sneakers became high fashion; original music was created from turntables, a mixer and obscure (highly secret) records; entertainment was provided with the kind of showoff street rap that almost any kid was capable of turning on a rival. (Toop 1991: 15).
Although Toop’s examples are certainly accurate historically, one must be careful of letting the very real influence of material circumstance on individuals become inflated into either a motive or an aesthetic for an entire movement. To do so demeans the creativity of the artists involved, suggesting that they had no choice but to create what they did because no other path was open to them. It virtually precludes the possibility that people chose hip-hop’s constituent elements from a variety of options and thus ignores the cultural values, personal opinions, and artistic preferences that led them to make those choices. Toop marvels that “original music” could be created from the “limited materials” of “turntables, a mixer and … records.” But exactly how are these limited? The idea that an individual could have access to a deejay system and thousands of obscure records, but not to a more conventional musical instrument (such as a guitar or a keyboard), is difficult to accept.
New York–based producer Prince Paul, for one, disputes the assertion that hip-hop’s innovators did not have access to other musical instruments:
You know, everybody went to a school that had a band. You could take an instrument if you wanted to. Courtesy of your public school system, if you wanted to.
But, man, you playing the clarinet isn’t gonna be like, BAM! KAH! Ba-BOOM-BOOM KAH! Everybody in the party [saying] “Oooohhhhh!” It wasn’t that “Yes, yes y’all—y’all—y’all—y’all,” with echo chambers. You wasn’t gonna get that [with a clarinet]. I mean, yeah, it evolved from whatever the culture is. But it’s just an adaptation of whatever else was going on at the time….
It wasn’t cats sittin’ around like, “Man. Times are hard, man…. a can of beans up in the refrigerator. Man, I gotta—I gotta—I gotta —do some hip-hop! I gotta get me a turntable!” It wasn’t like that, man.
Ask Kool Herc! He was the first guy out there. I know him, too. We talked plenty of times. A good guy. He’s not gonna sit there and be like, “Man. It was just so hard for me, man. I just felt like I needed to just play beats back to back. I had to get a rhymer to get on there to make people feel good, ’cause times was just so hard.”
Yeah, cats kill me with that. (Prince Paul 2002)
DJ Kool Akiem of the Micranots also questions the notion of poverty as the decisive factor in the development of early hip-hop:
DJ Kool Akiem: “They were too poor to get instruments.” Yeah, right. They were too poor for classes. Somebody came along with a hundred-dollar sampler.
Man, those samplers were [expensive] back then! I mean, you gotta have money, some way, to put your studio together…. Producing takes more money than playin’ a instrument. You play an instrument, you buy the instrument and then you go to class, you know what I mean?
Joe: Even deejaying costs more money than playing an instrument….
DJ Kool Akiem: I mean deejaying, if you’re serious, you’re gonna have to spend a thousand dollars on your equipment. But then every record’s ten bucks. Then you got speakers and blah, blah, blah.
Even
