A Jazz Head Reflects on Hip Hop’s 50th

Hemingway once counseled writers to write about what they know about. That’s why in my thirty years as a professional writer I’ve rarely written about hip hop. Another reason is because my passion is jazz, a cosmos of sound and sensibility I believe is the epitome of American music in terms of musical depth, cultural and emotional range, and sophistication. But in this post, I’ll venture a critical perspective informed by my being a father and quote from critical insiders who lament where hip hop has landed.

For me in the late 70s, when signs of that new musical form and culture were emerging in New York, I recall young men my age at 55 Bowen St. in the Clifton section of Staten Island hooking up turntables (“the wheels of steel”) to play and scratch on vinyl records of the new sounds with samples and snippets from what came to be called “old school’ Soul, R&B, and Jazz.

But at that stage of my young life, I wasn’t simply sampling bits and pieces of jazz; I was imbibing it for breakfast, lunch, and dinner as if my life depended on it. In the same way that I’ve always gravitated toward women older and more mature than me, I gravitated to the music that was the soundtrack of my grandparents’ lives.

While teaching in junior high schools in Brooklyn and Harlem in the late ‘90s through the early aughts, I ventured into the connection between hip hop and jazz to point young people toward checking out the latter. When I’d run into some of the students, a few would say thanks for introducing them to jazz, but I wonder if in the main my approach fell on deaf ears. And my daughter Kaya was born in the mid-90s, so as she grew, my view of hip hop evolved at the same time.

Aryeh Tepper, Coleman Hughes, and me

On the first episode of Straight Ahead: The Omni-American Podcast, podcaster, writer, and jazz trombonist and hip hop emcee Coleman Hughes explains the creative and cultural connections between jazz and hip hop. But one clear distinction between the two art forms is the massive popularity and commercial influence of the younger form compared to its ancestral art form, which rarely gets any play in so-called mainstream media. Another difference are the images that arise when we think of jazz artists and hip hop artists.

Images influence our sense of possibility; images are a communication vehicle to and for our souls. As a father of a brilliant daughter now approaching 30, I couldn’t vibe with the way the hip hop industry exploits the sexual image of women of all hues, but especially Afro-American women. So, I tried to ensure that she saw images of achievement and excellence that countered the hypersexualized exploitation and violent imagery in pop music generally, and in hip hop specifically.

Although all from the NY Times to NPR to Vice-President Kamala Harris have been uncritically “celebrating” the 50th anniversary of hip hop, there are critical voices who don’t believe the hype, critical voices who grew up loving hip hop culture but lament where the hip hop industry amid ultra-capitalist globalism has landed.

In 2004, my man Greg Tate, considered the father of hip hop journalism, wrote an essay criticizing uncritical celebrations of the 30th anniversary of hip hop. He wrote that "twenty years from now we'll be able to tell our grandchildren and great-grandchildren how we witnessed cultural genocide: the systematic destruction of a people's folkways." In 2003, Tate edited Everything But the Burden: What White People Are Taking From Black Culture. Jason England’s “50 Years Later, Is There Anything Left of Hip Hop” displays the influence of Tate in his reflections:

Anything that exists long enough in America to have a legitimate history becomes subject to this: The goal of our hyper-capitalist society is to flatten, standardize, and refashion anything counterculture into something that serves its bottom line. It could be MLK, Pat Tillman, or Che Guevara (with bling on)—depth and accuracy matter less than the salable aesthetic; the actual spirit of any movement matters less than whether you can tailor it to satisfy (and in some cases manufacture) a sense of nostalgia. Of course, nostalgia is history without moral reckoning. That’s precisely its appeal. In this case it rewards a fetishization of black culture without the burden of appreciating or even understanding it . . . .

So let’s blow out the candles. Hip hop is 50 and leaning more Andrew Tate than Greg Tate. The popular music has sounded—for a long, long time—like prosperity gospel, and too many of the rappers are sounding more like megachurch pastors than artists or insightful street reporters. Hip hop has aged, but it hasn’t necessarily matured. Like a lot of people I know, one of the things it has lost over the years is its ability—or maybe its willingness—to self-assess. 

And this, from Kevin Powell’s “Hip Hop—and America—are Changing, and Not for the Better”:

So, alas, and tragically, what hip-hop has been turned into, mostly, post-1998-era Lauryn Hill, has been a modern-day version of America’s long love affair with the minstrel show, that diabolical and inhumane and extremely profitable brand of entertainment that said Black folks were ugly, dumb, lazy, useless, violent, dangerous, overly sexualized, prone to be perpetual children and totally lacking in any morals whatsoever. Minstrelsy was the dominant entertainment in America for about 100 years, with racist stereotypes that did major damage to Black people, and by extension to every nook of America. Just like the past 25-plus years or so of these stereotypical hip-hop lyrics and images on a loop have done major damage to large chunks of the very communities that built hip-hop, and by extension to every nook of America. Ultimately, racism hurts all of us. . . .

Poor people do not want to be poor, and that definitely includes the poor people who created hip-hop. But as the lucky few — JAY-Z, 50 Cent, Kanye West, Lil Wayne and Drake — have transcended and become global pop and cultural ambassadors, we have to ask at what cost, to them, to Black America, to Black people worldwide? They all readily have used the n-word as if it is a first name, middle name, last name. They all readily thrust themselves headfirst into some of the most vile and sexist lyrical content imaginable. They all readily have rapped about violence in some form, casually tossing around toxic manhood stereotypes as if they were their birthright. They all readily show(ed) off their money, their material assets, even while the majority of the communities from which many of them come continue to struggle financially, just like back in 1973. And they all readily duck and dodge any political or social justice messages in their music, with the exception of a very different Kanye, in the 2000s.

To be candid, with the exception of Kendrick Lamar, examples of lyrical brilliance by artists like Rakim, Black Thought, and Nas, and some cross-genre collaborations, I don’t find much to celebrate on the 50th anniversary of hip hop. Turns out that Stanley Crouch and Wynton Marsalis were prescient when they criticized music industry-promoted gangsta rap and the exploitation of the sexuality of young people back in the 1990s.