Dearest Hip Hop

Printed in Letters From Young Activists
http://lettersfromyoungactivists.org/

By Walidah Imarisha and Not4Prophet

Dearest Hip Hop,

What’s up? It’s been a minute since we had a sit down together. I mean, I still see you at shows, we give each other a pound, and sometimes we even kick it at my spot and listen to records. But it ain’t like it used to be. You’ve changed, and I didn’t want to admit it. I been thinking about it a lot lately. I see you everywhere I go, and you all up in folks’ mouths that don’t have no right to call you by your true name, ’cause they don’t know even half the game. Sometimes it feels like you forget where you came from, or someone’s trying real hard to make you forget who you were, and that you coulda been more than a contenda, back in the day.

Often times, I wonder if you even remember the times when we would hang out at the cement city schoolyards in the south, south Bronx, plug into a lamp post, scratch scavenged sides simmering with stolen sounds and spit street science and inner-shitty subversion all night, and say “fuck you” to the popo as they rolled by, afraid to disturb our anti-govern-mental groove, un-regimented rhymes, and anti-authoritarian azz shaking.

You were born a bad azz bastard b-girl, a historical hybrid full of as many counter cultural contradictions as the project physicians that brought you into creation, built from bad breaks and basuras, cross colors and krylon. You were salvaged from garbage cans and demolition dumps, boosted in bulky parkas, and borrowed from our mom’s .45 collection, scrawled on the stank subway 6 train, and plastered on piss-filled platforms and sacred playgrounds.

You were our ten-point program, our list of demands, a declaration of existence, our statement of resistance, a shout (out) from those whose tongues had been previously tied by the shitstem, a voice for those who were not supposed to be seen or heard. Because you existed, we persisted. And you were as rebellious as a riot, as insubordinate as us, a borrowed black-brown-boricua bible tribal tone poem pieced together from the samo shit talk and sabotage spanglish, a ghetto griots god-guided tour of every gutter and all-borough bombing. You were just as hard as Harlem, as bad as the Boogie Down and Brooknam, and as stunning as Strong Island, St. Albans, and Shaolin,

You were the terrible twin of punk, Afrika Bambatta in a “Never Mind the Bullocks” t -shirt and afro-hawk, Ramalzee and Lee and the urge to get free, Dondi as a spray can splash Gandhi, Grand Master Flash and The Clash, both poles of Basquiat, painting primal anti-products on barrio billboards, ex-vandals drawing skelly courts on stolen streets.

You, the eternal outlaw, couldn’t/wouldn’t be placed in a box, and illegalist artists never got paid, but still they played and sprayed on reclaimed walls and project halls liberated in the name of nobody but ourselves. We boldly emblazoned our names and claims to fame in 40-foot-high letters on private and city property. Back then, no one would give us a permission wall or permission to be (who needs their permission to be free?) so we just took it. We stole that space just like our labor, our blood, our babies, our culture had been stolen from us since foreva and eva, amen.

We couldn’t afford (to pay for) instruments or attention, so we scratched on vinyl; we had no canvases, so we painted on overpasses; we had no ballet classes on these crazy calles so we made do with our own bold (b-boy) bodies and cardboard boxes. We stole back space and sound as reparations for the countless creations crafted by people of color then co-opted and commandeered by culture vultures with calculators, and the DJs and MCs of the APOCalypse didn’t give a damn if their utterances got any farther than that little slum schoolyard where they first plugged in their two turntables and a microphone, powered by our war-words and spit. In our cheap converses, appropriated adidas, low-budget levis and cool co-op kangols, we created a counter culture that you couldn’t get over the counter. And back then no one wanted you over the counter anywayz, not Virgin or Tower (of Babel). Not Sony or MCA or Atlantic, BMG either. Not white (washed) boys in segregated suburbs straining to grasp slum syllables while stretching our sold salvation army skins to fit their permanent privilege. Not music moguls and mass-media mobsters who buy our muse for their amusement and market our azzes for mass consumption to the highest (and lowest) bidder.

Back then bling wasn’t the thing, and the only platinum was a Piñero poem about a black woman with a blonde wig on, and there was no half-nekked salt-shakin’ sistas on MTV (or BET and VH1), and fuck Bentleys, you couldn’t even catch a cab on 125th street and Malcolm X Blvd. There was no corporate conglomerate to vomit back (and forth) our surreality, and no preacher-pimp publishing company would touch you with a ten-foot billboard.

But nowadays, I see you on every (clear) channel of the tell-lie-vision, on (and off) every stage, hear you laughing (and crying) on the radio, watch you acting (and re-acting) in movies, hawking your “hip hop” franchise fashions like French fries, your basketball shoes like rhythm without the blues, soda pop and pimp juice, and a million other mega-million dollar marketing schemes you’re tied into and tied up in, and I am faced with a painful question: You started out rebelling against the system, pounding on the doors of perception, but was that only ’cause you couldn’t find the key to open the door? And now that you smacked the doorman and snatched the key, art turned alchemy, it’s solid platinum, hanging from your neck like a slave chain. Sure, sometimes I think I see the old you peeking out shyly from underneath your worn kangol, a glimmer of a vision in your eye, now obscured by the “bling” and all them other material things. And I swear I can still hear you spittin’ sweet sedition way left of the de-funkt dial on my battered boom box, but just when you about to bring the noise, it’s inevitably drowned out in a bottle of counterfeit Courvesoir and a cup of (jim) crow. Tired of living the amerikan nightmare, you wanted the amerikan dream, so a microphone became just another way out the hood, like a basketball or a kilo or a fast car. In the end, you weren’t tryna bust out of the shitstem, only bust the door down to get in.

Yeah, you coulda been a leader for a people who will lead themselves, a real synonym for black power, the anti-nigga machine, the Moses for the massive. Man, you was beautiful, full of innovation and inspiration, rebellion and redemption, energy and possibility, but never beyond belief. Because you were something to believe in, in a world with nothing left to believe in.

We made ragtime and blues, jazz, be-bop, and rock-and-roll and soul and funk and ska and reggae and salsa and more, music designed to blow minds, while the Man built factories to manufacture our minds. But music does not belong to man, man belongs to music, and we thought hip hop was different anyway, because it resisted and existed outside of the maquiladora and the machine that our papis and mamis slaved in. Hip hop said fuck your factories, and FBI files too, and your idols and idea of fun. Yeah, hip hop, like Malcolm you were our shining black hope for forging our own damn future. Remember, long before the motor boats on the French Riviera, and the champagne on Thursdays, and the “cribs” designed by Trump and the R&B hook crafted by some random chump, before you was rich and famous, when a nickel bag cost a dime, you was just a semija dropped in some abandoned lot that no one ever thought would take root. But Tupac was right, roses do grow from concrete, and that rose in Spanish Harlem song wasn’t as corny as we thought. You flourished, feeding off the ghetto garbage, dumpster diving and stealing from supermarkets, a rebel without a pause, and we hoped that would be enough. And for a New York minute, it was.

I hope you don’t get it twisted, cuz I still got mad love for you. How could I not? We been to the mountaintop and the project rooftop together, we rode and wrote on the subways and highways before we went our separate ways. We saw a promised land of free meals, free lands, free minds, free hands, and back then we really gave a damn. I still remember how we held our boom boxes and ghetto blasters high as our head and where ever the beat fell was our traveling autonomous zone. And we did it all on our own. Now that was fame. Remember?