Harder Than You Think:Fight The Power:How Hip-Hop Changed The World.

"It was all like a pot of cultural get down"

Hip-Hop came from the South Bronx in the early seventies and it's gone on not just to become the most popular and powerful music in the world but to actually change the world. That's Chuck D from Public Enemy's not particularly contentious contention and it's the one he's made the show Fight The Power:How Hip-Hop Changed The World (BBC2/iPlayer) to illustrate.

It's a must watch and it covers a lot of ground. The talking heads that appear are impressive enough alone:- Ice T, LL Cool J, DMC, Eminem, B-Real, Will.I.Am, Warren G, Monie Love, Killer Mike, KRS-One, Melle Mel, Lupe Fiasco, and MC Lyte representing the hip-hop artists and elsewhere the likes of Al Sharpton and Nelson George as well as various authors, journalists, activists, street artists, members of The Last Poets, and associate professors of history at Ohio State University.

They're joined by archive footage that features an even more stellar line up:- Muhammad Ali, James Brown, Jesse Jackson, Dr Dre, 50 Cent, Madonna, Malcolm McLaren, Charlton Heston, Tupac Shakur, Afeni Shakur, Lil Wayne, Grandmaster Flash, John Kerry, Pharrell Williams, Queen Latifah, Stokeley Carmichael, and Louis Farrakhan. Oh - and almost every single US President from Richard Nixon onwards.

Quite a lot of those names listed, you will have observed, are not from the hip-hop world at all and many of them are politicians and that's because this, as you'd reasonably expect from Chuck D, is as much of a social history as it is a hip-hop history. In fact it's brilliant at telling the story of black America over the last few decades. The stories of William H. Parker, Daryl Gates, and Latasha Harlins are all, individually, fascinating (I knew nothing about any of them beforehand) but I won't be going into them here because, really, you need to watch this show.

The story begins in the sixties with the US, as now, undergoing a tumultuous period in its history. The assassinations of Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, John F Kennedy, and Robert Kennedy, the Vietnam war, and inner city riots. Black people started to get organised and the Black Power movement and the Nation of Islam began to gain notoriety and the newly formed Black Panther party not only became politically active but also used to serve lunches to poor kids in Manhattan.

The musical wing, if you like, of these movements came in the form of The Last Poets and Gil Scott-Heron. Inspired by the already politicised likes of Marvin Gaye, Curtis Mayfield, James Brown, Stevie Wonder, and The Isley Brothers, The Last Poets were social commentary set to music like never before. 

New York City was witnessing white flight and those moving out to the suburbs were being replaced in the city by black and Hispanic peoples. New York, pictures attest, was very run down at that time - and very dangerous. Those who lived there were advised not to walk the streets and not to take public transport which makes it sound like many became virtual prisoners in their own homes.

The Bronx, which had been cut in half by the Cross-Bronx Expressway - an idea of the renowned racist city planner Robert Moses who encouraged "municipal mayhem" and in doing so broke up neighbourhoods, was riven by gang violence, a terrifyingly high murder rate, and a heroin epidemic. The kids who lived there still wanted to make music but they had no instruments so they used the one thing in their house that created music:- the turntable.

While disco was the sound of Lower Manhattan, residents of the Bronx (as well as Harlem and Brooklyn) demanded a harder take and the first person to give them that was the teenage DJ Kool Herc who had been born Clive Campbell in Kingston, Jamaica and moved to the Bronx at the age of twelve.

Herc went to what he called "the yolk of the egg". He played the best bit of the record, the breakdown or the breakbeat, using two turntables over and over again and he did this, publicly, for the first time in 1973 when his sister asked him to play some records at a "back to school" jam. An unlikely celebration for such an influential music to be birthed at.

Soon others were copying his style. Parties were put on in parks, and on the streets of local blocks, that were mostly attended by kids who couldn't get into the clubs. They were either too young or they were seen as undesirable in other ways. Ways you can probably easily imagine.

Strangely enough Hatfield hard rock band Babe Ruth's tune The Mexican became an anthem at these parties and soon the MC became more a focal point than the DJ. The four pillars of the movement became the DJ, the MC, the breakdancing, and the graffiti. When all these four were aligned, Lovebug Starski named it hip-hop.

To give you an idea just how firmly Chuck D sticks to the political side of hip-hop there's no mention of the pioneering 1979 single Rapper's Delight by The Sugarhill Gang and we go straight to 1982's The Message by Grandmaster Flash And The Furious Five. A single that marked hip-hop growing up, becoming conscious, and becoming political.

Hip-Hop found its way into downtown Manhattan and soon the punks and the likes of Andy Warhol, Jean-Michel Basquiat, and Keith Haring were showing an interest. When Run DMC exploded in 1983, with a rockier sound, the white kids started to become interested but this didn't mean New York had become a harmonious city to live in.

The police continued to kill black people, crack cocaine started to appear in black neighbourhoods, and the hip-hop group that spoke most eloquently and powerful about all of this was Chuck D's own outfit Public Enemy (though honourable mention must go to KRS-One and Boogie Down Productions). Public Enemy's Night Of The Living Baseheads was a powerful anti-drugs song but it was also a relatable one. 

In a way that the Just Say No campaign wasn't. As with the film director Spike Lee (particularly his classic Do The Right Thing), Public Enemy talked not just about discontent but also the source of that discontent:- a failing, racist, political landscape.

The gang problems were getting really bad in Los Angeles. Drug markets, 'colours', Bloods vs Crips. The situation was only made worse by wanton police violence and, sure enough, LA hip-hop became vehemently anti-police. An early example being Ice T's Six In The Morning. When the press started to call the style "gangsta rap", Ice T ran with it and so did another LA hip-hop crew, NWA!

NWA's Fuck Tha Police didn't pull its punches but, of course, the police violence against black Angelenos continued. Most famously, though very far from being the only example, in the case of Rodney King who was beaten mercilessly by four white policemen. All of whom, initially, were found not guilty despite the fact video evidence of the crime had been shown all over the world.

Predictably, perhaps understandably, riots broke out and Ice T rapped about that in We Had To Tear This Mothafucka Up. But the riots, in which sixty-three people died, were blind rage, often directed at people's own communities, and Chuck D, KRS-One, and even Ice T spoke out about them. Made it clear that change doesn't come from smashing up or setting fire to your own neighbourhood.

Hip-Hop just became more popular with white kids who saw that this music spoke for them more than the establishment did. There was some hope when Bill Clinton defeated George Bush Sr in the 1992 presidential election. Clinton, of course, is white but he played saxophone and appeared on Arsenio Hall. He was popular with black voters and they helped get him elected.

But, perhaps to show to white America that he wasn't beholden to the black vote, he took on activist and Public Enemy collaborator Sister Souljah who had said, regards riots, ""If black people kill black people every day, why not have a week and kill white people?". I don't actually blame him on this. While it's okay for activists, polemicists, and artists to make controversial statements, politicians (and especially Presidents) need to err on the side of caution and Clinton did this.

Over in California, a whole new hip-hop sound was coming through. On the East Coast, people travelled on the subway and the music they made reflected that:- rough, edgy, harsh, noisy. But in California, the car was, and is, king and West Coast hip-hop felt like music to listen to while driving. It was slowed down, chilled out, and often stoned. The first big release in this style came from ex-NWA member Dr Dre and his 1992 album The Chronic.

Appearing on that album was the rapper that best personified this new sound, Snoop Doggy Dogg. Despite the different sound, the same problems remained. Gang crime continued and in response more prisons were built and more cops were sent into the inner cities. Guns were banned.

Ha! Not really. Of course not. That option never seems to be on the table. Instead huge numbers of young black men were incarcerated. Some for a very long time. Many, on release, got into the hip-hop world and the artist that spoke most passionately and articulately about these experiences was Tupac Shakur. Or 2Pac.

But Tupac didn't just write piercing social commentary like Brenda's Got A Baby. He also wrote about gangster life to the point of glorification, he rapped about rivalries and beefs, and it all got so out of control that the political side of his work was buried behind everything else. Ultimately, it cost him his life in 1996. Aged just 25.

 

The next year, Tupac's rival The Notorious B.I.G (just 24) died in the same fashion. A drive by shooting. What a waste. Gangsta rap had gone from documenting life on the streets and now, in many cases, seemed to glorify drugs and violence while becoming ever more misogynistic. No less a person that Dionne Warwick considered Snoop's Doggystyle album from 1993 to be the absolute nadir of hip-hop misogyny. 

Maybe she'd not heard Me So Horny by 2 Live Crew! It was a hypermasculine era of hip-hop but the likes of Roxanne Shante and Monie Love stood up and were counted. Later hip-hop saw such figures as Lauryn Hill, Missy Elliott, Megan The Stallion, Cardi B, and Doja Cat but, above them all, stood Queen Latifah whose track U.N.I.T.Y. called out the men who so casually referred to women as bitches.

Around the turn of the millennium, hip-hop seemed to offer up an aspirational and glamorous lifestyle. Beautiful women, sports cars, and lots of money. Not least for the likes of Puff Daddy. But the art behind hip-hop was in danger of disappearing. It was becoming formulaic, it was turning into pop music, and it was becoming more of a business than an art form.

Yet some resisted. When, in February 1999, the police shot and killed a 23 year old Guinean student Amadou Diallo in New York people were shocked. Diallo was completely innocent and it was a case of, supposedly, mistaken identity. Which still doesn't explain why the police shot him 41 times.

Rudy Giuliani, then Mayor of New York, defended the police who were eventually acquitted of any wrong doing.Some hip-hop acts, like Dead Prez - with Police State, reacted to what was happening with anger and disbelief.

Two years later another thing happened in New York. 9/11 saw the US receive sympathy from all over the world but when they decided to respond to the attacks by launching an invasion of a country completely unrelated to 9/11 (Iraq) that sympathy stopped. The invasion of Iraq did not make America or George W Bush popular.

Eminem spoke strongly against Dubya and Black Eyed Peas, in response to the escalation of hatred and violence, released Where Is The Love? When, in 2005, Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans (with just under 1,400 lives lost) it was Bush who managed to fuck up the response to that too. Lil Wayne wrote about it, Busta Rhymes and T.I. played shows to raise funds for disaster relief, and the likes of Jay-Z and Puff Daddy did more for New Orleans than the US government.

Many in the hip-hop community, and the wider black community, believed that only a black president could bring the change that was obviously needed and what do you know? Even now, after seeing Bush in action especially, Obama sounds passionate, articulate, capable, and full of hope. Something that once would have seemed impossible happened and Americans voted in their first black president. Not least when we hear stories of some white Americans who genuinely believed Obama would enslave all American whites.

It's sad now we realise just how far that pendulum would swing back but waching Obama's victory, even now, is emotional. Ice T goes as far as to call Obama "the first hip-hop president" and Young Jeezy's My President Is Black became a ubiquitous tune. But, of course, life under Obama wasn't perfect.

For some, far from it. There wasn't full equality. Hip-Hop's work was not done. In 2012, in Florida, 17 year old Trayvon Martin was shot dead by a "neighbourhood watch captain" and, in 2014, 18 year old Michael Brown Jr was shot and killed by a police offer in a suburb of St Louis. 

They were hardly solitary cases. The Black Lives Matter movement was formed and the tune that became their unofficial anthem was, unsurprisingly, a hip-hop one. Kendrick Lamar's Alright. Then in 2016 things got a lot worse. Donald Trump was elected president.

Back in the 1990s he'd been seen, by some, as something of a hip-hop icon. Obscenely wealthy with models for wives. Yet he was a full on, and unapologetic, racist who had called for innocent black men to receive the death penalty (when five black men were wrongly convicted of a gang rape in Central Park back in 1989).

It didn't take long for the racists to feel emboldened under Trump and in 2017 KKK members, neo-Nazis, and other unaffiliated racist groups were marching in Charlottesville, Virginia. Trump blamed the counter protestors. As the leading white rapper, Eminem knew some of his fan base supported Trump so he made sure it was on the record that he hated Trump.

Vehemently so. Towards the end of Trump's tenure the world was shocked by yet another racist murder. That of George Floyd in Minneapolis by the police officer Derek Chauvin. This time it was filmed. We've all heard Floyd repeat "I can't breathe" over and over again until eventually there's no life left in him to say it anymore.

"I can't breathe" became a slogan for BLM and BLM protests, quite rightly, took place all over the world. The Georgian rapper Killer Mike (of Run The Jewels and Dungeon Family) spoke with intense fervour, using well chosen words that conveyed both power and insight. Hip-hop, as ever, was the soundtrack to the struggle. As it has been now for over forty years. Fight The Power made a very good job of showing this.