Hip Hop America - Softcover

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Nelson George, supervising producer and writer for the Netflix series "The Get Down," is an award-winning author of both fiction and nonfiction. He has written for Playboy, Billboard, Esquire, the Village Voice, Essence, and many other national magazines, as well as writing and producing television programs and feature films.

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Table of Contents

Title Page

Dedication

Copyright Page

Introduction

chapter 1 - post-soul

chapter 2 - hip hop wasn’t just another date

chapter 3 - gangsters—real and unreal

chapter 4 - the “i” of me

chapter 5 - black owned?

chapter 8 - the permanent business

chapter 7 - sample this

chapter 8 - where my eyes can see

chapter 9 - new jack swing to ghetto glamour

chapter 10 - national music

chapter 11 - the sound of philadelphia—dunking

chapter 12 - capitalist tool

chapter 13 - too live

chapter 14 - skills to pay the bills

chapter 15 - funk the world

chapter 16 - “da joint!” and beyond

chapter 17 - we ain’t goin’ nowhere: twenty-first-century bling

sources / further reading

Acknowledgements

index

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HIP HOP AMERICA

Nelson George is the author of ten nonfiction books on African-American culture and of four novels. He has received two ASCAP-Deems Taylor Awards, a Grammy, and two American Book Awards from the Before Columbus Foundation for Hip Hop America and Elevating the Game. Hip Hop America and The Death of Rhythm & Blues were also finalists for the National Book Critics Circle Award. He has written for national magazines, including Playboy, Billboard, Esquire, Spin, Essence, and The Village Voice, and has written and produced several television programs as well as two feature films. His new film Everyday People recently premiered on HBO. He was born in Brooklyn, New York, where he still lives.

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First published in the United States of America by Viking Penguin, 1998
Published in Penguin Books 1999
This edition published 2005

All rights reserved

George, Nelson.
Hip hop America / by Nelson George.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographic references (p. ) and index

eISBN : 978-1-101-00730-3

1. Rap (music)_History and criticism. 2. Hip-hop_United States. 3. Popular culture_United States. 4. Music and society_United States. I. Title.

ML3531.G46 1998
782.421649_dc21 98-23414

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introduction

WE WOULD LIKE TO LIVE AS WE ONCE LIVED, BUT HISTORY WILI NOT PERMIT IT.

IN THE ’30s, ON ANY BALMY SUMMER EVENING THROUGHOUT THE rural South, the evening’s entertainment—boxing—would usually begin with a battle royal. This regal name hardly describes the nature of the event. A gang of “colored” youngsters—ranging from adolescent to college age—gathered in a boxing ring for a blindfolded, no-holds-barred brawl. There were no weapons except fists, but the physical damage that ensued in the frenzy was monumental. The last man standing won a nominal prize that hardly compensated for the broken teeth and fractured bones resulting from these gang bangs.

To the (white) audiences who witnessed these battles royal, it was an appetizer for an entire night of manly action. Ernest Hemingway, that definer of all things American and masculine, used to organize battles royal for boxing events he hosted in his beloved Key West, Florida.

For the young black men who pummeled each other in the quest for a bit of spare change, it was a chance to prove their toughness to friends, rivals, and themselves. For the biggest and most brutal participants, it was a way to get paid and, in a weird way, flaunt the physical power that the white viewers otherwise feared in everyday life. For white audiences, the heated bout allowed them to see the blacks as comical figures whose most aggressive urges were neutered for their amusement.

At certain moments, when hip hop is at its most tragically comic, I can imagine it as a ’90s battle royal, where young African Americans step into an arena to verbally, emotionally, and, yes, physically bash each other for the pleasure of predominantly white spectators worldwide. Ralph Ellison’s description of a battle royal in Invisible Man could be a contemporary rap lyric: “I played one group against the other, slipping in and throwing a punch then stepping out of range while pushing the others into the melee to take the blows blindly aimed at me. The smoke was agonizing and there were no rounds, no bells at three minute intervals to relieve our exhaustion. The room spun round me, a swirl of lights, smoke, sweating bodies surrounded by tense white faces.”

But most of the time I know, and I’m grateful, that this is the ‘90s, not the ’30s. Battling may be essential to hip hop’s evolution and the energy that keeps it dynamic, but its manifestations and effects are too complex and often contradictory for a single metaphor, no matter how resonant, to capture its essence. There is the will to battle, but other threads in its fabric involve fun, dance, literature, crime, sex, and politics—too many to simply say that hip hop means any one or even two things.

Think about this post-soul moment: One New York afternoon you’re checking out that funky pop-jazz standard from 1975, “Mr. Magic” by Grover Washington, Jr., on the black oldies station KISS-FM. Then you move a few spots down the dial to the hip hop—oriented Hot 97 and hear the music from “Mr. Magic” sampled to create the backing track on “Candy Rain,” a 1995 techno-R&B hit by a teenage vocal group named Soul for Real, most of whose members weren’t born when “Mr. Magic” first appeared. In the post-soul era, shards of the black past exist in the present at odd and often uncomfortable angles to each other.

At its most elemental level hip hop is a product of post—civil rights era America, a set of cultural forms originally nurtured by African American, Caribbean American, and Latin American youth in and around New York in the ‘70s. Its most popular vehicle for expression has been music, though dance, painting, fashion, video,...