An Introduction To Hip-Hop- Lesson Four

AN INTRODUCTION TO HIP HOP—LESSON FOUR

The preservation of Hip Hop is the preservation of our unique way of seeing the world. And because Hip Hop is a perceptual ability, its preservation can happen outside of physical reality. The documentation, preservation and interpretation of Hip Hop requires a slight consciousness shift on the part of the scholar. Hip Hop’s history, its documentation, preservation and interpretation, falls outside of linear time and physical space. The nature and essence of Hip Hop is in superposition and must be documented superhistorically. What does this mean?

As you have already learned, Hip Hop is our cultural idea. It is not a physical thing, it is an attitude. Hip Hop is not an object, it is a subject. As a non-physical subject, the documentation of Hip Hop can also fall outside of material reality. Documenting, studying and teaching the history of an idea like Hip Hop demands that one expands one’s own consciousness beyond linear time and specific places as well as beyond race and ethnic identity. Hip Hop comes from everywhere! It is a collective consciousness.

Super-historical Hip Hop reveals how Hip Hop’s true history is not just the documentation of moving objects in physical reality; it is more accurately the documentation of moving subjects in a transcendent reality. This methodology deals more with Hip Hop’s origins than with its history; we will create a better history when we have an understanding of Hip Hop’s true origin and nature.

Beyond race, class, gender, etc., OUR PEOPLE are united by certain universally accepted interests and ideas, and these specific interests and ideas are found all over the world and at different times in the world. Again, Hip Hop itself is not a physical thing, nor is it of the physical world—it is a shared urban idea. Hip Hop’s true and accurate history is the documentation of, and search for, Hip Hop’s collective attitudes, principles, views, abilities and interests throughout and even beyond linear time and physical space.

The old historical paradigm was to identify one’s self with one’s land of origin. When studying history and looking for one’s self in the events of the past we were taught to look for, and relate to, those historical characters that one physically resembled the most. If you were Black that meant that you were historically from Africa and if you really wanted to know more about your history you were compelled to take African Studies. You would never think or be encouraged to seek your African history and heritage within the history of the Irish, or the Chinese, or the Cherokees. This same example can be applied to any race or ethnicity of people.

In the old paradigm your personal identification in history is materially based—it is based upon race and the documentation of your race in certain geographical locations on the physical earth. And there’s nothing wrong with this approach; it is just limited to physical things in linear time and physical space which makes such an approach inadequate for the historical study of Hip Hop. When you seek to document a non-physical event like Hip Hop, the rules change dramatically. To identify and then document Hip Hop you must realize that you are documenting an idea, not a person, or even an event in Nature. Hip Hop is a shared idea. The true Hip Hop historian must undergo a slight consciousness change from identifying one’s self with certain people in history to identifying one’s self with certain ideas in history in order to truly understand the true essence of Hip Hop.