Hip Hop’s Essential Ties to Freedom

What’s something that all Hip-hop artists share? How can we conceptualize Sexxy Redd, standing next to Drake, while he’s battling Kendrick Lamar? How does Hip-Hop remain itself, even with its proven propensity to constantly evolve? It’s probably several things, as these things go. But in this essay, I will argue for freedom as that central, fundamental, and unifying commitment which connects Hip-Hop artists across time, style, and purpose.

Hip-Hop, as much as we like to stretch its origins to West African practices of signifying and ciphering, is an American music genre, maybe the most quintessentially American one we have. In that same breath of rebellion that Hip-Hop has always represented, it conjoins, it coalesces with the American story of pioneers braving the wilderness, turning a desire for freedom (from the crown and from the church) into an insatiable, indomitable – providentially-inspired even – expression of cultural will. 

Never quite patriotic though, Hip-Hop more popularly finds parallels with its American colonial forefathers in that second era of American freedom, when revolutionaries fought for the right to be free from British control, for the right to more fully, more freely control their strange system of slavery and capitalism. When we visit the Bronx in the early 70s, at that fateful neighborhood block party enhanced by the innovative and undeniably infectious sounds of DJ Kool Herc, the type of American freedom that comes to mind is that amended, evolved version of Revolutionary War days. 

It’s a freedom that turns away from the customs of its parents. A freedom that remixes the ways, the stories, the values that are handed down to it. When DJ Kool Herc found a dope way to extract and loop the drum breaks in his parents’ beloved collection of Soul and Funk records, he was expressing this version of freedom. It’s an American freedom still – the freedom to look around at what people are doing and have done for a long time, and to decide to take on the challenge to do something else. It’s the audacity to violate the sanctity of tradition, to reprimand the comforts of colonial culture.

And this type of freedom – it has been a defining and catalytic feature of Hip-Hop, a part of the reason for its continued success and vitality even through the genre’s early history of ruthless evolution.

Hip-Hop started with a simple groove that was black and was dope. It was a way to infuse new energy into a party, an energy that was distinct from the popular energies of the previous generation, as well as the traditional energies of the American colonial situation. What started as one man’s vision for a different sound, rebelling against family and country, quickly inspired many other people to craft Hip-Hop visions running the gamut of sound and purpose. People wanted parts of this new thing, and they wanted to make it theirs. 

Some people saw Big Herc and felt that they could express the longings of their soul with music technology in similar kinds of ways. But most people, they observed what was going on, and they quickly caught wind that the solar, catalytic thing about this new music, the sine qua was in fact – its newness. Its birth as a remix art form, as a form of rebellion, as an innovation of music and culture; these things hinted at the powerful spirit of freedom that would take “Dee-jaying” as an input, and spit out East Coast Mafioso Rap, Miami Freaknik Frolicking, and West Coast Funky Gangster Sagas.

Hip-Hop is about the freedom to innovate. It’s a powerful form of holding America accountable to its originally espoused, and even updated values. Whether one’s purpose is to more fully and culturally appropriately express one’s self, whether one sees Hip-Hop as an avenue for financial freedom, or whether one looks at Hip-Hop’s history with a progressive, remixing comtempt; Hip-Hop artists, being tied to the larger story of “The American Experiment” and 20th Century decolonization efforts, are inextricably connected by the timeless pillar we call freedom. It’s about doing our own thing, dominant culture be damned… kinda. And It Don’t Stop.