Hip-hop symposium addresses culture

Students from multiple universities gathered in the Fields Center on Saturday afternoon for “Hip Hop 2.0: The Price of an Era,” a symposium that addressed a number of issues surrounding the current state of hip-hop.

Organized by the student group Hip Hop: Art and Life, the second annual symposium featured lectures and panels throughout the day followed by a concert and an after-party that ran well into the night.

The speakers and panelists explored the racial politics at work in music while also considering the ever-increasing influence of commercialism and the Internet’s role in reshaping hip-hop culture.

ChiChi Ude ’12, an officer on the Hip Hop: Art and Life board, said she hoped the conference would shed light on “the changing times of hip-hop” and “how economics function in hip-hop culture.”

“[This is] an issue that everybody should talk about in their roles as consumers,” she said.

The events began with a workshop on pop culture titled “Is America Stupid?” hosted by Ise Lyfe, an activist and MC.

The keynote speaker, Tricia Rose of the Department of Africana Studies at Brown University, then took the stage.

Rose’s lecture focused on the evolution of hip-hop, highlighting what she called the “commodification of black culture” and examining the major challenges currently confronting the genre.

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She said she viewed market consolidation as the root of many of the current problems in hip-hop.

“The entire space of what we call the context for imaging, for music, for marketing of black popular culture but especially hip-hop, is in technically the hands of three or four major multinational conglomerates,” she said. “What are the terms of creativity and freedom in this corporate context?”

According to Rose, the inability of artists to reach the market and achieve commercial success without conforming to the standards of the corporate monopoly is in large part responsible for the proliferation of the destructive images and conceptions of black culture abundant in hip-hop.

She added that one particularly important part of redefining the role of hip-hop in pop culture is re-examining what she called the “ ‘gangster-pimp-ho’ trinity,” which, she said, seems to be “the major religion in hip-hop.”

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This trope, she said, encapsulates some of the most well-known and enduring stereotypes of black men and women. It is reinforced by the fact that socioeconomic inequality, produced partly by deindustrialization, pushes “astute” disadvantaged black youth into the only avenues for financial stability available to them.

“What’s happened is that the emergence of the ghetto as a structural condition has in the last 25 years spawned a belief that black culture is itself a physical manifestation of hundreds of years of stereotypes about black people,” Rose said. “This is really about ghettoization becoming the dominant narrative for black culture.”

A series of panels followed the keynote address, featuring a number of professors, bloggers and industry executives. The first, titled “Death of a CD,” examined the influence of the Internet on hip-hop and the second, “Digital Underground,” examined the outgrowth of independent record labels.

A final panel, titled “Selling Dreams,” featured religion professor Cornel West GS ’80 and discussed the importance of authenticity in hip-hop as well as the genre’s exploration of racial questions.

“The problem is, when you look at the younger generation today, with the variety of artists, you get the feeling that there is a formula for success rather than courage to tell the truth,” West said. “And they are not the same thing, at all.”

“If everybody is in it for the money — me, you and everybody else — what does that mean? That means there will never be another Martin King,” he aded.

West also attested to the cultural power of the hip-hop genre.

“I view hip-hop itself as the most significant cultural breakthrough since 1979,” he added.

Rose echoed this sentiment.

“This idea that the ghetto itself becomes entertainment and that we can think about these enormous structural sufferings as entertainment is really the transition in black music that really is a crisis but also an opportunity,” she said. “If we know what is happening in that moment, then we have all that we need to begin to unpack and separate ourselves from that process and to say that music itself has been this enormously healing balm for people of African descent.”

The event attracted 182 attendees, including students from Swarthmore, Rutgers, Cornell, Amherst, The College of New Jersey and Massachusetts Institute of Technology.