ISR Issue 48, July–August 2006

Interview with Jeff Chang

Hip-Hop politics

ONCE KNOWN only to partygoers within a few square miles of the South Bronx, later a criminalized nationwide youth culture, and now a global, multibillion dollar industry, the music, dance, visual art and style called "hip-hop" has made quite a journey. How did hip-hop come into being and why? Where is it going? What should activists say about the sometimes backward, sometimes radical nature of the music? Can it be a vehicle for progressive change?

In his book, Can't Stop Won't Stop, hip-hop journalist and activist JEFF CHANG traces the social origins and development of this art form from Kingston, Jamaica, to the South Bronx, to the global marketplace. In March, Jeff's nationwide book tour made a stop in Brooklyn at an event sponsored by the New York Haymarket Forum. Soon after, he spoke to BRIAN JONES about his book and the politics of hip-hop.

WHY DID you write this book?

I GUESS a lot of it came from a desire to see a narrative about my generation that didn't have to do with loss or decline. What I mean is that one of the things about the hip-hop generation is that we live in the shadow of the baby boomer generation, the civil rights generation, the Black power generation-whatever term you want to use for it-the soul generation. We're seen as a decline from that, something that is less than that. So I wanted to have-for myself-a narrative of our generation that centered us, as opposed to saying that we were things that came after (we're post-civil rights, post-baby boomer, those kind of things). Frankly, there were a lot of conversations I've had with elders about the relative demerits of the hip-hop generation, as opposed to merits.

Often, we are put on the defensive and being forced to account for the way things have changed in the last three or four decades and how that made us different. It was a frustrating kind of thing that I felt needed to be resolved. There were a lot of other things happening with me. I was doing a hip-hop label called SoleSides-it's now called Quannum Projects-and the idea behind that was to try to create music and culture that would give people the imagination to see themselves as part of something larger, and hopefully then to be inspired to change things. The other part of it in terms of writing the book was recognizing that a lot of what has happened during our generation was an amazing explosion of art and culture and recognizing that that is our contribution to this society and to changing the world. So I was trying to say, "Hey man, this is something that's been pretty amazing and pretty profound and let's hold it up and talk about what we've done."

CAN YOU say more about what drew you personally into hip-hop?

I GREW up pretty much like millions of other kids of my generation. At twelve years old I heard "Rappers Delight" and was blown away. I wanted to learn all the lyrics. I just found it really magnetizing and as I got older and began to see things like the movies Beat Street and Breakin' and later on Wild Style and Style Wars, these films made me say, "Wow, this is some real shit! This is something I can do and kids of color are doing." In that sense it was accessible and available as a way of expressing myself. I grew up sort of at the beginning of what used to be called Generation X. I came of age in Honolulu during the seventies and eighties and the generation before me, the tail end of the baby boomer generation, the music they had was called "local music." It was music that had come out of the Hawaiian Renaissance and a lot of land struggles and the stirrings of the native sovereignty movement in Hawaii. It was folk-rock and it drew upon Hawaiian guitar and the lyrics were about the land and the native struggles and that was something that was really inspiring to my older cousins and friends. What happened was when the eighties came along there was a lot of development going on in Hawaii-a lot of money coming in from Japan and California. Where I was got built up very quickly and I remember it becoming a concrete jungle in the night.

Looking back I was really angry about that, really angry about the concrete, all this concrete-I was angry at concrete! Hip-hop, in a way, seeing kids spraying graffiti on concrete, spinning on concrete, I was like, "I get it." It was something that gave us a chance to express ourselves-the kids that came after the baby boomers. As I got older and got involved in anti-apartheid and anti-racist movements at Berkeley, hip-hop was moving and growing and changing alongside. It became the soundtrack of my life. It wasn't the kind of thing where I only listened to hip-hop. I'm a big fan of the Replacements, reggae was my first love and I still love reggae, and of course I love Hawaiian music. All these things were happening at the same time but I felt it was hip-hop that spoke most directly to my feelings and what I felt like I was going through. As I got older, it became more and more of my identity and I think it happened to millions of other people at the same time.

YOU TALK in the book about changes that were going on in the world, and in the South Bronx in particular, that gave rise to hip-hop. At least one reviewer has called your book a "people's history of hip-hop." Can you say more about the social conditions that specifically gave rise to hip-hop?

I THINK the massive reversal of the gains of the civil rights movement sets the backdrop for the rise of hip-hop. I deliberately start the narrative in 1968 in the Bronx because it's seen as a golden year for the generation that came before us, but it's also a period in which the backlash begins to set in, and what we see is the politics of abandonment begin to take place in the Bronx. Literally, half the whites leave the Bronx between 1960 and 1970. Governmental disinvestment, which they euphemistically call "planned shrinkage," and deindustrialization, are in full swing, and it really impacts the Bronx very drastically and very quickly.

Between the mid-sixties and the mid-seventies the Bronx undergoes a drastic change and is laid to waste by a perfect storm of these three major trends. I talk about the politics of abandonment that is manifest in the Bronx, but it spreads all around the country (and really all around the world). This is a time when capitalism is going through a massive restructuring and leaves all of these urban spaces abandoned. It's not just poetic, but it's not surprising that a culture that comes out of that urban space should take hold in all these other urban spaces that are going through the same thing over the next two or three decades.

That's not to say that all hip-hop is political, but hip-hop comes out of that particular political context. Starting in the late seventies, but accelerating in the eighties, is the politics of containment because you've surplused all of these young people, so you've got to contain them. And so we get this massive ideological complex that begins (not so coincidentally) in attacks on hip-hop culture, street culture, street culture in New York City, particularly around graffiti, so that by the mid-nineties you have congressional hearings looking into rap music that reference this ideological shift. You've got an entire generation of young people that are "super-predators" and they're beyond saving, so not only do we need to lock them up and throw away the key, we need to crush their culture. I think that that's the backdrop for the rise of hip-hop from 1968 to now.

AND THEN came "Rapper's Delight." In the book, you describe a young Chuck D hearing this fifteen-minute-long rap and is not surprised that it's so long, but that it's so short!

ONE OF the things that's kind of lost these days is that hip-hop began as a live performed culture. It was something that kids did for fun. It was a music, a dance, it was a visual art that was meant to be experienced by immersion, not via products. If you were a graffiti artist you had to be in the scene to understand what the codes were. If you were a b-boy or b-girl or a fan of rap music, you went to the clubs or you went to the block parties, or you went to the community centers to see it performed. All of those who were involved in it before 1979 were experiencing it, they had to go out on the weekend to get to it…and what happened with "Rapper's Delight" was that they figured out a way to package this into a fifteen-minute song and Chuck was like, "How did they do that?" He couldn't have imagined that that kind of thing could have occurred. It is, in that sense, a massive change in the culture. Suddenly, the culture is available in a capsule form. If you can go ahead and buy this twelve-inch record (and millions of people did-it was the biggest selling twelve-inch single ever), that's the beginning of the commercialization of what was predominantly a local, youth street culture. Starting in the Bronx, spreading to the boroughs, but centered in New York City.

I HEARD you speak recently in Brooklyn. You talked about how this youth street culture used to be virtually invisible. Now, it has incredible visibility, it's become a multimillion dollar worldwide industry, and yet, the conditions of the people who originated this music are worse than ever before. You made the point that this shows that "culture is not enough." Can you elaborate more on the relationship between this industry and the people who started it?

THIS IS the biggest conundrum that our generation faces. You've now got a globalized economy that is based on the creativity, the bodies of young (often) males, of color. And yet, at the same time, politically, that same constituency is worse off than ever before-more surveilled than any generation has ever been, more likely to be in jail than in college-it's a massive disconnect. A lot of what hip-hop activism over the last five to ten years has been about is trying to figure ways to leverage the cultural power (limited as it is) that hip-hop has given young people of color. It's not an easy thing. It's not something as obvious as wearing a "Vote or Die" shirt. It's much more difficult than that. It's sort of the main issue that's facing the hip-hop generation-can we figure this out?

I've been really interested in following what's happening at the grassroots level as well as the global level-searching for sounds, looking for ways in which that might begin to manifest itself. The truth of the matter is that even though we do live in this new world of images, most people don't fully understand what the implications of that are, how it's possible for this kind of thing to be so disconnected. It's not simply an issue of a new multiculturalist hegemony being created via hip-hop, it's a lot more complex than that. So that's part of what I'm trying to figure out right now. What does this mean for how we understand race? Not just in the U.S., but all around the world. How is it possible for people to look at what's happening with steroids and not understand that it's about race? It is about race. It's all about race. Baseball hasn't wanted to go to the steroid issue until it was possible to peg a Black man on this. That's why you have this guy [Barry Bonds] facing down fans that are so angry they're throwing syringes on the field. It's not equivalent to Jackie Robinson, but there are a lot of eerie parallels.

BY ANALOGY, there is a lot of sexism in rock and roll, but it seems like hip-hop especially has drawn fire from politicians and has been under the microscope in a way that's totally different from other types of music.

YEAH, I totally agree with you on that. It's an easy target. Frank Zappa says this, and I quoted him in the book, when the censorship battles really picked up was when hip-hop got involved. Frank Zappa says the headless bats just didn't do it for folks, and it was easier to make it a presidential issue and to connect gangsta rap to images of young people protesting or in the streets after the Rodney King verdict. That enables this whole ideological backlash to occur, that leads to everything from Proposition 187, which cuts services to so-called illegal immigrants, to the issue of three strikes and the massive expansion of the prison industrial complex. This is all occurring at a time when crime rates are dropping to historic lows, so it's entirely ideologically driven. It's not driven by hard numbers at all. It's driven by right-wing ideology and this sort of fear of the "super-predator" generation.

AND YET, as progressives and activists, we expect something from artists-we celebrate them when they speak out in some way and talk about the social conditions. So on the one hand it's true that culture's not enough, we don't want to be like Tipper Gore, moralistically wagging the finger at people like 50 Cent. But on the other hand, what should we expect from artists when some of them seem to be, frankly, getting rich off of exploiting negative stereotypes about Black people and people of color?

WE CAN'T turn off our critical thinking caps. We have to be critical when the situation calls for it. This is what I have noticed and what I try to work against. We've been very much equipped to have the tools to deconstruct the images we see on TV. These are the kinds of tools that we've been able to have and to pass on to younger people. What we don't have the tools to do is to understand what has happened to the structures behind that to make the content so bad the way it is. What we understand is that we see a lot of sewage, a lot of shit. But why is it that all that shit is getting dumped in our particular part of the universe? Why is it that that shit is being disproportionately let out on our street and in our particular areas-because it is.

And that goes to how people have re-routed and changed and restructured all of the piping over the last thirty years. A lot of times people will talk about 50 Cent, but they won't talk about the structures that have made a 50 Cent possible. They talk about this "get rich or die trying" shit, without talking about the fact that that's the particular message that the folks who are recreating and redirecting this sewage system want to have directed towards us. We do a lot of good criticism of this already, what we don't understand as well is why those artists have been made possible, why those artists are moving in the direction that they've moved over the last twenty or thirty years. That's really, really key. It's something that you guys do, it's something that a handful of people working in media justice and some progressive media outlets do, but to me it's like, don't talk to me about 50 Cent until you've gone back and understood what the 1996 Telecommunications Act has produced, then we can start talking about this stuff. Because what you can do is, and what people have done is, pick out examples of crap that they don't like, they've been able to remove it, and then the next day somebody deposits another shit in front of your doorstep. They got rid of a radio host at Hot 97 and that person just goes across town to Power 105, and then they put somebody worse in at Hot 97. That's the thing that progressives have to do, is to focus on the real targets.

That's not to say that the artists aren't necessarily responsible, they absolutely are, but I think that the artists are soft targets. These are folks that will switch if you give them the right path to go down. They're simply out there being paid to do a job in some respects, in a lot of places these folks could be a lot better off and much more progressive. In terms of content, it becomes a race to the bottom.

CAN YOU talk more explicitly about the effect of the 1996 Telecommunications Act? You're talking about the centralization of the industry, the concentration of decisions about what we get to listen to. Who decides what we listen to? Are we really choosing the kind of music we get to listen to?

THE 1996 Telecommunications Act did some very specific things. In terms of hip-hop, it removed the ownership caps on radio stations, which basically ushered in a massive consolidation of the radio industry. That in turn, led to a massive paradigm shift in the way that regulatory agencies in Congress began to treat the entire entertainment industry. They were like, "It's OK, we can go ahead and let these guys consolidate themselves." The original charter of the FCC [Federal Communications Commission] was to ensure the public interest, but by removing the ownership caps they allowed the companies to be able to take over the definition of the public interest, and to really turn them into private interest. So now we have a situation where one company owns 1,200 stations and what that has meant is a massive narrowing of content. The narrowing of content inevitably eliminates progressive voices, marginalized voices, women's voices, and plays up stuff that is a lot more reactionary and conservative. That logic has permeated the entire entertainment industry-it has infected the magazines you read, the newspapers you read, the Web sites that you see-all of that.

At the same time there's been this shifting (of necessity) to more multi-hued faces that represent this narrowed content. So what's happened in hip-hop is we've gone from having a broad spectrum of voices from the community-your Queen Latifahs and MC Lytes, to NWAs, Compton's Most Wanted, Ghetto Boys-this massive spectrum of voices in the community has been narrowed. Now the women all have to dress a certain way, which is pretty much not to dress at all, and rappers are pretty much all in the "get rich or die trying" camp. It's not that there are fewer female rappers these days, it's not that there are fewer progressive rappers these days-there are a lot more than there were fifteen years ago-it's that these folks have all been locked out of the master systems that have been set up to distribute content all over the world. Instead, you have a lot more money based around a smaller number of artists. So this narrowing of content that's occurred, in a lot of respects we see it happening with hip-hop first-we're really on the front lines of this battle for media justice.

DESPITE THIS, there continue to be people distributing their homemade rap albums-there's still a margin on which people try to put out hip-hop. What I've been thinking about lately is the tension between the mainstream and the margins. Today there's a multimillion dollar industry, but the whole thing used to be invisible. There are still people who come up into it (and of course there's enormous pressure on them to fit a certain mold if they're going to rise in the industry). But now that there's a huge industry already erected, what hope is there for people on the margins to have an influence?

A LOT. The reality of it is that hip-hop started from nothing and it continues to function that way. There's an amazingly empowering impulse at the heart of hip-hop, which is that a small number of folks anywhere can really make a difference, and the reality of it is that the way hip-hop gets practiced around the world is a progressive type of thing, it just doesn't necessarily get reflected back to you through Viacom. Kids all around the world in thousands of locations-millions of kids-are having their poetry slams and doing their b-boying/b-girl contests or painting graffiti murals at their schools or in their communities, asking for positive change. People use hip-hop to fight the politics of abandonment/containment every day.

You never see any of that stuff, you probably never will see a lot of that stuff on the air. It's not packageable, you're not going to see it on any of the 500 channels that you have access to on your remote control satellite dish thing, but I think that's the way the majority of people still live hip-hop these days. In that sense, it continues to be an important and vital force for young people who desire change. That's the kind of thing that I want to focus on, and there are a lot of other people who are trying to do that as well. This is again where change begins to happen, in everybody's backyards, folks coming together and doing their thing. I think that over time that inevitably will morph into something else, and that will be the next major youth movement that we'll see globally. For now, from Kenya to Cuba to Korea, and all the way back here, that's what I've been seeing-a massive outpouring of creative initiative and desire for progressive change.

Jeff Chang has been a hip-hop journalist since 1991. He was a senior editor/director at Russell Simmons' 360hiphop.com, a founding editor of ColorLines magazine, and a co-founder of the influential hip-hop indie label, SoleSides, now Quannum Projects. He has helped produce over a dozen records, including for the "godfathers of gangsta rap," the Watts Prophets. He is currently editing an anthology entitled Total Chaos: The Art & Aesthetics of Hip-Hop, due in 2006. His previous book, Can't Stop Won't Stop, a "people's history of hip-hop" (in the words of historian Howard Zinn) has topped bestseller lists, and was the recipient of the 2005 American Book Award.

Brian Jones has toured across the country as Marx in Howard Zinn's one-man play Marx in Soho since 1999. His early experiences performing Marx are chronicled in "On the road with Marx" (ISR 23). He lent his voice to the audio recording of Noam Chomsky's book Hegemony or Survival and to several staged readings of Howard Zinn and Anthony Arnove's new book, Voices of a People's History of the United States. He is a teacher in Harlem, and a member of the United Federation of Teachers, Teachers for a Just Contract, and the International Socialist Organization.