Matt Zeitlin writes:
But even though I love hip-hop music, I think it's important to recognize that it's just music, and the possibility of using it organize young black voters, create any political movement or do anything more than have a great track for a banging party is probably an illusion. Samhita Mukhopadhyay has a post at the Nation discussing the possibility of some sort of hip hop movement or the general political possibilities of hip hop. How could a genre of music whose most prominent representatives celebrate violence and misogyny be a tool of progressive political organizing? This fantasy depends on a certain over-romanticized, fictional version of “authentic” hip hop in which in the South Bronx in the late 70s and early 80s, there was this pure art form uncorrupted by violence and misogyny that was about having a good time and/or criticizing Reagan budget cuts and the evil of the Cross Bronx Expressway and Robert Moses. In the white liberal/black activist narrative, things got really good with Public Enemy explicitly taking on the mantle of Malcolm X and Black Liberation. Then, NWA and Death Row records came in, white people became the majority of hip-hop listeners, and black artists became tools of the man and started an arms race to make the most violent, misogynistic records so as to attract white audiences. This narrative needs to be true for there to be any hope of Hip-Hop being politically viable, because as currently constructed, or even how the mainstream of the music has been developing for the last 15 years, there’s little hope that Young Jeezy talking about selling cocaine, Too $hort rapping “I busted a nut and killed a bitch” or that any rap music black people actually listen to can be leveraged to anything greater than an album.
