BLACK MUSIC MONTH:
THE POLITICAL PARTY

Introducing our Black Music Month special issue.

Whether or not hip-hop truly began with the legendary 1973 house party at 1520 Sedgwick Ave., where DJ Kool Herc’s twin turntables codified the gospel of breakbeats, it’s as good an origin story as anyone could invent. And with 50 years of struggle and glory in the rearview, it seems fitting that this revolutionary cultural form pushed its way into our weary world as a celebration.

The ways in which shared festivity and self-expression nurtured the struggle for survival and enfranchisement—and vice versa—are indelibly inscribed in the DNA of this music, Public Enemy taking the Beastie Boys’ “Fight for Your Right to Party” and inverting it with Chuck D’s invocation “Party for Your Right to Fight.”

Inarguable, however, is that the creative explosion we call hip-hop was born in a place of poverty, police violence, addiction and the overall malign neglect to which communities of color in America are invariably subject.

Hip-hop’s official birthdate coincides with the rot of the Nixon years: the traumatic fallout of Vietnam, the corrosive impact of Watergate on the public trust, “law and order” as a racist dog whistle and myriad attempts to sabotage the momentum of the civil rights movement and its leaders. White flight left American cities to decay as retail politics pivoted to the suburbs.

While all this misery rained down, kids on stoops and street corners, behind housing-project masonry and in countless other spaces off the mainstream radar, built a new art form on the foundation of beats and the spoken word. It germinated for years as a neighborhood forum—its practitioners weaving magically funky tapestries out of the grooves of old LPs and the stories of their surroundings—without any significant commercial prospects. The ’70s were coming to an end before hip-hop was even properly committed to wax.

It surely began as party music, with MCs crowing deftly about their prowess (lyrical, sexual and otherwise) and DJs whipping their tonearms like gunslingers. But it wasn’t long before there was “The Message,” Grandmaster Flash & The Furious Five’s damning portrait of ghetto life—“Don’t push me/ ’Cause I’m close to the edge”—and Melle Mel’s “White Lines (Don’t Do It),” a cautionary tale about cocaine that sketched our cruelly lopsided justice system as pithily as anyone ever has: “A street kid gets arrested/ Gonna do some time/ He got out three years from now just to commit more crimes/ A businessman gets caught with 24 kilos/ He’s out of jail and out on bail and that’s the way it goes.”

Rap was on its way to becoming “the Black CNN,” as Chuck D would later dub it. Public Enemy, Boogie Down Productions and N.W.A subsequently offered more militant critiques of the status quo. It’s noteworthy that N.W.A’s furious broadside “Fuck tha Police,” met by such pearl-clutching and authoritarian pressure when it was released, remains a powerful protest anthem, while the self-appointed moral guardians who decried it have largely sunk into disgrace or obscurity.

In the ’90s, the artists of the bohemian Native Tongues movement offered nuanced considerations of racist and sexist assumptions and a more inclusive, upbeat vision of hip-hop’s cultural possibilities. JAY-Z, Nas, Dr. Dre, Biggie and 2Pac took the potential of the evolving art form to new levels—and delivered scathing, world-rocking narratives of hustle, tragedy and triumph against a brutal urban backdrop.

The new millennium dawned and hip-hop scaled ever-greater heights of success and familiarity. The party that began in the bombed-out South Bronx spread to every corner of the globe. The whitest suburbs reverberated with booming kick drums (and not just Eminem’s).

But the nightmare of inequality persists.

In recent years, through the rise of Black Lives Matter and George Floyd protests, hip-hop has continued to be a voice for the voiceless—most eloquently in the work of Kendrick Lamar, J. Cole, Tyler, The Creator and other visionaries.

And in a toxic political era in which the old racist dog whistles have become brazen bullhorns, this music and this culture will continue to fuel the party and the fight—that they might nourish one another.

Here’s to the next 50 years.