Hip-Hop Culture as Reflection of Individual Lives - Coursework Example

Does hip-hop reflect individual lives or is it merely a product of a mass "culture industry"? Hip-hop, which today is one of the most controversial forms of expression in the United States, is not only about rap music and a lifestyle, but a multibillion-dollar industry also. Its phenomenal rise has sparked a lasting foothold in the market economy, and inevitably achieved acceptance worldwide as a cultural movement or art form. It thus earned a certain legitimacy that helped spawn critical and serious scholarly notice among cultural critics, art scholars, exhibition curators, media, and even from people in the music circuit. One contention that has divided many about hip-hop is whether it begs to be hailed as the newest art form to emerge in the last few decades or to dismiss it as just merely a product of the money-making capitalist world in what others refer to as mass produced culture industry. This research aims to address a more personal, tougher question: does hip-hop music and culture reflects individual lives, or least to say, an artist’s free expression or conception of how he sees the world surrounding him or it was merely a cultural product for consumption by people? Prospects for hip-hop as art, where derive To understand the concept that surrounds hip-hop as art, it said that it is best to postpone any attempt to define it until one has inquired into its history. Hip-hop then must be considered as timeless thing that is wanting of change and variety. Like all human artifacts hip-hop music and culture has a history; therefore, one’s understanding of this cultural movement, must be sensitive to those changes. Relative to this discussion are the views of Max Weber and Friedrich Nietzsche, two of the most important thinkers during their time. Weber (1864–1920) said, "Definition can be attempted, if at all, only at the conclusion of the study." Meanwhile, Nietzsche (1844–1900) held that "only that which has no history can be defined.” To understand then this once cultural movement and discover if hip-hop is a reflection of an individual artist’s life, we look to its history. In a documentary directed by Byron Hurt and featured by CNN titled, “"Hip-Hop: Beyond Beats & Rhymes,” it says that hip-hop, which is now more than thirty years and counting, catapulted to popular acceptance its own brand of music (i.e., hard-driving beat, rhythmic, and in-your-face lyrics), looks, streetwise attitudes, and multi-million industry. It is this musical art form that also gave voice to people who didn’t have one. Matt Silverstein traced back the birth of hip-hop in the early 1970s in New York’s South Bronx and exposed what life was really like and the struggles of second class citizens living there such as Jamaicans, African Americans, and Puerto Ricans. These urban inhabitants of the housing projects in the borough endured an impoverished and claustrophobic living experience, coupled with the landlord-induced burning of tenements (for insurance claims) stretched these dwellers’ patience but also in turn “generated a synergistic sense of desperation among the populace.” As if these hellish experiences were not enough, there was also joblessness to contend with and immediately forced many inhabitants to fell to the lure of illicit lifestyles in order to cope with the harsh poverty and in order to provide the needs of their families. The quality of education offered to the youth was below par that left many children disillusioned. According to Silverstein and to his words— “The daily pains of ghetto life, played out on gang-run streets and in drug infested projects, pleaded for an outlet to release the misery felt by its inhabitants. The hip-hop culture was the answer to these prayers.” (Silverstein, 2000) This cultural movement called hip-hop is actually founded within the frame of promoting the expression of free thoughts and longings, in ways that will respond to or escape an impoverished or oppressed environment. Scholars noted that there are four elements of hip-hop, namely—DJing, MCing, breakdancing, and graffiti—and how hip-hop artists use these to express their individuality and uniqueness. For MCs, they express the impoverished conditions of their lives through rap songs while breakdancers utilized their bodies to show or express their emotions. Graffiti artists, who in their own ways develop a unique writing style, to convey various messages or meanings and be able to make themselves known to a world they perceived to be indifferent to their kind. To this, Silverstein noted further that each element aimed too at unifying the community in their own ways, in effect providing a non-violent form of competition for the residents in these housing locations “to engage in, in a world otherwise pervaded by a dog-eat-dog way of life.” Hip-hop’s transformation into a mainstream, mass culture commodity While considered an art form, hip-hop became absorbed as cultural product espoused by the mass culture concept. This mass culture industry is the aggregation of television, radio, film, and advertising concerns. Popular culture items are also included here like jazz, magazines, soap operas, and even hip-hop. In the dynamics of mass culture concept, the “standardization and pseudo-singularity of cultural items, and the regulation of their promotion and distribution are expected.” Hence, there is likely merger of all forms of art into one such as in advertising and entertainment for example because the stress is mainly about commercialization or marketability. From its marginal place in the society, over the past two decades, it is said that hip-hop has slow by slow transcended this state that today, the term is continually reinforced and redefined. Art critic Derek Conrad Murray hailed the remarkable character of hip-hop and credited its longevity for its unwavering and continuous effort to innovate and inspire, citing that it struggles to maintain its authenticity in spite of being massive in scale. To recall, in the ‘80s hip-hop scene, artists who emerged are Run DMC, the Beastie Boys and L.L. Cool J., who later on crossed over on to the pop charts. In the '90s, Tupac Shakur, Notorious B.I.G., and Jay-Z helped hip-hop go mainstream. While starting out as fad, it soon goes main stream to leave its mark and legitimacy as one important mass culture phenomena and item. For years, the hip-hop music has gained wide popularity and recognition from awards shows like Grammys, American Music Awards, alongside country music artists. Reports from CNN’s Paula Zahn Show said that in 2007 this multibillion-dollar industry accounts for one of every five records sold in the United States, with white as top buyer gobbling up eighty percent. In this industry also, black ownership and entrepreneurship have been achieved on a massive extent. Hip-hop has spawned over the course of the years many subcultures and array of multinational forms as well, each with its own vernacular and personal style, yet what Murray finally observed is that artists and styles come and go at such a rapid pace that makes them almost impossible to track. Many hip-hop rap artists have also begun to branch out into other areas of the culture industry, and some others who have become global brand names on their own. In this multibillion-dollar trade, opportunities and employment grew at a faster pace, reporting an unprecedented rise in the number of colored people being employed. Opportunities were opened for stylists, clothing designers, graphic artists, Web artists, producers, publicists, writers, editors, make-up artists, among many others. There was also explosion of growth in black-owned advertising agencies, law and public relations establishments, whose primary clientele is from the hip-hop industry. Adorno’s Criticisms of the Capitalist-espoused Mass Culture Industry Concept Theodor Adorno, one of the most influential philosophers who have written extensively about his rebellion against the mass culture industry shared the idea that an art form that goes mainstream and becomes part of the culture industry will lose its autonomy because it undergoes the process of commodification to bear the commodity character of art. He puts it that— “The autonomy of the work of art, which of course rarely ever predominated in an entirely pure form, and was always permeated by a constellation of effects, is tendentially eliminated by the culture industry, with or without the conscious will of those in control.” (Adorno) He also noted the tremendous power that mass media wields as an organizing force–not during work hours–but during one’s leisure hours. He discovered first about the structural shift in late capitalism through his work with Paul Lazersfield, a sociologist with the Princeton University. Influenced highly by Marxist thought, Adorno’s criticism of the culture industry seem to reflect his use of this ideology as basis, highlighting further that the only concern of the said industry is toward the production of art for mass consumption with a clear dependence on the concepts of base (mode of production) and superstructure (cultural products). In Marxist’s thoughts, the wealthy or dominant ruling class as the base in capitalism is the one who controls a capitalist order to perpetuate “eternal laws” that support in “upholding of its desires, hence of increased profit.” While, he recognizes the differences among art from the same genres, Adorno sees these differences as mere “effects,” or “details” that serve only to make the work seem different from previous works however. Silverstein finally put this— “The producers are experts at creating this illusion of difference. This illusory difference ultimately concludes in work that “bears no relation to the details,” and thus might as well be the same movie, television show, or musical composition that the masses consumed prior to its production. The merit of the art shifts from the art’s intrinsic, or qualitative value (which is almost completely lost), to the “conspicuous budget,” or blatant cash investment in the work; the more money put into a project, the greater it is valued by the masses. By “diminishing tension between the finished product and everyday life,” the culture industry gains increased sway with consumers. Offering a vast array of products (a product for people at every level of society) that uphold and conform to the ideologies of the dominant class, results in a narrow, passive culture for consumers to wallow in.” (Silverstein) His visionary works form part of his earlier writings called The Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947), which he co-authored with fellow Frankfurt school leader Max Horkheimer. The chapter in the said studies titled, “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception,” he broached his first few prognostication about the roles of mass culture and communication in determining contemporary capitalist societies, then further enumerating these ideas in the essay “Culture Industry: Reconsidered”. With other members of the group of emigrants from Nazi Germany (Horkheimer, Leo Lowenthal, Herbert Marcuse, Erich Fromm, and others), Adorno’s critique of mass culture was established in the light of the trends prevalent in contemporary capitalism. To many, these social scientists were the pioneers in the systematic analysis and criticism of mass-mediated culture and communications within critical social theory, representing the first generation of social theorists to analyze the ubiquity of the “culture industry”, as they termed it, in the birth of contemporary societies where the so-called mass culture and communications gets the lion’s share of attention in the leisure activity, and act as veritable agents of socialization. In Culture Industry: Reconsidered, Adorno commented that the culture industry contemplates a plan to make the products or even art form tailored for the masses’ consumption, “and which to a great extent determine the nature of that consumption, are manufactured according to plan.” Looking into this transformation of hip-hop culture yields the commodification of hip-hop as one viewed to be the only logical explanation for this change, proving its products are marketable. The distribution of hip-hop products has predominantly been in the hands of established institutions ever since, giving the impression that as much as being an art, hip-hop is a commercial product that begs to maintain its capitalist-induced nature. In effect, the masses are said to be left entangled in the dominant class’s intentions to put hip-hop in mainstream culture because according to Adorno, the masses then becomes secondary and object of calculating an appendage of the grand plan of this culture industry concept. In his words, Adorno said— “Culture industry minuses its concern for the masses in order to duplicate, reinforce and strengthen their mentality, which it presumes is given and unchangeable … the masses are … the ideology of the culture industry, even though the culture industry itself scarcely exist without adapting to the masses.” (Adorno) Where then in a mass produced culture industry put the real artist, say, specifically in this study, hip-hop artists to have their distinct voice discernible? Adorno pointed out that the concept of art as a way or form available for the artist to make an independent and empowered action is in fact threatened or inevitably faces the threat by the forces of capitalist production, in effect muzzling the artist’s growth and freedom to express new ways of seeing the world. Since in mass culture industry, the masses or customer is its object, the effect it bears to the seriousness of high art is also inadvertently destroyed in speculation about its efficacy. How this happens, the Frankfurt philosopher said that “the seriousness of the lower perishes” the constraint to be imposed by the civilization at present against those who will rebel and resist the system. Likewise, culture industry’s emphasis on marketability shells out entirely with the “purposelessness” that was fundamental to the autonomy of art. Fifthdimension.blogspot.com noted that the culture industry is not concerned about preserving the genuine commodity character in artworks when the use value was presupposed by exchange value. So what happens now is that in the sight of the consumer, they only enjoy an art’s use value as fetish. This happens since a shift has occurred in terms of the internal economic structure of the cultural commodities, prompted by the absolute demand for marketability— “Instead of assuring freedom from uses determined by society, and thus having an authentic use value that people can relish, products liaised by the culture industry have their use value replaced by exchange value— Everything has value only in so far as it can be exchanged, not in so far as it is something in itself.” (Fifthdimension.blogspot.com) In a nutshell, what Adorno tries to stress is that any cultural industrial replacement of use value by exchange value opens the vent to a decisive shift in the structure of all commodities and in turn the capitalism’s structure itself. It will be observed that any production of creative output, whether these are literary works, have a production-market and worker mediation. Who then decides the value is the user, the arranger and mediator of the work since the contemporary work has nothing to do with the worker’s specific character. Hip-hop culture as reflection of individual lives is difficult What’s common among hip-hop artists and executives in the music industry is that with microphone, they can now speak and voice the reality. Grammy Award-winning hip-hop artist Mary J. Blige said that with hip-hop, there is, “The freedom to actually show people what it is that you have come from, how you have come through it, you know, and, if you're still in it, to share with people what you're living.”A civil rights activist interviewed for the said documentary, Al Sharpton enthused that what actually started hip-hop is through saying “fight the power,” which he further elaborated to mean that hip-hop expresses freely and reflects the hip-hop artists’ “real kind of defiant kind of urban street self-identity, self-definition.” Aside from realities, hip-hop mogul Russell Simmons of Hip-Hop Summit Action Network posited his stance that the music of hip-hop mirrors what we face in the real world, adding that rappers are in fact reflections of “our sad truth”. But still, there are some artists who use hip-hop to send positive message with their music. Yet, notwithstanding the monetary infrastructure involved, Murray observed that some of the most potent and dynamic visual art being generated today is spawned from hip-hop, and its global impact and influence on culture has been undeniable. In the face of global capitalism, sending one’s message or having that distinct voice discernible through hip-hop music may find it difficult and challenging. In a market economy, the customer who sometimes decides the fate of a cultural element such as hip-hop, the artist must as well realize that in order for his creative work to survive, he has to please what the masses wants or need. These, coupled with the reality that the mass culture industry has hands in suppressing or sometimes manipulating the socially and artistically valuable elements of the culture in our midst, can also weigh in an artist’s freedom to express. In some regard, some major record labels and promoters allowed artists of hip-hop culture express themselves freely as they learned and accepted to package hip-hop among the marginal side of the society, and thus retained its underground nature. Silverstein also revealed that there are also some artists who maintain their socially progressive qualities and stay true to their roots, free from the profit-driven pressures of major label deals. He put it, thus— “The original elements of hip-hop can still be found in the margins of society, and though they have become more developed, they have stayed the same in many ways. The true culture has never really made it out of the underground, because of the financial risks involved in promoting original material that challenges traditional notions of normalcy.” (Silverstein) With this, Adorno theories can be a handy support as he emphasizes that mass production does not result in the standardization of the cultural product. “The production of popular music can be called ‘industrial’ only in its promotion and distribution, whereas the act of producing a song-hit still remains in a handicraft stage. It is still ‘individualistic’ in its social mode of production.”(Gilroy,1993). Thus, he realizes standardization as a necessity of mass consumption. Murray, on the other hand, noted that there is a real contradiction that exists between culture and music, which according to him resides in the global acceptance and homogenization by the culture industry. As while the music of hip-hop tries very hard to maintain its authentic, hard-core street credibility, however, its artists are appearing in consumer produced elements like clothing, advertising, game shows, sitcoms, and even Hollywood movies. This in effect, makes room for conflict to exist— “Hip-hop would be quickly and summarily dismissed as the capitalistic detritus of a hegemonic consumer culture. Hip-hop's brand of radical black resistance in tandem with its embrace of digitality and aggression in the global marketplace locates it in an ideologically dichotomous position with traditional forms of art-historical praxis.” (Murray) On a positive side, this viable industry of hip-hop turned out to be a feasible path for many young people of colored in many areas of industry, from arts, business and law. My reasons for Agreeing To conclude, while the presence of the mass culture industry cannot be completely removed as the world progresses to a more market-driven economy, however, it does not equally means that an artist’s individual creativity or meaning will disappear wholly. It may be difficult for an artist to have his distinct voice heard or his independent and empowered action be recognized, however, the choice still rests to the artist whether to maintain pursuing and developing his craft until a more discerning, intelligent crowd discovers him or to be swayed by the deals offered by major institutions that form part of the mass culture industry. End Notes Adorno, Theodor. “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception” from “Dialectic of Enlightenment.” Continuum International Publishing Group: 1976 “Adorno’s Culture Industry: Modern Implications.” Fifthdimension.wordpress.com. Retrieved 20 Feb. 2008 Gilroy, Paul. Against Race: Imagining Political Culture beyond the Color Line (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000), 180. Murray, Derek Conrad. “Hip-hop vs. high art: notes on race as spectacle.” Findarticles.com. 20 Feb. 2008 Silverstein, Matt. “Hip-Hop and the Culture Industry: A Debasing Fusion.” Africaresource.com. 20 Feb. 2008 Read More