A few years ago, when reports came out that The Office star Ellie Kemper had been crowned at the first Veiled Prophet ball, what critics called the Klan ball, I turned and went back to bed. Last week, when TikTok climbed over Donald Trump and made a digital soft shoe as possible, thanking the future president for saving his presence in the United States, I turned off my light and retreated back under the sheets. But it was something about ’90s hip-hop stars joining the line to kiss the ring at Trump’s inaugural balls that still keeps me up at night.
For many of us Black millennials — especially those who grew up in working-class neighborhoods — hip-hop was the spirit of our childhood. It recorded every inch of our lives, reflecting back to us the sounds and feelings of our existence in a way that no one else could or cared about. Our normal lives were put to music as it was denigrated or considered to be on the fringes of real society.
It was also a window into what we can become. It lit the way to an end that was more than the minimum wage of a job or wasting our lives in the “second childhood” that was set before us. It allows us to think about being the winners of the problems of lumpen health and the health of the working class. Dressing well, being gangly or attractive, and being polite.
More than that, it was a concept. It wasn’t just about expressing the conditions of the neighborhood, it was a conference of thoughts and a clash of words. We heard the encouragement and criticism of the internal opposition in the section when Aaliyah told us “we don’t need a Coogi sweater”. We saw escapism in Rich Boy’s Throw Some D and were forced to quietly check it out after watching Pac’s Brenda’s Have A Baby and Latifah’s UNITY In one hour we tried to memorize the adrenaline-rush lyrics of an entire Heaven’z album. Bizzy Bone’s movie and the next time we imagined ourselves meeting a high school bully or a street corner with Mobb Deep’s Shook Ones.
We used this art as a song for what we knew they thought of as our disposable lives. It was the most accessible evidence to prove to ourselves that the world was lying to us about “the nothingness of Black people”. We didn’t need that well-intentioned white female teacher to pity us for being Black, holding a poster with George Washington Carver and a jar of peanut butter, telling us to “contribute”. It was quiet, the CD player spinning as we busied ourselves trying to decipher Wu-Tang hieroglyphics.
So it was another sight to see the intensity of our ghetto beauties being forced to dance to the rich boy’s unconventional dance routine. To see our griots crouch to pick up dollars under the lowest roof: racism. Seeing that it was our thinkers, too, who were going to play the game of white freedom, rolling their eyes, pretending not to see that the Nazi salute is an insult to the Nazis. They answered the jacket without being asked. Jumping even ahead of the Anti-Defamation League at the chance to give white supremacists the benefit of the doubt.
Of all the daily bombshells of racism that have defined this decade of immigrant resurgence, turncoat rappers have left the worst wound. It is not easy to recover from witnessing the writers of our history turning into doves on the burning cross.
Excuses flowed indiscriminately. It was said “check check”. It is said that “this is not politics”. It is pretended that they do not know what MAGA stands for and what it is trying to achieve. As if we didn’t know that hip-hop is a university rather than a university.
I remember in the past I was scanning the channels and sitting on Fox News making fun of rappers dancing. Now, Fox News is reporting that Snoop Dogg is “surprising the crowd” at the pre-opening event. I remember Snoop Dogg talking about 187 and now I worry about the day I get to see him wave the blue flag.
In the 90s, white power campaigned to ban hip-hop. How complete is his victory now that we rub his feet? Nelly said but he is “the president”. But this is the point. There’s no shortage of tracks talking about our lack of presidential cool. One can start from any song with Dead Prez.
In 1988, the grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan entered the US presidential race. If he had won, would we expect Eric B and Rakim to make Microphone Fiend “for the fans” wearing white hats because we “support the troops”? How close are we to the day when cop freestyle ciphers break out during mass murders?
We may not have known it at the time, but it wasn’t just the lives of the black and Latino working class in North America that were being played out in music. It has been played in slums in South America, Africa, Europe, Asia and Australia. It was the music of the slums, a religious weapon against the prison where they kept us.
So it is a stab in the stomach to see our culture and lives put to the work of men who shout that we are stealing pets and call our request to be allowed to live “terrorism”. It tramples on human behavior when our defenders now tap-dance to those who set off fireworks in the “rebellion” and support monuments to United Nations generals.
You can only put so many extensions in your pool. Only drive so many cars in your life. But what’s the “worth” of selling your soul for the price of a noogie? Signing up to do what they do, knowing that your gifted house will not be more than Massa’s house?
Of course, a few rappers taking photo ops with guys who nobody would bet didn’t do blackface doesn’t represent all of millennial hip-hop. But they are not the only ones. Chuck D fights for the people who come Elon Musk as he puts the spark plug in racism. Eva can’t get out of the Downton Abbey stable. And can’t General from commercial. And our beloved Black Thought, the singing of birds in a “moulded cage” – human speech reduced to “entertainment” for Jimmy Fallon petting fascists.
Anyway things fall apart and I have to count my blessings. I will probably never get out of bed again when I see Dead Prez or Lauryn Hill playing the fiddle. But it wasn’t to be any of them. It was our art, we say. It hurts to see our private inner lives laid at the feet of the state, next to our bodies.
They stole Erykah Badu and beat us with it. And now they have our head teachers leave their positions to beat the baby settler premacists in their laps. It is sad to see so many of our poets getting in line to kiss the ring of the king of Jim Crow.
But maybe it’s better this way. When Nas said hip-hop was dead, it might have been prophetic. Or at least these “uncs of rap” may still be living in an age of global racism. Now they are rich and vulnerable. Millennials may have to leave themselves and explore the new music of the colonized industry and a new generation of musicians, here and abroad, where, for now, at least, there are nowhere near the intense Palestinian rappers caught on the moon as the court jesters of Benjamin Netanyahu.
Gen Z has spent half of its life staring straight into the eyes of open fascism and has been forced to witness the public, daily slaughter of innocent Black people. I see them every day. No one is dancing.
Their “inaudible rap” – which we “old heads” have scoffed at – is not only advanced but more relevant than any rapper who says “f*** the cops” out of the other side of their mouth and “give the Confederacy a chance. ” to another. As for piercing, misdirected anticolonialism as horizontal violence in piercing lyrics is more useful for black liberation than a conscious rapper trying to find a difference in colonialism.
Millennials hip-hop may have left the shack, but the shack will have its day. Do hip-hop once; can do some hip-hop. And when it does, it will stand over the body of colonialism, Buggin Out’s boombox on its shoulder, singing the spirituals of that Black colonized sector, “Bigger than hip-hop.”
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect the editorial position of Al Jazeera.
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