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Author Patrick Neate is a staunch defender of hip hop music and its unique culture. Here he talks about its influence on social groups across the globe, its potential for positive change in certain deprived areas and the imaginative power of hip hop devotees

Recent research conducted by Pew Media in the US concluded that more than 70 percent of Americans (both black and white) consider hip hop music to have a negative impact on their society. I came across this statistic a month or so ago. It’s bothered me since.

I have been writing about hip hop my entire adult life and, in that time, the music has been decried repeatedly for its foul-mouthed lyrics, materialism and misogyny; for glamorising violence and promoting criminality. In fact, there can be no other popular cultural form that has generated such a volume of consistently bad press. I say this with some confidence, because whenever a hip hop scare story breaks I get a call from some or other media outlet to defend it. I got this call after the murders of rappers Tupac Shakur and Notorious B.I.G., when Eminem toured the UK and was proclaimed a threat to our children’s moral welfare, and when various politicians – Bob Dole, Hillary Clinton, David Cameron – have jumped on the nearest available bandwagon to attest to much the same.

Generally, I have responded to these scare stories with a standard series of arguments and examples. I point out that hip hop skills – particularly rapping and breakdancing (or ‘b-boying’) – were first developed in New York’s Bronx projects as a peaceful means of settling gang disputes. I quote the numerous hip hop artists over the past 30 years whose lyrics have contained positive messages of political consciousness, self-development and respect (from KRS One right through to Common and Kanye West). I assert that hip hop’s diverse subject matter, for good and bad, does little more than reflect the concerns of society, particularly the parts of it that feel most alienated and disenfranchised.

I still stand by the above, but somehow it seems increasingly beside the point and, returning to the Pew Media statistic, I think I know why 70  percent of Americans consider hip hop to have a negative impact on their society.

A cultural heritage

If hip hop were simply a fad like punk or goth or emo, it wouldn’t be shocking. But hip hop has always had greater pretensions than that. Hip hop is the only musical genre with a title that is routinely and meaningfully followed by the word ‘culture’. Traditionally, this has meant the ‘four elements’ – rapping, DJing, breakdancing and graffiti art – but now its reach is much broader. First and foremost, hip hop (and its associated offspring, often lazily lumped together with the catch-all term ‘urban’) is the world’s best-selling musical genre. Not so long ago, MTV had a ‘no rap’ policy and routinely excluded black artists from the channel. Doesn’t that now seem extraordinary with hip hop videos, frequently the most glamorous and highly sexualised, dominating output?

This isn’t simply symptomatic of the ubiquity of hip hop music, but also the ubiquity of its imagery. Hip hop is loaded with easily recognisable symbols that are replicated in countless advertising campaigns and, of course, through the pre-eminence of hip hop fashion on every high street. Hip hop has its own films, from Krush Groove to Hustle and Flow, film stars from Ice Cube to Will Smith, and TV personalities such as Method Man and Ice T.

In the early 1990s, following the LA riots and the release of his track ‘Cop Killer’, Ice T was number two on the FBI’s ‘National Threat’ list (something that could almost make one nostalgic for a more innocent time). A decade later, he was starring as a police detective in the hit TV series Law and Order.  Hip hop has its own language (ebonics), comedy, literature, pornography. Hip Hop Studies courses are the most over-subscribed at American universities. Hip hop has produced enough successful entrepreneurs for Forbes magazine to have created a dedicated ‘Hip Hop Rich List’. It even has its own business model as delineated by Def Jam president Jay-Z, who tops said list, in the track ‘Rap Game/Crack Game’, in which he compares the economics of selling hip hop to that of selling drugs.

Hip hop has its own politics and politicians; no longer just radical polemicists like Chuck D but also mainstream movers like Detroit mayor Kwame Kilpatrick; according to (hip hop) comedian, Chris Rock, he is ‘America’s first hip hop mayor’. On his election in 2002, Kilpatrick said: “Finally, someone from the Run DMC generation…has made it into the political circles we don’t look like we belong in.”

Has hip hop had its day?

The point is that hip hop is not a subculture. Rather, in the US (and increasingly in the UK) it is a cultural phenomenon with a reach extending to every aspect of society. So, when 70 percent of Americans question hip hop’s impact, they are not just questioning their kids’ taste in music, but also their society itself. What a dilemma this must present for African Americans in particular. On the one hand, through hip hop, African American cultural expression is commercially valued and represented like never before. On the other, that expression is increasingly one-dimensional and monolithic. As hip hop’s premier analyst Nelson George has written: “The price of success has been a narrow casting of what black culture means.” And there’s no point denying that the meanings that dominate the mainstream consciousness are those of materialism, violence and criminality. Hip hop once challenged the status quo in America; now it’s part of it.

In the main, as in many aspects of culture, UK hip hop largely apes its transatlantic parent (although the bling and braggadocio are often concealed beneath wry wit and a cockney accent) and it’s easy to regard the form as terminally stagnated. However, such a thought would be to ignore the extraordinary way the culture has been appropriated, reinvented and transformed in other parts of the world. This started in Europe. In France, indigenous hip hop has long been the voice of the excluded, in particular the Arab and francophone African immigrants from the banlieue ghettos. In Italy in the early 1990s, hip hop was the mouthpiece of anti-capitalism, with radical music emerging from the communist squats known as centri sociali. In the past 15 years, hip hop has established a foothold in South America, nowhere more so than Brazil, where rappers like Racionais MCs and MV Bill are famous for their troubling narratives of racial and economic inequality.

But it is perhaps Africa that is hip hop’s new nursery, as all across the continent young people have taken this all-American form and mixed it with local musical traditions to articulate their own concerns. Thus, in Ghana, the high life sound is frequently transformed into ‘hip life’, in Senegal, mbalax is twisted into ‘mbalax rap’, and Tanzania’s ‘bongo flava’ mixes afrobeat, Arabic and Asian music with a hip hop sensibility and lyrics in Kiswahili.

The material of African hip hop is sometimes little more than pastiche of its US counterpart, but it is more commonly used to express strident political opinions about subjects such as AIDS, corruption and colonialism.

The apparent ease with which hip hop has conquered the globe is significant both of the age in which we live and aspects of the medium. Of the former, it is of course notable that the emergence of African hip hop has coincided with the arrival of pan-African music television networks. With African-American hip hop artists dominating TV screens, the music’s profound impact on the continent is hardly surprising.

I once interviewed Ready D, a DJ from Cape Town regarded as one of the founding fathers of South African hip hop. He reminisced about seeing breakdancers the Rock Steady Crew on TV for the first time. “We could identify with them because they looked exactly like us kids on the Cape Flats,” he said. MV Bill told me much the same about seeing hip hop videos in a Rio favela.

Building an authentic brand

But hip hop is also modern. Rappers, whether talking crime or politics, express themselves in soundbites and slogans that are easily understood and replicated. Hip hop grasped the value of a strong ‘brand identity’ long before this was a marketing buzz phrase. There is no other musical genre in which a song will contain so many references to an artist’s name, the clothes they wear and even the street on which they grew up.

When this is combined with hip hop’s authenticity, it makes for a heady mix. The hip hop ethos says it doesn’t matter where you come from so long as it’s true. This has allowed young people globally to adopt the same tactics as their US forerunners and create locally meaningful identities and narratives that are formally equivalent and part of a bigger hip hop world. Most importantly, notwithstanding its authenticity, hip hop is inherently fantastical.

It is a place of the imagination populated with rappers with larger-than-life names, whose localities are transformed into cinematic landscapes suitable for epic stories. Look at the Wu-Tang Clan, for example, the New York hip hop crew who have named and renamed themselves as martial arts warriors, mafia dons and superheroes, and reinvented their Staten Island home as ‘Shaolin’. As it was for these young men from Staten Island’s projects, so it is for young men from ghettos around the developing world – hip hop creates an imaginative space in which they can transcend their circumstances and become empowered; judged only by their skills on the microphone or dancefloor or behind the DJ’s turntables.

In the US throughout the early 1990s, hip hop was at war with itself (usually metaphorically, occasionally literally). Some artists regarded themselves as heirs to the civil rights movement and the Last Poets, others as ‘gangstas’ who would, as 50 Cent later framed it, “get rich or die tryin’’. By the middle of the decade, mainstream record labels had recognised the commercial potential of gangsta rap, and the money won. A decade later, the ‘gangstas’ had transformed (both metaphorically and literally) into CEOs.

In the rest of the world, however, hip hop has remained largely untroubled by corporate interest and it’s notable that the artists frequently regard themselves (rather than their US contemporaries) as the rightful heirs to the likes of Public Enemy. Indeed, like the respondents to the Pew Media survey, they have little but antipathy for the current US form. Nonetheless, as hip hop stagnates Stateside, these artists are evidence that hip hop still gives voice to the cultural periphery.

Listen, for example, to K’Naan, a Canadian-based Somali refugee who has all the ghetto authenticity of a childhood in the Mogadishu war zone. On his track, ‘What’s hardcore?’, he pokes fun at American hip hop’s macho posturing: “If I rhyme about home and got descriptive/I’d make 50 Cent look like Limp Bizkit,” before concluding each verse with the question, “What’s hardcore, really? Are you hardcore? Hmm.”

The implication, of course, is not that he’s ‘hardcore’ but that it’s an absurd ambition, and he can say so because, as he raps elsewhere: “I come from the most dangerous city in the universe.” Strident, unarguable and true, this is hip hop and he knows it.  

Patrick Neate is being supported by RSA Arts & Ecology to participate and write about Amazônia, an inspirational climate change project by the Young Vic and People’s Palace. Find out more at www.rsaartsandecology.org.uk.