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The past decade and a half has witnessed the emergence of the most recent "seed" in the continuum of Afrikan-American culture,(1) rap music. Hip-hop music and culture have caused volumes of controversy and forged their way into a marginal position alongside that of popular culture. Through rhythm and poetry, hip-hop has endeavored to address racism, education, sexism, drug use, and spiritual uplift. Hip-hop criticism, however, has primarily focused on the music's negative and antisocial characteristics, and has rarely yielded information about hip-hop's relationship to its artistic precursors.
It is important that observers understand hip-hop in a context that reflects its aesthetic goals and the tradition from which hip-hop has emerged. Black Arts literary critic Addison Gayle, Jr., notes that Black art has always been rooted in the anger felt by Afrikan-Americans, and hip-hop culture has remained true to many of the convictions and aesthetic criteria that evolved out of the Black Arts Movement of the '60s, including calls for social relevance, originality, and a focused dedication to produce art that challenges American mainstream artistic expression. Conservative attitudes concerning hip-hop's irreverence for middle-class values--evident in slang, clothing, etc.--have impeded the process of critically analyzing an art form that, at its core, has proved to be a considerable force for social change through campaigns such as Boogie Down Production's "Stop the Violence." At the very least, hip-hop has brought much needed dialogue to issues affecting America's Black community in a manner that no popular art form has, prompting Public Enemy's Chuck D to refer to hip-hop as the "CNN" of the Black community.
In this essay, I point to three areas that show the ideological progression from the Black Arts Movement to hip-hop: (1) the elements of anger and rage in the cultural production of Afrikan-American art in the two movements being studied, (2) the ideological need for the establishment of independent Black institutions and business outlets such as schools and publishing and recording companies, and (3) the development of a "Black Aesthetic" as a yardstick to measure the value of Black art.
BLACK RAGE, ANGER, AND CULTURAL EXPRESSION
The element of black anger is neither new nor, as Herbert Hill would have us believe, pas. The black artist in the American society who creates without interjecting...