Friday, July 14th, 2006

Hip-Hop: Pro-Logo or Pro-Liberation?

Hey fam, today ends my little takeover at PBS.org. Looking back over the past 6 weeks, it was all pretty Hip-Hop 101 for some of you regular CSWS visitors, but I’m still very happy where we went with this blog.

In fact, I think this final short piece, called “Hip-Hop: Pro-Logo or Pro-Liberation?” could have been an epilogue to Can’t Stop Won’t Stop, if I’d had enough distance and foresight.

In any case, please check it out. You can read the columns in order, the way they were written, or random like Lady Sov. Feel free to join or set off discussions. And most of all, if you like what you saw and read, or even if you didn’t, let the good folks at PBS know. It’d be great to get more from our culture and generation into the public media pipelines…

Here’s a teaser:

The scholar Tricia Rose, whose groundbreaking book Black Noise was the first great intellectual work on hip-hop, has opined that at this point in its history, hip-hop culture has completely adopted the logic of late capitalism. But it’s important to note that, even in hip-hop’s first breakthrough product, the 1979 multiplatinum-selling single by the Sugar Hill Gang called “Rapper’s Delight”, there were lyrics like this:

Hear me talkin’ bout checkbooks, credit cards, more money than a sucker could ever spend
But I wouldn’t give a sucker or a bum from the Rucker not a dime ’til I made it again

In fact, part of the lore around these very lyrics is that they were stolen from one of the most popular rappers of the time — Grandmaster Caz — by his self-proclaimed manager, “Big Bank” Hank, to use in the song, another story in this culture of stories that only seems to boost the “capitalism-is-theft” school of thought.

posted by Jeff Chang @ 11:32 am | 1 Comment

One Response to “Hip-Hop: Pro-Logo or Pro-Liberation?”

Crunk says:

July 18, 2006 at 10:12 am

Wow… What an informational blog.. Keep it up! By the way, that book…. i gotta read it.

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