Less appreciated, I think, are the external adversarial forces that worked upon African-American culture in the early days of hip hop, forces that were deflected or 'flipped' into aesthetic practices. I am thinking of the postindustrial landscape of the South Bronx, where the physical decay and planned destruction of neighborhoods exposed strata of history and memory in brief flashes preceding total loss. It was a “permanent state of emergency,” and for young people, the formulation of a cultural-artistic response was a matter of life and death.
When I see pictures of the South Bronx in its saddest days, I am reminded of Walter Benjamin's 'angel of history':
There is a picture by Klee called Angelus Novus. It shows an angel who seems about to move away from something he stares at. His eyes are wide, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how the angel of history must look. His face is turned towards the past. Where a chain of events appears before us, he sees one single catastrophe, which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it at its feet. Th angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise and has got caught in his wings; it is so strong that the angel can no longer close them. This storm drives him irresistibly into the future, to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows towards the sky. What we call progress is this storm.
The desire to “awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed”—this is the source of hip hop's continued vitality, and as the storm spreads to the new slums of the 'global village,' it is no wonder that the human casualties of progress adopt its basic forms.
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