The following text tries to trace a possible “genealogy” of Hip-Hop and Rap within the history of “black art(s)” across the Americas, as a weapon for black people in the United States for reclaiming the fundamental right to “Life”. This latter term is here intended as the capacity for “free creation”, in contrast to the logic of slavery, aimed to reduce life to forced “production”, under the constant threat of her destruction.

“Hip is to know, it’s a form of intelligence. To be hip is to be update and relevant.
Hop is a form of movement, you can’t just observe a hop, you gotta hop up and do it.
Hip and hop is more than music . Hip is the Knowledge,
hop is the Movement. Hip and Hop is Intelligent movement.”

Krs-One – Hip Hop Lives, with Marley Marl

Every art, as a vehicle for expression and a cultural manifestation, has its own history, with its genealogies and even mythologies. Art embeds the multiple characters of social life stemming from the evolution of singular communities, which in turn possesses  all the necessary contradictions inherent to localized  life experiences. However, even if originating from positioned singularities, arts possess the claim for a universal echo, an aim for a plural acknowledgment of  going beyond time and space. Music is no exception: it has the capacity to affect, by representing life.

Representin' was the slogan appropriated by a wide-range cultural movement, where music played an integral part since the beginning. Hip-hop was born in 1973 in South Bronx, New York, baptized by the hands of Dj Kool Herc, a Jamaican who in 1967 emigrated to the United States as a child. Herc had inherited the “pulsing of life” reproduced by Dj's in Kingston's dance-halls and sound-systems, along with the Jamaican subcultural dimension of the under-classed and racialized ghetto masses. Sound-systems were about these “wretched”, who were seeking to contrast the dull “thundering of death” thrummed by gangs, police and State violence through guns, with its reversal, the beating of life through Dub productions, Reggae chants and Raggamuffin' “toasting”.

Music as “movement” has always had a strong political meaning for those who would not succumb to oppression. Across the Atlantic, through the so-called Modernity, from the tingling of enslaving chains and war-cry percussion-beating from Africa, to the Voodoo in the Caribbean, the Samba in Brazil and the Sound-Systems in Jamaica, music has designed what could be regarded as a “Black Internationalism”: a radical tradition of struggle, shaping the life-form experience of Afro-descendants across the Americas.

Hip-hop pertains to this legacy of struggle, carried out by Life itself, the “power to blossom”, which refuses to succumb to Death, the “power to annihilate”.

The conflict between the two “powers” has been constructed as structurally asymmetrical through history: marginalization and control of the bodies assures the domination of a group of people over another; with the basic scope of seizing the creative “power to blossom” of life for the extraction of (plus)value. The epiphenomenon is slavery, as forced labor shaped Modernity in the form of the ascendant global Capitalism. Life constrained to work. The “power to annihilate” was meant  to “police” Life, by “overseeing” her as enslaved capacity to “produce”.

Life had to resist Death within this dimension of structural violence, as a fixated asymmetry of power, , since an “outside” was not at her disposal. Thus, she counter-acted Death, engaged the conflict to reverse the asymmetry, trying to convert this violence in her counter-power. Throughout the Centuries, rebellious enslaved people across Africa and the Americas violently revolted against the exploitation regime of forced labour, under the menace of annihilation. Their revolts were ritualized through music. From the XVII to the XIX Century, music accompanied black insurgencies, and the dimension of violence in which they took place, in North America like elsewhere, across the so-called “New World”. (In)famous mass uprisings, like the “Great Black Conspiracy” of New York (1741) accounted for the alliance of black people with other underclass racialized people (e.g. Irish) and for the prominent role of women for a massive upsurge. The worst nightmare of the white bourgeois male, exposing the intersectional nature of both oppression and resistance, produced the riotous Hydra which was fighting against the capitalist, colonial and hetero-patriarcal “Cerberus”. And that was delineating a very different kind of Enlightenment, maybe stemming from the Manden Charten of Mali (1236), “intersecting" with European radical political traditions, as the example of Haiti shows.

Haiti Revolution

In the XX Century North America, no matter  the participation of Black People in both the American Revolution and the U.S. Civil War, The Jim Crow Laws had continued to pend on black lives, across two World Wars.

“As real as it seems, the American Dream
ain't nothing but another calculated scheme
to get us locked up, shot up or back in chains
to deny us of the future, to rob our names
kept my history a mystery, but now I see
the American Dream wasn't meant for me..”

2Pac– Panther Power (in the Strictly Dope)

During the Cold War, following also the global wave of Pan-Africanism, gigantic figures like Rosa Parks, Claudia Jones, Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, Stokely Carmichael and Muhammad Ali, led the impetuous movement for black liberation. Gospel, Jazz, Blues, Soul, Rhythm&Blues and Funk shaped the “black” form of the USA, along with the proliferation of gang-life in the metropolises.

Claudia Jones

With the "Long '68", civil and political rights were only formally conquered. Meanwhile waves of black “rolling stones” and “hustlers” invaded the ghetto streets and contended the territory formerly hegemonically ruled by other marginalized immigrants, mostly Irish and Southern Italian through “organized crime”.

Young underclass black  males (and latinos) seek self-determination through “money, power, respect”; while black women (and latinas) were taken in between their leading role in the emancipation struggle, and the sexist violence perpetrated by their fellow men continuously trying to "pimp" them, to reduce them to commodities.

“Freedom! You askin' me about freedom..
..Asking me about freedom?
I'll be honest with you.
I know a whole more about what freedom isn't,
than about what it is, cause I've never been free..”

Assata Shakur interviewed, from Common Sense – A Song for Assata

Social movements needed to deal with this “scum” from the streets. More radical black political movements, with a strong feminist component, like the communist Black Panther Party (Oakland,1966) advocatedfor armed self-defense and self-government, while denouncing openly the U.S. “internal colonialism”. In California the political struggle involved the black youth engaged in ascendant gangs like the Bloods and the Crips in Los Angeles, and tried to convert violence into power: a task that Hannah Arendt had defined an impossibility.

During the years of their warfare-like repression by the U.S. Intelligence, Hip-Hop saw the light, while Black neighborhoods were about to be deadly colored of white by crack.

From New York, Hip-hop expanded fast across the States. Rap started as emceeing, from the acronym MC, Master of Ceremony. The Mc's were word-players improvising on beatboxing, beat-braking and scratches made by Dj's during rap battles called cyphers, where communal antagonism was performed as art. They borrowed the rhetoric from the black urban Spoken Word tradition, and set the stage for the “Golden Era” of Hip-hop of the 1980s, that crowned the “Big Rotten Apple” as the Mekka, the City-Temple.

In the 1990s it took the form of Gangsta Rap Gangsta Nation of California. Differently from the East Coast style, more focused on punch-lines word-play and inspirational urban storytelling, the West Coast style recounted to the listeners true stories of everyday violence. It posed the trend for the later developing style of the South in the 2000s, called Trap, by which the drug-dealing everyday violence is narrated starting from the “trap houses”, hotspots where drugs are fabricated and sold: a sort of new  plantation, where black youth is actually trapped. In the Middle West, and notably in Chiraq-Chicago, Gangsta Rap evolved in the Drill style, according to which street violence is reflected and even mimed by bullet-like flows of utterly violent rhymes, performed to drill the mind, just like gunshots do to bodies.

Since the origins Rap music in Hip-hop culture has served the scope of representing life in the struggle against death, just like her musical ancestors had done across the Americas. A form of knowledge born in the struggle, to convert violence into power. A task still more than urgent, since black youngsters in the United States, like elsewhere, are still drilling each other, are still trapped, and are still scratching the streets, producing black noise to be heard. Black Lives (still) Matter. The “Black Fire” of Life is still alive. On the perennial Road to Zion, her centuries-old patience in fighting Death will never be over.

“Sabali, sabali, sabali yonkote
Sabali, sabali, sabali kiye
Ni kêra môgô..
Sabali, sabali, sabali yonkote
Sabali, sabali, sabali kiye
Ni kêra môgô.”