hip hop is dead (?)

"Hip hop as I knew it and loved it is dead and I've mourned that a zillion times."
-Joan Morgan, Hip Hop and Feminism Conference
April 8, 2005

Since attending the Hip Hop and Feminism Conference at the U of Chicago earlier this month, I've been meditating on Joan Morgan's sentiment. It was during one of the evening sessions--after a full day of theorizing, bemoaning, and dialoguing about what can be done to save hip hop--and Morgan was joined on a panel by eminent hip hop scholar Tricia Rose and seasoned feminist activist and Spelman professor Beverly Guy-Sheftall.

Hip hop as I knew it is dead ...

Morgan spoke plaintively. And I understood what she felt--what she meant--because I knew hip hop as she knew it; many audience members did. Having come of age in the seventies and eighties, we had witnessed the birth of hip hop (even those of us growing up on the west coast) and had been exposed to the entirety of the culture--tagging, breakdancing, dj-ing and scratching, beatboxing and MCs who could really, I mean really rip the mic.

Certainly hip hop as we knew it wasn't completely free of sexism and misogyny. While we hip hop babies were fortunate enough to grow up in the era of Eric B and Rakim, KRS-One, Salt n Pepa, MC Lyte, Public Enemy--do I need to go on?--the 80s also ushered in Luke and NWA. Morgan's point however is that there was a broad spectrum of hip hop to choose from. I listened to it all and knowing NWA's lyrics by heart didn't make me want to shake my teenage ass in any music video. I did find myself chanting "fuck the police" on occassion though.

But alas, hip hop as we knew it is dead...

Yet I'm a bit wary of nostalgia. Us old heads can lament the fact that hip hop's commercialism has spun out of control. We can complain that most of what we hear on the radio is some version of some tired ass "I grew up in the hood so I'm a real nigga" formula. We can yell at the top of our lungs after watching the bizzillionth video set around a pool, featuring a rapper surrounded by scantily clad video vixens shaking their asses and grinding them against said rapper and his pimped out entourage. We have many reasons to be sad and angry and to be in mourning because we witnessed hip hop when it was fucking great!

But the very existence of a (well-attended) Hip Hop and Feminism conference seems to suggest that although hip hop as we knew it is dead, hip hop is not. If Alice Walker is right and "anything we love can be saved" then maybe all our efforts at that three day conference will not be in vain. Maybe old heads and new can tap into hip hop's transformative potential and instead of resurrecting hip hop as we knew it, perhaps we can grapple with it as it is and make it even better than it was.