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The State of the Hip-Hop Generation: How Hip-Hop’s Cultural Movement is Evolving into Political Power

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 February 2024

Bakari Kitwana
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Abstract

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In the short decade between 1985 and 1995, the dominant cultural movement of our time, hip-hop culture, has become, seemingly overnight, mainstream American popular culture. This centering of hip-hop art, most specifically rap music, in American popular culture has given young African Americans unprecedented national and international visibility, at a historical time when images via the 21st century's public square of television, film and the internet are more critical to identity than ever. This visibility, and most certainly the often anti-Black and stereotypical images that accompany it, forces distinctions to be drawn between today's Black popular culture and traditional ideas of Black culture, including what is art and what's at stake in cultural commodification.

Type
Research Article
Information
Diogenes , Volume 51 , Issue 3 , August 2004 , pp. 115 - 120
Copyright
Copyright © ICPHS 2004

References

Notes

1. The term ‘bling-bling’ became prevalent in hip-hop lyrics beginning in the late 1990s, made popular by rappers like Jay-Z, Foxy Brown, Lil Kim, Mase and Puff Daddy. It generally refers to expensive platinum and diamond-encrusted jewelry and the light reflected by such. The term as I use it here also suggests status-centric high-priced commodities of American consumer culture.

2. The terms ‘bytch’ and ‘ho’ frequently used in hip-hop for the last 14 years generally refer to Black and Latino women. Prior to the late 1980s, these terms were rarely used in hip-hop, but have gained frequency as members of the hip-hop generation have become caught up in America’s criminal justice system as a result of the US war on drugs that disproportionately targets poor Black and Latino neighborhoods. These terms, as they are used in hip-hop to refer to women, have their roots in American prisons where a hierarchy is formed among men using the same.

3. SNCC: Student Non violent Co-ordinating Committee. A national organization founded by young people, mostly college students, in 1960 during the civil rights movement, SNCC was created with the help of SCLC and with the vision that young people should have their own organization. SNCC was a training ground for key leaders of the Black Power Movement which would emerge in the late 1960s and early 1970s and is often a point of reference for hip-hop generation activists for what’s missing in our own generation.

4. Barbershop, a popular 2002 movie that caused a generational rift. In the film the actor and comedian Cedric the Entertainer makes disparaging remarks about Jesse Jackson, Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King, Jr. Civil-righters found the references to be disrespectful. Hip-hop thought the old-school response showed how out of touch they are with young people.