Earlier this week, The Root published a fantastic excerpt from Ta-Nehisi Coates’s recent memoir The Beautiful Struggle. In “Hip-Hop’s Daisy Age,” Coates contextualizes a Golden Age–the arcadian summer of ’88–when a new “consciousness” movement in hip-hop brought together both the discordant militarism of Chuck D’s Public enemy and the neo-hippie soul of De La Soul. Although Coates grew up African-American in an economically-depressed Baltimore and I am white, and was living in Dunedin, New Zealand in the summer of ’88, we are roughly the same age. When he writes, “I was all X-Men, polyhedral dice, and Greek myths,” it’s not hard for me to imagine that we actually probably have at least a few things in common. And while I was clearly in a different cultural place, I owned and cherished most of the albums that Coates cites in his piece. I played them repeatedly, furtively listening in secret to the alien sounds on my Sony Walkman. I can’t help thinking of 3 Feet High and Rising without a warm tinge of nostalgia coupled with a sadness that something so fresh and vital and just plain different probably won’t come out of mainstream hip-hop again–or at least any time soon. Perhaps this is hip-hop’s legacy–20 years after its Golden Age, it’s earned the right to be as shitty, conformist, and downright stupid as any other commercial genre. But I’ve digressed. Coates’s piece is no lament. Instead, it’s a loving tribute to a particular moment, which, for him at least, seemed to transcend the space he was in and extend into all “the ghettos of the world, with their merchant vultures, wig stores, sidewalk sales, sub shops, fake gold, bastard boys, and wandering girls.” In the summer of ’88, I was living comfortably in a lovely harbor town, but the sentiment Coates expresses reached me nonetheless. As corny as it sounds, hip-hop in ’88 provided a cultural education for me, not just about the African-American experience specifically, but, more generally, as an expatriate, hip-hop told me something about what was new and fresh and vital in America. Now I realize that my own early love for hip-hop simply preceded the eventual mainstreaming, commercialization, and consequent dumbing-down of hip-hop. And honestly, I could never have the same spiritual attachment that Coates describes:
“…the rhyme-pad was a spell-book, it summoned asphalt elementals, elder gods, and weeping ancestors, all of whom had your back. That summer, I beheld the greatest lesson of 88, that when under the aegis of hip-hop, you never lived alone, you never walked alone.”
Where Coates experienced soul music, I heard punk rock. But for each of us, the hip-hop in ’88 was a new kind of rebel music. Looking back, it’s hard to believe that 20 years have passed. When I get home tonight, I’ll listen to EPMD’s Strictly Business and try to forget about Soulja Boy for 45 minutes.
Biblioklept 