Hip Hop & High Culture

I was struggling to find a topic for a final blog post in 2015 until I saw that Kendrick Lamar’s album, ‘To Pimp a Butterfly’ was named best album of the year in the Rolling Stone’s top 50 from 2015:

“Musically, lyrically and emotionally, Kendrick Lamar’s third album is a one-of-a-kind masterpiece”

As a prior English Literature ALevel student, I, like many others, grew to hate reading throughout the traumatic two years of sixth form. Yes, hate. However, the works we were reading enabled me to develop an appreciation for high quality literature, to the point where I couldn’t bring myself to read past the first chapter of ’50 Shades of Grey’.

The works of many writers such as Thomas Hardy, C.S. Lewis and Jane Austen are all considered ‘high culture’ and so, along with ballet, opera, and classical music, considered to be the peak of culture in terms of intellectual design, talent, difficulty, and execution. Most of which originating from Europe.

Academics such as Tricia Rose have been involved in the study of Hip Hop on the overall cultural scale within society. The comparative factors between hip hop and what has seemingly been classified as ‘high culture’ are numerous:

• Rap= Rhythm and Poetry: Shakespeare created 400+ new words and his works were frowned upon by many in his time. They were only truly recognised for their greatness hundred of years later. The complexity of the linguistics used in many hip hop songs today can be mirrored to those considered part of high culture. Complex poetic techniques can be found in Rakim’s ‘Follow the Leader’, “I can take a phrase that’s rarely heard, Flip it- now it’s a daily word” as identified by Ta-Nehisi Coates as haiku. Similarly, Digable Planets with ‘Rebirth of Slick’ in the linguistic analogy “We be to rap what key be to lock”. Even sampling (bricolage) can be perceived as the adoption of history into one’s own creative expression as one is working with ‘lived’ material.
• Social commentary: Art should be an empathetic expression of the lives of those around you as we often draw inspiration from what/who is around us. Shakespeare tells a story in many of his works while capturing the societal norms, values, political/economic state of the era he was in. The same is accomplished by many hip hop artists in the linguistic illustration of their lives and the lives of those dearest to them. Nas analyses the history, present, and potential future of African Americans in ‘I Know I Can’, while Kendrick Lamar’s ‘Blacker the Berry’ is too much for me to even summarise. Both challenging pieces of social commentary within their era.
• By definition: Traditionally, ‘high culture’ had an exclusionary nature to it as it was a commodity which only the elite could afford to consume (Pierre Bourdieu: cultural capital). However, due to globalisation and the advancement of technology making cultural engagement easier, today’s definition of ‘high culture’ by the oxford dictionary is a “Highly refined artistic or intellectual achievement; the manifestation of this in art, music, literature, etc.; the appreciation of this, cultural sophistication”. The keywords in this definition are ‘refined’ and ‘sophistication’, and so having a greater emphasis on quality rather than exclusion, which is evident throughout the Hip Hop culture as a whole e.g. Kanye West’s thought through thematic transition from ‘The College Dropout’, to ‘Late Registration’, to ‘Graduation’.

Consequently, we can see that in contemporary society, ‘high culture’ and high quality are not necessarily conjoined, and seem to be dictated by race and class. However, with the rise globalization the perception of hip hop is likely to increase e.g. Swedish and Japanese Hip Hop are currently booming. Just as Vincent Van Gogh, Shakespeare, Beethoven, I am almost certain that the true genius of some of the artists within this subcultural expression will only receive the full impact of the appreciation it deserves in years to come.

There’s so much more I could say and so many more examples to give but I have essays/exams in January and a career to find somewhere lol…

Interesting links:

• Tricia Rose ‘Hip Hop Wars’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uEFlgypN-Sw
• Akala ‘The Hip Hop Shakespeare company’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pVt0g86tWps
• Ta-Nehisi Coates ‘Dungeons and Dragons in High culture and Hip Hop as Haiku’: http://bigthink.com/videos/dungeons-and-dragons-in-high-culture-and-hip-hop-as-haiku