Fight the Power!

Music is the artistic form of protest. During the American Civil War, soldiers sang the “Battle Hymn of the Republic.” Civil right activists sang “We Shall Overcome” as they held hands in non-violent protest. And in the late seventies, when the American eye turned away from the struggles of the inner city, the street anthem was rap: “Don’t push me/’Cause I’m close to the edge” and “Fight the power that be!” Rap music is the political and protest genre of our time, reflecting the political climate and racial balance, its legacy is one of malcontent and social change, and through it, one can map the history of modern American society.
The creation of modern political rap can only be understood in the context of a much larger phenomenon: hip-hop. Hip-hop is a cultural movement, developed in the 1970s in New York City, mainly by African American and Latino communities. New art forms like graffiti, street art, break dancing, and hip-hop fashion enveloped the inner city. Musically, it introduced DJing, using two turn tables to loop rhythms, and MCing, or what we now call rap. In early hip-hop, the DJ was the main event and the MC just “rapped the crowd,” spouting a pithy line or two, and keeping the energy up. However as raps became increasingly complex, MCs had to evolve to stay relevant, and eventually, the format of modern rap was born. Overtime, rap developed into an expression of political discontent, an indicator of the societal problems that matter the most, and as those problems evolved, so did rap.
In the Beginning…
The ’70s were a time of sharp racial divide in music, both in terms of artists and audience, with white and black communities performing more or less to themselves. For most of the ’70s rap was isolated, the indie music of its time, and it wasn’t until 1979 that the first rap songs made it big, seizing the attention of white America. A truncated version of the Sugarhill Gang’s nearly fifteen minute hit “Rapper’s Delight” was the first rap song to reach the Billboard, at number 36.
However, rap music was already developing past party hits and carrying political weight. “The socio-cultural, economic, anti-misogynist messages have always been a dominant part of hip-hop if you want to listen,” Nicole Hodges Presely, a professor of theater at Kansas University, and contributing scholar at the Hip-hop Archives and Research Institution at the Hutchins Center, told the HPR. “It’s the dominant extraction of certain types of [negative] messages for commercial hip-hop that the media tends to focus on, but I think you can find these [positive] narratives from early on in hip-hop’s history.”
Despite having made significant gains during the civil rights era of the sixties, the 70s lacked enforcement of many of those gains. Rap became a way for black artists to express the daily problems still taking place in their communities. “The Message” by Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five (1982) was one of the first rap songs to discuss the reality of inner city life, where gang violence and abject poverty were commonplace, with little hope for anything better.
The Golden Age of Rap
In the mid-eighties that rap moved to the mainstream of the American music scene. The so-called “golden age of rap”, from 1986 to 1994, expanded the genre, integrated it, and produced some of the most powerful political music to date. Rap began to fuse with other genres and appeal to a wider audience, such as with the megahit “Walk This Way” (1986), a collaboration between the rock group Aerosmith and Run DMC. Meanwhile groups like Public Enemy raised the standard for meaningful political music with songs like “It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back,” and “Fight the Power!” the theme song of the Stan Lee movie, “Do the Right Thing.”
An evolving genre meant an evolving audience. Rap music was gaining popularity in suburban youth, kids who were growing up a world away from the lifestyle that rap depicted. Out of this demographic came a new type of artist—the white, suburban rapper. Artists like Vanilla Ice, whose hit “Ice Ice Baby” topped the Billboard in 1990, used popular, catchy riffs to back lyrics that kept with the major themes of rap at the time: gangs, violence, and bravado. Though enjoying the national spotlight, people like Vanilla Ice were under fire from other rappers for being disingenuous. They were rapping about things they never experienced, and making light of very serious issues that still dominated everyday life in parts of the country.
Partially in backlash to this style, partially in an expression of the anger and frustration that life “on the streets” was still as bad as it was, and partially in an effort to expose the truth of that life, Gangsta rap was created. Gangsta rap was gritty, violent, at times misogynistic, and frequently profane, a dramatic change to its squeaky clean predecessors. Groups like Niggaz With Attitude (N.W.A.), Ice Cube, Dr. Dre, and Eazy-E rapped a mixture of glorified outlaw life and social injustice, with the underlying theme that the system failed and forgot people on the streets.
Gangsta rap was extremely controversial, viewed by many outside the genre as perpetuating violence and preaching against prejudice that no longer existed. Decades after the racism of the sixties, and in a time of “pull yourself up by your bootstraps” mentality, the message of Gangsta rap did not resonate above the poverty line. Later incidents like the Rodney King Beating and the subsequent L.A. Riots granted legitimacy to what some had dismissed as urban fiction. The riots vindicated Gangsta rap as more than the angst-ridden musings of the unprivileged, but as musical protest strongly based in reality.
A Changing Genre for a Changing Generation
In the last fifteen years or so, political rap has been under the radar. Many think of modern rap as the watered-down thirty second soundbite squeezed between two verses of a mediocre pop song. Gangsta rap, though still very present, lost the ear of nation, the lyrics of hard inner city life and racial prejudice losing traction. The racial landscape of rap broadened, with artists like Eminem, who became incredibly influential in a traditionally black genre. Still, events of the twenty first century raised new concerns for a new generation. Racism of this century is much more complex than the black-white divide of the last, increasingly affecting Latino and Middle Eastern populations. Non-issues of the last century are suddenly salient—gay rights, modern feminism, and income inequality amongst others.
Modern political rap is constantly changing and evolving, more relevant than ever, even if it isn’t dominating the American music scene. Musicians like Nas have rapped specific political events, like his song “Black President,” and preached messages of education and social change. Macklemore and Ryan Lewis used soapbox to rap about the rights of the LGBT community in their song “Same Love,” gaining international attention. The Thievery Corporation is breaking barriers in content and sound, combining a mix of jazz, electronica, and global beats with a message of global economic justice.
“I think there are all kinds of messages that are circulated in hip-hop,” said Hodges Persley, “and it would be remiss to think there was just one message. But if you want a message of social uplift, it’s there. If you want a message of something else that’s more party driven, it’s there…Hip-hop cannot tell us what the future is going to hold, it’s just young artists narrating their present.” As we face new conflicts, confront social injustice, and work to balance our economic order, our progress will be set to the soundtrack of rap, the music of politics.