Hip Hop, You Don't Stop! Author: Morganics Area of Study: Popular Culture About the Author
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Title: Hip Hop, You Don’t Stop! Author: Morganics Area of Study: Popular Culture About the author: Morganics is a Melbourne based Hip Hop artist, director and community worker. Morganics makes regular appearances at SCANSW PIP Days, where his use and application of sociocultural terms and concepts is always very well received. He exists online at https://www.facebook.com/morganicsonline/ and https://www.youtube.com/user/morganicsonline. Contemporary context The following points are to be integrated across the study of Popular Culture: • use examples drawn from contemporary society • assess the impact of technologies, including communication technologies, on popular culture • examine a contemporary issue in popular culture using the research method of content analysis. Focus study Students are to examine ONE popular culture that conforms to the distinguishing characteristics and has a global acceptance by examining: the creation and development of the popular culture: • the origins of the popular culture • the development of the popular culture from a local to a global level • the process of commodification for the popular culture • the role of mythology in the creation and perpetuation of the popular culture • continuities and changes to the popular culture the consumption of the popular culture: • the consumers of the popular culture and the nature of its consumption • the relationship of heroes and mythology to media and consumption • how globalisation and technologies have influenced consumption • the relationship of access and consumption to age, class, ethnicity, gender, location, sexuality • how consumption and ownership of paraphernalia influence a sense of identity the control of the popular culture: • the ownership of the popular culture and the tensions between consumers and producers • the stakeholders and how they influence the popular culture – family, peer groups, media, marketers, governments, global groups • the role and impact of official and unofficial censorship • the influence of power and authority at the micro, meso and macro levels the different perceptions of the popular culture: • groups that accept and reject the popular culture • changing perceptions and the value of the popular culture to groups in society • how the popular culture constructs or deconstructs gender the contribution of the popular culture to social change: • how the popular culture expresses contemporary social values • the positive and negative impact of the popular culture on wider society • the ways in which the popular culture has contributed to social change. DJ Kool Herc is the person, America is the society, Hip Hop is the culture, the South Bronx in New York City is the environment, and 1973 is the time. Hip Hop you don’t stop, from the birth place to the tip top, from the ghetto to the world non stop, oh yeah! Bboys and Girls gonna get down, way before Netflix was in your town, from rags to riches putting rappers in pictures, we’ve come so far femcees aint bitches, from Queen Latifah to the one Jean Grae, now Jay Z’s Mum has come out gay, times have changed from way back in the day, when we said “Old School” the records they played were The Trecherous Three and The Furious Five, now Melle Mel’s on TV trying to survive “Don’t push me ‘cause I’m close to the edge….” of being that guy that raps in a TV car commercial. True story. That car commercial on TV with a guy rapping “Don’t push me” is the original Melle Mel, one of the first MCs ever, the king of socio-political commentary with “The Message” being his masterpiece as one member of Grandmaster Flash and The Furious Five. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PobrSpMwKk4 Salt’n’Pepa are in another accompanying TV ad singing their song “Push It” – no irony there yeah? I watched a Holden car ad with a young white boy top rocking in the great outdoors and since I’m a new father I couldn’t help but love the toilet paper TV ad with a computer animated baby busting out some Bboy moves in the clouds to sell, wait for it……toilet paper. Hip Hop You Don’t Stop! But before we get carried away, a couple of basic questions; what is Hip Hop, who invented it and where does it come from? Discussions about Hip Hop often end up focussing on mainstream recording artists as if they are the be all and end all of the culture, but we need to be aware that this is a reflection more of recording labels and their marketing departments than the full breadth of the culture. It’s a limited scope and shows a small amount of knowledge when people frame these discussions around what I would define as Hip Pop. To be clear, they think that Hip Hop is rapping, that it’s MCs, that it’s just a form of music – it’s not. Hip Hop is a cultural form that started in the South Bronx in New York City in the early 70s, that has four elements; 1. MCing (or rapping) 2. DJing 3. Bboying or Bgirling Disclosure with KRS One (breakdancing) and, https://i.ytimg.com/vi/9483Y5L5nG0/maxresdefault 4. Graffiti. Some would argue that the fifth element is the vocal percussion form known as Beat boxing, others such as KRS One https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ppR7s19c1RY would argue that other elements include philosophy, street entrepreneurship and fashion, but you get the idea, Hip Hop is not just rapping, it’s a multipronged urban cultural form. The inventor of Hip Hop is universally acknowledged to be DJ Kool Herc, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LhisX4mVoDI a Jamaican DJ who travelled to New York with his mother on her search for a better life. He pulled from the dub and reggae scene of Jamaica to transplant the idea of two turntables and a sound system as a way to share music and also “battle” with other DJs or crews in a musical form. One of the first names for Hip Hop was “Punk, Rock, Disco”, because there was no actual word to describe what was happening as all these different cultures, people, fashions and ideas started to meld themselves together in the South Bronx in the early 70s. It was the birth of a global – even interplanetary – form of funk music. A new form of movement such a Bboying pulled from elements of gymnastics, mime, Kung Fu movies and Puerto Rican folk dances. Hip Hop invented DJ culture as we know it, chopping, mixing and sampling from German electronic groups like Kraftwerk to Aussie rock like AC/DC, from James Brown’s drum breaks to disco bass lines. The MCs channelled the call and response of the gospel church, the fiery invocations of the preacher, the poet and the boxer to cajole, entice, enrage and excite the crowd. Graffiti artists turned the New York train system into a moving museum of aerosol art on wheels. One thing that all these forms had in common was the unique attitude of making an object do something that it wasn’t supposed to. For example, an aerosol can wasn’t designed to do huge colourful works of art, so the graffiti artists made their own nozzles so that the paint flow could be better controlled and directed. Record turntables weren’t designed to spin backwards, records themselves weren’t designed to be “scratched” and there was no machine that allowed DJs to listen to one record in their headphones while the other one played through the speakers – that is, until DJ Grandmaster Flash https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oA-OpvH4CIQ invented it. An MC on the mike could hype the crowd at a basketball court in a housing project and turn the location into a party place, a party for the whole block, a “Block Party”. Back when I started Bboying in North Sydney in 1984 there were no “Hip Hop” clothing labels, no “Hip Hop” friendly electronics companies, no local “Hip Hop” record labels; if you wanted to be a “Hip Hopper” you had to make it yourself. Hip Hop, like Punk music, was a DIY culture, a participatory culture. I went to the chemist and bought some white gloves for my mime inspired popping moves, I went to Paddy’s markets to buy a local fashion label called “Odyssey” that made baggy pants that local Bboys dug because they were good to dance in. I went to a Hobbyco store in Crows Nest to buy paint and glue to stick coffee jar lids and lego tyres onto my stereo to make my own “ghetto blaster” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=- DeTR8n7eTU We practiced our Bboying in a car park next to North Sydney train station, learning off each other in a time before the internet. We went to hardware stores to buy rolls of linoleum – we called it “lino” – to dance on when we were busking down at Circular Quay. From the periphery of mainstream society Hip Hop has quickly moved to the centre of the production of consumer culture. Will Smith started out as an MC, as did other Hollywood actors Queen Latifah, Mark Wahlberg and Ice Cube. Ice Cube was in N.W.A. the group famous for their song “F--- the Police” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z7-TTWgiYL4 I can remember Triple J playing the song, then some politicians said they shouldn’t be playing it, that it should be banned, so they played it on repeat for 24hrs. Now Ice Cube makes kids movies like “Are We There Yet?” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xFvco0kn7bw Red Bull spends thousands on the international Red Bull BC One Bboy championships https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC9oEzPGZiTE692KucAsTY1g Apple paid millions for Dr Dre’s headphone brand Beats, Missy Elliot plays for halftime entertainment at The Superbowl, Obama publicly states that he likes Jay Z’s album “The Blueprint” and Jay Z starts his own streaming service, Tidal, while Kanye West….well, let’s just leave it there.