Re-membering “For the Culture”
A Response to Harmony Holiday’s Bereavement of Hype
It cannot quite accomplish its goal, though, because it can’t distinguish between hip-hop and jazz, because it suffers a sort of historical myopia, in which the concave lens of our ever-denser, ever-noisier everpresent makes both hip-hop and jazz seem closer and more familiar than they are.
They are not what they appear to be from within that essay, but they are far stranger and, more important, grounded in historical moments in United States and world history extremely unlike our own.
“Hip-hop emerged during the summer 1973 in the spirit of collectivity and collective improvisation”
Absolutely not. Hip-hop emerged during desperate times for poor people improvising cheap entertainment in the midst of an ever harsher struggle for survival. Yes, these poor people were acting collectively and improvising, but their economic conditions made the music what it was. “A Short History of Hip-Hop” details this class situation.
Hip-hop began as a music of unemployment and dispossession, but by 1988 it had become conscious of itself as an art form that could possibly inherit the legacy of bebop; an art form that might possibly embody and preserve and develop black American culture. The producers did all that they could and the lyricists did all that they could.
But they could not escape the maelstrom that had started the music and that had only intensified in the intervening years. The heritage hip-hop artists were attempting to preserve and pass along happened to be private intellectual property, and, besides that, the cruelty of everyday American life only ever increased.
This movement in black American culture stands in well for the same movement in US and world history. This is the matrix of ideas out of which my sci-fi novel Rytius Records emerges, and with which it tangles:
Whereas hip-hop from 1973 to 1986 is clearly an excrescence of post-apocalypse—the truth of the broken promises of American society, like The Warriors; the truth about the frontier, like Mad Max; the truth about foreign policy, like Apocalypse Now and Scarface—it is not at all clear that its successful commercialization from 1988 to 1997 marked the real end of that for which it had been holding a torch all along. Hip-hop’s commercialization was simultaneously the death of the future, the end of progress, the dream slipping into oblivion. Those kids from the Bronx could not defeat the empire after all. Not least because they didn’t realize they were fighting an empire. They were just surviving. By the time the artistes of the late 1980s figured out what they were doing, it was too late.
“Hip-hop was the new bebop and the star-making machine needed luminaries, and leaders within the form, and nominated them, often by signing them in impressively cohesive groups”
The music merchants didn’t believe enough to invest major money into hip-hop until 1988, and it didn’t go mainstream until 1992, shortly after sampling was banned for low-budget entry-level artists. So this is clearly incorrect.
But this is reaching for a deeper connection between jazz and hip-hop…
Back in the days when I was a teenager / Before I had status and before I had a pager / You could find the Abstract, listening to hip-hop / My pops used to say that it reminded him of bebop / I said “Well, daddy, don’t you know that things move in cycles?”
—“Excursions,” A Tribe Called Quest, Low End Theory (1991)
No, they don’t. Not in a world dominated by economic exploitation. Fields are taken from their rightful owners, those owners are forced to work for wages, performing commercial monoculture, the fields are stripped of their fertility, and then abandoned to the workers now unemployed there. The emphasis on improvisation in hip-hop was always underground, at the lunch table, on the corner. It’s not commercial. It’s for respect for the culture. And those two things—commerce and culture—could not ever be held to be the same after 1992.
“Like so-called jazz came up through bands, initially big bands and swing before the war efforts and wartime economy forced the closure of large ballrooms and banned dancing with cabaret laws in New York, where jazz innovation was concentrated at the height of the genre’s popularity, turning the form more reticent and appealing to the cerebral or hip and disaffected white intelligentsia who enjoyed standing at a diagonal against the walls of small smokey clubs”
There’s a lot of historical elision here, which makes this more false than true. During World War II the US government did ban all but a couple of big bands from chartering buses, and vinyl acetate was commandeered, so the players tended to stay home and recording was rare. One can say that bebop was an invention of those small ensembles circling around New York City, drawing artists from the Southwest and the Midwest.
But the characterization of the music as reticent or having anything at all to do with appealing to whites is not true.
This movement in black American culture stands in well for the same movement in US and world history. The world of letters had largely ignored the achievements of the Harlem Renaissance authors, anti-Communism and the Cold War went a long way toward suppressing high modern expression among the white population (see John Dos Passos), and architectural experiments in beauty for the health of the republic and the edification of the democratic spirit ceased during the war.
Modernism in the American mainstream was buried, hidden under layers of apolitical double talk, imperial phrasemongering, and “principled” architectural austerity.
Which is why Charlie Parker ended up being the American Picasso.
Consider what it means that only the blacks were free to express sincere hope of a better future during the first half of the twentieth century.
The concave lens of the compressed contemporary moment makes these things—hip-hop and jazz—appear closer, more familiar, less controversial, than they were.
I will stop there, because I think this is enough to re-orient and, in fact, deepen our bereavement. It’s a twice-told tale vexing a literal world empire of exploitation, and its first telling was already forgotten by those who plugged their sound systems into that lamppost in 1973.
Why do authors actually type this word “nigga” out and use it as though it is a different one from “nigger”? Unless the entire sentence is in onomatopoeic dialect, we should have the courage to use the words we mean or use different words. To do otherwise contributes to the confusion abroad from the abuse of language for commercial and demagogic purposes. This protects no one from anything, and only makes non-blacks think they can use the word “nigger” via this linguistic loophole that is widened with every euphemistic use of this commercial pop-gangster record-cover spelling.
Unclear what exactly your point(s) is(are) here. HH's piece is wrong because you don't think she did enough work to differentiate hip-hop and jazz temporally? Record labels didn't invest in hip-hop until [x] year so "clearly" her statement is false? (Despite her not using a year anchor in the quoted sentence?)
You seem to have a sharp eye for cultural history and I suppose I see the need to recognize nuance but I'm struggling to see the point of this reaction. Honestly it feels like bad faith criticism just to be critical and I promise I came at this with an open mind.
If diction is as important as your footnote implies, surely you can agree that one can add complexity to anothers' thesis without labeling it "wrong"?
And looking at the sentence again I may not disagree actually. I'd have to double check what he is referring to.