I turned over and slept through a few years ago when it was reported that The Office’s Ellie Kemper had been crowned at a debutante ball known as “the Klan’s ball.” I blew out my lamplight and fell back under the sheets a week ago when TikTok gushed over Donald Trump and made the best use of a digital soft-shoe to thank the soon-to-be president for saving its presence in the US. However, something about 90s hip-hop artists getting together to kiss the ring at Trump’s inaugural balls still keeps me awake at night.
For many of us Black millennials – especially those raised in working-class neighbourhoods – hip-hop was the oxygen of our childhood. No one else could or wanted to be aware of the sounds and feelings of our existence that nobody else could and did not know about. It recorded every aspect of our lives. Even though music was criticized or perceived as living on the fringes of real society, our everyday lives were mirrored in it.
It opened our minds to potential as well. It opened the door to a fate beyond the minimum-wage job or the “second childhoods” we were given. It gave us the opportunity to imagine conquering working-class and the straits of lumpen. To dress well, to be gangsta or appealing, and have respect.
More than that, it was a mind. It was a conference of thought and conflicting debates, not just one that reflected the neighborhood’s conditions. When Aaliyah told us we “don’t need no Coogi sweater,” we were encouraged and criticized for intra-class antagonism. We saw visions of escape in Rich Boy’s Throw Some D’s and forced into quiet introspection after watching Pac’s Brenda’s Got a Baby and Latifah’s U. N. I. T. Y. We spent an hour attempting to recall the adrenaline-rush sentiments of Bizzy Bone’s entire Heaven’z Movie album, and the following hour, Mobb Deep’s Shook Ones made us feel like we were meeting the high school or street bully.
We set off this artwork to convey what we knew they thought of our disposable lives. The most readily available proof to show us that the world was telling us the truth about the “inferiority of Black people” was this. We didn’t need that well-intentioned white lady teacher pitying us for being Black, holding a poster with George Washington Carver with a jar of peanut butter, saying we, too, “contributed”. As we laboriously attempted to understand the Wu-Tang hieroglyphics, she was on mute and the CD player was spinning.
So it was interesting to watch the intensity of our ghetto beauty being compelled to dance in the disjointed frat boys’ discombobulated dance. To see our griots stoop to collect money under racism, the lowest of all intellectual limits. To see it was our thinkers, too, who would play the white liberal game, squinting, pretending they could not tell if a Nazi salute is a Nazi salute. their coats without being asked. leaving the White House before the Anti-Defamation League has the benefit of the doubt for white supremacists.
Turncoat rappers have left the most stinging wound of all the daily assaults on racism that have shaped this renaissance of settler supremacy. Our biographers being reduced to stool pigeons on a burning cross is difficult to recover from.
Excuses were preemptively flowing. It was said “a check is a check”. It was said “this isn’t politics”. They were made to appear to be unaware of what MAGA stands for and what they are trying to achieve. As if we didn’t know hip-hop is more university than the university.
I can recall looking through the channels and getting Fox News at the hip-hop artists dancing. Now, Fox News is reporting that Snoop Dogg “wows the crowd” at a pre-inauguration event. Snoop Dogg once mentioned 187, but now I’m worried about when I’ll see him waving a Blue Line Flag.
In the 90s, white power campaigned to ban hip-hop. How complete is the victory that it has won by rubbing its own feet? Nelly said but “he is the president”. But this is the point. There are no sporadic examples of our dislike of presidents. Any track by Dead Prez can be heard as the starting point.
The Ku Klux Klan’s grand wizard entered the US presidential race in 1988. Were Eric B and Rakim expected to perform Microphone Fiend for “fans” wearing white hoods because “we support the troops” if he had won? How soon will police officers begin to lynch people while they are freestyle ciphers?
Although we may not have known it at the time, the music also incorporated working-class and Black American culture. It was played in the Black poor’s spaces in South America, Africa, Europe, Asia and Australia. It was the music of the slums, the colonised’s counter-ideological weapon against the prison they kept us in.
Therefore, it is heartbreaking to see how our culture and lives are being used by the men who complain that we steal pets and call for “terrorism” in order to live. When our defenders are now tap-dancing for those who spray firehoses at the “woke” and stand back up the monuments to Confederate generals, it hurts the morale of the people.
Your pool house can only have a limited number of extensions. Only drive so many cars in your lifetime. But “what does it worth” to sell your soul at the price of a noogie? To consent to their actions knowing that your gifted mansion will never surpass Massa’s outhouse?
Of course, some rappers who perform photo ops with boys who no one would believe did not use blackface do so are not representative of all millennial hip-hop. But it’s not just them. As Elon Musk puts a dent in apartheid, Chuck D is battling off the people who are coming for him. Eve can’t get out of a still of Downton Abbey. Nor can Common from commercials. Nor can our beloved Black Thought, caged-bird singing from the “gilded cage” – the people’s oracle reduced to “the entertainment” for fascist-petting Jimmy Fallon.
I should count my blessings as the world continues to crumble. If Dead Prez or Lauryn Hill grabbed a fiddle, I’d probably never get out of bed again. But it shouldn’t have been any of them. It was art for us, by us. Our hidden inner lives are shattered by empire, alongside our bodies, and it is heartbreaking to watch.
They beat us with the wake they stole from Erykah Badu. And now they have our master teachers stepping down from their posts to cheer up young settler supremacists. Watching so many of our epic poets line up to kiss the warrior king of Jim Crow society is heartbreaking.
However, this approach might be more advantageous. When Nas said hip-hop is dead, it may have been a prophecy. Or at least these “uncs of rap” may have lost their relevance in the era of globalized apartheid. They are now rich and compromised. We may have to abandon them as millennials explore the new music and new generation of artists in the colonized sector, both here and abroad, where radical Palestinian rappers are currently nowhere near to be found posing as Benjamin Netanyahu’s court jesters.
Gen Z has been forced to leave the Black innocent daily as a result of the public’s forced lynching of the majority of their lives, staring directly into the eyes of open fascism. Every day I see them. Nobody is tap-dancing.
Their “mumble rap” – which we “old heads” have mocked – is not only more developed but more coherent than any rapper who says “f*** the police” from one side of their mouth and “let’s give the Confederacy a chance” from the other. In terms of drill, anticolonialism is more useful for Black liberation than a conscious rapper trying to find nuance in colonialism by using horizontal violence in drill lyrics.
Millennials ‘ hip-hop may abandon the slum, but the slum will have its day. It made hip-hop once, it can make another hip-hop. And when it does, it will stand over colonialism’s body, Buggin Out’s boombox on its shoulder, singing that old Black colonised sector’s spiritual, “It’s bigger than hip-hop”.
Source: Aljazeera
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