Whatever You Say I Am_ The Life and Times of Eminem - Anthony Bozza [60]
The history of hip-hop can be set in contexts as flexible as the culture’s boundaries. Books such as Nelson George’s Hip-Hop America; Ishmael Reed’s poetry anthology, From Totems to Hip-Hop; The Hip-Hop Generation by Bakari Kitwana; When Chickenheads Come Home to Roost by Joan Morgan; and Vibe History of Hip-Hop all dissect the culture from within and without with clearheaded intellect. Others, such as the Ego Trip’s Book of Rap Lists and Ego Trip’s Big Book of Racism, make their point with fierce, bitter humor as freewheeling and embracive as hip-hop itself. Nineties academics such as Professors Herb Boyd, Cornel West, Tricia Rose, and Michael Eric Dyson bring the after-party to the ivory tower to dissect the breadth of hip-hop’s implications, particularly now, when the culture has attained a global scope.
The following cursory overview skips over the three decades of hip-hop and the socioeconomic factors that shaped the hip-hop revolution. The purpose here is to trace hip-hop’s path to national exposure via mainstream avenues such as MTV, to understand how the culture has spread and been perceived by generations so far. In doing so, I hope to shed light on the effect that Eminem has had on hip-hop at the turn of the century and how, when, and why hip-hop shaped him. Hip-hop is such an elastic-rich culture that tracing its artistic roots is a question of how deep to dig.
A musicologist bent on true beginnings would begin in Africa, tracing the slave ships and slave songs to the Caribbean and, ultimately, to America. In Africa, tribes used a variety of rhythm instruments to communicate over distance, including, as their instrument-building skills advanced, talking drums. Among the Ashanti of West Africa, the drums were the town criers and first newspapers. Flexing lengths of animal hide stretched along the sides of the drum, the drummer could achieve a variety of tones, bending them to mimic the octave changes that were employed in African languages to change the meaning of words. The intricate rhythms traditionally retold the tribe’s past glories in celebratory ceremonies but were also used in war and mourning, as well as for sending messages to neighboring villages more quickly than a swift runner could.
The talking drummers recorded history in soundscapes, conveying the past to the present and the present to an extended community like a deft DJ. They were later joined by the griots, who, like the bards of Europe, crafted the trials and tribulations of their nation into long oral poems, memorized and set to song and passed along to each generation. Griots were the first historians, the original MCs. Africans uprooted by the slave trade and brought to the New World turned the griot tradition into what we now know as the blues, arguably the root of all modern popular music.
A social-sciences professor investigating hip-hop might begin with the culture’s sense of community and point out that hip-hop’s closest ancestor is jazz, the musical form of the black working class from the forties to the sixties. From the bebop innovations of Charlie Parker through the mind-blowing redefinitions of Miles Davis and the intergalactic freedom of John Coltrane’s late work, jazz has been a canvas of innovative African-American musical expression (that has since wilted, for the most part, into the vapid castrato of Kenny G). Jazz shares the scat vocal tradition with hip-hop as well; the storytelling being suffused with so much rhythm and feeling at times that only sound will do. Jazz swaggered with a cool confidence that defied segregation and racism with soul and style, and reflected the tribulations of black Americans. Like hip-hop, jazz connected with white audiences and was absorbed into mainstream white culture.
A historian studying hip-hop would couch the evolution of the form in the context of postwar, pre-eighties economic conditions in inner cities. The nutrients and waste products that fertilized the soil of hip-hop were America’s edgy, depressed post-Vietnam mood, widespread speed