And It Don't Stop

Hip-hop, politics, and the press

by Sabrina Ford

Jeff Chang describes his upcoming book, "Can't Stop, Won't Stop: A History of the Hip-Hop Generation," as the story behind the political and cultural history of hip-hop. Chang talked with News Watch Researcher Sabrina Ford about hip-hop from the days of Grandmaster Flash to this year's national Hip-Hop Political Convention and gave us his very inclusive defintion of the hip-hop generation. How long have you been writing about hip-hop?

Since 1989 or 1990. I didnít really start doing it seriously until 1991, when I started writing for URB magazine, which was just getting started then. There was this whole flutter of hip-hop magazines that were just coming out in the wake of The Source.

You grew up in Hawaii. What was the hip-hop scene like there and how did you first get into it?

I'm going to date myself now, but I got into it around 82 or 83. I was 12 when Rappers Delight came out and there were pop lockers (dancers) at our school.

It was a few years later when I started seeing music videos. They had these depictions of kids that were just like me that were b-boying, doing graffiti and rapping. It got us incredibly excited in Hawaii. So I got into graffiti. I was never really good at any of that but I was really into it. We actually convinced my art teacher to let me put together the first graffiti art show in Honolulu in 84. And after that, the graffiti movement in Hawaii just kind of took off. A lot of the kids that were in the show ended up becoming world famous. How do you feel being called a hip-hop journalist? Do you think that title limits you?

I have gone back and forth on that. It had gotten very serious for me in terms of promoting the book. The book is about politics and culture, but it is seen through the eyes of the hip-hop generation. I struggle with that. I was thinking what I was trying to do was write a story about the last three decades of the 20th century and the generation that comes of age in them. If I frame it as a hip-hop book, will I lose people who ought to know this stuff? If I call myself a hip-hop journalist will people be like, 'He's just a hip-hop journalist, he's not a real journalist.' I was like, 'fuck it.'

The hip-hop tag is a way of saying 'This is who I am, this is my generation and this is how we talk, this is how we think.' In the end, I was like, 'Yeah, let's roll with that,' because maybe there needs to be a way to rep that in the serious hardball world. Maybe I'll get ignored because of that but what the hell. We'll just try it and see what happens. It doesn't really bug me anymore.

Your writings have appeared in publications like Vibe, Mother Jones, and the Washington Post. Does your writing style, use of language and voice change depending on the publication you are writing for?

I think that it used to be a lot different. You could be very aware of how you wrote for a hip-hop magazine as opposed to how you wrote for a newspaper. I think that over time a lot of that ground has closed. I look at all these old articles that I wrote for hip hop magazines like 10 years ago and it's all slang. It's funny to read now because it seems really dated. If I am writing for The Washington Post then my writing might have a little more flava than they are used to and maybe if I am writing for a hip-hop audience it seems a little more academic than it used to. I have gotten more comfortable with my voice.

Was there enough coverage of the presidential election in the hip-hop magazines?

I think that the magazines this year have been attempting to do more political coverage than they have in the past. I, myself, as someone who is a writer making a living writing political stuff for hip hop magazines, have seen a big change over the last couple of years, as the media industry has gone through downsizing and tough economic times. The first thing they cut from the magazines is serious social and political coverage. That's been depressing.

The sections for politics in hip hop magazines have definitely gotten a lot smaller. Look at Vibe and The Source in the mid-90s when you could have a quarter of the book filled up with political stuff and these days you would be really happy to get one article and a side bar.

The spaces for political writing from a hip-hop perspective are the online sites, Pop and Politics, AlterNet, Wiretap and the blogs. The rise of this hip-hop bloggeratti is very political. Itís going to be something to watch going forward.

Hip-hop is big on politics these days, is this a new trend, or has hip-hop always been political?

Hip-hop didn't start as a political thing. It was a cultural movement.

I start the book in 1968, in the Bronx, in a borough where municipal services are getting wiped out, they're taking money out of the schools. They're closing fire stations, the only thing that they are not taking money from is the police. Then you have this exodus of half the white population of the Bronx by the end of the 60s. What happens in the Bronx ends up happening in inner cities across the country over the next three decades. It happens in Los Angeles, it happens in Miami, it happens in Houston, New Orleans, it happens all over the country and around the world.

The reaction to the politics of abandonment is the development of this culture. It's to say 'ok, you want to look at this as if I am not even here anymore, you want to ignore me, you want to take money out of my schools, you want to take money out of my fire stations, you want to just throw me away. But here I am coming back. I'm creating this culture that says here I am. I'm not invisible and I can do shit.'

In the beginning, hip-hop in terms of the music was not political. In terms of the graffiti it wasn't political. In terms of the b-boying it wasn't political. They weren't b-boying so they could tell Mayor Abe Beame (former New York City mayor), 'fuck you!' They were b-boying because it was fun. They were MC-ing and DJ-ing because it was fun. They were doing graffiti because it was fun. It becomes a political statement because of the context they were coming out of.

What you have in 1982 is "The Message" which was the beginning of what people call "political rap." Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five never wanted to do the song but it was forced on them. They made a living entertaining the crowd. Flash says, 'why would you ever want to listen to this stuff? You go to the club to escape this. You go to a club not to be reminded that you don't have a job and that shit is tough and that when you go home you got all this bills to pay and can you keep your lights on and your heat on during the winter? You go to a club to forget all that stuff.'

It becomes important because when people hear it they go, 'oh shit, that's exactly what I'm living.' The song came out during the bottom of the first Reagan recession when people were really just angry and they wanted to hear something like that. That's why the song took off.

Since that time, hip-hop grows and captures what people are talking about at any given time. In the mid-80s, you had a lot of racist killings in New York City like Yusef Hawkins in Bensonhurst and Michael Griffiths in Howard Beach. People were angry. This was a time when racism was rising and you had a lot of hate incidents on the campuses, and it comes out in the music. That's where Public Enemy and Boogie Down Productions come from. The music and the art reflect how people feel at that time, after the crack explosion.

What's happened in the last five years is this huge hip-hop activist movement that sprouted up in cities across the country and the biggest manifestation of that was this summer, the National Hip Hop Political Convention in Newark, New Jersey. Six thousand people came out to Newark for the first time in a generation to set a political agenda for the hip-hop generation. That was a really historical moment. The last time you had something of that scale was in 1972 with the National Black Political Assembly in Gary, Indiana. The media didn't cover that type of thing, but that reflects all of these people across the country had been working day in and day out to change progressive politics.

Your completed book will be at least 600 pages. Why is the history of hip-hop worth 600 pages?

The story of the hip-hop generation is the story of America; how America has changed for the better and for the worse. It's also a look into where America is going because these folks will eventually take over, maybe sooner than later. The view that we've gotten in the popular media has been the baby-boomer view of the world and the baby-boomer view of history. What we havenít gotten enough of is the hip-hop generationís view of history. What I am trying to do here is to express my version of it. There are a million different versions, this is mine.

The best way to understand the last three decades in America is to look at what happens to the hip-hop generation. The last three decades have been characterized by the politics of abandonment first and then by the politics of containment. This culture spreads to all of these other inner cities where the politics of abandonment have affected those places in exactly the same way (it did in the Bronx). Then in the mid 80s you get these bans on break dancing and playing boom boxes in public. You have anti-cruising ordinances so people canít ride around listening to hip-hop. You get curfew ordinances so young people can't stay out listening to hip-hop any more. They have to be home by nine o'clock. Then, you get these sweep ordinances, which basically take young people off the streets entirely. What it culminates in is a situation where you have gang databases in which two-thirds of a city's young black males might be in it and sweep ordinances where 43,000 people get arrested in the course of a year and never get charged but get thrown into a database. This is ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court later, because these are the same kind of laws you had during slavery and Jim Crow.

There is this shift in the late 80s to containing young people. First, you abandon them then, you contain them. I think that is a really important narrative that hip-hop brings out all the time. That doesn't necessarily get represented in the mainstream. If you look at the way the hip hop generation has come of age, the music, the art, the culture, the politics and activism, it reflects these broad changes that have occurred in American society that are not necessarily for the better. In that way, if you look at the history of hip-hop, it just says a lot about where this country is and where it's going.

With all the mobilizing in the hip hop community leading up to the election, where does it leave hip-hop politically after the election?

I interviewed Chuck D a few months back and he was like, 'look, I donít really care about November 2nd, I care about December. What happens then?'

I am actually on the glass-half-full side of this. I think what has happened this year is a very interesting mix of connections that people and institutions have started. The League of Independent Voters is a perfect example. The National Hip Hop Political Convention was the same thing. It's a network of people across the country, who a year ago didn't know each other. There is a psychological sense of something bigger than what they are doing in just their own city. I think that is different.

Who is the hip-hop generation?

That's a real controversial question. Bakari Kitwana came out with a book two years ago where he said itís people born after 1965 and before 1984 and that it was only African Americans. That was upsetting to a lot of people.

The preface to my book starts with a three-word sentence, 'Generations are fiction.' They are basically ideas that we create to figure out ourselves. What usually happens is generations are created by the generation before you.

In the mid-90s people started calling themselves the hip-hop generation. It's just a broad term to talk about the folks that come after the baby boomers. It's a political term in that sense because it's the people that grew up with hip hop.

I avoid the question, I just say, 'Youíre in the hip hop generation if you think you are and we'll know when it's over because the next generation will say it's done.'

You, as an Asian American, don't fit into Kitwana's definition of the Hip-hop generation. In mainstream culture, if that is the way people identify the hip-hop generation, how has that affected you as a journalist primarily covering hip-hop culture?

The interesting thing is that, yeah, I think the mainstream culture perceives hip-hop as being exclusively African American. Where as anyone who is really down with hip-hop would have to, even if they do it begrudgingly, recognize that hip-hop is embraced by a lot of other races. It is embraced by people all over the world where the question of race is not as it is here in the United States. So how would a mainstream person deal with a Bosnian hip-hopper?

The book's not out so, I don't have a lot of people saying, 'You're an Asian American, what do you know about hip hop?' I think that anyone who reads the book won't be able to ask that question.

Within hip-hop you come up against questions, 'Well, can you write this history, are you empowered to write this history?' I can say that I am, but I still have to prove it. And I think that's cool. That's part of what hip-hop is, you show and you prove. It's like this kid Jin (Asian American rapper), he had to get up on BET and show that he had skills (winning free-style battles) seven times in a row. It doesn't really bother me at the end of the day. I don't feel like I am exploiting anybody or that I am stepping on ground that is not my own. I do feel like I am being respectful. I do feel like I am being true to whatever it is that the people I have interviewed have wanted me to represent.

In your experience interviewing various hip-hop artists, did you ever receive any criticism because of your ethnicity?

No, at least not openly. I think people who know me know who I am and what I have done. I'm comfortable in my skin and know who I am and where I'm coming from and where I am going. I do think that there have been times when you get challenged but like I said, its just part of hip-hop.

For me, looking at it through Asian American eyes there are different questions that have become interesting to me. Like Kool Herc for instance, everyone accepts that he is Jamaican. The question for me that was really crucial was, what was it like for him to come to America and speak with this funny accent? What was it like for him to move from an island where you had fruit in your backyard to a tenement where you had to be worried about heroin junkies and gang bangers down the block? That was what I wanted to ask him about. I think that that would've only come from somebody who was familiar and aware of the immigrant experience. Maybe somebody who was Haitian and had immigrated to Brooklyn would've asked him the same types of questions. For me, moving from Hawaii was an immigrant experience in itself. That was the type of stuff I was interested in and it's the type of stuff I haven't seen in a lot of the accounts of Kool Herc. There are different things that I can bring to the table because I donít necessarily have the same frame of references other folks do. And that's not to say it's better it's just different a set of questions.