Underground Hip Hop Quotes

It was 1977. Bob Marley was in a foreign studio, recovering from an assassin’s ambush and singing: “Many more will have to suffer. Many more will have to die. Don’t ask me why.” Bantu Stephen Biko was shackled, naked and comatose in the back of a South African police Land Rover. The Baader-Meinhof gang lay in suicide pools in a German prison. The Khmer Rouge filled their killing fields. The Weather Underground and the Young Lords Party crawled toward the final stages of violent implosion. In London, as in New York City, capitalism’s crisis left entire blocks and buildings abandoned, and the sudden appearance of pierced, mohawked, leather-jacketed punks on Kings Road set off paroxysms of hysteria. History behaved as if reset to year zero. In the Bronx, Herc’s time was passing. But the new culture that had arisen around him had captured the imagination of a new breed of youths in the Bronx. Herc had stripped down and let go of everything, save the most powerful basic elements—the rhythm, the motion, the voice, the name. In doing so, he summoned up a spirit that had been there at Congo Square and in Harlem and on Wareika Hill. The new culture seemed to whirl backward and forward—a loop of history, history as loop—calling and responding, leaping, spinning, renewing.

The University of California, Berkeley, one of ten Universities in California, is in fact about to inaugurate, for the student season 2022-2023, a new course dedicated to rapper and singer, Nicki Minaj, entitled “The Galaxy of Hip-Hop Feminisms.” According to its description, “the constellation of dynamic voices, theories, and productions of underground and mainstream Black feminine rappers who have influenced the origins of Hip-Hop and its ongoing evolution.” It will also examine the “the genealogy and nuance of key Black feminine rappers and theoreticians in the field, practice, and culture of Hip-Hop Feminisms across the Black Diaspora.” Also, very interesting to understand is the “woke” propaganda, which is recommended readings for the course, that even include pornographic material, which come from supposed “Cultural Studies, Hip-Hop Studies, Feminist Studies, Gender & Sexuality Studies, Porn Studies, Media & Film Studies, and Performance Studies.

The photographer will ask you what kind of music you want to play during the shoot. Remember that whatever you choose will be blasted through the loft and heard by an entire crew of people who are all so cool that the Board of Ed. officially closed school. Just murmur, “Hip-hop,” or make up the name of a hipster-sounding band and then act superior when they’ve never heard of it. “Do you guys have any Asphalt of Pinking? [disappointed] Really? [shrug] Whatever you want, then.” Sometimes they ask if you want to hook up your iPod for background music. Do not do this. It’s a trap. They’ll put it on shuffle, and no matter how much Beastie Boys or Velvet Underground you have on there, the following four tracks will play in a row: “We’d Like to Thank You Herbert Hoover” from Annie, “Hold On” by Wilson Phillips, “That’s What Friends Are For,” Various Artists, and “We’d Like to Thank You Herbert Hoover” from Annie.

Are you one of those people who thinks hip-hop belongs to Black people?” I ask. “Of course it does.” He smooths the humor from his expression. “We made it. It’s ours in the same way jazz and the blues and R&B are ours. We innovated, making sound where there was no sound before. The very roots of hip-hop are in West Africa from centuries ago. But we share our shit all the time, so you’re welcome.” I lift a brow at his ethno-arrogance, but he throws his head back laughing at me, maybe at himself. “Art, specifically music, is a living thing,” he says. “It isn’t just absorbed by the people who hear it, but it absorbs them. So, we shared hip-hop with the world, and it isn’t just ours anymore. The Beastie Boys heard it. Eminem heard it. Whoever heard it fell in love with it, added to it, and became a part of it.” “And that’s a good thing?” “Mostly. If that hadn’t happened, if we hadn’t shared it and someone other than us loved it, it’d still be niche. Underground. Now it’s global, but that wouldn’t have happened if it hadn’t gone main- stream. Mainstream means more opportunities, so I’m all for white, Asian, Hispanic. We need everybody buying hip-hop, because ultimately, it’s about that green.