Hip-Hop's Place in History

One of my homegirls sent this article along and I thought I'd share...any thoughts?
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> WASHINGTON -- Evo Morales, the new president of
> Bolivia, has made those sweaters he wears so popular
> that I wouldn't be surprised to see a Phat Farm
> knock-off soon. Speaking of Phat Farm, Russell Simmons
> may have sold that hip-hop-inspired clothing line, but
> he could still look to Morales for other forms of inspiration. For
> instance, he could take heed of the Inca proverb that Morales has also
> introduced to a wider public: Ama shua, ama llulla, ama qella. Roughly
> translated, it means don't lie, don't steal and don't
> be lazy. I can't speak to Simmons' honesty or
> integrity, but his heavy-lidded comments at a New York
> news conference last month suggest that he's guilty of
> lazy thinking. Or maybe he was just sleepy.
>
> Simmons, who made his fortune as a founder of the
> hugely successful Def Jam record label, joined other
> rap music heavyweights to announce the Smithsonian Institution's plans
> for an extensive hip-hop exhibition. Several of the genre's pioneers,
> including Grandmaster Flash, Afrika Bambaataa and DJ Kool Herc,
> were on hand at a hotel in midtown Manhattan to
> introduce the project, "Hip-Hop Won't Stop: The Beat,
> the Rhymes, the Life."
>
> During his remarks, Simmons reportedly credited
> hip-hop as "the only real description of the suffering
> of our people."
>
> To borrow a phrase from Ida B. Wells, whose 1895 study
> of lynching, "A Red Record," remains one of the best descriptions of
> our suffering, "that is an expression without a thought."
>
> Let's set aside for a moment the woefully limited
> notion that African-American history is solely defined
> by suffering. Let's also dispose of the idea that
> hip-hop focuses exclusively on that suffering. The
> best of the genre's music also speaks eloquently about
> our resilience (in "Keep Ya Head Up" by Tupac Shakur,
> for example); our devastating wit (anything by De La
> Soul or OutKast); our romantic yearnings (Pharcyde's
> "Passin' Me By"); and our capacity for raucous
> celebration ("Rapper's Delight" by Sugarhill Gang).
> Hip-hop notes our trials and tribulations as well as
> any other art form, but does it provide the only real description?
> That's one heck of a lazy notion.
>
> Does anyone believe that those original 20 African
> captives brought to shore in 1619 didn't immediately
> begin to describe their condition and express their
> reactions to it, albeit in a foreign language? Not
> long after they arrived, their descendants mastered
> English and created the immortal Negro spirituals,
> famously described by W.E.B. DuBois as "sorrow songs."
> Their songs contained "bursts of wonderful melody,"
> DuBois wrote, "full of the voices of my brothers and
> sisters, full of the voices of the past."
>
> Sometimes I feel like a motherless child
>
> A long ways from home
>
> Couplets like that one perfectly describe -- in a
> single powerful metaphor, mind you -- the plight of
> early African-Americans. And that's to say nothing of
> the melody, which, unfortunately, I can't convey here.
>
> Spirituals led to blues, jazz and brilliant lyricists
> such as Andy Razaf, who worked with Fats Waller and,
> in 1929, summed up the African-American tradition
> thusly: "What did I do, to be so Black And Blue?" It's
> a small leap from there to more contemporary gems such
> as Sam Cooke's "A Change Is Gonna Come" (1964) and
> Marvin Gaye's "Inner City Blues" (1971). "The Message"
> by Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five rightly
> belongs in this tradition, as do other hip-hop songs,
> but let us praise them as a worthy continuation of a
> long and righteous tradition, not as one-of-a-kind trailblazers. After
> all, barely a decade passed between Gaye's masterpiece and that
> wheels-of-steel classic.
>
> The late Gwendolyn Brooks, not usually known as an
> observer of hip-hop, nonetheless astutely placed it in
> its proper historical context. In a 1990 essay in
> Ebony magazine, she pointed out the "delightfully
> visible, importantly thick line of development in
> quality, stretch and strength of black creativity"
> extending from black literature to more recent
> developments such as hip-hop. She wrote that rap at
> its best, like other mostly African-American art
> forms, offers "an intoxicating beat" and "varieties of
> tone" while expressing "love, light, loss, liberty,
> lunacy and laceration." Leave it to a Pulitzer
> Prize-winning poet to put it all in perspective.
>
> Give hip-hop its due, but not at the expense of
> everything that has come before it. That would be
> sloppy. Lazy even.

By Jabari Asim, Washington Post, Monday, March 6, 2006; 12:24 PM