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ACT TOO…THE LOVE OF MY LIFE: UNIVERSAL HIP-HOP AS A PARADIGM SHIFT IN THE ORIGINS OF THE ART FORM”

(FORTHCOMING IN THE UPCOMING DROPPING KNOWLEDGE: HIP-HOP PEDAGOGY IN THE ACADEMY,

EDITED BY CHARLES JONES AND KARIN STANFORD)

BY T. HASAN JOHNSON, PH.D.

“Somewhere. . .Everyplace. . . All sorts of things, Now Are going on in this millisec…Or at the ancient dawn,

Everytime. . .There is no other time than Now. . .” -“Right Now” Kent Foreman (http://kentforeman.net/video_rightnow.htm)

“Hip-Hop had many starts…”

KRS-One, Rhyme and Reason (Miramax, 1997)

“…my name is Hip-Hop and I have always existed!” Grandmaster Caz (The Cold Crush Crew), The Art of Rap (2012)

INTRODUCTION

The interdisciplinary nature of Africana Studies’ latest progeny, Hip-Hop Studies, is

appropriately useful in teaching about the art form itself, as well as a host of academic disciplines.

Using a Hip-Hop pedagogical lens to illustrate how such interdisciplinarity relates to students’ lives

not only captures the nuance and breadth of Hip-hop culture, but also the globalized world in which

they live. Thus, when we incorporate Hip-hop in our classroom instruction, it is imperative that we

do not oversimplify the dynamics of the genre. One such lingering oversimplification is the

attribution of New York City (NYC) as the sole originator of Hip-hop. This assertion minimizes the

contributions to the cultural production of Hip-hop made by other geographical sites existing

beyond the jurisdiction of the five NYC boroughs.

Consequently, this essay argues for a paradigmatic shift in the discourse pertaining to the

origins of Hip-hop culture. It proposes the concept of a “Universal Hip-Hop,” one which emphasizes

simultaneous multiple streams of cultural production rooted in localized settings across the nation.

Universal Hip-Hop contends that both the origins as well as the elements of the art form are

shaped by salient national trends that impacted the lived experience of the Black and Brown urban

youths residing in multiple, disconnected social contexts that created Hip-hop culture in different

ways, at times before NYC.1 Hip-Hop, then, is not a homogenous construct, but has always had a

multiplicity of forms and starts (as KRS-One and Grandmaster Caz note in the opening citations).

The chapter first proceeds with a brief synopsis of the major elements and societal

permutations of the art form. It then examines the interplay between key macro social, political, and

economic trends that spawned multiple settings contributing to the production of Hip-hop culture. It

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concludes by interrogating the formation of 1970s Hip-Hop aesthetics in a number of states to

illustrate the utility of the “Universal Hip-hop” concept.

“Act Too (The Love of My Life)” in the title refers to the classic song by The Roots (1999),

highlighting how Hip-Hop was at first a form of entertainment and social activism, but now in its

“second act” has become a space for a global grassroots activism, and, unfortunately, corporate

interests. It is in the second act that Hip-hop proponents assume the critical role of advocating for

the complexity and scope of Hip-Hop’s reach as a global form of communication and a medium for

the transmission of ideas. Moreover, Hip-hop constitutes an intellectual space for examining a wide

variety of issues from an interdisciplinary perspective, lending itself for academic study beyond

mere album sales and artist personalities. The global reach and intellectual breadth of the art form

counters assumptions by educators (K-12 and post-secondary) and conservative parents who

argue that Hip-hop lacks academic merit. This analysis will demonstrate the need for a serious

interdisciplinary approach to the study of Hip-Hop and its utility in helping students grasp the

relevance of world events to their seemingly innocuous interests.

DEFINING THE ART FORM

Hip-Hop has at least two tiers; compositional and performative. The compositional tier, illustrated in

Exhibit 1, comprises the major elements of the genre. Although it is generally accepted that there

are four common elements in Hip-Hop: emceeing, deejaying, b-boying, and graffiti art, there are

other intrinsic areas worthy of reflection.2 Heavily influenced by Jamaican styles of deejaying

(‘toasting’ to be specific) that called for lyrical play with the audience, it simultaneously helped

shape early emceeing.3 Both were popularized by mainstream vehicles, deejaying by Herbie

Hancock’s “Rock It” music video and emceeing by Sugarhill Gang’s “Rapper’s Delight” (Scratch,

DVD, 2002). Black and Puerto Rican youth, who were significantly influenced by popular cultural

referents and impacted by the limited economic experience endured by working-class Black and

Brown communities during the late 1970s and early 1980s, created b-boying dance styles. In

response to similar popular cultural phenomena (such as cartoons, television shows, and films),

African American youth in northern, central, and southern California developed a West Coast

dance counterpart distinctive and specific to the state.4 It was popularized by the film Flashdance

(1983) when several members of the Rock Steady Crew demonstrated their skills onscreen (The

Freshest Kids, DVD, 2002). Beat-boxing was inspired by elite Hip hop artist’s increased access to

state-of-the-art professional studios, which offered a host of newly available techniques.

Notwithstanding this newfound accessibility to recording facilities, the majority of the aspiring Hip-

Hop artists lacked access to expensive professional studios, which led to the development of

natural techniques emphasizing the skill of using one’s body that, in turn, framed the styles of

various subsequent beats and rhythms later used by other artists.5 Bombing culture (also known as

graffiti), originated in Philadelphia during the late 1960s, while also enjoying an earlier similar “birth”

amongst Latinos in Los Angeles (Bomb It, DVD, 2008).6 Bombing practices were inspired by

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people visiting cities with heavy amounts of graffiti such as New York, news media interest in

graffiti, and even subway and freight trains spread the aesthetic to almost every city in America,

carrying with them changing styles, content, and messages (Style Wars, DVD, 1984). Finally,

profiling is an element of Hip-Hop culture that has been present since B-boys at Kool Herc’s parties

attracted large crowds with their aggressive dance styles and stop poses. Since then, posing

regularly appears on various visual formats, such as photographs, record covers, and magazines,

illustrating the genre’s sense of cool and attitude of social rebellion.7 Profiling is a “gestural

element” that frames the body as both static and motive art. In this fashion, posing and even

walking become aspects of profiling.

EXHIBIT 1

Although few would disagree on the core elements of Hip-hop displayed in the

compositional tier of Exhibit 1 (albeit except for beat-boxing and profiling), the composition of the

performative tier of the “What is Hip Hop?” exhibit may certainly engender more controversy (see

Exhibit 1). The performative tier of Exhibit 1 represents cultural and economic aspects of the art

form. Yet these are not just outgrowths of Hip-Hop as entertainment, they are intrinsic to Hip-Hop’s

aesthetic fingerprint. They mark what IS and is NOT Hip-Hop, and although they change and

evolve over time, they evolve in response to previous incarnations, suggesting a distinct

vocabulary to each component of the list. It is an intentionality that is neither accidental nor

happenstance. Each component helps connect people’s conceptions of it, allowing participants to

grasp the manner in which to participate authentically. It rests on the assertion that Hip hop has

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indelibly impacted the larger society, which extends beyond the realm of entertainment. The

genre’s musical impact is undeniable. However, its influence on language, fashion, religion, and

social activism still remains underappreciated.

Hip-Hop’s spoken word, the casual verbal style stemming from localized ebonic

expression, has a distinctive parlance that has skillfully penetrated the language of the larger

society while styling, self- adornment (dress, hairstyles, make-up, and clothing styles) has

blossomed into its own aesthetic entity as well as successful economic entrepreneurship enterprise

(Persley 2009, 4). One example of the spoken word and styling can be seen at the end of

Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five’s classic video for “The Message.” Just before the group

is arrested, the manner in which they speak, their style of dress, clothing, posing, and style of

movement is all reflective of 1982 Hip-Hop culture in New York. In contrast, Snoop Dogg’s “Who

Am I (What’s My Name)” of 1993 reflects styling and spoken word in South Central, California.

Although diverse, they are both still part of the same vernacular, that is, Hip-Hop culture. However,

since “The Message,” renowned clothing designers such as Tommy Hilfiger, Polo, Gucci, or Louis

Vuitton have been lured by the art form’s panache to expand their fashion brand. Hustling, or Hip-

Hop entrepreneurship, has generated the economic capacity to provide employment for one of the

most underemployed demographic in America: young, urban Black males. Flavor, or Hip-Hop

styles of musical production, is an extension of deejaying, as many deejays became professional

producers in the 1980s and 1990s when the record industry began to pay more attention to

emcees rather than deejays (such as DJ Premier or Pete Rock). The musical skill once prominent

in stage performance was now transferred to the production aspect of the business, and resulted in

the development of Hip-Hop’s unique aesthetic of polyrhythmic beats over a booming bass and a

familiar sample.8 Hip-Hop’s sacred universal, or its meditation on spirituality, has been woefully

understated. During the late 1980s and early 1990s, Hip-Hop introduced religious practices for

philosophic reflection. Orthodox Muslims, Nation of Islam Muslims, the Nation of Gods and Earth

“Five Percenters,” Nuwaubians, ancient Egyptian Spiritualists, Moorish Science Temple “Moors,”

Rastafarians, Christians, and even Taoists took to Hip-Hop to espouse their faiths. Despite that

Christianity is the dominant religion practiced among African Americans, Hip-Hop introduced

practices that were relatively obscure outside of New York.9 Lastly, Hip Hop’s focus on the

struggle, or political activism against injustice, has taken specific and non-specific forms. Although

music groups such as Public Enemy advocated for direct action on behalf of its listeners, they

seldom advocated for any particular organization. Yet others, such as X CLAN, encouraged people

to join its Blackwatch movement, a militant Black Nationalist group. The struggle, or Hip-Hop’s

advocation for agitating against injustice, has advocated for everything from peaceful (De La Soul)

to militant activism (Paris X). The struggle in Hip-Hop is against a wide range of issues such as

low-quality education, police brutality, joblessness, black-on-black violence, mass incarceration,

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HIV-AIDS, limited support for mental health, and poor treatment of the environment to name just a

few.

HIP HOP JUST MADE SENSE TO ME!: FRAMING THE HIP-HOP GENERATION’S SOCIAL CONTEXT

In order to create the compositional and performative tiers of Exhibit 1 above, the Hip-Hop

generation uses a “transcontextual” sensibility for imagining Hip-Hop’s possibilities. They linked

contexts from their own experiential background, struggles with national and transnational forces,

and their own creative capacities to create Hip-Hop’s social relevance. In fact, the linking of

experiences, both remembered and reimagined, play a role in Hip-Hop’s continued reception. As

the former host of BET’s Rap City, Joe Clair stated in an interview about his first introduction to

Hip-Hop that “Hip-Hop just made sense to me!”10 And that was the feeling of a lot of people who

had never formally heard it, but somehow understood it. But why did this phenomenon seem to

make sense to so many youth from so many different places? Well, if we take into account how the

imagination, too, serves as a force that influences phenomena, then this ‘transcontextual

imaginary’ links historical and contemporary lived experiences, media productions, consumer

practices, and cultural/aesthetic developments into a series of interlocking forces that

simultaneously influence and adapt to input quite pliably. In other words, by studying how people

link seemingly disconnected experiences in creative ways we can better make sense of the hip-hop

generation’s shared context, serving as a conduit for people to both understand and contribute to

hip-hop culture. Hip-Hop’s cultural matrix (urban, poor, post-Civil Rights era, rife with limited

governmental support with virtually no funded youth activities, and easily accessible entertainment

media) yielded a shared worldview…a shared aesthetic that made ‘electric boogalooing,’ ‘locking,’

‘bombing,’ ‘turntablism,’ oral rhyming (and later Hip-Hop itself) highly infectious. So in a relatively

short period of time, Joe Clair could go from a casual listener to one of the first hosts of a national

show on Hip-Hop…simply because it just made sense to him.

There are several key factors that contribute to this “sense” Clair and others experienced

regarding Hip-Hop. First, the period ranging from African American enslavement to the World War

II-era Great Migration created a shared cultural context for Black folk. (Holloway 2005, 8) Retained

African practices and a forced, shared context gelled an experiential narrative that is distinctly

African American and spawned musical productions such as slave hollers, blues, gospel, jazz,

rhythm and blues, rock and roll, and soul music (it also spawned a popular dance tradition that

captured national attention from slavery all the way to Hip-Hop’s development). African American

church traditions added to this shared sensibility, bringing worship practices, musical traditions,

and forms of political mobilization that also helped create a shared Black context. This shared

sensibility was passed to the youth of the urban north up through the 1960s, and even if they could

not always explain this black sensibility, they could identify its authenticity—and mark who did not

share it.

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Beginning in the late 1970s and continuing through the decade of the 80s, a confluence of

social, economic, and political forces combined to produce the cultural moment that provided the

fertile, imaginative soil and national sentiment for Hop-hop among Black and Latino urban youth.

The following section of the chapter delineates the critical factors that birthed Hip hop including

rampant economic decline linked to the transformation of the United States economy; the

onslaught of draconian conservative policies; and a nationwide drug epidemic which devastated

the nation’s Black and Latin urban. De-industrialization signaled a fundamental shift in the nature of

the United States economy, which marked the beginning of the decline of the snow-belt states’

industry-based economic hegemony. This economic downturn had a devastating impact on

fortunes of Black workers, who found it difficult to sustain employment during the midst of the loss

of massive manufacturing jobs, especially in the Midwest, that were shifted to Third World sites

leaving the Black Community without its economic backbone (Wilson, 1996). During Ronald

Reagan’s two presidential terms in the 1980s (1980-1988) conservative policies severely cut social

programs (Palmer and Sawhill, 1984). President Ronald Reagan almost single-handedly was

responsible for a substantial transfer of wealth from the poor, working, and middle-class to the

ultra-wealthy corporations, families, and individuals (Pivens and Cloward, 1982). Again, the shared

experience of this era, and the activism spawned to address it, marks this shared Black context.

Further exacerbating these adverse economic and political trends of the period was Bay Area

journalist Gray Webb’s exposé alleging that the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) of the United

States conspired to smuggle cocaine into Los Angeles’ Black community and other predominately

Black ghettos of the nation. Webb’s groundbreaking exposé published in the San Jose Mercury

News entitled “Dark Alliance,” a three-part series focused on the Reagan Administration’s role in

the Nicaraguan Contras rebel’s armed opposition to the Sandinista Junta of National

Reconstruction Government.11 Crack cocaine flooded the streets of urban America as a result of

the CIA’s ominous conspiracy that created a drug epidemic in Black and Brown communities

across the nation. The so-called “War on Drugs” led to the untimely death of scores of urban Black

and Brown youth killed during drug altercations and gang violence (Lusane, 1999). One witnessed

increased drug addiction and the hyper growth of private prisons due to the surge in drug arrests in

Black and Latino communities (see Exhibit 2).

EXHIBIT 2

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New policies such as the Rockefeller Laws created a double standard among drug arrestees.

Crack cocaine users and sellers received higher jail terms than those individuals who indulged

powder cocaine. As result, White drug users, who tend to enjoy the powder form of cocaine,

received lower prison sentences or even probation. Ironically, Caucasian Americans have proven

to be just as apt, if not more so, to sell and consume drugs as Black and Brown drug users.

Nevertheless, there is a significant racial sentencing disparity among convicted drug violators,

where African American males are imprisoned at a rate of eight for every one Caucasian man.

(Guerino, Harrison, and Sabol, 2012; Banks, 31). The economic downturn of the de-

industrialization era was exacerbated by a deluge of drugs that took a tremendous toll (personal

and property-related) on already underdeveloped Black and Latino communities (Marable 1983,

23-67; Roberts 2004). Yet despite this state-sanctioned underdevelopment and heightened

incarceration of African Americans, these experiences further cemented a sense of shared context

among the Hip-Hop generation.

THE IMPACT OF POPULAR MEDIA ON THE AFRICAN AMERICAN SENSIBILITY

The popular media, specifically television, newspapers, magazines, and music of the 1970s

indelibly impacted the aesthetic perceptions and sensibilities of the subsequent Hip hop

generation. This new inclusiveness of Black life into the American mainstream media was

enthusiastically welcomed by Black America. Prior to the 1970s, the nation’s media industry had a

tenuous relationship with its Black audience who were relegated to second-class status and

seldom warranted consideration in the programming decision-making of television networks and

the movie industry executives. Beginning in the early 1970s, the national media featured narratives

of Black life in mainstream popular culture outlets on a more frequent basis. This seminal

programming shift served an important role in the inculcation of Black worldviews into

mainstreamed American culture that positively impacted intra-racial perceptions of Black

Americans—and vice-versa. Movies produced by Hollywood’s main three Black film directors of the

early 1970s, Gordon Parks, Ozzie Davis, and Melvin Van Peebles, Sr., articulated the Black

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experience to mainstream White audiences while simultaneously attracting black consumers of

mainstream media outlets. Similarly, television, shows such as Julia (1968), Good Times (1974),

and The Jeffersons (1975) also positively framed Black life in America.

In addition, several specific Black cultural phenomena penetrated mainstream media that held

currency in Black public spheres will be discussed below: James Brown’s musical influence

(Sullivan 2008; George and Leeds, 2008), Muhammad Ali’s unparalleled boxing career, two

television sensations Soul Train from 1971-1990s (George 2014) as well as the popular television

sit-com What’s Happening!! from 1976-1979 (most especially the dance prowess of Fred “Rerun”

Berry).11 Last but certainly not least was Michael Jackson’s mega superstar status.

The music of James Brown inspired a sense of Black pride and provided a major sampling

source for much of the early subsequent Hip hop music. Ali’s status as the most widely regarded

heavyweight champion of the world secured by a sense of bravado which would become prevalent

in Hip-Hop culture. Moreover, Ali’s recurrent use of poetry underscored the value of the spoken

word. Indeed, political figures who used Black vernacular such as Jesse Jackson and Eldridge

Cleaver and spoken word artists such as Amiri Baraka, The Last Poets, Gil Scott-Heron and Sonia

Sanchez served as inspiration for future hip-hoppers, illustrating how to address issues pertinent to

the Black community with style and substance. Soul Train was a harbinger of the nation’s latest

Black dances and fashion styles every week during a critical 20 year period (George 2014). Since

the show was primarily based in Los Angeles (creator Don Cornelius would leave Chicago and

follow the likes of Berry Gordy to Los Angeles), the ground breaking weekly dance program

provided a national stage for the southern California dance show which ultimately influenced Hip-

Hop dance aesthetics. Similarly, Fred “Mr. Penguin” Berry (known more for his television

character’s name “Rerun” on What Happening!!) was a fixture on Soul Train and a member of the

Hip-Hop dance group The Lockers. The popular weekly television comedy gave California’s Hip-

Hop dance style a platform alongside Soul Train helping to solidify Hip-Hop’s place in Black

culture.

During this era, Michael Jackson, a tour de force unto himself, was a global icon who

transmitted Hip-Hop dance aesthetics throughout the world. Whether during his remarkable career

while touring as a member of the Jackson 5 with his brothers or as a solo artist, Jackson impacted

popular culture on a global scale. During the 1970s and early 1980s, Jackson performed African

American dance styles that were heavily influenced by Soul Train and underground Hip-Hop

dancers. His use of “the robot” and “the moonwalk” (originally termed “the backslide”) (Soul Train:

The Hippest Trip in America, DVD, 2010) were central components of Hip hop dance aesthetics.

Known as the “King of Pop,” Michael Jackson, like the b-boys and b-girls popularly referred to as

breakdancers, employed dance moves drawn from a broad array of popular culture referents

ranging from the sophisticated choreography of Sammy Davis Jr. to the martial arts moves of

Bruce Lee.

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The legacy of Black music during this watershed era was also an important cultural transmitter

of musical styles critical to the development of Hip hop culture. It formed the connective fiber

amongst Black youth across the country that enhanced access to Hip-Hop musical sensibilities.

The blues as well as rhythm and blues traditions of Black music created a similar aesthetic

reference point of "good" music among the Hip-Hop generation. This tradition framed the eventual

importance of the rhythm and beat patterns, forming a familiar template for early Hip-Hop song

production. In addition, Hip hop producers frequently sampled from the recordings of the 1970’s

popular music acts. Sometimes the sample was a word or phrase while on other occasions it may

have been a hypnotic beat or a driving instrumental riff. Notwithstanding the nature of the musical

artifact, the key to the sample was its familiarity to the Black audience. Prominent Black performers

and soul bands such as James Brown (George and Leeds 2008; Sullivan 2008), the Isley Brothers

and George Clinton’s Parliament/Funkadelic (Vincent 1995, 231-252; Danielsen 2006) are just a

few examples of soul artists regularly sampled by the Hip hop community. In short, the newfound

inclusion of the Black experience into the national media framed a major part of the cultural matrix

that produced and made Hip Hop accessible to Black youth across the nation. These positive

media representations in film, television, and music not only provided a new aesthetic production

and expression of blackness, but also laid the conceptual groundwork for the receptivity of what

would later be known as Hip-Hop. This is why Joe Clair’s statement at the beginning of the

previous section is important, because it is a product of many different transcontextual fibers,

making Hip-Hop “sensible” to the inheritors of this multifaceted legacy.

A PEDAGOGICAL PARADIGM SHIFT: UNIVERSAL HIP-HOP

It is believed that Hip-Hop formally began in New York, but the socio-cultural context that

produced Hip-Hop was experienced nationally. These shared contexts presuppose that something

would fill the void (and actually, many different things did), but it is New York’s Hip-Hop that

became the standard for what became Hip-Hop. Yet if we employ a transcontextual Universal Hip-

Hop lens to study Hip-Hop’s origins, we find that Black and Brown urban youths residing in

multiple, disconnected social contexts created different streams of Hip-Hop in a variety of ways,

some before NYC!12 Any one of the practices listed below could have become the standard for Hip-

Hop, but instead they have, for the most part, become a part of the illusion of a consolidated Hip-

Hop when in fact, Hip-Hop is actually quite fractured. As stated by Joycelyn A. Wilson, "Because

hip-hop culture gelled in the South Bronx, New York, it is historicized as a culture created in New

York, and with this has come a regional arrogance that continues to rear its ugly head. Even in the

scholarship, New York is credited as the birthplace of such a dynamic culture. Lacking is the

recognition that hip-hop culture samples its elements from southern-born expressions that currently

dominate the overall hip-hop community of practice" (Wilson 2013, 79). While applauding Wilson’s

audacity, it is not just southern influences, but western, northern, and midwestern as well!

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Exhibit 3 illustrates the conventional view of Hip Hop history. For most people, New York

developed Hip-Hop independent of the rest of Black America. There is no contention that Hip-Hop

formally originated in New York. The production of Hip hop’s first major hit “Rapper’s Delight” in

1979 (Sugarhill Gang 1979) certainly cemented the city’s reputation as the harbinger of the new

youth generated art form. Indeed, New York provided the framework and the central vocabulary of

the Hip Hop genre. Yet, many of the factors creating the socio-cultural context that produced both

Hip-Hop and its cultural space in the “Big Apple” were also at play in other regions of the nation.

These multiple social contexts characterized and defined by poverty, economic frustration, political

disenfranchisement, educational alienation, the absence of the intergenerational Black activism,

and pervasive police intimidation impacted who Bakari Kitwana (2003) describes as the Hip-hop

generation, the youth of the 1970s and 80s.

EXHIBIT 3

For example, on both the East and the West Coasts, we can see how dance practices,

aesthetic styles of dress, language, and even performative poetic speech among the youth were all

elements that reflected similar sensibilities that gained popularity around the same time Hip-Hop

begins to form. However, according to Katrina Hazzard-Donald's essay, "Dancing in Hip-Hop

Culture" in That's the Joint: The Hip-Hop Studies Reader, West Coast dance in the early 1970s

was developed independently from the East Coast (Foreman and Neal 2004, 509). More

specifically, this has not only occurred in dance, but also in popular culture. Television shows in the

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1970's such as Soul Train (1971) and What's Happening (1976) illustrate the degree to which the

West Coast developed its own sense of what, then, had a different name...waacking, which later

became somewhat synonymous with Hip-Hop. Waacking culture then, was the West Coast’s “Hip-

Hop before Hip-Hop,” as Hip-Hop was not yet nationally known by the mid-1970's. Therefore, the

West Coast's development was an independent venture.13 In terms of graffiti, Latinos in Los

Angeles, California, were doing “Cholo” style graffiti since the 1930s. This became part of LA Hip-

Hop’s aesthetics much later, but had its own history (Bojorquez<http://www.hiphop-

network.com/articles/graffitiarticles/cholostyle.asp>). Both in its present and past incarnations, Hip

Hop is the result of a series of interlocked, paralleled, and sometimes disconnected historical

milieus that the majority of urban African Americans, Latino, Asian, and Caucasian youth shared

through popular culture in the mid-20th century (See Exhibit 4).14

EXHIBIT 4

In Chicago, Frankie Knuckles (the father of house music) was an out-gay producer who

migrated from NY to Chicago and pulled from electronic music (with a heavy influence from

Philadelphia music—discussed below). He sought to incorporate it into a purposefully dance-

oriented aesthetic fueled by disco and drum machines and synthesizers (Erbentraut 2014). The

dance music celebrated the sexual revolution emphasized in gay circles and complimented the

developing culture of out, gay Black men in Chicago. Here, the emphasis on dance, gay sexual

celebration, and electronic music rather than spoken rhyming marks a different emphasis than New

York Hip-Hop, but both came out of the same Universal Hip-Hop social and cultural context.

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Researcher Warren Scott Cheney notes “At the end of the 1970s and beginning of the 1980s,

house music was catching on in clubs, but at the same time in New York, hip hop music was just

beginning to combine DJs and MCs on recorded tracks. The most well-known of these combination

tracks were Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five’s ‘‘Superrapin’ ’’ and the Sugar Hill Gang’s

‘‘Rapper’s Delight.’’ The equivalent of these groups began to show up in Chicago in the early

1980s, with artists like Terry ‘‘DJ Casper’’ Marshall, DJ Groove, and later, MC Sugar Rae Dinky.

These innovators appeared at a time in Chicago when it would have been impossible to create

music without making at least a subconscious comparison to house music” (Cheney in Hess 2009,

318).

Although Boston maintained a somewhat synergistic relationship with New York, its

emphasis on funk in the 1970s fused into early Boston Hip-Hop (Foster in Mickey Hess 2009, 197-

199). Philadelphia, on the other hand, invented bombing (graffiti) in the 1960s. Graffiti is an

example of a New York Hip-Hop appropriation of a non-New York production, later billed as just

Hip-Hop rather than Universal Hip-Hop to designate the slippage in time and identification.

Philadelphia bombing came before New York’s, as

“Cornbread and other early Philadelphia graffiti writers, such as Sub and Cool Earl, trace

their artistic origins back to the mid-1960s, when they developed what became known as

the Philadelphia style, marked by its tall, skinny letters, large, one-color wall tags, and

Cornbread’s signature use of the arrow. The Vibe History of Hip Hop credits another Philly

writer, TOP CAT, with introducing the Philly-style skinny letters to New York City graffitists

when he moved to NYC in the early 1970s (Reeves, 219). By the 1970s, graffiti art had

evolved from basic tagging to more complex designs and murals. It had spread from North

Philly to Center City, and was no longer limited to gang territorialism. Rather than mark

walls to designate their turf, graffiti writers like Cornbread made the city their canvas. In a

July 25, 1971 issue, the New York Times referred to Philadelphia as the ‘‘Graffiti Capital of

The World.” In 1972, the Camden Courier-Post reported that it cost $1,000 a day to

remove graffiti from Philadelphia’s City Hall complex. A graffiti writer called KAP the

Bicentennial Kid even tagged the Liberty Bell in the weeks preceding the Fourth of July

Bicentennial celebration in 1976” (Hess, 144 and 151-152; Bomb It DVD, 2008).

In addition to graffiti, Philadelphia deejaying is also an example of Universal Hip-Hop.

“Philly’s DJ Cash Money invented the transform scratch, Jazzy Jeff invented the chirp scratch,

Schoolly D recorded the first [proto] gangsta rap records, and in 1979 two of hip hop’s earliest

records were recorded by Philadelphians: Jocko Henderson’s ‘‘Rhythm Talk’’ and Lady B’s ‘‘To the

Beat, Ya’ll,’’ which was the first hip hop single by a woman emcee” (Hess, 144).

Henderson’s work was independent from New York in that he began using rhyme over the

air in the 1950s. His album was a product of Philadelphia’s own soul tradition Kenneth Gamble and

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Leon Huff, founders of Philadelphia International Records, which released records from The O’Jays

and Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes (Hess 2009, 149).15 And as with the notion of Universal Hip-

Hop, Gamble, Huff and Henderson precede the formation of NYC Hip-Hop, but are intrinsic to

Philadelphia’s Hip-Hop tradition.

Regarding Atlanta, Georgia’s Universal Hip-Hop contribution, Joycelyn A.Wilson states,

"What I refer to as pre-southern hip-hop began in the late 1970s and early 1980s when

cities like Atlanta and Miami began to create their own signature style to fill the existing

regional voids while simultaneously being influenced by the elements of up-North

innovations. For example, down-South hip-hoppers wore hip-hop fashion styles: Kango

hats, Adidas jogging suits, and fat-laced tennis shoes were trends just as they were for up-

North hip-hoppers and graffiti are made its way to the sides of Atlanta's MARTA and

freeway overpasses. As dance groups showcased their talents in southern breakdancing,

popping, and locking in school variety shows. Atlanta modified the dance style with the

inclusion of a one-two, side-to-side hustle and called it yeek dancing, or simply yeeking.

Southern hip-hop contributed not only to dance elements of the culture in many ways, it

changed the way hip-hop talked, how hip-hop led, how it dressed, packaged music, even

how it schooled its listeners” (Wilson 2013, 79).

Wilson’s assertion about the relevance of the south to Universal Hip-Hop is mirrored by

Sociologist Zandria Robinson who notes that "Southern hip-hop offered an alternative

historiography of the genre, in particular the music element of the genre, that situates the South,

and not the Bronx, as its true spatial and epistemological origin" (Robinson 2014, 69). This notion

is furthered by a brief overview of Memphis, Tennessee and its Universal Hip-Hop. About this,

Robinson states,

"Blues, gospel, and jazz fused with rock and roll to become soul—that country-urban

sound that combined the strivings and expressions of the totality of African American

culture. Forwarding an organic soul sound that spoke both to Southern gospel and blues

traditions and civil rights struggles, Memphis music emphasized the existential, rather than

outright protest, dynamics of black life in America. The Stax soul sound, like its successor,

Memphis hip-hop, has often been characterize as gritty, raw, and organic, reflective of the

personal histories of the artists, the historical reality of life in the urban and rural South,

and the often spontaneous and accidental nature of the musical collaboration…Yet, no

matter where they end up, from Stax samples to gangsta walking, Memphis hip hop artists

have remained loyal to the city’s history of soul and pimp cultures." (Robinson in Hess

2009, 555-556, 559)

The emphasis on soul music and pimp culture in Memphis reflects Memphis’ unique

particularities, and such specifics merged with its burgeoning Hip-Hop tradition (slightly different

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from Oakland, California’s funk, pimp culture, and Black Panther infused Hip-Hop) (Ciccariello-

Maher and St. Andrews in Hess 2009, 257).

Miami’s geographical and cultural connections to the Caribbean have strongly influenced

the diversity of popular music produced in the city, including rap. As Luther ‘‘Luke Skyywalker’’

Campbell opined, ‘‘The Cubans and the Caribbean blacks gave this city its personality. The Latin

style blended with the black, Caribbean rhythm and colors and that is what Miami is…Cubans and

the other Latinos gave this town a rhythm and the blacks gave it soul… The prevalence of DJ

groups in the 1970s and the rise of a thriving pirate radio scene in the 1990s are among the

dimensions of the city’s rap scene which can be understood within a Caribbean cultural context"

(Miller in Hess 2009, 577). The Caribbean influences are that much more apparent with the “2002

debut of bilingual rapper Pitbull and the rise in popularity of reggaeton and other Spanish-

language, rap-influenced styles confirm Miami’s status as a place where culture mixture and cross-

influence produce innovative interpretations of the rap form" (Miller in Hess, 580).16 This is coupled

with Miami’s black music scene in the 1970s, known for soul, funk, and disco with of artists such as

Clarence Reid (and his X-rated alter ego, Blowfly) and Betty Wright in the 1970s (Miller in Hess

2009, 583).However, Miami was best known for its bass music, where Miller states, "…supremacy

was determined by the volume of bass that the speaker cabinets could generate and the

uniqueness of the performance of the DJs, who would often add vocal parts, sound effects, or

engage in creative mixing in order to win the crowd’s acclaim… As Luther Campbell explained,

‘‘This was before rap. It was when rap was being created. We DJ’ed differently down here’’ (Miller

in Hess, 586). Furthermore, “Miami DJ groups were influenced in important ways by the Jamaican

sound system culture, which hit its stride in the 1960s. Participants in these collective enterprises

included ‘‘selectors’’ mixing popular records through a powerful and bass-heavy system and

‘‘deejays’’ working the crowd and inserting their own patter over the recorded music…” (Miller in

Hess, 586). Miami’s DJ groups, like their Jamaican counterparts, devoted substantial resources of

time, energy, and money to the creation of sound systems… The activities of these groups

contributed on many levels to Miami’s early development of a thriving and stylistically distinct

interpretation of hip hop... One important result of this process is the technique known as

‘‘regulating’’ or ‘‘mic checking’’ that emerged from the DJ culture and was made famous by the Fort

Lauderdale-based Jam Pony Express, in which music is cut in and out while a DJ adds short and

precisely timed vocal parts which often change the meaning of the original song into a new local

context." (Miller in Hess, 586).17

Washington, DC’s Go-go music is a mix of funk, rhythm and blues, and a focus on lo-

fi percussion instrument. Started in the 1960s-1970s in DC, was influenced by the same factors

that contributed to Hip-Hop, and would later be blended with Hip-Hop with groups such as EU

(Experience Unlimited).18 Sidney Thomas tells us that “The go-go industry was so dominant in the

DC area that the hip-hop sub-culture had a difficult time becoming established. So by necessity the

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most talented rappers in DC gravitated towards the go-go scene. Many rappers during the 80's and

90's got their chance to shine by jumping on stage with the go-go bands. Tony Blunt, P.O.P.

(Prince of Poetry), Hechinger Mall Zhigge and Fat Rodney were some of the names that dominated

the go-go rap game” (Thomas 2009 <http://www.realnewsmag.com/id73.html>). So as far as

Washington DC is concerned, Go-go was DC’s contribution to Universal Hip-Hop and has

influenced local Hip-Hop productions.

Amanda Lawson tells us that St. Louis dialect is transcontextual, as “St. Louis has become

known for their distinguishable speech and vocabulary that accompanies it. A mix of Southern

county and Midwestern sounds and pronunciation, mass media America was introduced to the St.

Louis dictionary and accent for the first time with Nelly (Lawson in Hess, 354).19 Prior to 1979,

Gentleman Jim Gates, a DJ for St. Louis’ WESL, “was the first DJ in the country to ever play Sugar

Hill Gang’s ‘‘Rappers Delight’’ on the radio. Although Gates was the first DJ nationwide to play this

landmark song, many listeners in the STL had heard a precursor to this form in the call-and

response routines of their own Dr. Jockenstein, a rhyming radio DJ (Lawson in Hess, 344).20

Purists might question whether a rhyming radio DJ should be considered a rapper, but it is not a

question of whether or not they sound like the rappers they predate, but the efficacy of their local

impact. In other words, St. Louis radio listeners felt already accustomed to early Hip-Hop because

of their local productions.

CONCLUSION

Hip-Hop has had many beginnings, some going back to the 1950s, others starting at

approximately the same time a New York Hip-Hop, and still others after that. His is why the

concept of a Universal Hip-Hop can help us make sense of the myriad ways Hip-Hop has

presented itself. But it is necessary to use a new method for studying Hip-Hop because prior

methods often excluded the ingenuity of non-New York Hip-Hoppers, presenting them as passive

spectators rather than agents in the development of a multifaceted Hip-Hop culture. It is important

to cast these agents in their proper context, as creators of multiple streams of cultural production,

albeit rooted in localized settings across the nation, they are nonetheless participatory in a national,

international, and now global project that has become Hip-Hop culture.

It is also important to highlight that as Hip-Hop is a multi-billion dollar industry that has

achieved a global reach, it can also be a valuable tool for the study of human phenomena. Using

an interdisciplinary approach, we can link together a wide variety of fields to study human activity in

ways far beyond the mere enjoyment of music. Instead we can appreciate the contributions of

countless people who have found all kinds of ways to innovate and expand the art form, whether

as artists, activists, or passive listeners. For many of us, Hip-Hop has been one of the great loves

of our generation. For me, it has been as the Roots described it, my “Act Too (The Love of My

Life),” and it is for this reason that the breadth, depth, and broad scope of Hip-Hop needs to be

articulated as such, so others may stand on my generation’s shoulders and push it yet further.

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NOTES 1. “Universal,” here, is not for the purpose of including Hip-Hop from all over the world per se, but

represents the inclusion of elements of Hip-Hop that precede, are parallel to, or even come after the formal advent of Hip-Hop in New York. They are fairly disconnected, but their productions are a part of Hip-Hop nonetheless.

2. Mickey Hess points out that “These four elements did not come into existence in the same moment (in fact, hip hop pioneer Fab Five Freddy claims, in the documentary The Freshest Kids, that he and filmmaker Charlie Ahearn were the first to bring all four elements together, in their 1982 film Wild Style). Although graffiti has existed for centuries, the style of graffiti art that came to be associated with hip hop came to New York by way of a graf writer named Top Cat from Philadelphia, where graf writers like Cornbread had been tagging walls since 1967.” (Hess, xi).

3. Deejays such as Hip-Hop’s founder Kool Herc were heavily inspired by Jamaican deejays toasting tradition, something Herc denies but many believe he may have brought from Jamaica unconsciously. (Hess, xv) As further pointed out by Hess, “Kool Herc is called the ‘‘father of hip hop’’ because he invented the breakbeat, the backbone of hip hop music, by using two turntables and two copies of the same record to loop the same instrumental break over and over. Kool Herc was undoubtedly influential in creating the culture and music that has come to be known as hip hop. The question of when and where hip hop culture began, however, is more complicated than this August 11, 1973 birthdate acknowledges. First, Herc drew heavily from the DJ routines of Eddie Cheeba and DJ Hollywood, who were working in Harlem nightclubs—these routines included Hollywood’s use of two copies of the same record to extend the break (although he tended to play different types of records than Kool Herc did), and Eddie Cheeba’s call-and-response routines with the audience, many of which were later used by MCs in the Bronx.” (Hess, xi). Adapting such deejaying traditions to the South Bronx, they created with what was readily available. Many were graduates from electric schools in South Bronx, but had no job access. They used their knowledge on what was available, and rewired home stereos, speakers, street lights, etc. to create new sounds and new ways of absorbing/interacting with music. They created whole new soundscapes using bits of previously recorded music. Hip-Hop deejays used readily available equipment to create music, and instead of using instruments that played a scale of notes, used sounds from their parent’s record collections to recreate the scale itself. These “meta-notes” were overlaid with other meta-notes to create songs out of songs, a new genre out of a mix of available genres, yet their aesthetic sensibilities were shaped by popular culture.

4. West coast ‘popping’ and ‘locking’ dance moves were somewhat inspired by the advances in automation replacing workers in the 1970s (and society’s increasing aesthetic interest in regard to robots and androids), while dance styles such as ‘ticking’ were inspired by the impact of drugs in such neighborhoods. ‘Locking’ was started in Los Angeles by Don “Campbellock” Campbell in 1969 and popularized by his group ‘The Lockers’ from Fresno, California. Some of the dance moves in ‘locking” are: the ‘lock,’ ‘points,’ ‘skeeter [rabbits],’ ‘scooby-doos,’ ‘stop 'n gos,’ ‘which-aways,’ and ‘the fancies.’ Popping was started by Boogaloo Sam in Fresno, California in 1969. Popping is an umbrella term to refer to a wide range of closely related illusionary dance styles such as ‘strobing,’ ‘liquid,’ ‘animation,’ ‘twisto-flex,’ and ‘waving.’ See Jorge “Popmaster Fabel” Pabon in Jeff Chang’s Total Chaos: The Art and Aesthetics of Hip-Hop (Cambridge: Perseus Books Group, 2006), p. 18.

5. Artists such as Doug E. Fresh and Buff from The Fat Boys popularized this tradition.

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6. Art and music programs were de-funded in the 1970s, and there were no art studios or art schools looking for poor ghetto kids train, so Hip-Hop artists used public spaces as canvases, especially since they perceived advertisements as a form of corporate graffiti (i.e. think of any advertisement that uses public “space,” such as scenes and buildings to send out messages). These artists made social statements, even if it was simply, “I exist.”

7. As Nicole Hodges Persley states, “The performative codes that discursively produce African American identity in Hip-hop can be located in the narratives, visual iconography, styles of self-adornment and embodied gestures of the Hip-hop performer. I locate these performative codes of identity as language (vernacular, stereotype, oral narratives), self- adornment (dress, hairstyles, make-up, clothing styles) and embodied gesture (dance moves, walks, attitudes, etc.) associated with African American cultural production in Hip-hop.” (Nicole Hodges Persley, Sampling Blackness: Performing African Americanness in Hip-Hop Theater and Performance, (A Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School University of Southern California In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy (American Studies and Ethnicity), August 2009, 4).

8. For many deejays, producing music help them regain a lucrative foothold in the industry, as record companies helped transition marketing interests from the deejays of the past to emcees. Emcees replaced deejays as the focal point of Hip-Ho partially because they could more readily be marketed in much more direct ways than deejays.

9. Universal Zulu Nation, “Religious” <http://www.zulunation.com/RELIGIONS.html>. 10. Joe Clair interviewed by Will Hernandez

<http://www.whomag.net/index.php?page=interviews/113>. 11. Webb charged that the CIA and the Reagan administration were aware of the drug trafficking

that funded Contras insurgency in Nicaragua which violated the United States Congress' Boland Amendment. The profits from the drug sales were returned to Nicaragua to finance the Contra insurrection against the country’s socialist government. The editorial management of the San Jose Mercury News later retreated from the controversial news story which untimely ended Webb's journalistic career. Although Webb's reputation was eventually vindicated, in 2004; he was later found dead in a hotel room from two bullets to the head ruled by law enforcement authorities as a suicide despite claims of foul play (LA Times, <http://articles.latimes.com/2006/aug/18/opinion/oe-schou18>).

12. Universal Hip-Hop can be used to assess the international impact on the early development of Hip-Hop, but for the sake of this essay my focus will remain within the United States. However, it is noteworthy that Hip-Hop’s origins are inherently internationalized. Hess tells us, “In one take on history, hip hop was global before it became local. Two of hip hop’s three founding fathers were born in the Caribbean: Grandmaster Flash (Joseph Saddler) was born in 1958 in Barbados; and Kool Herc was born in 1955 in Kingston, Jamaica. The third founder, Afrika Bambaataa, is of Caribbean descent, and founded the Bronx Zulu Nation Organization after a trip to Africa in the early 1970s. Slick Rick, another early Bronx MC, was born in Great Britain in 1965. Doug E. Fresh, a pioneering MC and beatboxer, was also born in Barbados, in 1966. Although Kool Herc denies such a connection, many scholars believe that he, even unconsciously, brought the influence of Jamaican selectors, or radio DJs, to the music scene in New York” (Hess 2009, xv).

13. One example of the Midwest’s street dance aesthetic could be seen in the early episodes of Soul Train (circa 1971) when it was aired out of Chicago. They later transferred the show to Los Angeles, California, where it went into syndication, changing the dancers on the show

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(since Don Cornelius relied heavily on local street dancers) and employing an LA dance aesthetic.

14. During different periods in California's history, migration from the South and the East Coast of the United States, and from international locals (particularly South America), has shaped the cultural terrain. Other than African Americans, Mexicans and Asian groups have played a large role in the development of California Hip-Hop, influencing language and technological uses in the art form. Latinos and Filipinos in California for example, brought in a shift in the use of Spanish-speaking in Hip-Hop (alongside New York Puerto Ricans of course), while Filipinos and Japanese practitioners, for example, re-shaped deejaying practices in Hip-Hop around the world (Diallo in Hess, 239-240). In fact, Asians innovated turntablism and turned it into a specific form of artistry (such as DJ Babu and the Invisibl Skratch Piklz featuring Q-Bert, D-Styles, Mix Master Mike and Yodafrog to name a few)(Scratch DVD 2002).

15. Hess states that “Although he was not the first radio DJ to make rhyming a part of his on-air personality, he was known in the 1950s for rhymes like ‘‘Hello, Daddy-O and Mommy-O,This is Jocko,’’ and ‘‘Oo-poppa-doo, how do you do,’’ leading some hip hop fans to refer to him as the original rapper” (Hess 2009, 149).

16. "Miami’s Cuban community grew dramatically after the Cuban Revolution in 1959, and received a large and controversial boost during the Mariel Boatlift of 1980, in which around 125,000 people from the close by island arrived in the city. Cuban-Americans now constitute the area’s largest ethnic group, and exercise substantial political clout in the local and regional arena. The city’s ethnocultural balance was also dramatically changed in the late 1970s and 1980s, when between 50,000 and 70,000 Haitian refugees arrived in the city, fleeing the worsening conditions under the Duvalier regime. Cubans and Haitians formed a part of a linguistically and culturally diverse mixture that also includes Jamaican, Dominicans, Puerto Ricans, Nicaraguans, and a host of other nationalities" (Miller in Hess, 581).

17. Luthor Campbell would best be known for his raunchy style of Hip-Hop, but few know that this, too was reflective of Miami’s Universal Hip-Hop contribution. Miller states, "Despite the strong associations between Miami’s hip hop scene and the city’s thriving adult entertainment industry, strip clubs represent only the most exclusive and eroticized of a wide range of contexts in which Miami rap has evolved and thrived" (Miller in Hess, 587).

18. Lornell and Stephenson state that "Go-go's essential beat is characterized by a syncopated, dotted rhythm that consists of a series of quarter and eighth notes (quarter, eighth, quarter, (space/held briefly), quarter, eighth, quarter)…which is underscored most dramatically by the bass drum and snare drum, and the hi-hat…[and] is ornamented by the other percussion instruments, especially by the conga drums, timbales, and hand-held cowbells." (Lornell and Stephenson 2001,12).

19. Lawson tells us that St. Louis “…has always been known for its connection to ragtime, the blues, and jazz music. From the late twentieth century, its status as a river city and railroad center allowed several prominent musicians to pass by bringing new music and inspiring the greatest of artists. Becoming a musical hot spot, St. Louis was able to create its own brand of music. Just as hip hop often speaks to those struggling on the streets, blues hits from St. Louis touched millions of people during the Great Depression. St. Louis was also a center for ragtime music and jazz. Jazz innovator Miles Davis got his start in the Eastside of the Gateway City and took St. Louis sound all over the world” (Lawson in Hess, 354).

20. Amanda Lawson tells us “Roderick G. ‘‘Rod’’ King, was given the name ‘‘Dr. Jockenstein,’’ by George Clinton of Parliament Funkadelic. Jockenstein captured an audience of thousands of

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listeners who tuned in to hear ‘‘Dr. Jockenstein, operating on your mind’’ on his Roll Call show. He emphasized how everyone would want to call in and partake in this form of call and response. Jockenstein recalled, ‘‘I had letters from Southwestern Bell to change the time I was doing the ‘Roll Call’ show because I was tying up their switchboard’’ (Lawson in Hess, 344).

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