“We gon be alright:” containment,creativity,and the birth of hip-hop

“It’s like a jungle sometimes

it makes wonder how I keep from going under.” ¹

—“The Message,”

Black cultural production is informed by the social and spatial conditions in which Black life is lived. ² Gospel, the blues, reggae, jazz, and other cultural forms are products of Black genius and creativity. They were nurtured in the bosom of Black humanity. They grew up in thousands of different places, but they were born in Black soil.

That these Black cultural practices come from Black places matters. “Black matters are spatial matters,” says Katherine McKittrick. ³ And the places that Black people live and congregate inform their cultural practices with a sense of purpose, a politics, and a desire to express itself in ways that matter to Black people. Black geographies give them a style, an epistemology, a flare, all of which make them infectious and wildly popular. But Black people are forced to do this under some of the most inhumane and oppressive conditions. One hallmark of these conditions is containment. Containment is a persist element of Black life. ⁴ The middle-passage, plantation slavery, Jim Crow, urban segregation, and mass incarceration are hallmarks of racist “spatial matters.” ⁵ In Chicago, for example, carceral structures were woven into Black communities, giving the feel of prisons, while aiding in their impoverishment and negatively affecting their health. ⁶

This essay examines how containment has shaped the production of Black popular culture. For generations, Black people have used popular cultural forms (music and dance, e.g.) to resist subjugation and challenge the status quo. ⁷ Therefore, my intervention will examine one of the more recent, and perhaps most well-known Black cultural expressions: hip-hop. Before diving into the subject, its necessary I give some background on hip-hop is and its emergence.

Hip-hop is an Afro-Diasporic and Latinx cultural form. It has four main elements: emceeing, DJing, breaking, and graffiti. It was born in the early 1970s in the south Bronx, NY, one of the city’s poorest boroughs. Hip-hop as an ethos: keep it real, come as you are, represent the culture in your own way. It’s a big-tent cultural form that has spawned many variations and offshoots. But at its core, hip-hop is about love. Love yourself, love your community, love your hood, love who you are and represent that to the fullest. This ethos has given rise to some of the groundbreaking art and artists: Tupac Shakur, Jay-Z, Kool Herc, Naz, Lizzo, Lauren Hill, Crazy Legs, Cypress Hill, Lin Manuel Miranda, Basquiat, A Tribe Called Quest, Tierra Whack, Grandmaster Flash, The Notorious B.I.G., Kendrick Lamar, Rhapsody, Missy Elliott, Common, SKEM, Blood Orange, Africa Bambaataa, and so many more. The flexibility and openness of hip-hop has helped make it the largest youth culture in the world. And in just 30 years, rap music—the most well-known element of hip-hop culture—has sold more records than long established music genres. Indeed, hip-hop culture is global youth culture, and rap music is global pop music. What makes this even more astounding is that this was done under containment.

The South Bronx was the signifier of urban decay: an undisputed landmark for post-industrial decline. By the mid-1970s, the Bronx lost 600,000 manufacturing jobs. ⁸ South Bronx residents were making only half New York’s average annual income and just 40% of what the rest of the nation was making. Youth unemployment was 60%, but some believe it was closer to 80%. ⁹ “Fort apache,” “the Bronx zoo,” “a city on fire” were used to describe the South Bronx. It was the words of George Sterlieb, director of the Center of Urban Policy at Rutgers university that were most striking and disingenuous. He wrote, “The world can operate very well without the South Bronx.” ¹⁰ Abandonment, destruction, indeed, razing the geography of the south Bronx were seen as viable solutions to the problem of deindustrialization, joblessness, and poverty.

New York City made no illusion that isolation was the way to deal with the south Bronx. To do this, New York City built a major expressway through the borough: the Cross-Bronx Expressway. It was a barrier that divided the borough in half. The poverty of the south Bronx was effectively contained by the structure. Designed by urban planner Robert Moses, the Cross-Bronx expressway was created to link New Jersey, Long Island, and NYC to ensure white suburban travelers’ easy access to the city. Moses could have chosen a path that would have meant less destruction of the community, but instead he ran the project right through a densely populated poor and working-class community of color. Numerous homes were destroyed, and 60,000 were displaced. ¹¹ Vacancy rates skyrocketed. Slumlords let their properties disintegrate and many let hired thugs burn their building to the ground to collect insurance money. ¹² Moses’ project supported the interest of the white middle-class against the interest of poor and working-class people of color, which intensified the vast inequalities and uneven economic development within New York City.

New York City was able to drive the expressway through the south-Bronx with the aid of a policy called Urban Renewal. It provided local municipalities with federal funds to eliminate blight from cities. Their grand plan was to tear down these blighted buildings and replace them with livable, attractive, affordable housing. Using a federal law called eminent domain, residents were forced to relocate, and their dilapidated buildings were torn down. On the surface this might sound good. In reality, it was profoundly harmful. Residents first were given paltry sums of money to move. After the demolition the land was used by the city to build expressways or athletic stadiums, or it was sold cheaply to developers who held the land for years, waiting for the value to rise. Of the thousands of buildings torn down during urban renewal (1954–1970s) only a small portion of the demolished buildings were replaced. Instead, left in their place were massive piles of bricks, abandon lots, and the forced migration of tens of thousands of people. ¹³

The negative impact this had on poor communities of color was devastating. The effects of it can still be felt to this day. The trauma and stress of having one’s emotional ecosystem destroyed fosters a psychological shock that manifest itself in faulty nervous systems, hypertension, and compromised cardiovascular systems. ¹⁴ Moreover, it sent many people into a downward spiral of addiction from which few were able to recover.

Out of the abandonment, geographic containment, and razing of the South Bronx, emerged the creation of the most powerful youth culture the world has ever seen. Within the seven-mile world of the South Bronx, hip-hop was born. And it emerged at a moment of significant economic, political, and geographic transformation.

Economically, hip hop entered the world against the backdrop of no work. In the latter 1960s, US manufacturing relocated is production to union-free, low wage, de-regulated sites in the global south, dealing the first of many death-blows to industrial workers and their labor unions. ¹⁵ Overnight, the US, once a strong manufacturing economy, became a service workforce with much of the industrial production done offshore and shipped back to the US. The children of hip-hop, whose parents were downsized and whose jobs were eliminated, came of age in a period of high unemployment, recession, and the disappearance of work.

Politically, hip-hop also faced a formidable racial backlash. On the heels of the civil rights movement, which created anti-racist public policy (the voting rights act of 1968, for instance), transformed universities (giving rise to Black studies and Women’s studies), reshaped political parties (southern Dixiecrats left the democratic party for the republicans), and exposed the centrality of race in the political and social consciousness of the nation, conservatives pushed back. Nixon’s autocratic conservatism, and the rise of Ronald Regan, signaled to the children of the hip-hop generation that the politics of the civil rights era was over, and a new more conservative (or neo-conservative) party would use the power of the state to undermine its social welfare system in an attempt to harm Black people. Republican political strategist and advisor to former President Ronald Regan captures this point explicitly when he says:

You start out in 1954 by saying, .“Nigger, nigger, nigger.” By 1968 you can’t say “nigger” — that hurts you. Backfires. So, you say stuff like forced busing, states’ rights and all that stuff. You’re getting so abstract now [that] you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] Blacks get hurt worse than whites.” ¹⁶

Geographically, hip-hop came of age under two forms of containment: racial segregation and mass incarceration. Hip-hop was born on the Black and brown side of the color-line. The South Bronx was, in the 1970s, overwhelming Black and Puerto Rican. ¹⁷ It had some of the highest rates of poverty in the city. The availably of housing was low. And what was available was burned-out, dilapidated and, in some cases, dangerous. Its housing stock consisted of housing projects created during the Second World War and walk-up apartments. ¹⁸

Like most segregated societies, the people of the south Bronx lived in isolation. Manhattan, the economic and cultural center of the city, was only a few trains stops away, but it may as well have been worlds away. As is often the case, there was something more sinister underlying this segregation—anti-blackness.

Black Americans are the only racial group to experience racial segregation. ¹⁹ In housing, education, religion, healthcare, dating, shopping, and almost all social gatherings (barring work), Black Americans live in a world unto themselves. And in the few cases were other people of color lived with or near them, they experience it too. The anti-Black nature of this segregation grew out of shifts that took place after the civil war in the 19th century. During slavery, white southerners viewed Blacks as happy, timid, and incapable of life without white rule (a U.S. version of the “white man’s burden”). The end of slavery in 1865, turned this view on its head. After emancipation, Black people in general and Black men in particular were cast as violent, criminal, and sexually rapacious. White scholars sought to prove Black criminality and sexual deviance was born into Blackness. By the time that the great migration, in which half of the south’s Black population moved to northern and western cities (like the Bronx), began during the first world war, newspapers in northern cities ran editorials about the great Black menace moving into white cities like New York, Philadelphia, and Chicago. As a result, Blacks were herded into ghettos, like the Bronx, and with the help of the federal government, were denied access to housing outside Black neighborhoods. ²⁰

Linking criminality and sexual deviance also justified and laid the ideological groundwork to make prison and prison like-containment for many Blacks a daily reality. Without actually entering prison, many Black people live in them. No, this is not a metaphorical prison, but a physical one. U.S. racial segregation is enabled by carceral logic. Prison-like practices and techniques were deployed into the “innocent” spaces of Black life. Policing, surveillance, and mechanisms of containment (the Cross-Bronx expressway) were woven into the quotidian living spaces of poor and working-class Blacks. ²¹ These mechanisms created a world in which Blacks were not simply segregated but contained. This containment was part of the architecture of post-World War II public housing; it is visible in how Black communities were policed. This would have devastating implications, affecting performances of gender, economic immobility, and health. ²²

This prisonization of Black life had its most salient expression during the latter 20th century when the prison population grew exponentially. Deindustrialization and the civil rights backlash would help to make crime, particularly drug crime, the engine behind the great prison build-up.

Hip-hop came of age under mass incarceration. If mass incarceration has a soundtrack, it is rap music. Under Nixon, Regan, Bush, Clinton, and Bush II, the US continued its longest running war—the drug war. With growing joblessness, the punishment industry relied on the bodies of poor Black and brown people to become what Angela Y. Davis calls the “raw material” for its growth. ²³ Between 1973 and 2000, the US incarnation rate grew to astonishing levels. In 1973, 161 per 100,000 people were behind bars; by 2000 it was 767. It had quintupled! Black Americans constituted 12% of the national population. Yet, they were half the nation’s 2 million prisoners. While the numbers are devastating, they conceal the dangerous ways prison made its way into hip-hop culture and Black life. From the very beginning, emcees rapped about incarceration. By the early 1990s prison had become so linked to Black life and hip-hop that prison ascetics—baggy pants, exposed boxer shorts, bodies covered in tattoos—were becoming common place among emcees and lovers of hip-hop. By the 2000s the lines were so crossed that it was hard to distinguish where hip-hop began and where prison ended.

Against the backdrop of this containment and isolation, the creators of hip-hop chose to “dance their way out of their constrictions,” to paraphrase Parliament Funkadelic. ²⁴ In other words, they drew on art as a response to isolation, containment, and poverty. They turned to art not just to make beautiful things (which they did). They created art to save their lives.

From the start, hip-hop was multiracial. Black and Puerto Rican youth in the Bronx birthed it. Working class white kids rounded out its demography. Black youth were active in all four elements of hip-hop. But emceeing is the only one to come out of Black cultural expression. It’s part of the lineage of Baptist preachers, the blues, and jazz, all of which emerge in relation to the political milieu of racism, white supremacy, and segregation. ²⁵

To paraphrase the British intellectual giant, Stuart Hall, “the Black in hip-hops’ Black cultural expression,” is “impure” and “hybridized.” ²⁶ Indeed, the “Black” youth in the Bronx was Afrodiasporic. Dominicans, Puerto Ricans, Jamaicans, Barbadians, and Black Americans were living in the Bronx together when the culture was formed. But they were tied together through their collective experience with colonialism, slavery, anti-Black racism, and white supremacy.

This fact imbued hip-hop with an ethos, an identity, a consciousness. Cedrick Robinson called it a “Black radical Tradition.” It provides Black people with way of understanding the world and their relationship to it. It embraces metaphysical and collective freedom. And it fought to reshape history by changing the presumption that Africans did not, as Hegel argued, make history. And they achieved this by giving their lives for the pursuit of freedom. They defined the terms of their own destruction and created a radical politics that pre-dates European and Marxist radicalism. ²⁷

Rap music and hip-hop culture draws strength form the Black radical tradition. Like other forms of Black art, hip-hop embraces the lived reality of Black life, eschews bourgeois ideals and individualism, and makes art on its own terms. Living under conditions of unfreedom created a platform. Hip-hop used it to contemplate freedom, while creating innovative art and new ontologies of freedom along the way. The bold innovation of graffiti, the acrobatic dance of breaking, the inventiveness of DJing, and the mesmerizing storytelling though rhyme of rap music are expressions of Black people living under horrible conditions and finding value, meaning, and joy in the midst of it. They transformed the Bronx. Poor, burned-out, and closed in it was, but hip-hop showed that the Bronx was not static. They remixed the geography of containment and poverty into one of freedom and “furious styles.” ²⁸

They did it by using their abandonment and containment to physically remake the space of the Bronx and to cultivate their art. The kids who created hip-hop had passion to create, but no resources. They went to underperforming schools. They had no musical training, no access to instruments or painting materials or dance programs. Poverty brought on by deindustrialization eroded the tax base. White New Yorkers fled the city for the suburbs, taking their tax money with them, fueling the elimination of arts programs from Bronx Schools, in the process. ²⁹

Like those before them, Bronx youth defined the terms of their own artistic expression. Creativity sprouted from the rubble that contained them. The city became an art studio where B-girls and B-boys, emcees, DJ’s, and arousal artists used subway trains and station, walls, parks, and abandoned buildings, as sites for the expression of hip-hop. Before it had a name, hip-hop, crept into the public life of South Bronx residents. It was everywhere. Going “all city,” which meant getting your Graffiti on the subway trains that traveled to multiple boroughs, helped hip-hop spread throughout the city. B-girl and b-boy crews developed in queens, Brooklyn, and Harlem. And DJ’s like Afrika Bambaataa, did shows in downtown Manhattan. By the mid-1970s all five boroughs were developing their own distinct hip-hop cultures.

Hip-hop turned the contained world of the Bronx into fertile ground for the development of art and culture. It birthed and nurtured the world’s most powerful youth culture and it demonstrated that poor and working-class kids of color were architects of social and spatial transformation. Hip-hop showed those who were contained could create pathways for freedom. By dancing their way out of their constructions, hip-hop turned the physical and social walls that contained them into bridges.