The all-out arrogant backlash against the community compassion movements of the mid twentieth century led to a situation so problematic (building highways through struggling communities of color in the South Bronx) that many urban neighborhoods literally began to resemble war zones (Bowser 2012: Kindle locations 338-84). The hip-hop social movement emerged in response. In 1973, the late Gil Scott-Heron, who might be thought of as the progenitor of hip hop, described this time as “Winter in America.” I’ve embedded a YouTube link to a recording of Scott-Heron performing this piece in 2010.
Youth gangs in such profoundly traumatized neighborhoods actually formed to provide desperately needed protection and order. Their communities had been devastated by everything from loss of employment opportunities and school funding to disastrous public works projects and drug addiction. Then they were also deserted by police, fire, and other city services. Hip hop as a social institution essentially took on the role of the invisible institution from antebellum times that brought diverse people together to bring the rain for a new river of community. Benjamin Bowser wrote that:
Hip hop remained open and flexible for another local reason. Apart from its poverty, the South Bronx was characterized by extraordinary ethnic diversity compared to most U.S. ghettos. Neighbors could be from Nigeria, India, China, Vietnam, Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, Cuba, Haiti, Jamaica, and 20 other islands in the Caribbean, each with distinct histories and cultures.
The “hip hip hybridity” in the title comes from the closing chapter of a 2004 monograph by Guthrie P. Ramsey. Ramsey introduces the term and suggests that the hybridity that hip-hop brings to Blackamerican sacred music is removing the need for Du Boisian double consciousness as a “master trope” (Ramsey 2004: 192-213). Ramsey wrote,
Policing the boundaries of black religious expression in the West is an activity that reaches back centuries. The historical record documents negative reactions to black religious practices from a range of detractors that includes both black and white critics. A self-conscious hybridity has marked the development of African American religious practices since their appearance in the New World. Scholars trace many of these tendencies back to the ring shout of slave culture. Accounts describing the ring shout abound in the literature of missionaries, travelers, and abolitionists, among others. A typical report describes religious services that combine elements of dance, storytelling, singing, and shouting from the African heritage within the context of a Christian worship service spoken in English. From the beginning, the syncretism that characterized the ring shout was condemned as heathenish, barbaric, and profane in much the same spirit as miscegenation was.
Most scholarly explanations of the ring shout highlight the collision of European and African practices embedded in the ritual. But another mixture is just as important. Practices like the ring shout together with other expressive practices of early African American culture resulted from the blending of many ethnic groups among the enslaved Africans. Moreover, the continual flow of blacks from the Caribbean to North America during the years of the slave trade brought another dimension of cultural negotiation to the process of African American culture. Hybridity, in other words, has always been a part of the background and pedigree of African American culture.
Hybridity has clearly shaped the religious realm. Thomas Dorsey’s mix of blues and gospel in the 1920s and 1930s; Rosetta Tharpe’s blend of jazz and gospel during the 1940s; Edwin Hawkins’s and Andre Crouch’s pop-gospel of the late 1960s; and the Winanses’ smooth-soul gospel of the 1980s were all seen as hybrid—and quite controversial—expressions in their day. Few social or musical boundaries have been considered too contentious to cross in black religious music’s quest for expressive resources. This tendency for hybridity links gospel to the larger world of black diasporic religious practices to which it belongs. This system… existed as permeable and additive with respect to its relationship to other cultures.
The MC-ing of hip hop, which became the rap “music” of modern Western culture started out simply as a way of bringing people together to create community. The words of the MC were initially just spoken words to encourage and inspire the dancing people. This improvisational poetry focused specifically on addressing the immediate and present community.
God Hop, a term that Five Percenter and Nation of Islam artists have used for their rap music (Miyakwa 2005: 21), directly confronts the globally commodifying social structure. It–and other “conscious” rap music–provided what I have characterized as a feeling of pentecostal “rushing wind” and “tongues of fire.” About eight years after rap music first gained national attention, “Public Enemy, the rap collective featuring lead MC Chuck D, ‘trickster’ Flavor Flav, and a back-up militia crew… produced its first album, Yo! Bum Rush the Show, in 1987,” according to Miyakawa who quoted Chuck D from Nation Conscious Rap (Eure 1991: 359)
I try to bring the youth into a level where they’ll be interested to even begin to get into what the minister’s speaking and the teachings of Elijah Muhammad, and the reason for self sufficiency in America, and the curiosity to learn more about themselves.
The “hardness” of songs like the title track of embedded below empowered conscious “rap” music in general to crossover to white audiences, and also to inspire people in other cultures who would respond with conscious rap of their own (Bowser 2012: Kindle locations 891-1051).
A significant problem arises, however, concerning God Hop in particular and much of rap music in general. Miyakawa points out that God Hop’s message is often so coded and complex that casual and uninitiated listeners may often end up hearing messages that do not seem all of that different from Gangsta Rap (Miyakawa 2005: 71-2), which Bowser and other scholars characterize as a reversal of blackface minstrelsy (Bowser 2012: Kindle locations 891-1251).
Concerning the effects of globalization on the struggle for human community ecology, Bowser wrote:
[T]he civil rights movement collapsed not simply because of the assassination of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. The movement’s initial focus was on an anachronism in industrial society, the Jim Crow laws still in force in the South. By outlawing Jim Crow segregation in the South (like later outlawing apartheid in South Africa), the national government did not have to touch essential keys to industrial life and its profits—namely, economic segregation and racial inequality. In fact, the civil rights movement came up against its strongest and most effective opposition when King began to address industry-based economic inequality. Even if he had lived, his efforts were too late. Globalization was already too far along, making international corporations, banks, and investor groups—not government—the main arbiters of American social life. National governments are now no more than subdivisions of increasingly powerful corporate entities. As subordinate entities, state departments and militaries have new roles. One is to advance corporate market shares and profits. Another role of national governments is to prevent increasingly impoverished national populations from challenging corporate dominance.
Jeff Chang described the effects of globalization upon the hip-hop generation as a “war on youth.” In the context of this essay. It might be best understood as a war on compassion.
All of this brings me back to the parable sung in the spiritual “I Got a Home in that Rock,” as perhaps the underlying “rock” of compassion in Anthropocene of human nature and perhaps of non-human nature as well. I’ve pasted the lyrics in below from an attributed online source. In terms of what has been said so far, Lazarus represents our compassion. The rich man represents our arrogance:
I got a home in that rock, well, don’t you see?
Way between the earth and sky
I thought I heard my Savior cryWell-a poor Lazarus poor as I
When he died he had a home on high
He had a home in that rock don’t you see?The rich man died and lived so well
When he died he had a home in Hell
He had no home in that rock, well, don’t you see?God gave Noah the rainbow sign
No more water but the fire next time
He had a home in that rock, well, don’t you see?You better get a home in that rock, don’t you see?
“I Got a Home in that Rock” is presented below in a modern jazz style by The Golden Gate Quartet.
In the current context, I imagine “the fire next time” in the final verse—which is also the title of a novel by James Baldwin (1924-1987)—as also differentiating the ecological compassion of water from the technological arrogance of fire.
I like to think of what has preceded as offering a problem-solving hypothesis for the unfolding crises of our times. That’s why there’s a question mark in the title. But it’s really just a Blackamerican creation story that in some ways feels like a personal re-imagining of what James Noel described as Black Religion and the Imagination of Matter in the Atlantic World. There’s no way to determine, however, if my personal re-imagining has added any real value—in particular as a problem solving hypothesis—without sharing it. So, here it is.
A more contemporary musical expression that seems to resonate most closely to the tone of this particular essay would be the “Liquid Spirit” by Gregory Porter as embedded below:
Introduction / Chapter 1 / Chapter 2 / Chapter 3 / Chapter 4 / Chapter 5 / Chapter 6 / Chapter 7
Peace Jungle 