HIP HOP HISTORY MONTH NOVEMBER SERIES

Usually, the more commercially successful an art form becomes, the less authentic it feels for the consumer. Hip-hop has managed to hold on to one of the hardest and that is the tension between art and commerce. He still has an affinity for hip-hop’s hustle of abundance.Ībundance from resistance can hold a lot of contradictions. A couple of decades later, the other side of the world would know him as comedian Trevor Noah. This kid in a South African township is making a killing selling mixtapes and DJ’ing parties featuring American hip-hop. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, pirating technologies are shipping the sound of Black urban and exurban storytelling all over the world. He is also growing up on the cusp of hip-hop as a global export. And he isn’t just growing up in apartheid South Africa. That’s also a big part of hip-hop culture. On this side of the diaspora, we would call that playing the dozens. Take a mixed-race kid in South Africa, for instance. The thing about resistance is that there are more people around the world with something to resist than there are people with something to rebel against. Some of the most exciting hip-hop is coming from subcultures-places undergoing rapid sociopolitical changes and cultural transformations.

Being fabulous celebrates resistance and makes it fly as hell. They built a culture on being fabulous instead. They couldn’t build a style, an ethic, a culture, an ethos, a sound based on excess. But the Black kids in the Bronx have never been America’s teenagers.

The sameness of twinsets and blinding homogeneity. A rebellion against white middle-class norms. It’s built on the foundation of rock’s youth culture: the creation of the white American teenager. You’re either flaunting that you have it or celebrating that you have the power to reject it. Pop culture goes through cycles of excess iconography (hair metal and disco come to mind). Rock aesthetics have also perfected excess. Its most iconic images are studies not only in excess but in fabulousness. There is something to the extraness of hip-hop that has made it endure. “I think hip-hop has survived because folks took nothing and made abundance out of it,” Carson says. For a culture often derided as derivative, hip-hop has three generations of cultural innovation. How exactly did hip-hop beat the odds? Its brilliance is its brand of excess. Not bad for a genre some people declared a bunch of noise lacking originality or artistic vision when it was first beamed from the Bronx in the 1970s. Whether you want high or low culture, you can find it-symposia, concerts, symphonies, retrospectives, block parties, and more, all across the country.

HIP HOP HISTORY MONTH NOVEMBER SERIES

A&E gives you a season of Nas voicing Origins of Hip-Hop, an episodic bio series of the genre’s legends. If you don’t want to leave home, there is enough content to program your own hip-hop festival. The New York Public Library is not letting attack politics stop its system-wide celebration. The Fashion Institute of Technology with its “Fresh, Fly, and Fabulous: Fifty Years of Hip Hop Style” exhibition. And the parties are popping off for hip-hop’s 50th anniversary.įirst up was Questlove’s masterfully orchestrated Grammys compilation this year. Turning 50 years old is a celebration, especially if you are Black and you aren’t supposed to live that long.

Hip hop history month november