hip(py)hop
April 22nd, 2007 at 7:49 pm (art, race)
I wrote most of this many months ago with the intention to expand upon it, but never did. So it’s a bit dated, seeing how quickly we move on from one style to another, but still. It’s something I still think about, regardless of my taste in djs these days…
Glitch hop. I’ve seriously been in love with hot glitchy breakbeat remixes of hip hop tracks. There’s nothing like getting hot on the dancefloor to dirty bass.
Hott. With two t’s for emphasis.
And yet, as I watch and participate in this phenomenon of remixing hip hop to breakbeats, I wonder how much we’re repeating white culture’s dirty little habit of reappropriating black culture and making it our own. Are we doing anything differently this time around, or are we perpetuating the same old shit that we’ve been doing for decades (even centuries?) - from slave songs to gospel all the way on to blues and bop and jazz. In other words, can we really claim that the west coast hippie culture of today is merging with hip hop culture in some new, real way, or is it really just the old habit of taking what we want, ignoring what we don’t, and disrespecting where it comes from? Can we really listen to remixed tracks about pimps and hos and guns and ghettos ironically without essentially disrespecting who’s producing that music, what culture it’s representing, what historical context it comes from?
Are we just being the same privileged white people so many of us claim to critique?
I’ve wondered this for years, through my introduction to socially conscious hip hop, like Saul Williams, to the mass middle class middle american appropriation of rap through MTV culture, and now, more intimately, with the small and incestuous west coast scene I’ve found myself part of. And I’m not comfortable with it. I fully admit that I’ve very conveniently ignored this aspect of the (mostly white, privileged) scene over the past couple of years (it’s easy to do when you live here - we like to take our privilege to a whole new level of irony here in San Francisco), because hell, I *do* love what we do to these tracks. And yet, it nags at me, because we’re probably just as bad as the rest of them… and I don’t do shit about it.
So (how) does it matter?