Hip hop

Hip hop is the ultimate urban music of the late twentieth century.  It was born in New York, in the Bronx.  Just as New York is the definitive modern city, so the Bronx is in some sense the most representative of its areas.  It is the new Harlem, where fires rage and where the rule of law does not necessarily operate.  It is a marginalised land colonised by those whom society has marginalised.  Hip hop is the music of those people.

Like the string quartet, hip hop is a direct outgrowth of the resources available at a certain time.  It does not require a complex array of instruments like a band, nor many people to create it.  It is pre- 
eminently a tool of the individual.  It is no accident that most of the best hip hop crews adopt precisely the same kind of extravagant, hermetic nicknames as the subway graffiti artists.  Just as the spray can art represented the culturally disenfranchised's chance to create their own personal visual images which at the same time asserted their existence and their differentness, so hip hop is a revolt against previous and particularly white culture, and also a way out for young blacks.

Words play a crucial role.  They are not lyrics, but the nearest that this unsentimental society will allow itself to get to poetry.  By using crude and obvious rhymes, hip hop seeks to undercut any pretensions.  As with oral formulaic verse, the rigid forms provide a handy structure, especially for the improvisatory rappers, who, like their ancient counterparts, hold a store of ready-made phrases.  The exiguousness of the music allows the words their full force.  Many of hip hop's concerns are social, sometimes implicitly political.  This partly explains its success.  As well as appealing to the feet with its insistent beat, it speaks to the head.  Hip hop is an urban articulacy for the hitherto inarticulate. 

Although the music may be reduced to a bare drum machine track with a few musical punctuations, its message is always the same as the words.  Its very spareness is a comment on the indulgent opulence of commercial recordings.  It eschews fancy effects produced by technology.  Instead, by means of the crudely effective scratching, it uses ready-made elements in its strange fragmented collage.

As well as mixing pre-existing records together, the use of simple samplers allows phrases to be interpolated and manipulated.  This is junk music in the best sense; it picks among the debris of our times, and takes what it can use.  Apart from the similarity of style, there is also a continuity engendered by the constant borrowings of rhythms, phrases and even chords, some of which have entered the vocabulary as independent elements like drum sounds.

Inevitably some of this music has crossed over, with hip hop hits riding high in the mainstream charts.  Of course, once they lose their context, and become part of the music industry machine, they are severed from the source of their power.  Just like punk, hip hop is in danger of being hijacked, assimilated and nullified.  This is worse than it sounds.  In hip hop the silenced blacks have learnt to speak.  Saying pain makes it less.  Without hip hop, they have only their silent rage.
 
(7.10.86)

See also Moody Sonnets - Sixty-eight Quartets

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