An Introduction To Hip-Hop- Lesson Five

AN INTRODUCTION TO HIP HOP—LESSON FIVE

Presented By Master Teacher K.R.S-ONE

Our activity today is the origin of Hip Hop’s history and heritage tomorrow. Be conscious of this always. OUR ACTIVITY TODAY IS THE ORIGIN OF HIP HOP’S HISTORY AND HERITAGE TOMMOROW! Remember, Hip Hop and all of its elements are first human skills, and the teaching of Hip Hop is the teaching of the human Skills. With this in mind, Hip Hop’s elements are also taught as:

Breakin—Dance

Emceein—Speaking

Graffiti—Writing

Deejayin—Science

Beat Boxin—Music

Street Fashion—Art

Street Language—Reading

Street Knowledge—Mathematics

Street Entrepreneurialism—Wealth

This list is called The Refinitions. The full list is found in the Gospel of Hip Hop. Once this attitude toward Hip Hop is part of your character, you see and feel Hip Hop more accurately. However, I say here with all due respect to everyone who attempts to teach Hip Hop, when it comes to the actual teaching of Hip Hop many instructors today still fall short because they don’t actually LIVE Hip Hop; they are still objective with it, they are still observing it as opposed to being it, they are still reading about it as opposed to actually doing it. They may teach a history of hip-hop, or they may have even been a Hip Hop pioneer themselves, but when it comes to actually being Hiphop and then imparting useful Hip Hop knowledge and techniques designed to enhance and empower the actual lives of real people, many hip-hop courses remain depressingly inadequate.

Some instructors believe that reviewing Rap lyrics, or watching the motion picture classic Wild Style is somehow Hip Hop scholarship; they are sadly mistaken. Others believe that they can read about hip-hop, and then claim some sort of scholarship on Hip Hop. They too are sadly mistaken. Even others believe that because they may hold a college degree in Black Studies, or Cultural Studies, or Musicology, or Journalism that such accreditations give them the authority and ability to teach Hip Hop. Again, they are sadly mistaken. And this is in no way to be taken as a critique of the hard work many Hip Hop educators have put toward the teaching of Hip Hop; we are all learning. But as we learn and grow it us, those who actually have a passion for teaching Hip Hop, that must take OUR craft more seriously.

Many who claim to teach Hip Hop have never even mastered any of Hip Hop’s elements, nor are they actually part of the Hip Hop history they teach. They teach Hip Hop with no formal training from any qualified Hip Hop instructor, and very few Hip Hop instructors have actually produced an authentic rap album, or a graffiti mural, or any kind of fashion statement themselves, yet they are teaching and introducing Hip Hop to young people—for money. No memorable concerts, or DVDs, or legendary battles, or even old school photos of their own; they’re just teaching whatever they remember seeing or hearing of Rap music in their childhood. How can Hip Hop grow like this? How can any Hip Hop instructor even grow like this?

Part of the reason for this however, has to do with how students/professors are trained by their college. The true teaching of Hip Hop begins with a respect for, and knowledge of, those that established the subject you are now attempting to study. The true teaching of Hip Hop begins with the origin of the teaching methodology itself, and who or what established it. What was the original point? Teaching Hip Hop on a professional level without the authority to do so is simply theft. Without the expressed permission and/or accreditation of Hip Hop’s Master Teacher you are simply doing the same things most invaders and colonizers have done to most of the Earth’s indigenous people.

For those studying with the Temple of Hip Hop, the true teaching of Hip Hop is not about adding more information into your brain about Hip Hop; it is more accurately about questioning and investigating the information your brain has already retained regarding all subjects, including Hip Hop. Here, the true teaching of Hip Hop is about stripping away useless ideas in the mind that prevent you from experiencing Hiphop. Once you’ve rid yourself of useless ideas and information, Hiphop will be all that you have left. Hiphop is already with you, it is your innate being. However, it is the combination of useless ideas along with self-doubt that blocks the apprentice from experiencing true Hiphop. To even study true Hiphop the apprentice MUST have the courage to be one’s authentic Self, and think outside of mainstream academic learning methodologies.

The point here, which is also the beginning of your Hip Hop teacher’s training, is that most college educated professors unconsciously bring westernized methods of understanding and investigation to Hip Hop which immediately blinds these professors from actually seeing Hip Hop for real. True Hip Hop scholars must be aware of this. You cannot assume that you can come to a new subject with an old mentality, or even worse, an objective mentality.

True learning is about self-transformation—a scary process for some, a welcomed experience for others. In any event, to truly engage in the critical study of Hip Hop it is YOUR mind that must make some slight adjustments in the way that it understands reality.

First, in every professional subject known to scholars there is always an acknowledgement of the pioneers and trendsetters of such a subject. Cures are named after the doctor’s who created them. Scientific theories and the biographical history of the theorist are taught side-by-side. Laws are named after the victim or event that caused such laws to exist. In almost every teachable subject there is precedence, biography and surrounding history that goes along with the subject being taught. But when it comes to cultures that exist outside of the western worldview, yet influences or even directly teaches Europe something, these original teachers are always left out of the European’s explanation of what is being studied.

The western academic model seems to start reality and all knowing with itself regardless of where it may have acquired such knowing from. This is why in the European model of education you first learn of Christopher Columbus before you learn of the indigenous tribes that where living and thriving in the so-called Americas centuries before Columbus. You learn first about the United States Constitution before you learn about the Iroquois Indian nation that influenced it.

Many young aspiring philosophers learn about Greek philosophy before learning about Egyptian and/or Sumerian philosophy, or Arab history which actually preserved the ancient Greek texts that everyone studies today. Many more learn the English alphabet without ever learning about the Phoenicians from which it comes. It seems that the same way in which we are taught Greek philosophy before we learn of where the Greeks got their philosophies, is the same way Hip Hop as a philosophy and teaching methodology is being treated by academicians everywhere today.

Many college educated professors never approach Kool DJ Herc, Afrika Bambaataa, Grand Master Flash, Crazy Legs, Chuck D, Just-Ice, Wise Intelligent, Big Daddy Kane, Rakim, KRS-One, or any of Hip Hop’s first teachers as actually knowing more about Hip Hop than they do. In fact, all true scholars know that you cannot even fully understand the depth of what you are studying without some kind of historical context pertaining to those who first originated your field of study—even if your learning institution buries this information. But the westernized academic pursuit of knowledge has more to do with capturing information than actually knowing what you have captured, and many college educated professors are perpetuating this mental form of invasion and colonization upon Hip Hop. Meaning that, the Hip Hop landscape (its culture) has a unique reality as well as a distinct set of principles that accompany Hip Hop’s unique reality. But professors of all sorts are ignoring such principles as well as the way in which Hip Hop approaches itself in an attempt to make Hip Hop understandable and palpable to their westernized academic institutions.

Perpetuating a colonizer’s approach to foreign cultures and peoples, that is, to settled down upon THEIR cultural landscape in an effort to establish your own, totally disregarding the actual reality and meaning of what or who you are observing so that you may make up a reality that fits YOUR basic worldview, seems to be the normal educational model today toward Hip Hop both theoretically as well as scientifically. No one is really learning anything about Hip Hop because Hip Hop is a new experience; it produces new knowledge. And because new knowledge usually replaces old knowledge and shatters existing ideas, ideas that people have become so comfortable with that anything else conflicting with these accepted ideas is met with fierce resistance, the study of Hip Hop now has to fall in line with the same outdated and in some cases blatantly wrong teaching methodologies just to be heard in these institutions of so-called higher learning.

It’s my way or the highway! This is the present style of thinking Hip Hop is faced with within the academic arena. We know, and you don’t know, even your own culture. This is how Hip Hop’s original teachers are being treated in my time, and it is this colonizing approach to Hip Hop’s fertile intellectual landscape that every true Hip Hop scholar must be aware of.

The idea of setting your view aside in an effort to fully understand the view of another or the other is virtually impossible for a student trained in this colonizing way. And on top of that, as a scholar trained with a colonizer’s character, even if you happen to lightly understand what you are observing you would still give no credit to the actual thing itself as being your source of information and thus your first teacher. With a colonizer’s personality you approach Hip Hop like land, for its use, not for its actual existence and further development.

The true Hip Hop scholar asks within himself; does my teaching of Hip Hop advance Hip Hop or does it advance Hip Hop’s further exploitation? The true Hip Hop scholar is a guardian of Hip Hop, a custodian of Hip Hop, a member of the international Hip Hop tribe. The Hip Hop scholar is not a colonizer, nor does such a scholar think through a colonizer’s personality.

To truly understand what is being said here try to remember that the very order of the societies in which we live is kept together by military force—not science, or human cooperation, or even religious belief. Social order is kept together by the threat of imprisonment or death by some militarized group, and this is because of how most of our modern nations were formed. Most industrialized nations began with the invasion and conquest of an indigenous tribe whose view of reality was to subjectively be not to just objectively know.

Through medicinal herbs, stories, dancing, drawing and singing original people BECAME the reality they wanted to know—being as a form of knowing. However, the reverse, knowing as a form of being is the result of observing something that you are not in an attempt to either eat it or assume its resource for your own survival. This seems to be the historical model for the colonization of most of the World’s tribes and their lands by Europe. Most of the educational methodologies presented to the students of an invading nation can only be objective.

Those who invade other nations only study those nations to invade and plunder them. Invading nations have little interest in becoming who or what they are invading. In fact, most western invasions of the east were over gold, spices, knowledge, slaves, plants, oil, water and other valued resources. This is what formed the educational view of observing your subject as opposed to becoming your subject.

Invaders analyzed the ways (the being) of Nature and called it mathematics; the study of patterns. But they never united with Nature itself; they observed it with the intent to conquer and control it. Original people relying upon their intuit knowledge were united with Nature from birth; there was no other understanding of Nature other than the fact that all of Nature was you. Anything you did was natural and in harmony with Nature. Outsiders, those people with the sickness of Nature-phobia, sought to explain Nature by observing it as opposed to becoming it. Outsiders and invaders seeking only the power and the riches of the original people they encountered were only interested in observing the patterns of Nature and Nature’s people in an attempt to place both under their control; and this they called “mathematics” and “science”.

This could mean that the greatest philosophical minds of Europe were merely observers trying to interpret and/or reproduce the results of indigenous peoples at natural play. Observation as opposed to being is the foundation of westernized philosophical thought, and many great minds are paying a lifetime price for being educated like this. Western man never really learned what they were studying because they were studying it as opposed to being it.

Being has to do with total transformation if you are an outsider, and this is terrifying to a person only interested in stealing what you got. Why would I want to be you if my intent is to plunder you? This is the foundation of western education around the World; observe, but don’t become. Look, but don’t join in. Take, but never give back.

This is the difference between a real Hip Hop educational system and Hip Hop being used by an educational system. If our children are to really know who they are and what they are capable of they are going to have to return to hours and hours and hours of playtime. Not free time, but play time, creative time, experimentation time, let’s break something time. They need hours of being not hours of learning.

Industrialized people are trained to analyze that which they are not. Natural people simply ARE! They DO! They BE! They EXIST! They are REAL! Their very movements in physical reality match up harmoniously with the mathematics of the universe itself which amazes the scientists of the future trying to figure out how such primitive people could have known such advanced mathematical concepts. They forget that mathematics is not the thing itself, at best it is only an interpreter, a describer; it is not however what it is describing. Math and science are only techniques used to describe and calculate perceived reality, they themselves are not the reality they are describing and possibly perceiving. This distinction is what every serious Hip Hop scholar should know when seeking to indentify real Hip Hop.

I can only imagine what scientists will say of Hip Hop in just 100 years! We already know that you can never truly know anything through observation. You can interpret, you can mimic, you can even act like what you are studying; but until you become the subject of your study you will never truly know it. As with any profession, you can read about it all day, you can study your subject for many years gaining high honors in your studied field; but until you are actually BEING and DOING what you’ve studied you really have not truly learned anything about the subject you’ve devoted your time to.

As great as math and science are as sources of knowledge, it is the unconscious act of random play that truly creates them both. Play and the continuous return to joy and pleasurable moments is what causes human awareness to grow and expand. The true basis of knowing; is being. You cannot really know what you are not. Reality itself surrounds and plays with beings of all sorts, and it is this playing with reality itself that reveals Truth and knowledge. Again, mathematics is not the thing itself; it is an interpretation of the patterns that such a thing may create. However, in Nature patterns are created by beings at play. Ultimately, if you cannot play and experiment you cannot really learn or know, or even learn to know.

This is the beginning of an authentic Hip Hop education. It is not so much about the practice of breakin, emceein and/or deejayin. A real Hip Hop education has to first undo centuries of bad learning and replace such learning with productive being and doing. A good Hip Hop education teaches its apprentices first how to learn; not what to learn. Hip Hop’s teacher (or teachings) must be able to separate the illusionary world of a colonizer’s symbols from the actual reality of doing and being.

In his 1973 film Enter The Dragon Bruce Lee and his teacher has a conversation on this very topic. Bruce Lee explains; a good fight should be like a small play, but played seriously. A good martial artist does not become tense, but ready; not thinking, yet not dreaming. Ready for whatever may come. When the opponent expands, I contract. When he contracts, I expand. And when there is an opportunity, I do not hit, IT hits all by ITSELF. The teacher replies, now you must remember; the enemy has only images and illusions behind which he hides his true motives. Destroy the image and you will break the enemy. The IT that you refer to is a powerful weapon easily misused by the martial artist who deserves his loss.

In our case, the IT is Hiphop. However, mainstream education rest upon an objective symbolic approach to the nature of reality. Most students are not taught to handle reality directly, the IT; they are taught to approach physical reality through symbols. Mathematics and numbers are symbols of real forces in Nature. However, most students do not work directly with reality itself, they work with certain symbols like numbers and letters to explain reality. Like in the example of letters and writing; both of these are symbolic. They are not real unto themselves, they point to what is real; they describe reality, they are not reality itself. They are simply not IT.

Letters and writing are the symbols of direct human speech. Direct human speech is the real word, the real living word. A true Hip Hop education reveals that pronunciation is the actual form of words, letters are their symbols. The living word is sound understandable by the ear which is then symbolized through letters to reach the eye. Letters (let-ters) allow you to see sound; brail allows you to touch sound.

A true Hip Hop education is not exclusively interested in the symbols others may place upon our sounds. A true Hip Hop education explores OUR sounds OUR way, and creates its own language and symbolic interpretations to the reality we strive to manifest. This style of education is not about learning anything, it’s about being anything. IT is about being anything you have the imagination for. Once the Hip Hop apprentice realizes that she can change her reality by changing the symbols she uses to interpret her reality, she begins to free her mind. Other people’s symbols and interpretations of OUR lives no longer hold any validity. We can create our own word symbols like breakin, emceein, deejayin, even Hip Hop, etc., and experience the realities that these word symbols create for us.

I am not the letters K-R-S-O-N-E and I am the reality that the K-R-S-O-N-E word symbol refers to. K-R-S-O-N-E the word is not what is real—I am. I am the meaning of the KRS-One word symbol that everyone responds to, not the actual letters K-R-S-O-N-E. These letters are not the real thing at all; I AM. And once the Hip Hop apprentice realizes that she is the real thing, that she is the IT and not all of these illusionary symbols, she begins to live from the reality she creates.

This is what I am Hip Hop means psychologically. It means that the world no longer tells us who we are, we now tell the world, not only who we are but what the world is and how it is going to respond to us. This is the first teaching of Hip Hop—the actualization of one’s real Self free from the paradigm of a colonizer’s education.

Once this is fully overstood, the Hip Hop apprentice now has the right mental attitude to begin studying Hip Hop properly. Unlike other disciplines which require that you sustain your education before your education sustains you, an authentic Hip Hop education sustains you as you learn. In fact, the teaching of Hip Hop at the High School and college freshman level could arm students (and teachers) against being overwhelmed by the paying-back of college loans and other debts during their study/teaching and even after they graduate, take a break, or are laid-off. Hip Hop is a real financial aid to both students and teachers.

The teaching of Hip Hop speaks to the fact that for many young people today it is becoming more and more difficult to ‘make an honest dollar’. Jobs that use to be reserved for first-time employees are now the literal ‘bread and butter’ of many out-of-work elders—many of which are holding prestigious college degrees.

Years ago a young freshman student with a little rap or DJ skill would hear the advice; make sure you get a college degree in case your rap career doesn’t work out! Today the advice has completely reversed; make sure you can rap in case your college degree doesn’t work out! DJ-ing alone is exploding all over the world, and it pays well! Graffiti art, Rap music and Breakin’ are also in high demand all over the world and they too pay well! Critics can say whatever they like about this rapper or that DJ, but people all over the world are paying for Hip Hop! Our people need to know this. They need to know where to go to pay off their student loans (if any) and find support for the further study of their chosen profession. Properly understanding and then overstanding Hip Hop can help with this.

When properly understood, Hip Hop actually provides a supportive income to the student while in study and actually pays for itself in the end. Those students engaged in a real Hip Hop education are earning money while they are learning Hip Hop because the study of Hip Hop is the being of Hiphop. They are being and doing a very valuable and ancient activity in the world, and it is this style of education that raises one’s self-worth, self-esteem and self-respect.

There it is.