In an earlier article I asked the reader to consider the hypothesis that we were at the end of Hip-Hop history.  I asked the reader to consider whether Hip-Hop as a distinctly African-American phenomenon has in principle reached the end of its innovative stage.  Having been an on and off observer of Hip-Hop for the past twenty five years, it is my opinion that for Black American Hip-Hop to make any substantial strides at this point, true Hip-Hop artists will need to study the history of Hip-Hop.

In this way, they will able to make the necessary adjustments so that American Hip-Hop will continue to be relevant as a constructive artistic and cultural phenomenon, and not simply as a commercial one.  Personally, I am skeptical about this happening, but it is not impossible.  To understand my meaning more clearly, let us take a look at one of the most important events in the history of Hip-Hop:  the creation and global mass distribution of the film feature and Hip-Hop epic, Beat Street (1984).

A watershed in global Hip-Hop history, Beat Street is a comic-tragic Romance and concert film about the Black and Hispanic youth sub-culture in the Bronx, NY, during the early 1980’s.  This film played an important role in opening up new and future markets for Hip-Hop’s commercial products, but it is not what we would call today a “commercial film”.  The film is created to entertain, but also to instruct, almost like a PBS documentary.  For brevity, one could look at Beat Street as Hip-Hop’s answer to Martin Scorsese’s Mean Streets.  It is the first great testament of Hip-Hop, as it self-consciously announces itself to the world.

The film introduces to a mass American and European audience to the following innovative inner city sub-cultural forms: “break-dancing”; “graffiti mural art”; a variety of “turntable/discotheque innovations”; “the art of rapping”.  It is important to note that Hip-Hop did not necessarily invent all or any of these forms specifically, but instead they came together, both consciously and accidentally, into a kind of temporary equilibrium, at a certain time and place.

Beat Street primarily is a film about brilliant young artists, who are obviously very talented, dedicated, and skilled, but whose chosen artistic form is misunderstood by the middle class American public, White, Black, and Hispanic.  It is a story about innovative young artists, who are genuinely creating and exploring new artistic forms, and primarily dedicated to their work as progressive artists and servants of the people.  Furthermore, they are creating these forms out of that which middle class American society has disposed, abandoned and/or despises.  It is a film about young artists from the inner city ghetto turning “garbage into gold”.

However, “gold” is understood quite differently than in contemporary rap music.  “Gold” is not money, but instead the artistic fruits of a brilliant young artist’s experience, introspection, and well-honed technical skill.  “Gold” signifies the art which is a product of the young artist’s irrepressible will to create, and to make the seemingly dismal and depressing world of the Bronx, NY ghettoes into works of beauty and art.  This is best represented in the character of the New York-Rican graffiti mural artist, Ramón, who literally sacrifices his life for his art, and to make the ghetto-world around him a work of art and beauty.  Specifically, his goal is to make his fellow New Yorkers perceive themselves as living in an “island paradise”, akin to Puerto Rico, through the vehicle of graffiti mural art.  As Melle Mel’s title track suggests:

“Every time you touch a spray paint can,

Michelangelo’s soul controls your hand.”

It is interesting to note that the new Bronx expressways built during the post-war period, which were said to destroy the traditional Bronx neighborhoods, and set in motion the extreme “urban blight” of the 1970’s and 1980’s, became focal points of Hip-Hop cultural practice.  The Black and Hispanic youth in the Bronx were literally building their new sub-culture on the ruins of the older civil order, which had been abruptly uprooted by executive decree, and the perceived need for better avenues for the “flow of traffic”, to and from the newly settled suburbs.

Former inhabitants, particularly upwardly mobile White Catholics and Jews, watched as their old Bronx neighborhoods were either completely destroyed, or had decayed to a point of putrification, and they fled in mass.  Beat Street is a film about brilliant young artists demonstrating to the outside world the beauty hidden in the harsh exterior and harsh realities of these Bronx ghettoes, and subsequently setting themselves the task of beautifying these neighborhoods, as well as making others see this disguised beauty, through music, dance, and visual art.  Where others see urban blight and decay, they see, reveal, and create beauty and art.

One of Plato’s most famous works, the Apology of Socrates, is literally Plato’s version of the speech Socrates delivered at his trial, a defense or “apology” against charges of capital crimes.  These charges were specifically that Socrates was a citizen of Athens, “who corrupted the young, did not believe in the gods, and created new deities”.  Hip-Hop has traditionally come under similar charges.  Of course, these charges are worded in more contemporary American English.  Nevertheless, rap music and videos have been repeatedly accused of corrupting young people’s minds, of creating false idols, and propagating unsavory mores on a mass scale.

Indeed, rap music has recently been called under investigation by the US Congress for promoting pernicous opinions of the female sex, particularly Black women, and rightly so.  In the Platonic sense, Beat Street is Hip-Hop’s first and (in this writer’s humble opinion) greatest apology.  This is not to say that there have not been substantial and important advancements in Hip-Hop since 1984, but instead that this film is the greatest defense yet created that Hip-Hop seriously has something to contribute to American or Western art, culture, and/or civilization.

The concept of the phrase “beat street” at the most basic level signifies the ghetto street itself, as the young inner-city artist experiences it.  The Bronx neighborhoods where Hip-Hop developed in its formative stages had a certain character, with distinct rhythms of everyday life.  This is reflected in the particular way that the young males strut in the ghetto streets.  Moreover, music, both performed live and played on stereos, mobile and immobile, pervades these streets.  Furthermore, these are neighborhoods of conflicting cultures, Black, Hispanic, and ethnic White, and each ethnicity tends to play a different kind of music, in their tenement apartments, in their cars, and in the streets, and sometimes simultaneously.  People live in cramped conditions.

The music of these streets is not entirely harmonious, but instead there is a great deal of dissonance, from technological media of various forms, from the constant sounds of cars and trains, and other typical forms of modern urban noise pollution.  Hip-Hop music and culture has a certain dissonance at its core, which generally remains unresolved at the end of the performance.  Listening to Hip-Hop is a continual process of coping with dissonance.