Histories, peace, and building

The words that proved meaningful at Day 3 of the Words Beats and Life Teach-in center on negotiation. I brought up the issue of the Smithsonian exhibit and Crazy Legs' response with Blue Black, a hip-hop producer. Blue Black is 45 years old as of yesterday, and grew up, like Crazy Legs did, in the Bronx. He's been working with me and others through the Hip-Hop Education Center's "def" committee to develop some working definitions of hip-hop education. Blue Black has been quite influential to my own thinking because he offers a constant and consistent reminder that hip-hop education is not something that the academy can create because it's already been worked out in hip-hop communities themselves.

Just before the presentation yesterday on the Smithsonian exhibit, Blue Black gave an interesting and erudite paper on hip-hop as a post-modern identity. How he defined post-modernism was progressive and interesting, and a very good break from the rather overworked, apolitical and sometimes tiresome understandings (and misunderstandings) of the term that were thrown about in graduate school. When I asked him today about his thoughts on the Smithsonian exhibit presentation, he said the key word was "negotiation."

Representing ourselves in hip-hop, in his words, was not about attacking someone for getting it all wrong. Rather, it was about initiating and forming a dialogue that would educate and build alliances. In that sense, he noted, my characterization of Crazy Legs' response as "appropriate" was not one he agreed with. He felt that the response could have been an opportunity to build, rather than an invocation to battle.

Plus, some of the points of the story that the Smithsonian seeks to tell are somewhat true. The curator's approach was off, perhaps, but in Blue Black's eyes, her approach was very hip-hop in and of itself. The curator knew herself to be an outsider to the culture and was presenting a project that had begun to be developed before she had much control. She had to come in strong and assertive because she knew she was entering foreign territory.

What's likely to happen next, Blue Black added, is that he and other organizer/educators with Words Beats and Life will probably end up meeting with the curator and will effect the right outcome in the end run.

Blue Black's thoughts reinforced for me the value of story in writing and teaching about hip-hop. Not just the history but the personal story. At the same time, his thoughts reminded me of the fallibility of history. There is no one single, right version. Everyone who was "there" in New York City in the 1970s, going to jams, listening to deejays, trying their hand at break-dancing, and imbibing the culture has a different version of where it all began. I pointed out to him that I had stopped saying hip-hop originated in the Bronx because so many others who were "there" had suggested that it was in Queens, in Brooklyn, in parts of Harlem. As a Bronx b-boy, Blue Black seemed protective of the Bronx. At the same time, he noted that one of the things that made the Bronx the heart of the origin of the culture that came to be called hip-hop was not so much the fact that the pioneers in the Bronx were better at p.r. than those elsewhere, as one other individual had noted. Instead, a critical mass had cohered around the Bronx, and hence it's a point of origin.

Two speakers followed my lunchtime conversation with Blue Black, both of whom are legends within the world of hip-hop. One hailed from the Bedford-Stuyvescent part of Brooklyn; the other from Spanish Harlem. Both of them talked about jams, break-dancing, deejaying, and emceeing happening in their neighborhoods, and how that convergence of creative activity had moved them. One -- Grandmaster Pop Fabel -- emphasized that while he didn't want to take anything away from the magic that was being created in that time in the Bronx, other related things were happening in neighborhoods throughout the city. The point that I glean from these thoughts is that a culture that Afrika Bambaataa came to call hip-hop sprung from the Bronx, partly because Bambaataa himself was from the Bronx. But the culture was emergent everywhere, and that the more stories of the early days of hip-hop that are put together, the more insight we will have about hip-hop.

I left the conference feeling full of a special kind of history, a history that I always have craved to read more of and to help put into written form. This is a history that is a collection of different voices speaking not always in harmony or in collectivity but speaking truths derived from personal experiences. Over three days, I heard stories about the Bronx, about Brooklyn, and about Harlem from one of the first break-dancers, Crazy Legs; a longtime activist and poet whose art and activism predates hip-hop, Sonia Sanchez; a multi-dimensional media artist Fab Five Freddie; a b-boy and community worker Pop Fabel; and scores of other young and middle-aging deejays, emcees, poets, and deep participants in hip-hop culture. I left with a sense of hip-hop history as rich, poly-vocal, dialogic, and dynamic. I also left with a feeling that trying to bring coherence to the hip-hop story might make some sense but might lose much of the richness through a process of sanding down.

I also left with a new understanding of two terms used often in hip-hop circles: "peace" and "building".

Peace, explained MC K-Swift, was the aspiration of hip-hop, and as such should be used and responded to in exchanges within all who participate in hip-hop culture.

Building never was articulated. But I have come to understand it as negotiation. Negotiations of the type that Blue Black describes to effect a successful outcome with the Smithsonian.