Chicago Hip Hop & Counter-Narrative

Vassar College Digital Window @ Vassar Senior Capstone Projects 2019 "I hope y'all hear me" : Chicago hip hop & counter-narrative Tamar Ballard Vassar College Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalwindow.vassar.edu/senior_capstone Recommended Citation Ballard, Tamar, ""I hope y'all hear me" : Chicago hip hop & counter-narrative" (2019). Senior Capstone Projects. 886. https://digitalwindow.vassar.edu/senior_capstone/886 This Open Access is brought to you for free and open access by Digital Window @ Vassar. It has been accepted for inclusion in Senior Capstone Projects by an authorized administrator of Digital Window @ Vassar. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Title page “ ’ ” & - page 2 “ ' , , , ' ' , ' , , ' ' .”1 ...................................................................................................... ........................................................ .................................................................... ............................... ................................................................................... : .............. : .................................... : ( ) ....................................... : ............ : ......... ...................................................................................... , , , . , . , . : . , , - . , , . , . : – . ’ . ’ . , . “I hope Y’all hear Me.”3 “this life, this new story & history you cannot steal or sell or cast overboard or hang or beat or drown or own or redline or shackle or silence or cheat or choke or cover up or jail or shoot or jail or shoot or ruin this, if only this one, is ours.” Danez smith, “dear white america” 3 Cover of Kanye West’s Late Registration (2005) CHAPTER ONE: INTRODUCTION I was introduced to Chicago hip hop what the popular albums at the time were, on September 12, 2005, my ninth birthday. and they’d pointed her towards those four. It Before then, my mom didn’t allow me to was West’s Late Registration that won me listen to anything that she didn’t approve of, over completely at the end. Over the next which was anything that wasn’t old school year, I never went anywhere without my CD r&b or gospel music. She determined that player and that album. I’d take it with me on the music wasn’t good for me; there were bike rides around the neighborhood with my too many curse words, too much degrading friends or to the gazebo in the middle of our of women, and I was too young. She didn’t apartment complex to listen to it while want the mind of her only-child (read: her trying to decipher the names written on its only chance) to be manipulated by the walls and benches; I even took a chance on music. However, I’d get my fix of early my life by sneaking it to school a couple of 2000s hip hop while riding in the car with times to show it off to my friends. my friends and their families or while quickly turning to 95.5 The Beat, the local The albums intro “Wake Up Mr. r&b/hip-hop station in our part of Georgia at West” was something I’d never heard the time, as she paid for gas inside a Shell or before. The piano loop mixed with Adam Chevron not too far from where we lived. Levine’s lyrics warning of the temporariness of life and West’s verses detailing the lives My musical coming-of-age finally of his family and the physical and mental happened on my ninth birthday. I degradation in “Heard ‘Em Say” – none of unwrapped my presents to find a portable which I understood at nine years old – CD player, and several CDs: Mariah Carey’s lingered in my mind like the trumpet sample The Emancipation of Mimi, Bow Wow’s in “Touch the Sky” from Curtis Mayfield’s Wanted, Usher’s Confessions, and Kanye “Move On Top,” while Lupe Fiasco’s West’s Late Registration. She’d decided to “Bottle-shaped body like Mrs. Butterworth”1 ask some of her co-workers at Circuit City line from the same song was the most 9 impressive thing I’d heard in my life so far. help of a sample of Monroeville Music His album Lupe Fiasco’s Food and Liquor, Center’s “Hairy Fairy Hotaruna.” The lyrics particularly his song “Superstar,” would be of the song are filled with Chance talking the next piece of Chicago hip hop that I’d be about the paranoia and inevitability of death, introduced to. the feeling of being trapped in the “ghetto,” and the need for the world to pay attention After that, my exposure to Chicago to what’s going on in Chicago, particularly hip hop was limited to West’s and Fiasco’s to black people in Chicago, in a way that next couple of albums until May 2, 2012. isn’t focused on numbers and statistics, but That day, while scrolling through Tumblr, I in a way that is centered on the fact that was introduced to Chance the Rapper’s people in the city are suffering and scared. I “Pusha Man” and his second mixtape, Acid listened to the rest of Acid Rap three times Rap. I would’ve scrolled past it, like I did that day. most of the music shared by people I follow on Tumblr (I only trust a total of four For the following two years, I would people’s music taste), but the cover art of be introduced to Vic Mensa, Saba, Noname, Acid Rap pulled me in. It was a painted Alex Wiley, Mick Jenkins and projects like portrait of Chance by Brandon Breaux and The Water[s], Village Party, Innanetape, was filled with various shades of pink and Comfort Zone, and LIGHT; once I found purple, which happened to be my two Chance, the treasure of Chicago’s up and favorite colors at the time. coming artists was easy to find and easy to unlock. All of these artists would go on to After clicking on the play button, I help paint a picture of black Chicago life, was immediately hit with the glittering through music that sounded like nothing else synthesizer and piano keys of a pitched I had ever heard before. They were showing down sample of Dave Grusin’s “Modaji.” I the world a Chicago that wasn’t wrapped up was being transported directly into Chance’s in media hype and over-theorized jargon. world. What really hit me was the part of the Their music told stories of pain, hurt, song after the 30 seconds of silence in the sadness, joy, and pride. And this thesis is middle. The instrumental changed to a about recognizing that. gloomier, more otherworldly sound with the 10 Too many times, black life is youth are alive and are willing to tell their allowed to be minimized into 30 second stories to anyone that will listen, which is clips of voiceless black bodies in peril that easy to do when the music is so good. circulate social media, statistics that mark predominately-poor black neighborhoods as dangerous and in a perpetual state of “this life, this new story & history you disarray, and news articles and segments cannot steal or sell or cast overboard or that demonize blackness. When black people hang or beat or drown or own or redline or are allowed to tell their stories, they’re told shackle or silence or cheat or choke or for the benefit of a predominately-white cover up or jail or shoot or jail or shoot or system and a predominately-white audience, ruin very rarely for themselves. They’re told to this, if only this one, is ours.”2 legitimize white fear. They’re told to Danez Smith, dear white america legitimize white supremacy and nationalism. They’re told to push us farther and farther from the collective understanding and appreciation for black bodies and the lived “The world in my hands, the world in my experiences that come with them. What I am hands hoping to explore in the pages of this thesis The world in my hands, the world in my is the way that young black hip hop artists hands from Chicago have attempted to reverse The world in my hands, the world in my dominant black Chicago discourse, in a new hands and innovative way: a way that doesn’t sell The world in my hands, the world in my out the stories of the people in their hands”3 communities, a way that brings humanity to black Chicago and to blackness as a whole, Saba, “World in My Hands” and a way that proves that black Chicago 11 “ , . ’ . ’ , ? ’ , ’ … .”4 CHAPTER TWO: AN ABBREVIATED HISTORY OF BLACK CHICAGO After the Chicago Great Fire of subjected to the lack of freedom and self- 1871, white immigrant communities, determination in the rural South, black including German, Irish, and Scottish Americans began to seek better immigrants, began to settle in communities opportunities in the urban North. outside of the Loop, the city’s central business district. The influx of black There were several distinct factors Americans in this area of the city would that made the urban North a potential occur during the Great Migration, a process settling place for black Americans, including that would happen in two waves pre and “the recruitment of black workers to post-World War I and II and would lead to Chicago factory industries to act as the creation of two large black communities strikebreakers [and] the increase in work on the South and West sides. Generally, the wages relative to the South;”5 these pull early 1900s – the beginning of the first Great factors were similar to the ones that were Migration – saw the move of black pulling black people to places like Harlem, Americans from the South to the North, in New York; Detroit, Michigan; and Gary, hopes of establishing communities in Indiana. Northern black newspapers, like the Northern cities that were free from the Chicago Defender and New York’s black denial of black personhood and upward press, worked to “openly [advocate] urban mobility that plagued communities in the settlement” for black communities looking South.

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