Is the legacy of political rap going to live on?

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By Davey D
AllHIpHop.com

Whenever we talk about hip-hop and politics it’s always done from the standpoint with us going to the ballot box as the ultimate goal. Don’t get me wrong, voting and participating in the electoral arena are important, but hip-hop is so much bigger and so is politics.

For many of us politics is more than us voting for a particular candidate or having a catchy slogan that everyone chants at a rally. At its core, politics is about empowerment. It’s the social, economic and political control of our communities with voting and political education being among the important steps we take to reach that goal.

Hip-hop is more than a “Hot 16,” “fresh new gear” or “swagger devoid of substance.” At the end of the day hip-hop like politics is also about empowerment. It’s about giving voice to the voiceless and helping remove both ourselves and the community from a position of being maligned and irrelevant with respect to the larger society. Like voting, knowledge and understanding of self and our communities is critical.

It’s important for us to have a firm understanding about the political and social conditions that existed at the dawn of hip-hop’s birth in the early 70s. It’s important to note that our communities were under serious attack and the expressions associated with hip-hop was one way in which we responded and ultimately coped.

The pioneers to this culture came up seeing how the FBI under the leadership of J Edgar Hoover and his COINTELPRO, went all out to destroy the symbols of resistance and liberation from earlier generations including; Malcolm X who was killed, Martin Luther King who was killed and the Black Panther Party which was destroyed with many of its members jailed. Among those incarcerated during the dawning of hip-hop was Afeni Shakur and the mother of Tupac. She along with her Panther comrades known as the New York 21. were jailed in 1971 while she was pregnant with Pac

The free speech and anti-war movements were under attack with then President Nixon declaring an all out war on radical youth. Hippies and Yippies were two components of youth culture caught up in the cross hairs as were black and brown organizations like SNCC, the Young Lords and the Brown Berets.

During hip-hop’s dawning, New York City was enduring serious financial hardship as it teetered on the brink of bankruptcy. That calamity was avoided when city leaders decided to keep the cops, the firemen and garbage workers and instead fired 15 thousand school teachers leaving many of us without after-school programs, extracurricular classes like music and art and our overall education, shortchanged on many levels.

All this was exasperated by greedy landlords in the South Bronx who were burning down tenement buildings almost every other day and collecting the insurance money. Their actions put an already stressed community into an economic tail spin as the Bronx became the worldwide symbol of urban decay.

While all this was going on, the NYPD seemingly working in tandem with President Nixon’s War on Youth had launched an all out war on the gangs that were starting to emerge in the Bronx. They even had a special gang division who were just as brutal back in the days as they are now. Compounding this war by the police, was the fact that many Black and Brown gangs formed because they found themselves under attack by white greaser gangs who didn’t take too kindly to the Bronx neighborhoods expanding its Black and Puerto Rican populations. Hence there was serious racial tension.

It was in this climate that hip-hop emerged.

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