That's The Joint: The Hip-Hop Studies Reader

Though you’d view it with surprise, there was a time when rap lyrics weren’t about murder, wife beatings, gold rings, or revenge. There was also a time when graffiti wasn’t meant to be hateful vandalism. When it all began, it was about brightening a city that was a dreary, grimy, smoggy mess. The graffiti may have been an eyesore to most, but without it, the NYC subway cars were already filthy. It’s not like the city ever bothered to clean them.

That’s the Joint portrays hip-hop as a tree growing out of garbage and rubble. Everything to do with hip-hop and graffiti spread by word of mouth, not by the press or radio (these were the pre-internet days of course.) In Jeff Chang’s essay Zulus on a Time Bomb: Hip Hop Meets Rockers Downtown he portrays graffiti as having been obscure until Henry Chalfant began photographing it. Chalfant was a classically trained sculptor, by the way, who became fascinated by subway car murals, and his photos brought it mainstream. Of course you then had the big businesses try to cash in on it, and then Mayor Kotch put greater effort into power-washing the paint off the cars, so the graffiti craze quickly ended.

This book has neither illustrations nor photos, so it comes off more as a serious study of history than anything else. There weren’t any real surprises in the book, and that isn’t necessarily a bad thing either; I watched the VH1 documentary NY77: The Coolest Year in Hell, which also tells the story of hip-hop’s origins. When it began in the late 1970’s New York City, it was more about cheap amusement than fighting. In fact hip-hop shows were a refuge from crime and violence. The equipment was bargain-basement stuff, and the performers and DJ’s didn’t prance around in gold chains. Similarly, with punk rock (also gaining ground at the time) the “fashions” were thrift-store rejects. In the documentary The Filth and the Fury, John Lydon recounts how the leather jacket emblem of punk rock was based on a misconception:

None of us could afford fifty quid for a leather jacket, not in UK in 1978. None of us had that kind of money. He must’ve stolen his, and then you see him in the papers in his leather jacket, and all of a sudden, you have all these kids wearing them.

However, I did not agree with much of what Michael Eric Dyson says in Cover Your Eyes as I Describe a Scene So Violent. He blames the NRA for perpetuating the US gun culture, and blames violence in the “Ghetto” on smaller and smaller living spaces. But this isn’t true for several reasons; first off, the NRA neither advertises nor lobbies towards black men, and secondly, in the most violent neighborhoods there is no shortage of housing. The South Bronx and Jamaica in NYC, South Side of Chicago, Compton in LA, and the worst parts of Detroit are teeming with massive housing projects and/or empty buildings. In the controversial All God’s Children: The Bosket Family and the American Tradition of Violence, the author Fox Butterfield has a different approach, no guns involved. He blames black-on-black killing as a low-class southern habit. He claims that in the Old South, there was a culture of revenge; the word no was an insult, and all insults had to be avenged (just like in Naples, Italy and in Albania, and often in Latin America.) The “you disrespect me, I’ll pop you one,” phenomena didn’t originate in Africa.

That’s the Joint makes up for what it lacks in illustrations with some great writing by top notch writers. Even when some of these writers are wrong, it still makes you think. Hip-hop is controversial, as it was 30 years ago, and will still be controversial in later years. I remember back in 1991, my parents were watching The Beatles movie Magical Mystery Tour and said “their lyrics were smart, this rap garbage won’t last.” Well it’s been 23 years, and rap sure did last. I’m going use this book when I teach US history to high school students from now on. In the past decade there’s been a mania for all the music and fashions of the early 1980’s, which none of the aficionados are old enough to remember. It would be wonderful for them to learn where it all originated.