While America’s Hip-Hop is again under scrutiny within the black community as a stereotypical haven of gangsta rap, drugs, and negative urban lifestyle, the real hip-hop culture as a political movement continues to flourish globally.
That was the message during the two-day “Poetics & Politics of Hip-Hop Cultures Symposium” that took place at the University of Arizona in Tucson February 7-8, 2013.
The UA received worldwide attention late last year when it introduced the nation’s first “Minor in Africana Studies with Concentration in Hip-Hop Cultures.” Joining a growing number of international academics working to legitimize serious scholarly study of the movement’s ability to bridge cultural divides by intersecting with politics and culture in contemporary societies - an aspect ignored in the U.S., according to Alain-Philippe Durand, the symposium’s principal organizer and UA's Africana studies department head.
“Probably only a few of the American media understand this. And for sure, the majority of the American population does not,” Durand told USAonRace.
Durand, who is also author of the 2002 book, “Black, Blanc, Beur: Rap Music, and Hip-Hop Culture in the Francophone World,” notes that Hip-Hop as a cultural force in global issues is much more understood in France, especially during the French Presidential elections last year.
“French rappers and other hip-hop artists were part of the debate, asked their opinions by French media, and not just by popular culture media. Whereas, it was certainly not the case in the U.S. during the Presidential elections,” says Durand. “Another example is to see what happened in Senegal during their last presidential elections, when a rap collective named Y en a marre forced President Wade to leave power.”
Hi-Hop has so influenced mainstream American culture as a multi-billion dollar industry that corporations have embraced – if not taken it over - as a means of marketing virtually everything. And in the same way American politicians have fallen all over themselves to embrace the Hispanic vote, hip-hop has become a “targeted demographic.” Republican Senator Marco Rubio praised hip-hop and President Obama is a big enough fan that he invited rapper Jay-Z to his 2013 inauguration. It’s a big change from 1992, when Republican Vice President Dan Quayle called rapper Tupac’s celebrated first album a disgrace, noting: “There is absolutely no reason for a record like this to be published by a responsible corporation.”
So can Hip-Hop as a political movement do anything in the U.S. to change the racial attitudes that seem to remain prevalent even with an African American president?
“This is hard to say. One thing for sure is that it cannot hurt but it will be a long process,” says Durand. “It is one thing for people to accept and like hip-hop culture, it is another to have people embrace it as something respectable and serious; that is important and should be part of political debates. We are very far from this in the US, and we are still very far from changing completely these racial attitudes, unfortunately.”