‘Hip-Hop Nation’ Examines the Rise of a Musical Movement

Born three decades ago on the streets of the Bronx, condemned by the establishment for its encouragement of violence and misogyny, hip-hop has survived to become a major component of American and world culture and a billion-dollar industry.

And now it is art.

The Brooklyn Museum of Art is holding the first major art museum exhibition ever devoted to hip-hop, exploring its history as a multifaceted art form involving music, dance, poetry and visual art in the form of costume and graffiti.

“We had wanted to do something about the street culture in the local community,” said museum co-curator Kevin Stayton. “Then along came the idea of doing this show, a concept we found perfectly appropriate. Hip-hop has proved an expressive art form that goes far beyond its musical impact.”

A long subway ride off the beaten track for New York museums, the Brooklyn Museum of Art has won a reputation of late for staging flashy, controversial exhibitions as a means of drawing attention and crowds to itself--witness its recent “Sensation” show featuring an elephant dung Madonna and dissected farm animals floating in formaldehyde.

But in the case of “Hip-Hop Nation: Roots, Rhymes and Rage,” it has succeeded in winning an audience with a minimum of controversy.

“It’s one of our most popular shows,” Stayton said. “And it’s drawing people not only from Brooklyn but from the rest of New York and a lot of visiting tourists as well.”

Tipper Gore and others who feel offended and threatened by hip-hop lyrics and attitudes might not agree, but experts in urban culture think it only right that the work of the Beastie Boys and Ice-T is being enshrined in an institution where one also finds Thomas Cole, Winslow Homer, John Singer Sargent, Georgia O’Keeffe and Richard Diebenkorn.

“It is curious to find it curated, so to speak, but quite appropriate,” said DePaul University professor Michael Eric Dyson, one of the nation’s leading hip-hop scholars. “Hip-hop is a phonic archive and a verbal museum of urban black and Latino culture. It has become so dominant because it so brilliantly addresses the dominant themes of black youth and Latino youth in America--and increasingly now white youth and beyond.”

Organized by Cleveland’s Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and sponsored by Levi’s and the National Endowment for the Arts, “Hip-Hop Nation” is a chronologically arranged encyclopedic exhibition, following the development of the phenomenon from its origins on the stoops and sidewalks of the South Bronx and Harlem to the big time.

It also explores the cultural roots of hip-hop, going back to the pre-World War II uptown music of Cab Calloway, including his not exactly feminist musical lamentation “Minnie the Moocher.” Today’s hip-hop street wear, if wildly different, is no more outlandish than the zoot suit outfits Calloway and his contemporaries wore, for the same nonconformist, self-expressive reasons as modern-day rappers.

Exhibition Resembles a Hip-Hop Hall of Fame

Rich in artifacts, with more than 400 objects and videos on view, the show embraces hip-hop in the same way Cooperstown embraces baseball.

In displays about as subtle as pinball machines, you’ll find Beastie Boys promotional posters, a Kool DJ Herc Stetson hat, a Slick Rick hat and eye patch, a Jazzy Jeff three-finger ring and Notorious B.I.G. sunglasses.

But the show illustrates rather than explains hip-hop’s development into what the museum calls “the most influential American cultural phenomenon of the past 25 years.”

On view are mementos of Queen Latifah’s rise as an oddly feminist hip-hop diva (as in the number “Ladies First” on her debut “All Hail the Queen”; certainly a riposte to many rapper lyrics). But we’re not told how she was able to translate her street music success into a film career and a continuing role as a fixture of mainstream American daytime television.

The dazzling visual record of hip-hop history displayed in the show includes some spectacularly lively images, including a photo of the group Stetsasonic with the Rev. Jesse Jackson, and some of the wildest posters in the history of the medium.

But graffiti art, the most visual expression of hip-hop culture, seems to take a back seat here to all the studded stars’ jackets and floppy caps.

It would have been interesting to explore the connection of rap graffiti to that of 1960s Pop art icon Jean-Michel Basquiat.

“That kind of powerful, chaotic color and very staccato imagistic world he summons was a definite precursor to graffiti art,” Dyson said.

And there’s another connection to the oral-literary phenomenon of slam poetry. Dyson believes the latter’s success has grown out of that of hip-hop.

“Slam poetry has found a very powerful emphasis within bohemian cafe life and black artistic subcultures and white subcultures because of the popularity of hip-hop,” he said.

Show Consists of Five Sections

The exhibition has five sections; the first devoted to an introductory display of hip-hop’s four elements: deejaying, emceeing, break dancing and graffiti.

The second section deals with the culture’s origins, with artifacts from both the Calloway era and the early careers of genre pioneers Grandmaster Flash, Afrika Bambaataa and others in the 1970s.

Section 3, “The Golden Era,” is all about what Stayton calls hip-hop’s most creative period, from the mid-1980s to 1990. As a museum spokesman noted: “The era produced the remarkable rhyme skills of Rakim and Slick Rick, the feminist flavor of Salt N’ Pepa, MC Lyte, Monie Love and Queen Latifah; the agitprop poetry of Public Enemy; and the gangsta soundtrack of N.W.A.”

Section 4, “Controversy: Outrage and the Rise of Gangsta Rap,” follows with what might be described as the genre’s “dark age,” when the gangsta idiom and mind-set came to the fore and earned itself a full measure of public opprobrium. This was the time of Ice-T’s “Cop Killer” record and 2 Live Crew’s obscenity trial. It saw both Tupac Shakur and the Notorious B.I.G. gunned down in drive-by shootings.

Extending through most of the ‘90s, this period also saw hip-hop move fully into white America, with hip-hop and gangsta styles and music becoming part of ordinary life in high schools as far removed from the Bronx and Harlem as Langley, Va., or Wilmette, Ill.

The fifth section, “Pop Goes the Culture,” depicts the current-day pervasiveness of hip-hop, from the scratch-and-thump music’s domination of the pop music charts to the way national advertising now markets products to teens.

If not fully explained in this show, the appeal of hip-hop to the entirety of American and world youth is certainly obvious.

“Teen and youth rebellion are universal,” Dyson said. “You don’t have to be inside black culture to understand what it means to be alienated from the police. Hip-hop speaks to the kind of alienation from parental authority and society that is a staple of generational divorce from time immemorial.”

Its popularity has also been driven by its controversy.

“The controversy comes up, ‘Well, is this music destructive and does it feed into stereotypes that mainstream white society has of black people anyway?’ ” Dyson said. “There may be some ring of truth in that, but overwhelmingly it is focusing a powerful spotlight on the rhetorical dexterity of these black kids, who have been able by dint of their sheer artistry to transform what was an anarchic and rather mechanical art form--something very primordial, something very fundamental--into a multimillion-dollar business. Initially, it was thought to be here today, gone tomorrow, but it has outlasted the naysayers.”

Where Hip-Hop Is Headed Isn’t Answered

What the exhibition doesn’t make clear is exactly where hip-hop will be tomorrow. It’s already being exploited commercially by the white community. Will it be subsumed by it as well, as rock ‘n’ roll, an offspring of African American blues music, was in the 1950s and 1960s?

Will the aging Pat Boone, recently transformed from white bucks to heavy metal, re-transform himself into a rapper?

“I hope not,” Dyson said.

“People argue that a lot of this music is being bought by white suburban kids who are kind of safely touring black culture without being implicated in its worst circumstances,” Dyson continued. “Its commercial success is certainly undermining some of the indigenous vitality that was originally found in hip-hop. There’s self-righteousness on the part of the purists who think they’re protecting the true art form against those who have commercially commodified it.”

He said he expects the tension between the two to keep the culture vital--that it will continually recycle itself into new forms true to its origins.

Instead of going the way of rock ‘n’ roll, he thinks it will follow the course of jazz, which has kept its integrity for nearly a century.

“Bebop was a response to the kind of sweet music you got when jazz was overtaken by white musicians,” he said. “They were applauded while the black musicians who created jazz were being overlooked.”

Like jazz, Dyson said he thinks hip-hop will continue to find itself ennobled as an art form, both in lofty exhibitions such as Brooklyn’s and on the concert stage.

“People go to the Lincoln Center and listen to jazz,” he said. “Maybe in 20 or 40 years hip-hop will be performed in a concert hall where Snoop Doggy Dogg will be an ancient relic, and a grand old man like Duke Ellington was, sitting on a stand and reciting his poetry to suit-and-tie people. It’s hard to imagine, but it was hard to imagine that with jazz in the beginning.”