It's Bigger Than Hip Hop: The Rise of the Post-Hip-Hop Generation Read Online Free PDF

everyday life. He writes:
    Could such a metamorphosis have taken place as suddenly as it has appeared to? The answer is no; not because the New Negro is not here, but because the Old Negro had long become more of a myth than a man. The Old Negro, we must remember, was a creature of moral debate and historical controversy. His has been a stock figure perpetuated as an historical fiction partly in innocent sentimentalism, partly in deliberate reactionism. The Negro himself has contributed his share to this through a sort of protective social mimicry forced upon him by the adverse circumstances of dependence. So for generations in the mind of America, the Negro has been more of a formula than a human being—a something to be argued about, condemned or defended, to be “kept down,” or “in his place,” or “helped up,” to be worried with or worried over, harassed or patronized, a social bogey or a social burden
.
     
    It’s startling that today, more than eighty-five years later, we are dealing with the same shadow, a shadow not even cast by our own Black bodies. A shadow that, as Locke writes, is “fiction,” but is paraded as real. And this is
reel
Blackness.
    With rap videos, movies, music, news, advertisements, our minds have been shaped by one-dimensional, stereotypical, racist, and, most of all, limiting images of what Blacks can be. Because of the post-hip-hop generation’s overexposure to media-recepting technologies, these images—a multiplex of comfortable violence, sexism, machismo, and conspicuous consumption—bombard us 24-7. Although they may notreflect our reality, their sustained and continuous presence can determine it—determine the real.
    The reel becomes the real.
    In 1994 , at twelve years old, I stayed in the house for nearly a year. When I did go outside, I didn’t wander beyond the ring of our home phone.
    Why?
    Because I couldn’t miss the call from my brother.
    Brrrinnnnggg. Brrrinnnnggg
.
    I was the first to pick it up.
    “ ’Ello,” I would say in a budding, out-of-breath voice.
    “You have a collect call from the state correctional facility,” the operator would say in monospeak. A smile would split across my face as I pressed 1 and accepted the call.
    “What’s up, lil’ brother?” My big brother would ask sincerely. A few minutes into our conversation, he’d say the magic words: “Play somethin’ for me,” and he called the other inmates to the phone so they could huddle up and listen to my selections. I remember putting the phone to the speaker on my boom box and bumpin’ “Life’s a Bitch” off of Nas’s
Illmatic:
    Keepin’ it real, packin’ steel, gettin’ high
    ’Cause life’s a bitch and then you die
.
     
    As a preteen, I became a remote prison DJ and as I rocked the crowd of inmates, I began to see just how powerful hip hop was as my brother and the other inmates erupted in awe, repeating, like scripture, the lines: “Keepin’ it real, packin’ steel, gettin’ high / ’Cause life’s a bitch and then you die.” It was clear then, as it is now, that thehip-hop generation was using rap music, almost exclusively, to shape, develop, and define both public personas and personal identities.
    Although for the hip-hop generation, “keeping it real” became the ultimate barometer of one’s character, the post-hip-hop generation realizes that because we do not control how “real” is constructed, defined, and disseminated, this image is not real at all. Rap may serve as the most visceral example of the performance of reel. As writer William Jelani Cobb, in
To the Break of Dawn
, writes, “‘Real’ is to the rap industry as ‘All-Natural’ is to the fast food supplier, as ‘New and Improved’ is to the ad agency. As ‘I Solemnly Swear’ is to the politician.” Hip-hop culture, and in particular rap music, is particularly unique in this because “The blues artist may sing about evil, but is not required to be it or live it. The rapper is