Post-Modernist Youth in War, Hip-Hop, and Radical Movement (2 of 2)

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This chapter takes a particular focus on the generation's poets for a very intentional reason. Hip-hop is a music, business and culture born out of a post-industrial impoverished generation of youth robbed from sufficient educational and recreational spaces. A key way in which they were disenfranchised were its displacement of musical instruments. Out with the horns and guitars, the birth and preeminence of rap made the human voice the primary and so often the only musical instrument available for generations of youth here after. As Nuyorican poet Guy LeCharles Gonzales wrote in "Behind the Music," "pen and paper [was] less default than option." Ironically, though post-industrial poverty constrained the forms of how youth could express themselves, in many ways it would lead to freeing the access and directness of artistic expression and leisure for urban youth. Amidst the privatization and destruction of public space, urban youth became party-rockers and poets out of necessity. The rap art form democratized poetry and speech in an unprecedented way other past youth cultures could not. In order to be a rap musician, one had to be a poet, a speaker, a mover and shaker of the crowd, i.e. "the people." A popularized hip-hop thus created more than pop icons and musicians out of MC's, it created social leaders--political, fiscal, cultural, and spiritual leaders of entire youth populations, whether they were ready for the responsibility or not. Calling them poets is telling it like it is--but so would be the labels entrepreneurs and revolutionaries, and these multiple locations and identities are exactly where the chapter's interests peak.  

It must be stated here how transnational/globalized this has become, how these poets are from everywhere--Trinidad, India, Mali, Korea, Puerto Rico, Japan, Cuba, Palestine, Brazil, the Philippines, Jamaica, Nigeria, Bosnia, Barbados and elsewhere--and they all recite 2Pac's poetry, follow Jay-Z's entrepreneurism, but have their own local artists/leaders whom articulate their lives in their own language. It also must be acknowledged here that how polyculturally realized we are and have always been is a different matter. As Chang states, "in the real world, cultures layered, blended, and sounded together like the polyrhythms of jazz or a DJ riding the cross-fader." Or as Kelley has noted, Bruce Lee was just as much "soul" as Shaft in his youth, and as I observe today, Dragon Ball Z just as much "hood" as Scarface. (How these latter narratives are all stories of exile from a lost homeland, in other words, diaspora stories of outsider super heroes, is significant, and this deserves a chapter in itself.)  

As a poet, I always try to be succinct, and without negating the value of each local's scribes, I must acknowledge that the poets mentioned or discussed here are but a few of many, many more. The core of the chapter comes from my experiences as a hip-hop youth, multi-disciplinary artist, and the lessons learned having been engaged with Asian American, African American, Latino/a, and Middle Eastern youth. I end the chapter with a meditation on our generation's most beloved martyr Tupac Amaru Shakur, whose ideas are just as powerfully relevant today as yesterday. May it be reminded that he was taken away at the terribly young age of 25 and represented in voice, action and image millions of global youth. To Reverend/Scholar Michael Eric Dyson, Shakur and King were "the honorary heads of their generations" for their gifts "to speak truth to power," and like King, Shakur with a profoundly political idea of Love. As confessed in his posthumous song "Unconditional Love," he knew what time it was: his "mission" "to be more than just a rap musician," but the "elevation of today's generation if I can make 'em listen."

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