Dear Hip Hop: Fault Lines get me Funky

Dear Dr. K,

When I was a kid, I lived with my parents and to younger siblings in the backroom of a garage at a house some friends from church had. I slept on a vinyl sofa and listened to scooby doo episodes on a radio that picked up TV audio. My dad had odd jobs nearby, but one summer, he got work in San Francisco near the mission district, and we found a place near there. 

It was one of the tallest houses I had ever seen in all my 7 years on the planet. A two-story Victorian built before the ‘06 shake and fires. A real survivor. We got the flat on top over a young couple from NYC who hated our bagels but loved the city and worked for the mayor's office. 1979, what a year, standing in line to see Empire with my grandparents, who flew in from Texas since we now lived somewhere worth visiting. It was then and there that I first encountered the flavors and feels of what I would learn much later to be hip-hop. 

There were intimidating older boys in the neighborhood who seemed to always be home, even on school days, and would stand out on the sidewalks with their big, cool boom boxes. On the cool days, they would drag cardboard out and bounce and robotically pop to the beats that oozed from their speakers, music that seemed crafted just for them at that moment. I didn’t hear these songs on the radio, though some beats and pieces reminded me of Michael Jackson.

It was exciting but ultimately stressful watching these guys doing something that seemed so cool through the bay windows in our living room on the second floor. My folks thought I should stay away from those worldly boys and were quick to stifle any attempts to match the style in clothing or music. Hip-hop was forbidden from the start. It was a dalliance at best in my youth but a love forbidden. 

If I had to personify hip-hop, which I hesitate to consider, it would be for me, a cool cat I worked with some 20 years ago, a musicologist guru, and a really cool dude. He makes beats, produces, has his clothing line, is a yoga fiend, and is an all-round spiritual dude. We bonded over Bowie, and he opened my eyes to some of the brilliant madness of Hip-Hop. I wasn’t the best student. I got too busy reading about Marx and Co. to spin all the jams he sent me.

Thankfully, fortune favors the fool in my case as I have been able to attend this class, a raw, honest celebration of the five pillars of hip-hop, what it means in the world, and why the academy needs to take it more seriously. Something that has stood out to me through the course of writing the reading reflections for this class is my constant return to the theme of racist capitalism (i.e., ALL CAPITALISM) and the need to revolutionize the future! The two reflections posted here were an example of me finding familiarity with what I encountered in class. A familiar that was being informed by the folks in the trenches.  I was finding threads related to my line of research as an academic, and this resonated with Crawford's work translating hip-hop into a dissertation and the symbolic as it produces subjectivity and the structural similarities to vibe, and how Black bodies are already attuned to this influence. But it wasn’t just these reflections, posted here, but all of them as they shared these similar/familiar themes. Hip-hop was coming to life before my eyes as a rhetoric of action and resistance.

Hip-hop has a history and record of resisting the racist capitalist status quo and this is why I chose the group presentation that I participated in about the role of the DJ and sampling. The DJ in particular stood out to me as sort of a time travelling historian of hip-hop and its swerving place in the world around it, taking the past beats and samples and revising them in an unwritten future place of pure potentiality, then blessing us with the present of their voyage. I think in framing it within time-travel I highlight the retroactive/reciprocal nature of authorization and validity within hip-hop that resists hegemonic controls. It’s just this kind of meaning-making that I find fascinating in its influence on human subjectivity, especially for young people.

I chose Bergamo, the conference put on annually by the Journal of Curriculum Theorizing, because it’s something I know, a place where theory nerds with a passion for making the world better somehow, just like me. The influence of curriculum within our present system has preoccupied me as it has an out-sized influence on people of school age, playing a large role in how they see and interact with the world. I hope that my research can help lay bare the mechanisms of racial injustice and highlight the ways it can be resisted.

In putting this portfolio together I must confess to leaning strongly toward stuffy academic in my writing style. I was always drawn to the seemingly obscure jargon that pervaded academic writing as a young person, and still am. I dig theory and philosophy. So, as this letter will attest I meander dangerously close to life-insurance copywriter language us hither and thither. Apologies. I wish that I could naturally attest to a long and generative relationship with hip-hop. The hip-hop I knew before this class will always stand out as cool and impactful in my life, an impact that has only been deepened by this class, and the future of my relationship with hip-hop is promising, and it is this future relationship that I look to with hope in my heart. I had thought that we might learn some cool dance moves in class. It’s the first thing everyone asks me when I say that I am taking “The Rhetoric of Hip-Hop.” Oh well. I am an older, crusty white guy who can’t stand for the way this world is submitted to the rampant exploitation all around and hip-hop has given me another way, perhaps the only way, to fight the power.