The evolution of a 'radical political' culture
Photo by JC Olivera/WireImage/Getty Images


Ask the casual-to-enthusiastic fan to name the world’s first political hip hop song and they’re all but bound to mention Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five’s 1982 hit “The Message.” Say the words “a child is born with no state of mind” to any self-respecting Black American between the ages of 40 and 60 and they’ll recite the rest of MC Melle Mel’s verse more faithfully than they can the “The National Anthem.”

Hip hop turns 50 this year. The culture from which it comes is that of the neighborhoods of the Bronx, NY, with freshly-canceled school music programs. Early MCs built on tools developed by fierce critics The Last Poets and Gil-Scott Heron as much as they did slick pimp talk. And hip hop’s first blast of mostly-live content was created on turntables looted during the New York blackout riots of 1977.

From the form’s inception, to make hip hop was to perform a radical political act.

But sometimes over the decades — between gritty urban classics and ubiquitous dance gimmick videos — rap songs got explicitly political. This didn’t happen very often, but the culture would overcome record label interference and music media disjunction to help deliver to the world wokeness.

The Message” remains so epic and startlingly detailed that fans want to believe it is the mothership of socially-conscious rap. It’s easy to hear the song as the tent pole from which every politically-minded group from Public Enemy to Run the Jewels have draped themselves.

In fact, the first would-be political anthem was “How We Gonna Make the Black Nation Rise?” The 1980 single on the Clappers label and the only release from Brother D with Collective Effort, “How” featured male and female vocalists rapping over the 1978 Cheryl Lynn hit “To Be Real.” Producer Lister Hewan Lowe got the most radical Black people to jump on the mic.

“We’re fired up! We won’t take no more!” was the chant to this simple song.

Rap about the Jimmy Carter-era gas prices appeared on the Harlem World Crew’s “Rappers Convention” in that same year. But these were essentially local vinyl products. Fully-fledged socially-aware songs were not a thing on a national scale until “The Message.”

The song’s harrowing depiction of ghetto life would prove to be but a warm-up for the horrors to be visited upon American ’hoods. Everyday poverty would degenerate into widespread homelessness in the most challenging time of post-slavery Black American life. In this decade, widespread crack cocaine addiction would combine with the requisite gang warfare and a silent killer called AIDS to give every artist something to rap about.

Those conditions would give birth to the conscious MC. Before there was woke, there was “conscious.” Near the end of the ‘80s, being conscious had become a badge of honor worn by the most admired in hip hop culture.

The era featured a couple of landmark achievements in cooperative music-making on the East Coast and the Left. But by 2000, to be called conscious was to be labeled as limited, someone who couldn’t cross over to mainstream radio or sell music to non-Black fans.

Its first line announced the time, so the world can never forget when “Fight the Power” hit.

The summer of 1989 was when project housing and public parks of America became aware of Public Enemy. The film “Do the Right Thing” had not yet hit theaters, and the Long Island-based group was niche among the rap superstars (LL Cool J, EPMD) on the powerful Def Jam label. Casual watchers recognized the group’s colorful S1W security crew more than they knew what P.E. was rapping about. (It stands for the fact that we’re not third-world people,” explained group leader Chuck D. “We're first-world people.””

But filmmaker Spike Lee was into Public Enemy and he hired them to do a song for his film. In the weeks before “Do the Right Thing” hit theaters, cassette tapes of the film’s recurring sonic theme were circulating around American ‘hoods and banging out of boomboxes like a sustained preamble. Or the warm-up for a hotly anticipated show.

It’s hard to exaggerate the racial tensions in America when that P.E. groundswell began. Beyond the aforementioned social ills, brimming in the national consciousness was the seemingly emblematic Charles Stuart, the white guy who killed his wife and blamed his crime on a generic Black man. A girl named Tawana Brawley’s rape allegations against New York police were roiling the city as American cities hardly roil anymore. Like hip hop itself, the story had grown from a New York concern to a national phenomenon.

America’s roster of overwhelmingly white newspaper columnists predicted riots for the movie. They were wrong. The only fight in its wake is the debate over whether Spike Lee had created one of American cinema’s greatest 20th-century works. And, aside from bolstering the narrative power of “Do the Right Thing,” the Public Enemy song ushered in the greatest period of conscious rap in the hip hop era.

I began the dicey gambit of trying to sell articles about hip hop artists and its culture in 1992. It’s fair to say the majority of editors in the music department of editorial outlets didn’t believe the stuff was even music. To say that these decision-makers didn’t get rap — politically or otherwise — is aggressive understatement.

They tended to miss the culture’s political statements when not overt. Because it was made by the underclass, rap’s most effective political material came from street-level crews like Houston’s Geto Boys. Crass, contradictory and funky AF, the trio didn’t make outright political songs; Geto Boys’ politics, admirable or reprehensible, were woven through the lines of their Texas ’hood yarns.

Political content from female MCs, too, was regularly overlooked. By even being a female MC – or a world-class DJ – a woman practitioner was dripping political action. Queen Latifah earned leadership status by not overtly trading on her sexuality, recognizing her diasporic forebears and, on her album cover, posing before a flag with the colors of Africa. More explicit content from women who rhymed were likely to be one-offs such as “Janet Reno,” the 1988 child support anthem from Anquette.

The period may have been political rap’s heyday, but few artists were naive enough to think they could base their careers on selling to the young, and often ignorant, the complex politics of race in America.

Which takes us to the San Francisco Bay Area – wildly overrepresented in the genre. Some of the most august makers of rap music based on rhyming political observation and urging – Paris, Boots Riley and of The Coup – hail from the famously progressive region. In retrospect, the most ambitious of all was Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprisy.

The most remarkable fact about the S.F.-based group will always be that one of the world’s greatest guitarists played on Hypocrisy Is the Greatest Luxury, the group’s sole album. Charlie Hunter does, arguably, the least that a massive talent has ever contributed to an important musical document. But after that, the group’s immortality comes on the basis of politics that were more specifically progressive unlike no nothing else in rap. On the “Television: Drug of A Nation,” MC Michael Franti rhymes, “The only COLA that I support would be a union C-O-L-A – Cost of Living Allowance.” Awesome and practical as the line is, I laugh as much today as I did upon its 1992 release:

Pandering to the union crowd isn’t going to get you anywhere, Michael, I continue to say.

In 2023, “Financial Leprosy” proves to be the most resonant of Disposable Heroes tracks and perhaps all political rap. Consumerism and the prison industrial complex snake around the inhabitants of the song’s world, with “all means to attract and distract” dragging one character into homelessness: “Well I used to own this street. And now I’m living on Market Street.”

The most magnificent of socially conscious or political rap anticipated events, blended anger with a undeniable sadness and carried just enough of hyperbole’s whiff to function as entertainment. Consider one of the decade’s most woke classics, courtesy of the Geto boys.

They call my neighborhood a jungle

And me an animal, like they do the people of Rwanda
Fools fleeing their countries to come here Black

But see the same bullshit and head right back

They know what niggas already know

The world is a ghetto.

— Bushwick Bill, “The World is a Ghetto,” 1996

Since the Clinton-era peak of rhymes with politics in them and the rise of rap with decidedly materialistic concerns, there have been many stellar examples of the form’s survival.

The Artist Formerly Known as Mos Def has the indispensable “New World Water”; Digable Planets’ abortion rights’ song “Femme Fetal” is a dynamic example of how the form might have evolved did it not live in a space where mindless boogie had industry privilege. People may view Eminem’s “White America” as that politically key MC’s most potent railing against the system, but only the ones who haven’t heard his cameo on Immortal Technique’s scorching post-911 underground anthem “Tell the Truth.” (“I don’t rap for dead presidents / I’d rather see the President dead”)

Today, B-Real from Cypress Hill can perform a set based entirely on its weed advocacy. And many were inspired by YG’s 2016 track “F-ck” Donald Trump.

Kendrick Lamar is the world’s standout “conscious” rap superstar, largely alone.The bounty of wokeness is in the flesh and bones of hip hop, not contained to a particular song. (The catalog of Dead Prez, once considered the most incendiary pro-Black stuff around, would now fit neatly on the agenda put forth in Congress by A.O.C. and The Squad.) Political content dwindled as real-world influence became tangible.

We got congressmen and news anchors quoting rap songs, out in public.

The legacy of politics in hip hop is best viewed through Jay Z’s video campaign to end the drug war or Childish Gambino’s “This Is America,” a project rife with symbolism and abstraction. And it’s in international moves, like Vic Mensa and Chance the Rapper taking their Black Star Line concert tour to Ghana as a means of returning cultural nourishment.

It’s conceivable that the music sent down by Public Enemy, Melle-Mel, and Brother D with Collective Effort was like a rocket booster or the stuff of a butterfly’s cocoon. There is no political rap that defines America’s landmark summer of 2020, after the death of George Floyd. Now this uniquely American invention works best for MCs in strife-ridden contexts overseas, a ripe avenue of expression handed down from the Reagan Era’s earliest days by Brother D and company.