First Songs
‘Lemme hear you say… fight the power’
Public Enemy
Just as Ragtime, Jazz and R&B, and other Black music forms entered mainstream culture earlier in the century, today it is Hip Hop culture and its unique sound that is becoming an important form of music and cultural style around the globe.
According to some, Hip Hop’s distinctive vocal technique – rapping – can be traced from African bardic traditions to rural southern-based expressions of African Americans ( such as toast, tales, sermons, blues, games, songs, and allied forms) all of which are chanted in a rhyme or poetic fashion.1
Although we know that Hip Hop sprang from the turmoil of the Bronx, the idea of music as a vehicle for carrying political messages is not new. As far back as 1776, in the US, some of the nation’s first protest songs were by and about slaves. Songs such as ‘Steal Away’, ‘Go Down Moses (Let My People Go)’, and ‘We Shall Be Free’ were rooted firmly in religious hymns and spirituals. These, over time, evolved into more openly political songs of action and rebellion. In 1813, a secret slave organisation in South Carolina opened and closed their meetings with the song: ‘Arise, arise! Shake off your chains! Your cause is just, so Heaven ordains, To you shall freedom be proclaimed…Call every Negro from his task, Wrest the scourge from Buckra’s hand, And drive each tyrant from the land!’2
Some time later, in support of a different fight for freedom, Julia Ward How penned the ‘Suffrage Song’ to highlight the women’s suffrage cause (to give women the right to vote).
My country ‘tis for thee, To make your women free, This is our plea, High have our hopes been raised, In these enlightened days, That for her justice, praised, Our land may be.
VIDEO:
Palenque, a small village in Colombia, where Hip Hop is used by local kids to release the frustration of poverty and racism. From Nga Tahi - Know the Links.
»watch video
Civil Rights and Unions
In the 1890s, workers started calling for unions and an improvement of workers rights and conditions – and protest movements all over the world during the 20th century (including Aotearoa) took up one of the most famous songs from this era, ‘Bread and Roses’.3 It was the reference to this song that Aotearoa filmmaker Gaylene Preston used as the title for her bio-pic about unionist and politician Sonja Davies.
As we go marching, marching, Unnumbered women dead,
Go crying through our singing, Their ancient call for bread,
Small art and love and beauty, Their drudging spirits knew,
Yes it is bread we fight for, But we fight for roses, too.
The time of the 1930's Great Depression inspired many to write of the harsh realities going on around them. In Harlem (New York), and elsewhere in the US, the African American tradition changed music forever, and jazz now reigned supreme – and produced songs like the deeply disturbing ‘Strange Fruit’, the story of black lynching in America’s South (interestingly, it was written by a Jewish scholar from the Bronx).
Southern trees bear a strange fruit, Blood on the leaves and blood at the root,
Black body swinging in the Southern breeze, Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees…4
It was during this time that white artist Woody Guthrie, one of the great political balladeers, worked his way across the Depression-scarred countryside and wrote his collection ‘Dust Bowl Ballads’ (1940) – and was also when the song ‘Brother Can You Spare a Dime’5 topped the music charts.
…They used to tell me I was building a dream, With peace and glory ahead, Why should I be standing in line, Just waiting for bread…Once I built a railroad, I made it run, I made it run against time, Once I built a railroad and now it’s done, Buddy can you spare a dime?
With the founding of the new Folkways record label in 1947, many in the general public and mainstream music community discovered the ‘blues’ for the first time – a tradition deeply rooted in African American history, slavery and protest – and opened up opportunity to Black artists such as Huddie Ledbetter (known as Leadbelly) and Billie Holliday.
Well, me and my wife we were standing upstairs, We heard the white man say ‘I don’t want no niggers up there’…
‘Bourgeois Blues’ by Leadbelly
The Rise of Folk
Among those predominantly white artists who toured America, singing to support struggling workers before WWII, was a young Pete Seeger – who became one of the great champions of folk and protest music, and helped bring ‘folk’ into the mainstream in the early 1950s. It was into this new awareness of folk music that singer/songwriters like Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell, Joan Baez, Arlo Guthrie (Woodie’s son) and Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young arose in the 1960s and ‘70s – many protesting against US involvement in the Vietnam War.
He’s 5 foot 2 and he’s 6 feet 4, He fights with missiles and with spears, He’s all of 31 and he’s only 17. He’s been a soldier for a thousand years. He’s a Catholic, a Hindu, an atheist, a Jane, A Buddhist, and a Baptist and a Jew. And he knows he shouldn’t kill, And he knows he always will kill, You’ll for me my friend and me for you…
‘Universal Soldier’ Buffy Saint-Marie
New York Hip Hop writer Lee163D spoke of this time: ‘Shit was deep. You had Vietnam and all types of protests, The Black Panthers, The Young Lords, racism and hatred at a peak and brothers and others fighting inequality and dying trying to put a stop to it. Burn Baby Burn. Tension. The odds were against you.’ African Americans were making a declaration with ‘I’m Black and I’m Proud,’ whilst the Funk was ‘kicking ya in the ass, saying we’re all just one nation under a groove, getting down just for the funk of it’.6
In the 1970s, the South Bronx was internationally known as the model of urban blight in the United States…This area was said to be ‘the most famous slum in America’…7
And so the stage was set for protest songs to find new voice in a new age - through Hip Hop. The release of ‘The Message’ in 1982 by Grandmaster Flash & The Furious Five saw political rap take over from party rap – commenting on the social conditions of Blacks at a time riddled with poverty, unemployment, violence, crime and a wider society who couldn’t care less.
It’s like a jungle, sometimes it makes me wonder, How I keep from goin’ under…8
Meanwhile, Aotearoa was not immune to all this change. Our own history had given rise to many protest songs – particularly within the folk scene. Protests against the Vietnam War, the 1981 Springbok Tour protests and the protest leading up to the passing of the anti-nuclear law in 1987 gave many New Zealanders a new sense of independence and identity separate from our colonial past.
Well they can flex those muscles of 70 years, Call me juvenile and naive, I’ll pay no ransom for my life, It’s only fools who fight that fight… coz I’m neutral and nuclear free, flicked the fear out of the family, got natural friends who are naturally, neutral and nuclear free…
Shona Laing, ‘Neutral and Nuclear Free’
In fact it was Reggae that became the most important musical vehicle for protest at this time (late 70s - mid 80s) - particularly for Māori and those of Polynesian descent - addressing colonisation, land claims, the Springbok tour, racism, nuclearism etc with groups like Herbs and Dread Beat and Blood. Reggae is the 'parent generation' of many of today's Hip Hoppers (Te Kupu's first group being a reggae band) and often quite literally (i.e. in the case of Che Fu). This love of Reggae still continues today.
The late 1960s were also a time of growing awareness of the impact of colonisation on Māori, and urban protest movements such as Ngā Tamatoa (the young warriors) appeared. In the 70s, this and other groups of mainly urban Māori led protests about the loss of land and culture. In 1975, led by Dame Whina Cooper, thousands of Māori from all over the country walked from Te Hāpua (in the north) to Wellington. This land march cemented a new political activism that went on to spur protests at Waitangi (the site of the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi). To address this, and other long-standing land grievances, the Waitangi Tribunal was set up in 1975. In 1977-78 occupation of Bastion Point by Ngāti Whātua further raised land and colonisation issues in the minds of white Aotearoa9, as well as underlining these issues again for Māori.
Into this setting came Hip Hop – providing a way for young Māori to present their language and the issues that mattered to them most. But it is not just Māori who have benefited from access to this new musical medium. It is the politics, messages and messengers of a new generation of activists, across the full spectrum of Aotearoa’s society, which will form the basis of our study in the rest of this section on politicisation of Hip Hop.
Mark my words it’ll be real quick / It’ll be the roughest when the revolution hits / Trigger happy on the frontline/ I’m a rise for the cause / Elevate to ensure / Tino Rangatiratanga.
Dam Native – ‘Revolution’ 'Kaupapa Driven Rhymes Uplifted' Tangata Records 1997
Test your knowledge
- Where do some people claim Hip Hop’s distinctive vocal technique came from?
- What was the song ‘Arise Arise? Shake off your chains!’ particularly used for?
- What song did Aotearoa filmmaker Gaylene Preston reference in her bio-pic about the life of Sonja Davies?
- Who wrote the song ‘Universal Soldier’?
- What song is claimed to have shifted ‘party rap’ to ‘political rap’?
- Who led the 1975 Māori Land March?
Extend your thinking
Why do you think people feel more free to express in song what they may be scared to express in other forms? What makes protest songs so powerful? What protest songs have you heard that moved you or affected the way you thought on an issue? Why did it/they? If you were to write a protest song about the issue that mattered most to you, what would it be about?
1 Keys C. L. (1991:40) ‘Rappin’ to the Beat: Rap Music as Street Culture Among African Americans’.
2 From website for PBS film ‘Independent Lens – Strange Fruit’,
http://www.pbs.org/independentlens/strangefruit/index.html .
3 Oppenheim, J. and Kolsaat, C. ‘Bread and Roses’. Circa 1890's - early 1900's
4 Meeropol, A. (1903 - 1986) best known under his pseudonym Lewis Allan; ‘Strange Fruit’. 1940
5 Harburg, E.Y. and Gorney, J. ‘Brother Can You Spare A Dime?’. 1931
6 Tamati, S. 2004 ‘A window to our world’ ‘The Next – An Impression of Hip Hop Expression’ p20.
7 Rivera, R. 2003 ‘New York Ricans from the Hip Hop Zone’ Palgrave McMillian, NY.
8 Grandmaster Flash & The Furious Five – ‘The Message’. 1982
9 Te Ahukaramū Charles Royal. ‘Māori’, Te-Ara – the Encyclopedia of New Zealand, 31 Jan 2005.
