Black power and ‘edutainment’: The political roots of hip-hop music The Origin of Political Hip-Hop in The US
Rats in the front room, roaches in the back
Junkies in the alley with a baseball bat
I tried to get away but I couldn’t get far
‘Cause the man with the tow truck repossessed my car.
It was 1982, and as New York was emerging from one of the worst financial crises in its history, these lyrics by Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five struck a chord with listeners. The Message, a gritty indictment of the city’s failed institutions, is broadly viewed as the origin of political hip-hop in the US. “You are into the blowback against the civil rights and Black power movements, where people are trying to roll back the gains that were made during that time frame,” political scientist Adolphus Belk, co-author of For the Culture: Hip-Hop and the Fight for Social Justice, told Al Jazeera. The song’s success was intertwined with the rise of Ronald Reagan, who served as US president for most of the 1980s, Belk noted. Reaganomics, the term applied to his neoliberal economic policies, rewarded the managerial class while neglecting society’s most vulnerable communities – disproportionately African Americans and Latinos. The newly created “marginalised class” in the inner cities would be plagued by poverty, bad schools, drugs and gang violence, while arts programmes suffered massive cuts. “So we went from good times to hard times, and the music changed to reflect what was happening in the society,” Belk said.
The seeds of hip-hop’s countercultural movement had begun to sprout a decade earlier, in August 1973, when Clive Campbell, better known as DJ Kool Herc, threw a back-to-school party with his sister in the Bronx borough of New York. They needed a musical act, but hiring one would have been prohibitively expensive. Instead, Kool Herc brought out his own sound system and did what he did best, jumping from one record’s break to another with expert timing. “He revolted. He did not want to play the disco music we heard on the radio,” rapper Kurtis Blow said in the Netflix series, Hip-Hop Evolution. “He wanted to give us the music that we grew up on – the soul music. And it was incredible, because in a world of disco, here is this DJ coming out playing this special kind of music. And this was so important to the birth of hip-hop, that we’re going to be playing funk music.”
Hip-hop has since grown into a culturally impactful form of artistic expression, gaining millions of fans while tapping into global phenomena. Its addictive beats and powerful political messaging, experts say, have propelled the genre’s broad appeal, from the US to the Global South. This momentum began to build when Rapper’s Delight, released by The Sugarhill Gang in 1979, was credited with introducing hip-hop to an audience outside the five boroughs of New York. Borrowing from the glitzy and fun-filled themes of mainstream music, the song appealed to a wide cross section of music fans, eventually planting itself on popular shows such as American Bandstand and Soul Train. The Sugarhill Gang (L-R: Wonder Mike, Master G and Big Bank Hank), credited with introducing hip-hop to an audience beyond New York, perform live in 1979 [Michael Ochs Archives via Getty Images]