Deeper Than Words

In this exclusive interview, Jeff Chang, journalist and award-winning author of Can’t Stop Won’t Stop and A History of the Hip-Hip Generation; and Joan Morgan, award-winning journalist and author of When Chickenheads Come Home to Roost, discuss the definition of hip-hop; how inclusiveness has become its shortcoming; and the lack of ownership within the culture.

SM: What is your definition of hip-hop?

JM: You know, I’m gonna have to say that I never do this. It’s one of those questions that I rarely answer and the reason why I don’t answer it is because of the debate of what is hip-hop by definition versus what is rap music. To me, it is really most important to people who function outside of the culture. I think that if you are a part of the hip-hop culture, you instinctively and intuitively know what hip-hop is. And if you’re outside, you’re searching for a definition.

So, the reason I don’t give a definition is because I don’t know what outside people are looking for when they ask that. I think a lot of the distinction between what is rap and what is hip-hop to me feels like semantics at the end of the day or people needing to make sense out of something that they find confusing. But to me, on a really intuitive artistic level, I just know hip-hop when I see it, and that can be something as clear-cut as break-dancing and graffiti. It could also be the way a line of poetry is delivered in a non-hip-hop way or a way a line of literature is written and delivered. I just aesthetically recognize that.

JC: I like that answer because there’s a certain amount of art room for it to grow. It’s kinda like this: if you’re able to boil it down to three sentences, then you’ve got a business plan and it’s not what art wants to always be. I like Joan’s characterizing it in that sense. The other way I’ve come at the question is to say that by now, it’s almost like the generation of world views, so it’s the way people approach not just art aesthetics, but also politics. For me, I can see hip-hop in everything. Well, not everything. Music is kinda the fundamental metaphor that it’s always been, but it branches out into all these other art forms as well.

SM: Should we be concerned about the inclusiveness of hip-hop? That, as it evolves, it will become watered-down or misinterpreted?

JM: That’s a very interesting question and I think that it’s something that people have been grappling with for the last 20 years. What will happen to this thing as it grows? I actually find that it’s something that no one has any control over…it’s not something any of us can contain and I don’t think that anyone should. I think that we look alot at the inclusiveness of hip-hop, but we don’t look at the power of what has happened globally. We talk about it in relation to how we experience it in the United States, and I find when you turn the world views on and give it that lens, all you can see is the immense power of this art form and I don’t think hip-hop loses anything. I think inclusiveness just adds to it.

JC: With this question of hip-hop and non-Black cultures, non-Black people, and how they interact with it, I think we could spend a long time talking about this. What we’re faced with in this particular moment of history within the U.S. is trying to understand exactly how we got to a point in which many of us feel a disconnect with the kinds of hip-hop that we loved and the kind of hip-hop that is represented at large. That’s the debate that’s been going on for at least two decades. Way back in the 80s, there were old-schoolers looking at the hip-hop coming out back then and going, ‘That’s not hip-hop,‘ so there’s this whole cycle of death and rebirth that it goes through. Part of the worry that we have is, ‘Will it maintain some sort of vitality and continue to evolve?’

And we’ve had this conversation — those of us now on the upper-end of this generation. Do we let it go, make room for it to come in, or should we try to preserve and conserve it? What do we do? What is our responsibility? I think part of our responsibility is to be able to continue to be as critical as we’ve always been and continue to develop our critical faculties and understandings of the culture and its place in the world. And at the same time, pass on stuff which younger people may decide to pick-up and may not decide to pick-up. Either way, it’s gonna be fine.

SM: How does hip-hop go about owning a bigger piece of the pie? And how is it, during a time when hip-hop does not own much of itself, that Imus’ comments left hip-hop alone to defend itself?

JC: When you’re talking about a group of Black music executives getting together and deciding that they’d like to do something…the truth of the matter is, they really don’t have any “juice” in that sense. They have no strength of enforcement, they have no way to compel other folks within the industry to fall in line. They [the industry] are a small group of folks that are happy to have hip-hop out there taking the fall, taking the brunt of the fire while they’re off making global deals.

But in terms of the “juice,” it lies with those distant boards of directors who don’t have to deal with shareholder unrest anymore because they learned their lesson during the 90s. They are really concerned about consolidating the media and entertainment into one economy. And that’s the real thing that’s going on here.

JM: I’m not sure that if we did own a piece of the hip-hop pie, it would make that much of a difference. What has happened with the artists that we’ve seen — who’ve become the most commercially successful — is that they have become capitalists. They’ve gained a strong understanding of how corporate America works. They’ve gained a very strong understanding about how important branding is in this economy, and they are figuring out how to maximize to the utmost to get their own personal piece. And what I’m getting from artists is this, ‘Corporate America is this big bad evil machine, but if I can get something from it and work that system in a savvy enough way, that’s what I’m going to do.’