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Before Hip-Hop Was Hip-Hop

by Rebecca Walker

If you ask most kids today about hip-hop, they’ll spit out the names of recording artists they see on TV: Eminem, P. Diddy, J. Lo, Beyoncé. They’ll tell you about the songs they like and the clothes they want to buy. They’ll tell you about the indisputable zones of

hip-hop like “EO” (East Orange, New Jersey), the “ATL” (Atlanta, Georgia), and the “West Side” (Los Angeles, California), neighborhoods they feel they know because they’ve seen them in all the glossiest, “flossiest” music videos. Hip-hop is natural to these kids, like air or water, just there, a part of the digital landscape that streams through their lives.

I watch this cultural sea change with fascination. It astounds me that hip-hop has grown into a global industry, a force that dominates youth culture from

Paris to Prague, Tokyo to Timbuktu. I can’t believe that in small, all-white towns like Lincoln, Nebraska, high school boys wear their clothes in the latest “steelo”: pants sagging off their waists, sports jerseys hanging to their knees, baseball hats cocked to one side. Even in the pueblos of Mexico, where mariachi bands and old school crooners still rule, it is hip-hop that sells cars, sodas, and children’s toys on TV.

The vast empire of hip-hop amazes me because I	reserved.
knew hip-hop before it was hip-hop. I was there when
it all began.	rights
Way back then, in what today’s ninth graders might
call the ancient eighties, there was no MTV or VH-1.	All
flipping through the stacks at the record store, or	affiliates.
We found out about music by listening to the radio,
buying “mix tapes” from local deejays at two dollars	its
	or
apiece. Back then, we carried combs in our back
	Inc.,
pockets and clipped long strands of feathers to the
	Education,
belt loops of our designer jeans. We wore our names in
cursive gold letters around our necks or in big brass	Pearson
letters on our belt buckles. We picked up words and
inverted them, calling something that we thought was	©

58 Close Reading Notebook • Unit 2

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really cool, “hot,” and something that had a whole lot of life, “def.”

We didn’t know a whole new language was rolling off our tongues as we flipped English upside down and pulled some Spanish and even a few words from Africa into our parlance. We didn’t know that young people for years to come would recycle our fashions and sample the bass lines from our favorite tracks. We thought we were just being kids and expressing ourselves, showing the grown-ups we were different from them in a way that was safe and fun. In fact we were at the epicenter1 of one of America’s most significant cultural revolutions, making it happen. Who knew?

Not me.

When I moved from Washington, D.C., to the Bronx the summer before seventh grade, I had one box

of records, mostly albums I had ordered from the Columbia Record Club. In 1982, if you promised to buy a record a month for one whole year, the Club sent you eight records for a penny. I had Bruce Springsteen’s “The River,” REO Speedwagon’s “The Letter,” “Belladonna” by Stevie Nicks. I had “Stairway to Heaven,” by Led Zeppelin and the soundtrack from the movie Saturday Night Fever, which I played so many times I thought my mother would go crazy from listening to me belt out the lyrics with those lanky, swanky Bee Gees.

Along with my albums I had loads of 45s, what today we would call singles, little records with just two songs on them, that I bought at the record store near my school for just a dollar a piece. I had Chaka Khan’s “I’m Every Woman,” and Luther Vandross's “Never Too Much,” and Chuck Brown and Soul Searcher’s big hit, “Bustin’ Loose.” I had Michael Jackson’s “Rock with You” and even Aretha Franklin’s cover of “You Make Me Feel Like a Natural Woman,” which I sang along to in the mornings as I styled my hair.

If you had asked me then about rap music I would have shrugged my shoulders and looked at you like you were crazy. Rap music? What’s that?

But then I started seventh grade and my whole world turned upside down. At Public School 141, I went to

1. epicenter (ep» i sent« ßr) n. focal or central point.

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classes with kids from all over the Bronx. There were kids whose families came from Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic, and kids whose families came from Russia and China. There were kids who were African-American and kids who were Irish-American, kids who were Italian-American and kids who were Greek-American. There were kids whose families were poor, kids whose families were well off, and kids whose families were somewhere in between. Some were Jewish, and others devout Catholics. Some were Muslim. Some of the Asian kids were even Buddhist.

The charge created by so many different elements coming together was palpable.2 The school crackled with energy, and as you can imagine, things weren’t always smooth. There were some pretty entrenched cliques, and a few vicious fights in the schoolyard.

But there was also so much “flavor.” You could hear Spanish spoken with a thick “Nuyorican” accent to a kid wearing a “yamulke.” A seemingly reserved Asian-American girl would get out of her parents’ car, wait for them to drive off, and then unzip her coat to reveal a fire engine red Adidas sweatsuit. A guy in a preppy, button-down shirt would “sport” gold chains with pendants of every denomination: the Jewish Star of David, the Arabic lettering for Allah, and a shiny gold cross. He was everything, that was his “steelo,” and everyone gave him “props” for it.

When I got to 141, I felt like a blank canvas. Nothing had prepared me for the dynamism, the screaming self-expression of the place and its students. For the first few weeks I secretly studied the habits of the seventh, eighth and ninth graders with whom I walked the halls and shared the cafeteria. I was transfixed

by the way they infused their words with attitude and drama, moving their hands and heads as they spoke. I was captivated by the way many of them walked and ran and joked with each other with confidence and bravado. I noted what they wore and how they wore it: the razor sharp creases of their Jordache jeans, the spotless sneakers with the laces left loose and untied.

Slowly, I began to add some of what I saw into my “look.” I convinced my grandmother to buy me a name chain to wear around my neck, and my stepmother

2. palpable (pal» pß bßl) adj. able to be touched, felt, or handled; tangible.

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60 Close Reading Notebook • Unit 2

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to buy me dark dyed designer jeans. I bought my first pair of Nike sneakers, red, white and blue Air Cortez’s, with money I saved from my allowance.

One by one, I started to make friends—Diane, Loida, James, Jesus, Maya. When James and Jesus weren’t making fun of me for being so “square,” they took me to parties on the Grand Concourse, the big boulevard lined with old apartment buildings and department stores that ran through the Bronx. The parties

were incredible, filled with young people who didn’t drink, smoke or fight, but who just wanted to dance and laugh and ooh and ahhh over the “scratching” sounds and funky beats the DJ’s coaxed out of their turntables.

A lot of the kids at the parties were “breakers” or “poppers and lockers,” which meant they could breakdance, a style of movement that blends the

Brazilian martial art of Capoeira with a dance called the Robot, and incorporates classical dance moves as well. The “breakers” moved in “crews” that competed against each other.

Standing in a circle we watched as members of the different groups “moonwalked” into the center, and then hurled themselves to the floor, spinning on their heads, kicking their legs into the air, and making elaborate hand gestures, each more intricate and acrobatic than the last. Everyone at the party who wasn’t “breaking” was a judge by default, and we registered our scores by clapping and yelling.

When Loida and Diane weren’t “capping on” or making fun of my clothes, they were “hipping” me to Kiss 98.7 and WBLS, the radio stations that had started to slip some of the songs we liked into their

rotation. Songs like “Planet Rock” by Soul Sonic Force and “Take Me Home” by Lisa Lisa and the Cult Jam. After school and on the weekends, they took me to the street vendors that sold the accessories we all coveted: the big knockoff Porsche sunglasses everybody wanted but not everybody could afford, and the heavy gold chains people collected around their necks like so many pieces of string. Loida and Diane also took me around the city on the bus, familiarizing me with the routes of the M1 and M3 and M7, showing me all the different neighborhoods like Little Italy and Chinatown, Bed-Stuy and Harlem.

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I remember looking out the big sliding glass windows of the bus at the lines drawn in concrete and glass and thinking that while the world outside seemed so divided, inside, in my circle, among my friends, those lines didn’t seem to exist. Loida was Dominican and Diane was Puerto Rican. Our friend Mary was Irish-American, and Lisa was Italian-American. Maya’s family was from Haiti. Julius was Russian-American. We were different ages, with different likes and dislikes, but we were united in our love of hip-hop.

We loved the “dope”3 beats, the ever changing and ever expanding lexicon, the outrageous dance moves, the cocky swagger, the feeling that we were part of something dynamic and “fresh”4 that was bigger than any one of us. That world, that other realm that we created on the streets and in our minds, that streamed from the radio in the privacy of our bedrooms and coursed between us as we talked on the phone, that was where we lived.

That was where we felt free.

Looking back on it now, I can see that hip-hop was born of the diversity I found at 141. Unlike the hip-hop of today, it didn’t come pre-packaged from a marketing department with millions of dollars to spend. Our hip-hop was the product of a bunch of kids from a bunch of different places trying to talk to each other, trying to create a common language that could cut through the many languages people spoke at home. Intuitively, kids were making a community where there was none; we were affirming our sameness in a world that seemed to only emphasize our difference. That desire to come together irrespective of superficial differences and sometimes in celebration of them, was what gave hip-hop authenticity, that was what kept it honest and as crucial to our well being as food. It’s what kept it real.

I can’t say much about hip-hop today, but I can say that old hip-hop, original hip-hop, changed my life forever. I only lived in the “Boogie Down Bronx” for

a year, but those twelve months gave me so much. I learned that art could bring people together and make them forget their differences. I learned how good it could feel to move with a “posse,” a group of friends

3. dope (dòp) adj. slang term meaning “great; irresistible.”

4. fresh (fre§) adj. slang term meaning “new.”

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62 Close Reading Notebook • Unit 2

who had my back no matter what. I learned that I could express myself and communicate with others through what I wore and how I walked and what music I liked. I learned that it doesn’t take money or a special degree to transform the grit and drive and hardness of the city into something beautiful.

Loyalty. Community. Self-confidence. Creativity. Hip-hop taught me more about real life than anything I learned that year in class.

I hope when kids today look at shiny videos by their favorite hip-hop artists, they will see through the expensive cars and exotic locations, the women in skimpy outfits and the men trying to approximate a “gangsta” lean. I hope they will remember that hip-hop was born without a formula and without a lot of

expensive props or violent undertones. I hope they will marvel at the fact that in the early days of hip-hop, young people were making it up as they went along, following their hearts, following what felt good. I hope they will think about what it takes to create culture that is unique and transcendent and honest, and I hope they begin to dream about creating a new world for themselves.

I hope hip-hop inspires them to make their own revolution.

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