Has Hip Hop Rediscovered its Radical Spirit?
If there’s one thing Awards season has taught us, it’s our cultural institutions are still happy to hint at wider representation and pay lip service to political art without embracing it fully. It was somewhat discernible at this month’s Academy Awards but more apparent at this year’s Grammys, when Kendrick Lamar missed out on Best Album for the third time running.
While it’d be true to say organisers of these ceremonies have made greater strides to better reflect cultural diversity to a certain extent — not a single white man was nominated for Best Album this year, for example — such measures feel tokenistic given hip hop was again overlooked in virtually every category.
This lack of recognition is important when you consider hip hop is officially the most listened to genre in the US. No rap song has ever won Record of the Year. In 60 years, Lauryn Hill and Outkast are the only artists to have picked up the Best Album prize. In 1989, DJ Jazzy Jeff and Will Smith sparked a boycott by the hip hop community after their win wasn’t broadcast on TV. Last year, Drake threatened something similar.
Why is this blanket dismissal of specifically hip hop so significant? The refusal to recognise the art form goes beyond entrenched institutional racism — it stems from suspicion of its radical potential and origins as a powerful cultural voice for working class minorities. Guardian journalist Laura Snapes commented that: “Expecting radical action from an awards ceremony is like expecting the weather forecast to rearrange the skies.” But such events are just a microcosm of wider society’s misgivings about hip hop as a whole.
It’s remarkable that Kendrick Lamar’s last three projects — which have openly explored racial inequality, institutional discrimination, economic injustice and police brutality among other things — were nominated at all. This achievement isn’t just a reflection on his songwriting abilities; it’s testament to the power that grassroots social movements have had over the past few years that conditions exist in which a radical artist can be successful.
When hip hop first emerged in the late 1970s, it belonged to the South Bronx community that spawned it. Derek Ide of the Hampton Institute says the economically deprived area “provided the perfect matrix in which marginalized youth could find a way to articulate the story of their own lives and the world around them”. Artists like Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five famously offered commentary on racism, economic inequality and social justice.
Hip hop’s progressive credentials in the decades that followed are more dubious. It’s well reported that major labels deliberately exploited hip hop culture throughout the 1990s and 2000s, principally promoting artists who appeared to promote misogyny, drugs and gun violence. As Public Enemy’s Chuck D put it in 2003: “Rap was anti-elitist, and anti-establishment… Now… rap is for the companies, rap for the corporations.”
But there are signs the tide is starting to turn again. At a surface level, this is most recognisable in the output of some of the most successful hip hop artists. Gone are the days when ‘politics’ was a dirty word: Kendrick Lamar, Joey Bada$$, Rapsody, Brockhampton and Tyler, The Creator are just some of the major artists to have tackled issues like gender politics, LGBT issues and white nationalism in the last twelve months.
Even Jay-Z, arguably hip hop’s most indisputably capitalist artist, consciously positioned himself against Donald Trump due to his comments on “shithole countries” and Black unemployment. A feud between billionaires might not be the most obvious example of anti-establishment struggle as we know it, but that doesn’t negate the fact the genre’s leading statesmen are more outspoken against the current president than any other since Ronald Reagan.
Last year, leading artists at the influential REVOLT Music Conference went as far as devoting an entire panel to discuss how hip hop can “use the power of hip-hop to challenge the political system” in the aftermath of Trump’s election. However, any resurgent radicalism within hip hop has only come to the fore because of developments in the grassroots. Hip hop was central in giving voice to the Occupy Wall Street protests in 2011.
This isn’t just an American phenomenon either: hip hop played a huge role in the Arab Spring, when political revolutions sprung up across the middle east and northern Africa; it’s a thriving underground movement in strictly religious Iran; and was very recently banned in China. Increasingly, hip hop seems to be at the heart of struggles against perceived authoritarianism, inequality and injustice.
Does this all serve as irrefutable evidence that hip hop has rediscovered its radical spirit? Wider discourse around hip hop would still need to shift dramatically. In his book The Hip Hop Movement, Reiland Rabaka says it’s still the case that “when rap music and hip hop culture are discussed in the mass media… the focus is most often on … nihilism, materialism, misogyny, and homophobia expressed via these forms of rap”.
Kendrick Lamar’s provocative performance at the Grammys, just his latest example of barbed social commentary, rightfully earned plaudits. Would a homosexual, feminist, socialist, anti-war or environmentalist hip hop artist receive the same reception? Perhaps not, but reviewer Kitty Empire also notes that the success of recent projects by Lamar and Beyonce are “emblematic of a cultural moment in the US… a time in which highly politicised African American feeling doubles as wildly successful art”.
Hip hop might not be the panacea it’s imagined to be by some purists, but it can’t merely be viewed solely as a cool urban culture that can be ‘pimped’ to benefit labels and A&Rs. At the very least, looked at through the lens of industry ‘trends’, hip hop is simultaneously more popular and more radical than it’s been in 30 years. And so while it’s debatable whether hip hop is in itself a defined social movement in 2018, at the very least it might be the soundtrack to one.
This article was originally published on Rocket Radio in March 2018.
