Introduction: Hip Hop in History: Past, Present, and Future

Author(s): Derrick P. Alridge and James B. Stewart

Source: The Journal of African American History , Summer, 2005, Vol. 90, No. 3, The
History of Hip Hop (Summer, 2005), pp. 190-195
Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of Association for the Study
of African American Life and History

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/20063997

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 INTRODUCTION:
HIP HOP IN HISTORY:
PAST, PRESENT, AND FUTURE
Derrick P. Alridge and James B. Stewart*

Over the past three decades, Hip Hop has developed as a cultural and
artistic phenomenon affecting youth culture around the world. For many
youth, Hip Hop reflects the social, economic, political, and cultural realities
and conditions of their lives, speaking to them in a language and manner they
understand. As a result of both its longevity and its cogent message for many
youth worldwide, Hip Hop cannot be dismissed as merely a passing fad or as a
youth movement that will soon run its course. Instead, Hip Hop must be
taken seriously as a cultural, political, economic, and intellectual
phenomenon deserving of scholarly study, similar to previous African
American artistic and cultural movements such as the Blues, Jazz, the New
Negro Renaissance, and the Civil Rights, Black Power, and Black Arts
Movements. The essays in this special issue undertake such scholarly
historical analysis of Hip Hop.
According to many Hip Hop aficionados, Hip Hop culture consists of at
least four fundamental elements: Disc jockeying (DJing), break dancing,
graffiti art, and rapping (emceeing).1 Since its emergence in the South Bronx
and throughout the northeast during the early and mid-1970s, Hip Hop has
encompassed not just a musical genre, but also a style of dress, dialect and
language, way of looking at the world, and an aesthetic that reflects the
sensibilities of a large population of youth born between 1965 and 1984.2
This broad characterization of Hip Hop may seem imprecise to some, but it
reflects the Hip Hop community's refusal to be singularly defined or
categorized, and demonstrates the dynamic nature of Hip Hop as a
phenomenon that many hip hoppers believe must be felt, experienced, and
communicated.
Since Hip Hop's birth about 35 years ago, very few academic historical
studies have examined the phenomenon. It has been over a decade since the
publication in 1994 of Tricia Rose's now classic, Black Noise: Rap Music and
Black Culture in Contemporary America and Robin D. G. Kelley's Race
Rebels: Culture, Politics, and the Black Working Class. Rose's treatise was the
first to provide an extensive historical study of Hip Hop. While focusing
primarily on rap music, Rose examined the historical development of Hip

Derrick P. Alridge is Associate Professor in the College of Education at the University of Georgia, Athens;
and James B. Stewart is Professor of Labor Studies and Industrial Relations and African American Studies at
Pennsylvania State University, Mckeesport, PA.

190

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Introduction: Hip Hop in History: Past, Present, and Future 191

Hop and its impact on youth culture, and she anticipated many of the
present-day discussions about black female rappers. While Kelley's study did
not focus solely on Hip Hop, he linked Hip Hop to black history and located
Hip Hop along a continuum of black working-class culture. Rose and Kelley's
works remain invaluable in the field of Hip Hop history and have helped lay a
solid foundation for contemporary historians' investigations of Hip Hop.3
The most recent historical study on Hip Hop at the time of this writing is
journalist Jeff Chang's huge 500-page work, Can't Stop, Won't Stop: A History
of the Hip Hop Generation. Literary in style, Can't Stop, Won't Stop offers an
engaging text filled with valuable historical data. Based on many interviews,
Chang's work offers an oral and narrative history of Hip Hop and is destined
to become a classic in the field of Hip Hop studies.4
A number of other works have also contributed immensely to providing
an historical foundation for the scholarly study of Hip Hop. David Toop's
Rap Attack 3 is an updated version of his classics Rap Attack I and Rap Attack
2. One of the earliest historical analyses of Hip Hop, Toop's volume traces
Hip Hop history through personal interviews with the movement's pioneers.
Rap Attack 3 brings Toop's trilogy up to 1999 and provides a somewhat
nostalgic reflection of 1970s and 1980s Hip Hop. Lacking the rich historical
contextualization and insightful interpretive frameworks of Rose and Kelley's
texts, Toop's volume provides an interpretation that seems in sync with Hip
Hop, mainly because much of the text was written in close contact with the
Hip Hop community. Another similar work is Alex Ogg's, The Hip Hop
Years: A History of Rap. Based on many personal interviews, Ogg presents a
narrative history through the voices of hip hoppers from the past to the
present. For many novice readers on the topic of Hip Hop, Ogg's brief
biographies and glossary at the end of the book are helpful.5
Historian James G. Spady's oral histories and interviews of hip hoppers
also provide firsthand accounts of individuals whose lives and careers have
shaped and been shaped by Hip Hop. His volumes include interviews with
Afrika Bambaataa, Kool Here, LL Cool J, MC Lyte, Salt-n-Pepa, and many
other icons of the Hip Hop community. Such interviews have been
particularly valuable given the limited availability of and access to archival
documents and other primary sources on Hip Hop. Spady's collections of oral
histories include Nation Conscious Rap, Twisted Tales: In the Hip Hop Streets
ofPhilly, and Street Conscious Rap.6
Equally important is Jim Fricke and Charlie Ahearn's Yes, Yes, Tail: The
Experience Music Project Oral History of Hip Hop's First Decade. This well
organized volume includes interviews with such early hip hoppers as Afrika
Bambaataa, Afrika Islam, and Grand Wizard Theodore, among others. The
text also presents photographs from the early Hip Hop era, which provide
excellent primary source material for Hip Hop historians.7
A helpful volume edited by Alan Light, The Vibe History of Hip Hop,
presents a collection of essays that covers the history of Hip Hop. While the
text leaves some gaps in Hip Hop history, it is nevertheless effective in

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 192 The Journal of African American History

highlighting some of the major events and artists of the Hip Hop generation.
The Vibe History also provides chronologically arranged essays by some of the
major writers on Hip Hop and youth culture, including Danyel Smith, Greg
T?te, and Light himself.
A number of other books present Hip Hop's history through
photography. One of the earliest such works is Steven Hager's Hip Hop: The
Illustrated History of Break Dancing, Rap Music, and Graffiti. Hager's work is
extremely important because it provides some of the earliest details about
break dancing and graffiti, two elements of Hip Hop that have not received as
much attention as rap music. Ernie Paniccioli's volume Who Shot Ya? also
provides a vivid pictorial history of Hip Hop from its early years to the
present. Like other historical data, the photographs in Hager and Paniccioli's
works are valuable primary sources that convey firsthand accounts of the
history and imagery of Hip Hop8.
William Eric Perkins's Droppin' Science: Critical Essays on Rap Music
and Hip Hop Culture extends some of the themes in the Rose and Kelley
works. The essays in this volume, however, also fill gaps in Hip Hop studies
by exploring largely neglected issues such as Hip Hop in Latino and Puerto
Rican communities, Hip Hop and dance, and the connections between Hip
Hop and sports.9 Murray Forman and Mark Anthony Neal's That's the Joint!:
The Hip Hop Studies Reader, a collection of essays written by academics and
journalists, provides an historiography that covers almost the whole range of
subjects encompassed in Hip Hop studies. The book features essays by
scholars from a variety of disciplines, including Michael Eric Dyson, Paul
Gilroy, Robin D. G. Kelley, David Toop, Joan Morgan, Tricia Rose, Mark
Anthony Neal, Murray Forman, S. Craig Watkins, and many others.10
Other important works that provide social critique or literary analysis of
Hip Hop include Houston Baker's Blacks Studies, Rap, and the Academy,
Russell A. Potter's Spectacular Vernaculars: Hip-Hop and the Politics of the
Postmodern, Michael Eric Dyson's Between God and Gangsta Rap: Bearing
Witness to Black Culture and Holler If You Hear Me: Searching for Tupac
Shakur, Todd Boyd's Am I Black Enough for You?: Popular Culture from the
'Hood and Beyond, Nelson George's hip hop america, Bakari Kitwana's The
Hip Hop Generation: Young Blacks and the Crisis in African American
Culture, Mark Anthony Neal's Soul Babies: Black Popular Culture and the
Post-Soul Aesthetic, Murray Forman's The 'Hood Comes First: Race, Space,
and Place in Rap and Hip-Hop, Yvonne Bynoe's Stand & Deliver: Political
Activism, Leadership, and Hip Hop Culture, and Imani Perry's Prophets of the
Hood: Politics and Poetics in Hip Hop. The literature on Hip Hop is
expanding each year and new texts continue to add to our understanding of
the movement. This introduction is meant to provide an overview of many
of the major works that have helped provide the intellectual grounding for
our analysis of the history of Hip Hop.11
This Special Issue of The Journal of African American History seeks to
contribute to the scholarship on Hip Hop by examining the movement within

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Introduction: Hip Hop in History: Past, Present, and Future 193

the historical context of the African American experience. The featured

essays examine both the history of Hip Hop and the role of Hip Hop in
African American history. Basically, the authors are concerned with
investigating the connections between Hip Hop and previous social and
intellectual movements; the history of social and political ideas in Hip Hop;
Hip Hop and gender in African American history; and Hip Hop's relationship
to a variety of contemporary social ideas and theories. In addition, although
we recognize that Hip Hop is an international phenomenon, the essays in this
Special Issue focus primarily on Hip Hop's origins and development within the
United States.
We also acknowledge that much Hip Hop, like earlier African American
art and cultural forms and those of many other ethnic minority groups, has
been commodified by what Frankfurt School theorists Max Horkheimer and
Theodor Adorno called "the culture industry," which has distributed Hip Hop
to the masses in ways that reinforce historical stereotypes about African
Americans by highlighting sexist, misogynistic, and nihilistic lyrics and
images.12 Some of the essays in this volume specifically examine aspects of
this problem. However, this collection also offers complex interpretations of
Hip Hop that often defy and challenge the negative images promulgated by
mainstream commercial media. Our purpose here is to offer critical,
scholarly, and balanced analyses of Hip Hop within the context of African
American history, building on the solid foundation of scholarly historical
work that has already been produced.
In the first essay, "Message in the Music: Political Commentary in Black
Popular Music from Rhythm and Blues to Early Hip Hop," James B. Stewart
challenges notions from some artists of the Hip Hop generation that Rhythm
and Blues (R & B) was a politically vacuous musical form that failed to engage
the social justice and community issues of the 1970s. Examining R & B lyrics
from the 1970s, and drawing on the perspectives of such scholars such as
Zora Neale Hurston, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Alain Locke, Stewart presents an
historically derived theoretical framework that helps to illuminate various
political ideas and messages in R & B. In illustrating the role of earlier musical
forms in nurturing political consciousness, Stewart's essay shows the fertile
ground from which Hip Hop musical forms were able to grow and flourish.
In the second essay "From Civil Rights to Hip Hop: Toward a Nexus of
Ideas," Derrick P. Alridge engages the pressing problem of generational
tensions between the civil rights and Hip Hop generations. Alridge argues that
socially and politically conscious Hip Hop shares common ideas and ideology
with the Civil Rights-Black Power Movement and the larger Black Freedom
Struggle. By illuminating the shared ideas and ideology of the two generations,
Alridge attempts to identify common ground as a means of encouraging
dialogue between the civil rights and Hip Hop generations and forging
collaborations and coalitions to address the ongoing liberation struggles of
African American and other historically oppressed people.

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194 The Journal of African American History

In their essay, "Oppositional Consciousness within an Oppositional

Realm: The Case of Feminism and Womanism in Rap and Hip Hop, 1976
2004," Layli Phillips, Kerri Reddick-Morgan, and Dionne Stephens offer a
feminist and womanist analysis of female rappers and their lyrics, and
question traditional ways of thinking about women's empowerment. This
essay traces womanist and feminist ideas in the lyrics of female rappers and
shows the dialectical and oppositional manner in which black women's ideas
about themselves and their relationships with men often materialize in Hip
Hop. The authors reject the idea that female rappers merely reinforce
negative and misogynistic ideas about women, arguing that female rappers
offer a "street-level" interpretation of black women's realities. Such
interpretations, the authors argue, expand womanist and feminist ways of
thinking by redefining and reinventing ways of articulating liberatory
possibilities for a broad segment of women, particularly African American
women.
In her essay "In Search of the 'Revolutionary Generation': (En)gen
the Golden Age of Rap Nationalism," Charise Cheney offers a fresh
of the so-called Golden Age of Rap, the years from 1988 to 1993.
beyond a tendency to merely praise the progressiveness of rappers of
Cheney illuminates the homophobic and sexist language and anal
mindset of black nationalist rappers or "raptivists." Such language an
Cheney argues, have a long historical lineage in black nationalist rhet
thought. Cheney's essay extends the notion of black nationalism bey
idea of a geographical and physical nation-state and shows the manif
of Hip Hop as a type of black consciousness and ideology that exhibi
of the positive and negative attributes of classical black nationalism.
The concluding essay '"Of All Our Studies, History Is Best Qual
Reward Our Research': Black History's Relevance to the Hip Hop Gen
by Pero G. Dagbovie provides a much needed historiography of black
for the Hip Hop generation. Dagbovie calls on the Hip Hop gener
study African and African American history to help guide them to
better understanding of Hip Hop in black history. He also encour
Hoppers to use Hip Hop as a tool for disseminating black history
masses. Praising the pragmatism of historians such as Carter G. Woo
John Hope Franklin, Dar lene Clarke Hi?e, and others, Dagbovie arg
historians of the Hip Hop generation should write in popular magaz
as Vibe, XXL, and Ebony to reach the Hip Hop generation and to brin
a renaissance in the study of black history.
We hope the essays in this special issue will inspire historians as w
scholars from a broad variety of disciplines to conduct historical rese
Hip Hop. We encourage scholars to expand their efforts to include c
oral histories of Hip Hop, identifying and preserving artifacts that do
the evolution of Hip Hop, and developing flexible and historically d
frameworks through which to examine Hip Hop. In this way, our goa
only to contribute to and advance the scholarly discourse in the fie

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Introduction: Hip Hop in History: Past, Present, and Future 195

Hop studies, but also to play an active role in helping preserve Hip Hop for
future generations.

NOTES
We would like to thank Gloria Harper-Dickinson, past President of the
Association for the Study of African American Life and History, and
V. P. Franklin, Editor of The Journal of African American History, for their
encouragement and support for this Special Issue. Thanks also to
V. P. Franklin for working diligently with us on the issue and for his support
in bringing this project to fruition.

*Over the years, hip hoppers and scholars have identified additional activities as elements of Hip Hop.
2 According to Bakari Kitwana, the Hip Hop generation is comprised of those born between 1965 and 1984
who identify with the language, culture, and music associated with Hip Hop. For practical purposes, we
accept this periodization, but we do not exclude those born before 1965 and after 1984 who embrace Hip
Hop culture.
^Tricia Rose, Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America (Middleton, Connecticut,
1994); Robin D. G. Kelley, Race Rebels: Culture, Politics, and the Black Working Class (New York, 1994).
4 Jeff Chang, Can't Stop, Won't Stop: A History of the Hip-Hop Generation (New York, 2005).
^David Toop, Rap Attack 3: African Rap to Global Hip-Hop (Blacstock Mews, London, 2000) and Alex Ogg
with David Upshal, The Hip Hop Years: A History of Rap (New York, 1999).
"Joseph D. Eure and James G. Spady, eds., Nation Conscious Rap (New York, 1991); James G. Spady, Stefan
DuPree, and Charles G. Lee, eds., Twisted Tales: In the Hip Hop Streets of Philly (Philadelphia, PA, 1995),
and James G. Spady, Charles G. Lee, and H. Samy Alim, eds., Street Conscious Rap (Philadelphia, PA, 1999).
'Jim Frick and Charlie Ahearn, eds., Yes, Yes, Y'all: The Experience Music Project Oral History of Hip-Hop's
First Decade (Cambridge, MA, 2002).
8 Ernie Paniccioli and Kevin Powell, eds., Who Shot Ya?: Three Decades of Hip Hop Photography (New
York, 2002); Steve Hager, Hip Hop: The Illustrated History of Break Dancing, Rap Music, and Graffiti (New
York, 1984).
yWilliam Eric Perkins, ed., Droppin' Science: Critical Essays on Rap Music and Hip Hop Culture
(Philadelphia, PA, 1996).
10Alan Light, ed., The Vibe History of Hip Hop (New York, 1999); Murray Forman and Mark Anthony Neal,
eds., That's the Joint!: The Hip Hop Studies Reader (New York, 2004).
^Houston A. Baker, Jr., Black Studies, Rap, and the Academy (Chicago, 1995); Russell A. Potter,
Spectacular Vernaculars: Hip-Hop and the Politics of the Postmodern (New York, 1995); Michael Eric
Dyson, Between God and Gangsta Rap: Bearing Witness to Black Culture (New York, 1996); Todd Boyd, Am
I Black Enough for You?: Popular Culture from the 'Hood and Beyond (Bloomington, IN, 1997); Nelson
George, hip hop america (New York, 1998); Bakari Kitwana, The Hip Hop Generation: Young Blacks and
the Crisis in African American Culture (New York, 2002); Mark Anthony Neal, Soul Babies: Black Popular
Culture and the Post-Soul Aesthetic (New York, 2002); Murray Forman, The 'Hood Comes First: Race,
Space, and Place in Rap and Hip-Hop (Middletown, CT, 2002); Yvonne Bynoe, Stand & Deliver: Political
Activism, Leadership, and Hip Hop Culture (Brooklyn, NY, 2004); Imani Perry, Prophets of the Hood: Politics
and Poetics in Hip-Hop (Durham, NC, 2004). For a very useful source book on Hip Hop, see Vladimir
Bogdanov et al., eds., Hip-Hop: The Definitive Guide to Rap & Hip-Hop (San Francisco, CA, 2003).
12See Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adrono, Dialectic of Enlightenment (New York, 1972), 120-21. For a
concise and useful discussion of the culture industry, see John Story, An Introduction to Cultural Theory &
Popular Culture (Athens, GA, 1998), 104-115. For a discussion of the concept of the culture industry and
black music and culture, see Ellis Cashmore, The Black Culture Industry (London, 1997).

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