According to the definition of Encyclopedia of Rap and Hip Hop Culture (2006), the term “hip hop” refers to the newly-formed music and subculture of which Africa Bambaata credits DJ Lovebug Starski as the inventor. Around 1973, the Zulu Nation8 begins widespread usage of the term hip hop as means to organize the new subculture (171). The birth of hip hop culture is in fact based on the youth who live in the urban black community in the South Bronx district of New York City, where people in poverty desire new things for a change. The background story starts with the city planner Robert Moses’s The Cross-Bronx Expressway Project between 1948 and 1972. Although this urban renewal project at the first claims to benefit all city residents, it turns out to support the rich and the influential, leaving the minority and the working class’s civil rights behind. As Tricia Rose indicates, “The Cross-Bronx Expressway Project, like many of Moses’s city projects, broke up Black and Latino communities and left them with little leadership and resources” (quoted from The
History of Rap Music 18). The desperate reality triggers the birth of hip hop culture.
As the founder of the Zulu Nation, Bambaataa urges his young fellows to commit to rap music and dance instead of drug and violence as outlets to express themselves (The History of Rap Music 24). Lipsitz analyzes that this appeal, to a large degree, helps “channel the anger and enthusiasm of young people in South Bronx away from gang fighting into music, dancing and graffiti” (26). Thus, the performing style of hip hop is generated from the very urbanized life and also the very marginalized part of
“ghetto”; through constant struggles and challenges, as Tricia Rose analyzes, “[it] is ___________________
8. The Zulu Nation is a group which Bambaata organized in 1974, a collective of DJs, breakers, graffiti artists and homeboys.
the tension between the cultural fractures produced by postindustrial oppression and the binding ties of black cultural expressivity that sets the critical frame for the development of hip hop” (425). As a result, hip hop enters the public sphere to become one of the members of popular culture with its unique performing style and critical nature. The activities and events held by Bambaataa soon spread in favor of young people of color under the tough living circumstances in the marginalized communities, which those groups of diverse ethnicities enable the cross-cultural exchange, as Lommel describes the phenomenon, “[g]raffiti-tagged trains became unwitting cultural ambassadors, showcasing hip hop throughout New York City”
(Lommel 24).
And African-American and Latino teens from neighborhoods across the city descended on parks and clubs in the Bronx to hear rap musicians relate experiences overlooked by mainstream media and entertainment” (Lommel 18-19). Nelson George also concludes in Hip Hop America (1999) that Bambaataa’s important contribution lies in the myth he established for hip hop culture for the Zulu Nation
“filled the fraternal role gangs play in urban culture while de-emphasizing crime and fighting” (18). At present, Bambaataa and the Zulu nation still serve as the anchor and also mediates disturbances for its safety value in hip hop culture for over twenty-five years and more (George18-19), even when hip hop is not possessed by merely small amount of local people.
Along with Bambaataa, DJs (Disco Jockeys) in the clubs such as Kool Herc and Grandmaster Flash are also the precursors in cultivating and promoting rap music and break dancing. They develop new techniques9 for break beats on turntables and
___________________
9. The new break-beat techniques included “cutting”, “back spinning, “punch phasing” (The History of Rap Music 23). Further aesthetics of rap will be explained in following sections.
blend reggae styles (based on their Jamaican and Afro-Caribbean heritage) into the foundation of rap music; they recruit young people for dance crews and produced hip hop tracks for rap groups like The Furious Five, which push the culture to higher visibility as well (The History of Rap Music 23). Kool Herc introduces Coke La Rock as his MC (master of ceremonies); Coke La Rock later invents several party slogans which are to be deemed as the classic ones in the club culture. As to Flash, with his electrician background, he further invented and applied techniques to mix sound. As George analyses, “[O]ut of his curiosity came the ‘clock theory’ of mixing where Flash is able to ‘read’ records by using the spinning logo to find the break” (Geroge 19). Flash even leads beat mixing to an entertaining level by using body gesture to please the crowd (George 19). On the whole, Africa Bambaata, Kool Herc, and Grandmaster Flash’s contributions to hip hop culture not only build the criteria of rap music but also merge the music into “an expression of a local culture hungry for new connections and eager to form a unique identity” (The History of Rap Music 25) to the youngsters in the South Bronx community and “outgrew the local and burst on to the national scene, drawing in young white teenagers as well as others of the African-American diaspora” (The History of Rap Music 25). By the time the rap hit “Rapper’s
Delight” (1979) presented by Sugar Hill Gang, it has marked the momentous
milestone that hip hop music first starts to be known by the mainstream public, so as to claim the coming of the epoch of hip hop (Rap Attack 3 ix). The song also heaves the position of hip hop “from a local to an international entity” (Encyclopedia of Rap
and Hip Hop Culture xxiii).
Nevertheless, Bakari Kitwana has provided an alternative way to understand the formation of hip hop culture. In The Hip Hop Generation (2002), Bakari Kitwana points out that the group of African Americans whose birth years start from 1965 to 1984 can be considered as the group of “hip hop generation”. They are involved in
the activities of all areas, from artists to activists. They also lay the key ground that helps materialize this cultural form. Hip hop generation is set to describe “the young African Americans born between 1965 and 1984 who came of age in the eighties and nineties and who shared a specific set of values and attitudes” (Kiwana 4). This group of people play a very essential role in laying the groundwork for hip hop to appear in the society as a prominent youth/popular culture. They obtain the rights from their older generations to enjoy “the fruits of civil rights and Black power movement,”
including voting rights, affirmative action, the rise of Black elected officials, and social programs benefiting the poor (Kitwana 147). They offer their critical or political viewpoints through their works. Rap artists in the late 1980s such as NWA, KRS-One, Queen Latifah or writers and filmmakers like Carlito Rodriguez, Bonz Malone, Selwyn Hinds, John Singleton and Hype Williams in the mid-1990s all endeavor themselves to the making of hip hop culture. Kiwana believes that those hip hop generationers lay the foundation for understanding the generation’s worldview (Kiwana 4-5). However, with those harvests of the previous civil rights movements, those young Black middle-class citizens of hip hop generation seem to have less critical and political acts regarding their culture and rights. Hence, the hip hop generation seeks for a change covering race, class, gender and ethnicity. As Kiwana continues to state, “our generation focuses on a wide range of issues: racial profiling, environmental justice, electoral politics, youth issues, parenting, and globalization”
(Kiwana 149). Yet, Kiwana gives credits to Africa Bambaataa, Grandmaster Flash, Melle Mels and DJ Kool Herc and many others that Lisa Sullivan called the “bridge generation,” who technically do not belong to the hip hop generation but the ones who
“gave birth to the hip hop movement that came to define the hip hop generation”
(Kiwana xiii-xiv).
The historical consciousness, as mentioned above, endows the hip hop
generation with a strong motivation to search for their identity and also encourages them to manifest their significance to the society of coming out from the streets to the nation.