Hip Hop Planet
Whether you trace it to New York's South Bronx or the villages of West Africa, hip-hop has become the voice of a generation demanding to be heard.
Photograph by David Alan Harvey
This is my nightmare: My
daughter comes home with a guy and says, "Dad, we're getting married."
And he's a rapper, with a mouthful of gold teeth, a do-rag on his head,
muscles popping out his arms, and a thug attitude. And then the
nightmare gets deeper, because before you know it, I'm hearing the
pitter-patter of little feet, their offspring, cascading through my
living room, cascading through my life, drowning me with the sound of
my own hypocrisy, because when I was young, I was a knucklehead, too,
hearing my own music, my own sounds. And so I curse the day I saw his
face, which is a reflection of my own, and I rue the day I heard his
name, because I realize to my horror that rap—music seemingly without
melody, sensibility, instruments, verse, or harmony, music with no
beginning, end, or middle, music that doesn't even seem to be
music—rules the world. It is no longer my world. It is his world. And I
live in it. I live on a hip-hop planet.
High-stepping
I remember when I first heard rap. I was standing in the kitchen at
a party in Harlem. It was 1980. A friend of mine named Bill had just
gone on the blink. He slapped a guy, a total stranger, in the face
right in front of me. I can't remember why. Bill was a fellow student.
He was short-circuiting. Problem was, the guy he slapped was a big guy,
a dude wearing a do-rag who'd crashed the party with three friends,
and, judging by the fury on their faces, there would be no Martin
Luther King moments in our immediate future.
There were no white people in the room, though I confess I wished
there had been, if only to hide the paleness of my own frightened face.
We were black and Latino students about to graduate from Columbia
University's journalism school, having learned the whos, whats, wheres,
whens, and whys of American reporting. But the real storytellers of the
American experience came from the world of the guy that Bill had just
slapped. They lived less than a mile (1.6 kilometers) from us in the
South Bronx. They had no journalism degrees. No money. No credibility.
What they did have, however, was talent.Source allhiphop.com
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