Vision Circle

Being Hip Hop

KRS-One came to the yard a couple of years ago as part of a lecture series. Most people my age, a little bit older, and a little bit younger, owe their careers to KRS-One somehow. It'd be hard to find anyone claiming hip-hop even a little bit that doesn't owe a debt to the Blastmaster.

When he spoke, he used hiphop to weave a much larger narrative about youth culture than perhaps was warranted. Arguing that hiphop extended farther back than Afrika Bambaata and the Zulu Nation, farther back than Malcolm X even. I understand what he was trying to do--until very recently universities didn't think that hip-hop was a valid artform worth studying on its own. And this wasn't just the white boys talking. Even brothers and sisters were likely to compare hip-hop to bebop in order to grant hip-hop "legitimacy."

Like hip-hop needs legitimacy at this point.

Anyway, over at allhiphop.com, one of KRS-One's former boys challenges KRS to a debate. KRS-One demures. The central beef seems to be KRS-One's attempt to make hiphop an ethnicity/religion. Adisa doesn't buy it, and thinks its dangerous to even make this attempt.

I'm not really sure why the debate is even important. Take a group of 100 people, split them in two and make them the same in every way except one. One group claims hiphop as an ethnic identity, and one doesn't.

Are there any substantive differences between the two? Does the police treat them differently? Do they engage in different behavior? Do they have different attitudes?

Hip-hop is the most powerful popular cultural force on the planet, bar none. And the fact that people take the artform seriously enough to engage in a debate about its contours is a good thing. But damn, aren't there more important things even within hiphop to debate about? I believe that hip-hop began with Afrika Bambaata and that the first hip-hop crew was the Zulu Nation. Malcolm X couldn't have been hiphop anymore than I could've been a seed in someone's head two years before I was born. But so what? KRS-One isn't writing an academic treatise on this shit.

Thanks to Jimi for bringing this up.