The Conquest of Hip-Hop — pt. I

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Before I even begin here, the thing you got to understand about music from rock and roll onward is that music is not longer just music, it is part of a performance art project called the Group, or the Star, the Auteur or the Band.

Now that you understand that I can say this has become even more of a thing with Hip-Hop, and now we’re at the point where I can say what I want, which is: given the technical innovations and abilities of Hip-Hop, as music, all music is now Hip-Hop.

This is also a natural evolution from rock and roll, where bands would make country albums or jazz albums or whatever, but because they were rock and roll somehow those albums became country rock or jazz rock fusion or whatever. The main thing is that it was rock and roll because the presentational side of the popular performance art-form known as the rock group made them so.

But now if you make a rock and roll album, without Hip-Hop elements to it, it is still Hip-Hop because of its imminent inclusion by the musical side of Hip-Hop into the universe it represents.

Any long or short piece of music, uncut, unsampled, without transitions or mixes with other music in it, is, in the world where Hip-Hop and its methods are the technical summit, Hip-Hop, and you just haven’t heard anything mixed into it yet.

In fact how would you know? if I as a DJ mix together twenty different songs that you don’t know, you might suspect I have done so, but can’t know, so from the hearpoint of the listener any music that is unknown must be assumed to be composed of multiple sources.

And I as a musician when I produce something using older methods, when it becomes available, I must consider that it can be taken and sampled and integrated into the great musical graph that is Hip-Hop, connecting all sounds, beats and melodies of the past and future.

And someone else as a DJ when they hear something they might not use it now, but it is there in their mind as node on that graph that has perhaps not been connected by some edge to another node, but which has the potentiality to be connected by them, or indeed any DJ who hears it, and with Hip-Hop, the democratization of studio technology, everybody is a DJ.

Hip-Hop has the same presentational aspect as the rock group, but greater, more advanced, more spread out. What Hip-Hop has achieved in the presentational aspect of the its art was hinted at by some groups and stars of the Rock and Roll era, I am not thinking of these artists as inspirations for Hip-Hop, although sure they might have inspired some small bits here and there, I am saying that they somewhat, as artists indicated that there was something interesting in a particular direction, but then did not fully go out there to discover what that interesting thing was, later on Hip-Hop went out there and explored, mainly all on its own, but when they bring something back a music nerd can sort of point and say oh yeah that’s sort of like what these guys did before, but it isn’t really.

Now, with adequate preperation I can talk about the four who sort of saw something Hip-Hop like in the presentational area, but did not really go there.

The Beatles, Bob Dylan, The Grateful Dead, & David Bowie

Psych. I’m just going to keep talking about what Hip-Hop did but then you can say hey, that’s sort of like, but then realize oh he said I would say that and then it’s all copacetic.

The Units of Character

Before, in the performance art that was a Rock and Roll Act, the units that performed were the stars and groups. A single star, or a group of people. If there was a community or a family, that just existed to highlight how this musical genius attaining pure rock freedom manifested amongst us middle class or sometimes even really poor schleps but rose above via the ability to ROCK and EXPRESS THEMSELVES and BE FREE TO DO WHAT THEY WANT TO DO!

But Hip-Hop moved beyond the units of stars and groups, those still existed, but they were built upon. There was community, sometimes community was gang membership, sometimes it was a neighborhood, sometimes it was a building in the projects; the neighborhood for a group was something they transcended, they sprang from, but the community of Hip-Hop is often with them, it is something they bring with them, or they return to be nurtured. Not always, but often enough that it is notable.

The community in Hip-Hop is a character in itself, that also acts in the presentation of Hip-Hop as a Performance Art. It is often the main star of the music, or if not the main then someone that plays along with the main star. You may get that in a few songs with some bands, but in Hip-Hop it is likely to be nearly every song of some particular bands. Many songs of Rock and Roll do not have a place they are staged in, they are abstract, or placed somewhere that is essentially a fantasy of some sort. Hip-Hop goes back to older music forms in that there are a significant number of Hip-Hop tracks that have a real sense of place.

The Graphical Dimension

The image of the star was put on things, but those things were not things that had any relation to the star, they were meaningless things that you, a follower of the star, used to signify your allegiance, they were cups or caps or t-shirts or jackets but they meant nothing, they were your trivial little branding emblems.

The image of the group was put on posters, and those posters didn’t mean anything, you could buy them and hang them in your room the same way you could wear the t-shirt, it was a nice way to send some money to somebody who appreciated getting money from you. Or, get this, sometimes when the band was coming to town they would put posters up all over the town showing how cool the band was, and in the record stores they would hang up posters of the band to show hey you can buy their music here!

There was a different approach with psychedelic rock, there was at the same time a graphical movement among visual artists exposed to psychedelic drugs, just as there was a musical movement and the groups adopted the visual style to indicate that they shared the same source of inspiration as the visual artists, namely psychedelic drugs.

This tracks closely to the use of graffiti as Hip-Hop’s graphic representation, except that there again the connection was much more explicit and close, through the unit of community that Hip-Hop opens up as a member of the performance. And part of this was that both the music and the graphical representations were movements from the same source communities, located at the bottom of the social ladder.

Psychedelic rock and psychedelic art were movements among the middle class being proselytized by the chemists and drug dealers of a movement outside music and graphics. The Beatles did not come up from a psychedelic source, they came from a working class area, became rich and powerful and were then courted because of their talent and position. The bands and artists of the Psychedelic movement could be better thought of as recruits to a cult who then spread the message they were taught, whereas Hip-Hop functioned from the first days as their own movement.

Or to put it another way, as I find I must often do when discussing complicated things, the psychedelic movement was a movement focused around a drug and the aesthetics were side effects of that drug, but Hip-Hop did not really have aesthetic side effects, because the movement was itself an aesthetic movement.

And so the graphics of Hip-Hop sprang up from the same community as the music of Hip-Hop and they moved together and communicated and were close, and because the graphics were cohesive and actually expressive of an art movement they meant something. And when you took the images of the group or stars and put them in a giant mural on a wall it meant more than it did when you got that poster, or when you took their logo, which might be made in the style of a graffiti tag and put outside the wall of your school it meant more than previous generations putting the name of their favorite band outside the wall of their school, because in tagging you were taking part in the primitive form of the art of Hip-Hop, whereas in writing Led Zep rocks or something similar on the wall that was just being a vandal, there was no overarching meaning to the act that made it mean more than what it said.

Do You Wanna Dance?

Pretty much every popular musical form has dancing involved. Rock and Roll too, it had dances that were invented and people would dance these dances and people would say oh look at that dance that looks like fun. Of course everyone has this, and Hip-Hop has it too.

But Hip-Hop dancing is not like Rock and Roll dancing, because there is no Rock and Roll dancing, there are dances that were popularized by rock and roll but there is not a genre of dance that is the Rock and Roll dance. Rock and Roll dances don’t really mean anything other than, sometimes, ooh sexy. Which granted, given the 1950s when Rock and Roll got going, that was a pretty radical thing to mean.

Just as there was a Jazz dance genre before, there is a Hip-Hop dance genre, which the use of genre in this case is just a big set that it named “Jazz dancing” or “Hip-Hop Dancing”, where the overarching culture threw the ways of dancing in one subgroup, mainly for racial reasons, if not explicitly Racist ones.

Because of this, Hip-Hop dancing has a meaning beyond ooh, sexy.

The Hip-Hop Outvasion

Cute words, but most movements function like an outvasion, that is to say the opposite of an invasion. The movement starts in an area where various like minded people live and associate, perhaps it is a movement among very well to do individuals, as most artists have been over the centuries and thus it turns out that they become familiar with similar movements in other places and they expand and incorporate each other to create a larger movement, at some point they reach a point where there is enough momentum to carry them beyond their local area and their movement becomes important to the world outside the movement and the movement’s localized reach.

The British Invasion was in some ways an Outvasion of British rock groups from London to the rest of Britain and Europe but they went to America so quickly afterwards, and the rest of the world that their localized origins become slightly muddied, but a bit of that carried over, with the knowledge of these British groups being groups that all knew other to some extent.

The communities of Hip-Hop that came out were more interlocked and complex than the British Invasion bands’ dynamic. And because they shared a socioeconomic bond, communal bonds, were often composed of racial groups outside the dominant society (Black, Latino), and possessed graphics and music and dance all together, they functioned more like the major art movements of the early 20th centuries, with a heavy layer of intellectualism underlying their message and an implication of political and social goals.

Rock and Roll when it first came around had all this as well, but in a more diffuse form. Rock and Roll did not really get any real definable world-changing goals associated with it until the mid 60s when the civil rights movement became somewhat associated with it, and then later the goal of ending the Vietnam War. The political goals of Rock and Roll were by chance, and came along late, and after they were somewhat fixed Rock and Roll seemed somewhat pathetic in comparison to its past because artistic movements that have political and moral goals seem somehow more important than ones that do not.

But Hip-Hop because of its racial makeup and its communal origins had from the beginning strong undercurrents of political and social change. Rather than take up space with making this argument I will link, as one is meant to on the Web

The Absorption and Co-opting of Hip-Hop

OK we all know this one, Hip-Hop has been co-opted by Capitalism. Blah blah. And I’m gonna say — nope, you don’t know what you’re talking about, or rather, sure it looks like that, because you ain’t seeing the big picture.

Big Picture on the Music Side

While Dance and Graphics are nice to have in your movement, the main driver of Hip-Hop has always been the music.

And I said earlier — all Music now is Hip-Hop, even if it seems to be in another genre, because of the technology that Hip-Hop is built on. That is so true you might be forgiven for not noticing it was a lie of omission.

If all Music now is Hip-Hop it follows that all sound now is Hip-Hop, but that’s not all.

While Hip-Hop is a musical form it is also, very often, almost always, a spoken word form, and often the samples are spoken word samples, hence as we say that all sound is now Hip-Hop it follows that all spoken language is within the field that Hip-Hop commands.

This is a bold statement, but it should be seen as true but also a truth that is not demonstrated as often as it might be.

But let’s take it further. As the written word is the encoding of a spoken form, then that which is written may be spoken and thus all that is written is also within the field of Hip-Hop.

Now I think we can all agree these possibilities are not fully exploited by Hip-Hop as yet, these possibilities that are implicit in the musical side of the movement.

I do not believe that any artistic form that has such a large area under its purview that is as yet undeveloped can be said to have been co-opted, it has instead been paused, it has been unfairly blocked in its natural evolution, it has still a ways to go.