Posted by Recently, Azealia Banks has gotten into a huge battle with the white Australian rapper Iggy Azalea over Iggy’s cultural appropriation of blackness, calling it a “cultural smudging”. As we have moved further and further away from the founding of the genre, as the older heads recede from the game, hip hop risks losing its sense of history.
I came in to hip hop in the late-1980’s through mid-1990’s when political rap was at its popular forefront – Public Enemy, Ice-T, NWA and its solo member offshoots Ice Cube and Dr Dre, A Tribe Called Quest, Snoop Doggy Dogg, even Arrested Development. A suburban kid can’t really relate to those conditions but the music was authentic, real, harsh, raw and sometimes funny. And did it ever sound great, lyrically and sonically. Dr. Dre’s Ain’t Nuthin’ but a G Thang still ranks among my favorite songs of all-time. Grandmaster Flash & the Furious Five’s The Message was jarring, to say the least.
As such, Iggy Azalea and folks of her ilk, who willfully disregard hip hop’s socio-political history, are the new minstrels. To simply mimic the very vocal patterns within which hip hop was established, when that is not her modus operandi, and to make an exaggerated fetish of some behaviors is to disrespect the genre. It is profoundly inauthentic. No one who truly cares about the genre and isn’t just looking to make a buck (or an aussie) should applaud it.
Aamer Rahman takes the significance of this appropriation a step further:
A white rapper like Iggy Azalea acts out signifiers which the white majority associates with black culture – hyper sexuality, senseless materialism, an obsession with drugs, money and alcohol – as well as adopting clothing, speech and music – as a costume that they can put on and discard at will. It’s a cheap circus act.
For me, hip hop will never be successfully divorced from its socio-political roots. That sense of injustice, of describing and railing against an unfair world is the very reason why the genre took off. Even the bravado, the clever rhymes and staged rap battles arise, to my mind, from a sense of wanting to fight back, to rage, rage against the dying of the light.
“Today I didn’t even have to use my AK. I gotta say it was a good day.”
Q-Tip, in an epic series of tweets to Iggy Azalea, patiently explained the history of hip hop. This part caught my attention:
Hiphop now was FOR EVERYBODY!! All of those who cld relate to the roots, the spirit, the history, the energy.. It reached YOU… it touched your spirit n took u up. We magnetized you! That’s what BRILLANCE does… now u are fulfilling your dreams … BUT! you have to take into account the HISTORY as you move underneath the banner of hiphop. As I said before… hiphop is fun it’s vile it’s dance it’s traditional it’s light hearted but 1 thing it can never detach itself from is being a SOCIO-Political movement.
U may ask why … Well once you are born black your existence I believe is joined with socio-political epitaph and philos based on the tangled and treacherous history SLAVERY alone this is the case it never leaves our conversation… Ever. WeAther in our universities our dinner tables our studios or jail cells… the effects still resononates with us. It hurts… We get emotional and angry and melancholy… did u know president Clinton was the ONLY PRESIDENT to apologize for it? did u know that remnants of slavery exist today thru white privilege? When certain “niceties” r extended your way because of how u look? Isn’t that crazy?
A few years ago when I visited Liverpool, my cousins introduced me to some pretty intense British rap. To an American ear, it sounds a little odd in a British accent but at least it was real. One of the things that my cousins complained about American rap is its seeming loss of gravitas. They’re not entirely wrong. A lot of popular American rap is naught by detritus. But there are folks who are doing good work and they deserve more notoriety. And it’s fine for Australians (or Brits) to use hip hop as a means of expression but they have to speak to and from within their own experience. To fail to do so, especially if you’re white and Australian, is to put on a metaphorical Black Face.
I can’t rap about life in the inner city (nor do so in its cadence) any more so than someone from the inner city can sing about tractors and farm life. The continued success of American and non-American hip hop depends on it telling real stories. The same is true of any genre, really. Otherwise it loses its emotion and its ability to move and connect with its listeners.
Hip hop, like any other genre, is art and as W. Somerset Maugham once wrote:
Art is a manifestation of emotion. And emotion speaks a language which all may understand.
