I
am writing this post on about four hours of sleep, plane sleep. I boarded my
flight out of Seattle-Tacoma International Airport at about 11 p.m., and
happily fell into a good hard sleep within about 15 minutes. I was jolted awake
when the plane wheels thudded the ground in Detroit, some four and a half hours
later. Still, a hard sleep of a few hours is better than no sleep. My husband
texted me as the connecting flight landed in Albany to say that he was just leaving.
That has given me an hour in Albany to collect my thoughts before heading up to
Lake Placid to volunteer for the Ironman.
I
was thinking about what kind of sense to make of Boogie Up the Block, the big
Seattle community hip-hop festival that capped my week of walking, wondering,
and doing other kinds of ethnographic research in the city. The big event was
not so big after all, and many of the female artists whom I had hoped to catch
up with were not present. It was a beautiful sunny day, and a pleasure to be
outdoors. But I wasn't feeling particularly moved by the music on stage, or by
the break-dancing occurring in sporadic ciphers on the streets. I found myself
feeling a little lost: It took a lot of time and money to get here. Was it a
waste of time?
Considering
this question led me to consider a variety of factors: work and other community
based obligations that kept the b-girls I had hoped to see away from the event;
my own work and prior commitment to volunteer at the Lake Placid Ironman that
prevented me from staying in Seattle an additional day to attend their
signature event -- an all women's break-dancing battle -- organized by Bean,
one of my initial interviewees; and the work of parenting and making a living
that had made it challenging for my potential co-author for the book I hope to
write to meet up. It also took me back to an all women's reading and hip-hop
event I had created in 2010 as part of an Individual Artist's Grant I had
received from the Seattle Mayor's Office of Arts & Cultural Affairs. I
poured a lot of energy into creating the event; worked closely with emcee
Beloved1 and deejay DJ B-Girl (Mia Beardsley) to organize a plan; and
negotiated dates and times with about nine different artists in order to come
up with a day that would work for everyone. I created an eye-catching poster
and flyer, promoted the event via Facebook, stapled my flyers all over central
Seattle, wrote a press release that the Office of Arts & Cultural Affairs
distributed to media, and even wrote a piece for public media about the women I
had interviewed who would perform. The event drew about 30 people, most of who
were the performers, two videographers I had hired, and our friends and family
members. All the work. Thirty people. Somehow, it still felt like a success.
This
made me think about how hip-hop works out what it calls the Fifth Element in a
community setting.
To
clarify some language, the culture of hip-hop has been defined in terms of
components: break-dancing (or, more accurately, within hip-hop circles,
b-boying and b-girling), emceeing (also known as rapping, either inaccurately
or accurately, depending on who you talk to), deejaying, graffiti, and the
Fifth Element of knowledge. The Fifth Element is a term coined by Afrika
Bambaataa, founder of the Universal Zulu Nation. He articulated it as a process
of self-development and individual transformation. The Fifth Element infuses
all of the other elements -- which are seen as more skill-based -- and it also
stands apart as the work from which a philosophy of hip-hop might emerge.
For
the past three years, much of my work with hip-hop has been academic in nature.
I have been in dialogue with hip-hop scholars and practitioners at conferences
such as the Words Beats & Life teach-in earlier this month in Washington
DC. I have read books and articles that have emerged out of hip-hop studies,
and I have contributed to the field with academic writings of my own. One of
the most fulfilling endeavors to date has been participating in a committee
organized by Martha Diaz of the Hip-Hop Education Center at New York University
to create a set of defining terms for hip-hop education in college and K-12
curricula. These dialogues have been heavy on word power, verbal exchange, and
thought. They are not the types of conversations that might occur easily in a
community setting.
Which
led me to wonder: How was the Fifth Element present at Boogie Up the Block? In
many ways, it had to be present, if for no other reason than the fact that its
main organizer was 206 Zulu, the Seattle branch of Bambaataa's brainchild, the
Universal Zulu Nation.
Considering
that question reshaped my understanding of the event considerably.
On
what I'll call an umbrella level, the Fifth Element was present in the array of
participants. I spoke during the first two hours of the event with a 206 Zulu
member who worked with the organization's security as well as with an activist
seeking citizen input on alternatives to juvenile detention. I also reconnected
with a b-boy who serves as a pastor and owns a coffeeshop in my former Central
District neighborhood, located at 25th and Union. He remembered me as the woman who "did the project on
Seattle b-girls" and was pleased when I told him that I was still working
on it. He also told me about some of his work as a volunteer with a project
known as the Seattle Green Plate, which had turned a corner plot of vacant land
at the busy Union Street and Martin Luther King Way intersection into a garden
that provided produce to the homeless and educational outreach to
schoolchildren. I also toured a community P-Patch across the street from 206
Zulu's headquarters at Washington Hall, noting how the fence surrounding this
community garden was like a teaching museum. It displayed placards and images
of community history, mentors to future musicians such as Quincy Jones, and
traced the legacy of Seattle's style of small-ensemble jazz to racism,
segregationist practices, and the relatively small size of the African American
community relative to other towns where a "big band" style became the
norm.
As
I spoke with community workers and toured the garden, other dialogues and
interactions were taking place around me. We might see these interchanges as
expressions of the Fifth Element as each individual sought new knowledge for
their own growth. These dialogues took place against a backdrop that a history
of cultural form and artistic expression has come to define as hip-hop: deejays
and emcees on an outdoor stage on one side of Washington Hall, a mobile stage
with skateboarding ramp and cardboard duct-taped together to create a dance
space on the street to the opposite side. Amid bicycles, detouring cars, and
pedestrians, children and young adults formed ciphers. Some of the dancing was
like mine – on the side of the cipher, legs and hips bopping but not much else
in the way of body movement. Other dancers were down on the ground, following
the traditional break-dance routine of top-rocking, power and finish, and
practicing the call and response logic of the cipher to invite others in.
There
wasn’t a whole lot of cohesion, but there was a sense of understanding and of
respect that everyone was at the event to build community and to engage in some
way or the other with the Fifth Element, to learn.
In
the middle of festival lay one final – and perhaps the most powerful – element:
an altar for Trayvon Martin, the African American teenager in Florida who was killed
by the white security guard, George Zimmerman. The security guard, of course,
was acquitted by a jury whose rationale for the decision was grounded in a
racially coded understanding of right and wrong. Zimmerman, according to one
juror, was only guilty of making a bad judgment in pulling his trigger. The
fact that an African American boy was killed as a result of that “bad judgment”
offers a reminder of how the real lives of the peoples of the communities that
hip-hop strives to uplift continue to bear ongoing societal assaults.
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