Can't Stop Won't Stop Read online

  Can’t Stop

  Won’t Stop

  Can’t Stop

  Won’t Stop

  A History of the Hip-Hop Generation

  Jeff Chang

  Introduction by DJ Kool Herc

  St. Martin’s Press New York

  CAN’T STOP WON’T STOP. Copyright © 2005 by Jeff Chang. Introduction copyright © 2005 by DJ Kool Herc. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.

  “Two Shot Dead In Bronx Duel.” From The New York Amsterdam News, January 11, 1975. Reprinted with permission. All rights reserved.

  Excerpt from “Black Art” by Amiri Baraka, from the book The Leroi Jones/Amiri Baraka Reader, William J. Harris, editor. Copyright © 1960, 1961, 1963, 1964, 1965, 1966, 1967, 1968, 1969, 1970, 1971, 1972, 1975, 1979, 1980, 1981, 1984, 1987, 1989, 2000 by Amiri Baraka. Appears by permission of the publisher, Thunder’s Mouth Press, a division of Avalon Publishing Group.

  Excerpts of letters, quotes, and lyrics by Chuck D and excerpts of quotes by Sally Banes, Simon Reynolds, and Richard Goldstein are reprinted with permission.

  www.stmartins.com

  www.cantstopwontstop.com

  Design by James Sinclair

  ISBN 0-312-30143-X

  EAN 978-0312-30143-9

  First Edition: February 2005

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  To Lourdes, who walks with me

  To Eugene and Eleanor and Nestor and Melinda,

  who haven’t always understood where we were going

  but packed lunch and warm clothes anyway

  To Jonathan and Solomon, who will soon be leading us

  Special Livication to

  Rita Fecher, Benjamin Davis, Richie Perez and the Ancestors

  Longing on a large scale is what makes history.

  —Don DeLillo

  Contents

  Introduction by DJ Kool Herc

  Prelude

  Loop 1: Babylon Is Burning: 1968–1977

  1. Necropolis: The Bronx and the Politics of Abandonment

  2. Sipple Out Deh: Jamaica’s Roots Generation and the Cultural Turn

  3. Blood and Fire, with Occasional Music: The Gangs of the Bronx

  4. Making a Name: How DJ Kool Herc Lost His Accent and Started Hip-Hop

  Loop 2: Planet Rock: 1975–1986

  5. Soul Salvation: The Mystery and Faith of Afrika Bambaataa

  6. Furious Styles: The Evolution of Style in the Seven-Mile World

  7. The World Is Ours: The Survival and Transformation of Bronx Style

  8. Zulus on a Time Bomb: Hip-Hop Meets the Rockers Downtown

  9. 1982: Rapture in Reagan’s America

  10. End of Innocence: The Fall of the Old School

  Loop 3: The Message: 1984–1992

  11. Things Fall Apart: The Rise of the Post–Civil Rights Era

  12. What We Got to Say: Black Suburbia, Segregation and Utopia in the Late 1980s

  13. Follow for Now: The Question of Post–Civil Rights Black Leadership

  14. The Culture Assassins: Geography, Generation and Gangsta Rap

  15. The Real Enemy: The Cultural Riot of Ice Cube’s Death Certificate

  Loop 4: Stakes Is High: 1992–2001

  16. Gonna Work It Out: Peace and Rebellion in Los Angeles

  17. All in the Same Gang: The War on Youth and the Quest for Unity

  18. Becoming the Hip-Hop Generation: The Source, the Industry and the Big Crossover

  19. New World Order: Globalization, Containment and Counterculture at the End of the Century

  Appendix: Words, Images and Sounds: A Selected Resource Guide

  Notes

  Acknowledgments

  Index

  Introduction

  by DJ Kool Herc

  When I started DJing back in the early ‘70s, it was just something that we were doing for fun. I came from “the people’s choice,” from the street. If the people like you, they will support you and your work will speak for itself. The parties I gave happened to catch on. They became a rite of passage for young people in the Bronx. Then the younger generation came in and started putting their spin on what I had started. I set down the blueprint, and all the architects started adding on this level and that level. Pretty soon, before we even knew it, it had started to evolve.

  Most people know me as DJ Kool Herc. But sometimes when I introduce myself to people. I just tell them that my friends call me Herc. Later on, they might ask, “Are you that Herc?” My thing is: come and meet me as who I am. My head is not swollen, I don’t try to front on people. If you like what I do, if you like me playing music or giving parties, hey, that’s what I do for my friends and people. It’s what I’ve always done.

  To me, hip-hop says, “Come as you are.” We are a family. It ain’t about security. It ain’t about bling-bling. It ain’t about how much your gun can shoot. It ain’t about $200 sneakers. It is not about me being better than you or you being better than me. It’s about you and me, connecting one to one. That’s why it has universal appeal. It has given young people a way to understand their world, whether they are from the suburbs or the city or wherever.

  Hip-hop has also created a lot of jobs that otherwise wouldn’t exist. But even more important, I think hip-hop has bridged the culture gap. It brings white kids together with Black kids, brown kids with yellow kids. They all have something in common that they love. It gets past the stereotypes and people hating each other because of those stereotypes.

  People talk about the four hip-hop elements: DJing, B-Boying, MCing, and Graffiti. I think that there are far more than those: the way you walk, the way you talk, the way you look, the way you communicate. Back in my era, we had James Brown and civil rights and Black power; you did not have people calling themselves hip-hop activists. But these people today are talking about their era. They have a right to speak on it the way they see it coming up.

  Hip-hop is the voice of this generation. Even if you didn’t grow up in the Bronx in the ‘70s, hip-hop is there for you. It has become a powerful force. Hiphop binds all of these people, all of these nationalities, all over the world together.

  But the hip-hop generation is not making the best use of the recognition and the position that it has. Do we realize how much power hip-hop has? The hiphop generation can take a stand collectively and make a statement. There are lot of people who are doing something positive, who are doing hip-hop the way it was meant to be done. They are reaching young people, showing them what the world could be—people living together and having fun.

  But too often, the ones that get the most recognition are those emphasizing the negative. And I think a lot of people are scared to speak on issues. “Keeping it real” has become just another fad word. It sounds cute. But it has been pimped and perverted. It ain’t about keeping it real. It’s got to be about keeping it right.

  For example, rappers want to be so “bling-bling.” Are you really living a luxurious life? Don’t you have other issues? What things touch you? That’s what we’d like to hear rappers speak about. Start a dialogue with people. Talk about things going on in the neighborhood.

  Music is sometimes a medication from reality, and the only time you get a dialogue is when tragedy happens. When Tupac or Biggie or Jam Master Jay died, that’s when people wanted to have a dialogue. It was too late. Not enough people are taking advantage of using hip-hop as a way to deal with serious issues, as a way to try to change things before tragedy strikes.

  We have the power to do that. If
Jay-Z comes out one day with his shirt hanging this way or LL Cool J comes out with one leg of his pants rolled up, the next day everyone is doing the same thing. If we decide one day to say that we’re not gonna kill somebody senselessly, everyone will follow.

  I don’t want to hear people saying that they don’t want to be role models. You might already have my son’s attention. Let’s get that clear. When I’m telling him, “Don’t walk that way, don’t talk that way,” you’re walking that way and talking that way. Don’t just be like a drug dealer, like another pusher. Cut the crap. That’s escape. That’s the easy way out. You have the kid’s attention. I’m asking you to help me raise him up.

  You might be living lovely. But if you came out of the neighborhood, there was somebody who was there to guide you when you needed it, someone that said, “Son, here’s two dollars.” You might have beat up on the ghetto to get out of it, but what have you done for the ghetto lately? How can you come from nothing to get something, but yet the same time, still do dirt to tear it all down?

  Hip-hop has always been about having fun, but it’s also about taking responsibility. And now we have a platform to speak our minds. Millions of people are watching us. Let’s hear something powerful. Tell people what they need to hear. How will we help the community? What do we stand for? What would happen if we got the hip-hop generation to vote, or to form organizations to change things? That would be powerful.

  Hip-hop is a family, so everybody has got to pitch in. East, west, north, or south—we come from one coast and that coast was Africa. This culture was born in the ghetto. We were born here to die. We’re surviving now, but we’re not yet rising up. If we’ve got a problem, we’ve got to correct it. We can’t be hypocrites. That’s what I hope the hip-hop generation can do, to take us all to the next level by always reminding us: It ain’t about keeping real, it’s about keeping it right.

  Prelude

  Generations are fictions.

  The act of determining a group of people by imposing a beginning and ending date around them is a way to impose a narrative. They are interesting and necessary fictions because they allow claims to be staked around ideas. But generations are fictions nonetheless, often created simply to suit the needs of demographers, journalists, futurists, and marketers.

  In 1990, Neil Howe and William Strauss—both baby boomers and self-described social forecasters—set forth a neatly parsed theory of American generations in their book, Generations: The History of America’s Future, 1584 to 2069. They named their own generation “Prophets,” idealists who came of age during a period of “Awakening,” and their children’s generation “Heroes,” who, nurtured by their spiritually attuned parents, would restore America to a “High” era. In between were “Nomads” inhabiting a present they described as an “Unraveling.” What Howe and Strauss’s self-flattering theory lacked in explanatory power, it made up for with the luck of good timing. The release of Generations intersected with the media’s discovery of “Generation X,” a name taken from the title of a book by Douglas Coupland that seemed to sum up for boomers the mystery of the emerging cohort.

  Howe and Strauss’s book was pitched as a peek into the future. Cycles of history, they argued, proceed from generational cycles, giving them the power to prophesize the future. Certainly history loops. But generations are fictions used in larger struggles over power.

  There is nothing more ancient than telling stories about generational difference. A generation is usually named and framed first by the one immediately preceding it. The story is written in the words of shock and outrage that accompany two revelations: “Whoa, I’m getting old,” and, “Damn, who are these kids?”

  Boomers seem to have had great difficulty imagining what could come after themselves. It was a boomer who invented that unfortunate formulation: “the end of history.” By comparison, everything that came after would appear as a decline, a simplification, a corruption.

  Up until recently, our generation has mainly been defined by the prefix “post-.” We have been post–civil rights, postmodern, poststructural, postfeminist, post-Black, post-soul. We’re the poster children of “post-,” the leftovers in the dirty kitchen of yesterday’s feast. We have been the Baby Boom Echo. (Is Baby Boom Narcissus in the house?) We have been Generation X. Now they even talk about Generation Y. And why? Probably because Y comes after X.

  And so, by the mid-1990s, many young writers—sick of what Howe and Strauss and their peers had wrought—took to calling themselves “the Hip-Hop Generation.” In 2002, in an important book, The Hip-Hop Generation: Young Blacks and The Crisis in African American Culture, Bakari Kitwana forged a narrow definition—African Americans born between 1965 and 1984—a period bracketed by the passage of the Civil Rights Act and the assassination of Malcolm X on one end and hip-hop’s global takeover during the peak of the Reagan/Bush era at the other.

  Kitwana grappled with the implications of the gap between Blacks who came of age during the Civil Rights and Black Power movements and those who came of age with hip-hop. His point was simple: a community cannot have a useful discussion about racial progress without first taking account of the facts of change.

  Folks got bogged down once again in the details. How could one accept a definition of a Hip-Hop Generation which excluded the culture’s pioneers, like Kool Herc and Afrika Bambaataa, for being born too early? Or one that excluded those who had come to claim and transform hip-hop culture, but were not Black or born in America? Exactly when a Hip-Hop Generation began and whom it includes remains, quite appropriately, a contested question.

  My own feeling is that the idea of the Hip-Hop Generation brings together time and race, place and polyculturalism, hot beats and hybridity. It describes the turn from politics to culture, the process of entropy and reconstruction. It captures the collective hopes and nightmares, ambitions and failures of those who would otherwise be described as “post-this” or “post-that.”

  So, you ask, when does the Hip-Hop Generation begin? After DJ Kool Herc and Afrika Bambaataa. Whom does it include? Anyone who is down. When does it end? When the next generation tells us it’s over.

  This is a nonfiction history of a fiction—a history, some mystery and certainly no prophecy. It’s but one version, this dub history—a gift from those who have illuminated and inspired, all defects of which are my own.

  There are many more versions to be heard. May they all be.

  Jeff Chang

  Brooklyn and Berkeley

  January 1998 to March 2004

  And if I don’t get my desire

  Then I’ll set the spaceships on fire

  —Gregory Isaacs

  LOOP 1

  Babylon Is

  Burning

  1968–1977

  “Ladies and gentlemen, there it is.”

  Photo © Matt Daly/Code Red/911 Pictures

  The St. Athanasius school baseball team, South Bronx

  Photo © Mel Rosenthal

  1.

  Necropolis

  The Bronx and the Politics

  of Abandonment

  When you come to the ballpark, you’re walking into a place that is all deception and lies. . . . There’s nothing truthful at the ballpark. Except the game.

  —Barry Bonds

  It was a bad night for baseball in the South Bronx—an angry arctic wind, an ominous new moon.

  The largest crowd of the year filled Yankee Stadium for the second game of the 1977 World Series, the New York Yankees versus the Los Angeles Dodgers, east coast versus west.

  The Yankees were the best team money could buy. When Major League Baseball raised the curtain on free agency before the 1977 season, owner George Steinbrenner opened his checkbook and with a $3 million offer landed the biggest prize in the game, home-run slugger Reggie Jackson, the son of a Negro Leaguer who had received seven dollars a game. For the Yankees—who did not sign their first Black player until nine years after Jackie Robinson broke the color line—Jackson was their most expen
sive signing in history.

  Manager Billy Martin seethed. He had opposed signing Jackson. He refused to attend the press conference introducing Jackson in pinstripes. As the season began, he cold-shouldered the star, sometimes benched him. When he was upset, he called Jackson “boy.”

  Jackson got along no better with his new teammates. Some resented his salary, even though white players like Catfish Hunter had million-dollar contracts as well. They thought Jackson too flamboyant, flaunting his blonde girlfriends in the Rolls-Royce Corniche that Steinbrenner had bought him. But it was his arrogance that finally turned them. In a magazine article, Jackson dissed captain Thurman Munson, saying, “This team, it all flows from me. I’ve got to keep it all going. I’m the straw that stirs the drink.” Maybe he had not meant to say it that way. Maybe he was just telling the truth. Jackson’s teammates stopped talking to him.

  During a June game against the Red Sox, the tension finally exploded. After Jackson missed a flyball in right field, Martin angrily pulled him off the field. Jackson trotted slowly and angrily for the dugout. “What did I do?” he asked Martin.

  “What did you do?” Martin barked. “You know what the fuck you did.”

  “I wasn’t loafing, Billy,” Jackson protested. “Nothing I could ever do would please you. You never wanted me on this team. You don’t want me now. Why don’t you just admit it?”

  “I ought to kick your fucking ass!” Martin screamed.

  Jackson lost it. “Who the fuck do you think you’re talking to, old man?”1 The Yankee coaches leaped up to restrain Martin from punching Jackson, while TV cameras rolled.

  That night in his hotel room, Jackson came to tears in front of a small group of news reporters. “It makes me cry, the way they treat me on this team. The Yankee pinstripes are Ruth and Gehrig and DiMaggio and Mantle and I’m a nigger to them,” he moaned. “I don’t know how to be subservient.”2