i just read the preface to Can’t Stop Won’t Stop: A History of the Hip Hop Generation, by jeff chang, and it has put me in a much less sarcastic mood than i am usually in when i sit down to write here.
i joke that “circus is the next hip hop,” i joke that there’s anything could be the next hip hop, but let me make one thing clear: it’s a joke.
it’s referring to the kind of “hip hop” that’s a trend. the kind of “hip hop” that’s a marketing buzzword that’s been abused since vanity fair, in all seriousness, labeled paris and nicky hilton, the hip hop debutantes.
that “hip hop” is a farce.
but there is another kind of hip hop. a hip hop that cannot be replicated, cannot be commodified, and cannot ever be rebranded, and it is hiphop as a force.
a force concieved in a mess of poverty, devastation, neglect, and chaos. a force that grew out of racism, plagiarism, jimcrowism, indifference, censorship, white kids burning black records proudly declaring that “disco sucks,” denial, globalization and in the end, appropriation. it grew where nothing else would grow. like the rose that grew from concrete, hip hop grew.
and this force became big. this force just would not get along. it refused to fit in, refused to be discounted, refused to be ignored. hiphop refused to sit in the back of the bus, and left its mark as big as metro train bombs, because it would not go unseen.
hiphop was mad! it roared with anger! it was angry of envy, angry of hunger, angry of despair, degredation, angry of all the other voices that got to sing. hiphop raged until it could not be ignored! destroyed itself over and over with the madness of the surf, and spread as far accross the world as the oceans. there is no “next” for a force like that.
if you grew up in the projects, went to a public, urban high school in the 90’s, and liked to dance, it didn’t matter what color your skin was, hiphop would be the music you listened to. hip hop would be the frequency you vibrated to. hip hop would be the history that spoke to your present, and if you started to develop a curiosity about this history, then you’d hope that one day, a hip hop journalist like jeff chang would write a book like “can’t stop won’t stop,” and it would start like this:
“Generations are fictions.
The act of determining a group of people by placing a beginning and ending date around them is a way to impose a narrative. They are interesting and necessary fictions because they allow claims to be staked around ideas. But generations are fictions nonetheless, often created simply to suit the needs of demographers, journalists, futurists, and marketers.
In 1990, Neil Howe and William Strauss–both baby boomers and self-described social forecasters–set forth a neatly parsed theory of American generations in their book, Generations: The History of America’s Future, 1584 to 22069. They named their own generation “Prophets,” idealists who came of age during a period of “Awakening,” and their children’s generation “Heroes, who, nurtured by their spiritually attuned parents, would restore America to a “High” era. In between were “Nomads” inhabiting a present they described as an “Unraveling.” What Howe and Strauss’s self-flattering theory lacked in explanatory power, it made up for with the luck of good timing. The release of Generations intersected with the media’s discovery of “Generation X,” a name taken from the title of a book by Douglas Coupland that seemed to sum up for boomers the mystery of the emerging cohort.
Howe and Strauss’s book was pitched as a peek into the future. Cycles of history, they argued, proceed from generational cycles, giving them the power to prophesize the future. Certainly history loops. But generations are fictions used in larger struggles over power.
There is nothing more ancient than telling stories about generational difference. A generation is usually named and framed first by the one immediately preceding it. The story is written in the words of shock and outrage that accompany two revelations: “Whoa, I’m getting old,” and “Damn, who are these kids?”
Boomers seem to have great difficulty imagining what could come after themselves. It was a boomer who invented the unfortunate formulation: “the end of history.” By comparison, everything that came after would appear as a decline, a simplification, a corruption.
Up until recently, our generation has mainly been defined by the prefix “post-.” We have been post-civil rights, postmodern, poststructural, postfeminist, post-Black, post-soul. We’re the poster children of “post-,” the leftovers in the dirty kitchen of yesterday’s feast. We have been the Baby Boom Echo. (Is Baby Boom Narcissus in the house?) We have been Generation X. Now they even talk about Generation Y. And why? Probably because Y comes after X.
And so, by the mid-1990’s, many young writers–sick of what Howe and Strauss and their peers had wrought–took to calling themselves “the Hip-Hop Generation.” In 2002, in an important book, The Hip-Hop Generation: Young Blacks and the Crisis in African American Culture, Bakari Kitwana forged a narrow definition–African Americans born between 1965 and 1984–a period bracketed by the passage of the Civil Rights Act and the assasination of Malcolm X on one end and hip-hop’s global takeover during the peak of the Reagan/Bush era at the other.
Kitwana grappled with the implications of the gap between Blacks who came of age during the Civil Rights and Black Power movements and those who came of age with hip-hop. His point was simple: a community cannot have a useful discussion about racial progress without first taking account of the facts of change.
Folks got bogged down once again in the details. How could one accept a definition of a Hip-Hop Generation which excluded the culture’s pioneers, like Kool Herc, and Afrika Banbaataa, for being born too early? Or one that excluded those who had come to claim and transform hip-hop culture, but were not Black of born in America? Exactly when a Hip-Hop Generation began and whom it includes remains, quite appropriately, a contested question.
My own feeling is that the idea of the Hip-Hop generation brings together time and race, place and polyculturalism, hot beats and hybridity. It describes the turn from politics to culture, the process of entropy and reconstruction. It captures the collective hopes and nightmares, ambitions and failures of those who would otherwise be described as “post-this” or “post-that.”
So, you ask, when does the Hip-Hop generation begin? After DJ Kool Herc and Afrika Bambaataa. Whom does it include? Anyone who is down. When does it end? When the next generation tells us it’s over.
This is a nonfiction history of a fiction–a history, some mystery, and certainly no prophecy. It’s but one version, this dub history–a gift from those who have illuminated and inspired, all defects of which are my own.
There are many more versions to be heard. May they all be.
Jeff Chang
Brooklyn and Berkeley
January 1998 to March 2004
i’m sure i’ll be writing more about this book as i tackle everything that comes after these first 3 pages…