In this week's Village Voice there is a piece by Ta-Nehisi Coates on Russell Simmons' attempt to make hip-hop into a political force. Coates is one of the few journalists that "get it right" I think. It is not necessarily a coincidence that Coates appears in the Voice rather than in the Post or the Daily News or even the Times. A snippet:
Simmons hopes he can add a coolness factor to social insurgency. "The most important thing we gotta do is make it cool to show up at the rallies, make it in style to pay attention," says Simmons. "At the hip-hop summit in Philly, we had tremendous success. It was the place to be. LL Cool J was there, Wyclef was there, Damon Dash was there. But no one could get in unless they registered to vote."
Like most brothers and sisters of my age, hip-hop is my life's soundtrack (though to be fair, I'm really a househead). But here's where I get off.
Ever since Bambaata created the Zulu Nation in part to shift the energy of New York youth towards beats and breaks, there's been a political component to hip-hop in general. You can't properly talk about the growth of hip-hop without talking about the budget cuts during the Reagan era that decimated cities left and right. And even now you can't talk about the supposed thematic shift in rap without in turn talking about the political-economy of popular music (Norman Kelley's puts his foot in it in his RHYTHM AND BUSINESS).
But to make the step from this to the type of movement that Russell is involved in (along with Benjamin Chavis)? I'm not buying it. Not because the intentions are off...though they very well may be. I'm not buying it because the theory is way off.
Check out this path:
Inform people of their material reality
-->people participate and-->mobilize
Give them the tools to change their reality
If you both tell people what's going on around them, how politics at a local and a national level is having an adverse impact on their life chances AND educate them about their options...you will THEN get people to not only participate, but odds are those people will in turn mobilize others. Teach a man to fish....
We don't see this in Simmons' account. This is the logic we're seeing:
Create mass events
---->people will vote
Make these events cool
See the difference? I acknowledge that the first path has more moving parts, and is harder to pull off. But the payoff is much richer isn't it? Or is it?
This is nothing new, really. There's always been a difference between the rich organizing style of black folks on the left, and the pseudo-organizing of the integrationists on the one hand (King stands out) and the nationalists on the other (Farrakhan stands out). The pseudo-organizing approach is about one thing....getting enough votes to be able to take them to some cat and say "give ME something, because I've got THESE [shows votes]."
Maybe I should start calling this the bling-bling model of politics?
Posted by at January 9, 2004 08:09 AM | TrackBack