As I sit back and listen to the music blaring through my
speakers I began to realize the importance of hip-hop, now you’re probably wondering
where exactly I’m going with this, who really sits back and thinks about the importance
of hip-hop. I remember growing up listening to music and getting excited to
actually hear what the artist had to say, music had substance, a message, but
more importantly music had a purpose. Today, I don’t know if I can say the same
about the hip-hop/rap culture. Many artist today lack substance and purpose,
it’s more about “turning up” in the club, there is absolutely nothing wrong
with that kind of music (I happen to enjoy it myself from time to time), but
what about more?
When we think about politics often times we do not initially
correlate it with the hip-hop/rap culture, even though we should. The hip-hop
community as a whole has a very big influence on politics and governmental
affairs. The hip-hop community represents the people, to be more specific,
often times they represent the youth whose voice goes the most unheard. Hip-hop
describes the many issues that take place and have taken place within the inner
city communities across the U.S. through descriptive lyrics that makes you feel
as if you were right there as it happened. When I think of political hip-hop I think of
an artist telling the stories of the unjust atrocities within the inner cities.
Political hip-hop is a way of informing the world of the things that go on that
often times do not get the attention that is needed. Many hip-hop artist have
made politically inspired songs such as Grandmaster Flash & The Furious
Five with, “The Message”, Common, with “The Corner”, NWA’s “F**K tha Police”,
or Public Enemy’s “Fight the Power”. As the songs change on my IPod I began to
hear Tupac’s “Changes”. Tupac was always ahead of his time. He was very clever
in his rhymes, so much, that often times you did not realize how political he
was in his songs. “Changes” was written in the Golden Era of hip-hop (1992) at
the height of cocaine epidemic, when poverty was at an all-time high, lack of
jobs, over populated jails, etc. Tupac was able to convey all of this in this
one song.
During the 1980’s and early 1990’s there was a crack
epidemic that began to surge throughout many inner cities. The crack epidemic
was not the root of the problem at this time, it was poverty and lack of jobs
which ultimately caused many to resort to the crack. Blacks were
institutionally marginalized to a great extent during this time. “Institutional
marginalization includes those embodies in organizations, policies, standards,
operating procedures, and laws that control or limit the full participation of
marginal communities in dominant institutions.” During this time President
Reagan implemented new economic policies that were supposed to help the poor
instead it helped those who didn’t need the help in the first place and gave
black women the stereotypical phrase as being a “welfare queen”.
I began to stop thinking and really listened to the words of
Tupac, “I made a G today, but you made it in a sleazy way, selling crack to the
kid. I gotta get paid, well hey, well that's the way it is”. In these inner
cities there is a common saying that either you have a nice jump shot or you
sell drugs, these are the only two outlets that many inner city youth feel they
have. “Government policies that fail to address inner city needs for the
provision of health care, education, housing and employment opportunities
create an environment where drug culture, both using and dealing, become the
norms. Unrestrained suburban flight puts jobs beyond the physical reach of most
of the residents of inner city communities”.
As the cocaine flooded into many inner city communities, it
began to provide families with the necessary money and gangs the necessary
connections and money to turn this into an issue bigger than one could
imagine. Gangs became more powerful than
ever before, they now had weapons and means to purchase automatic weapons. But
could we really blame the drug cartels or gangs in these inner cities for the
continuous growth of crack in these neighborhoods? Of course they all played a
part in this, but the government was root of the cocaine epidemic that existed
in the U.S. The government began to infiltrate
drugs into these inner-cities, which in turn made people distrust the government
even more. In the song Tupac says “Instead of war on poverty they got a war on
drugs so the police can bother me”. Police began to racially profile blacks
because they fit the description of what a drug dealer would be. During this
time blacks were being stopped for the simplest things (which still happens
today. Is history repeating itself?). As illustrated in the documentary
“Letters to the President” one black man was pulled over because his “license
plate was flopping.” Many blacks at this time were all seen as the same no
matter how well of you were, you were always seen as a suspect or a threat to
the population. Tupac like many others during this time, felt that we should stand up to the police
officers/government and not let them put us (those blacks living in an inner
city that made an honest living and had nice things) in a box just because we
may be economically well off than the typical black man from the inner city.
“Don't let 'em jack you up, back you up, crack you up and pimp smack you up.
You gotta learn to hold ya own they get jealous when they see ya with ya mobile
phone”
Consequently if cocaine was an epidemic as well as threat to
society, the only two avenues that were likely for an individual that takes
part in this is either death or jail. The government provided this drug only to
trap blacks and place them back in the system, which I feel is “modern
slavery.” Tupac stated in his song “It ain't a secret don't conceal the fact
the penitentiary's packed, and it's filled with blacks.” In the documentary
“Letters to the President”, it was said that “blacks make up 62.7% of all drug
offenders sent to state prison. That’s 13.4 times the rate at which white men
are imprisoned for drugs.” Another surprising statistic from that same documentary
stated that “while 49% of crack users were white in 1998, according to federal
estimate only 6% of those convicted in federal court for crack sales were
white. Blacks, 34% of users, were 85% of federal convicts.” This just shows how
the penal system as well as the government began to target the inner cities.
Political hip-hop has been around in different forms since
slavery. In today’s society political hip-hop seems to slip in between the
cracks due to the high demand of “turn-up” music. Artist like Tupac, Public
Enemy, Nas, Common, NWA, (the list goes on) made a statement in music because
they were brave enough to voice what was actually going on within the inner
cities across the U.S. Even though crack is no longer an “epidemic” in the
black community, there are still issues that many face living in inner cities
that often go unnoticed. Changes may have been written in 1992, but we are
still dealing with the same issues of racial profiling, lack of jobs, lack of
affordable housing…etc. So I have to ask is political hip-hop dead?
Britt Daise
Urban Echelon Magazine & Blogspot
Urban Echelon Magazine & Blogspot
Twitter: thisisbee
PHOTO CRED: Tupac
No comments:
Post a Comment