Love & Hip Hop

As the country is dragged deeper and deeper into an anti-literary abyss, artists like myself continue—under increasing fire—to write in the traditions of resistance, love, truth, and healing. If you value what you read in Witness, please consider becoming a paid subscriber. Thank you.

After reading award-winning author Mitchell S. Jackson’s “The Five Best Rappers of All Time,” a thoughtful treatise on who he believes are the champions of the form, I texted him immediately and told him that I wanted write about who my five favorite rappers of all time are. I shared with him one rapper I thought he should have included on his list. We sparred a bit about that and laughed the way brothers sometimes do. Then he said he was looking forward to seeing who I was going to uplift on a list of my own. That was almost two years ago.

Each time I sat down to create my list, I found that I couldn’t do it. I was afraid of something; afraid to confront something. So, I meditated on it. I asked myself: “Bruh, why can’t you just list your favorite rappers?” And what I discovered was before I could get to that, I would have to get through this:

I was present for the birth of hip hop.

From very young, I’m talking two/three years old, I had been hearing older kids rap in the parks, on street corners, on subway trains—with nothing but their mouths, hands, and feet as instruments. I didn’t know what it was called. I didn’t yet know it was art. I thought it was just another version of those handclap games that the kids in my neighborhood played; you know, like: “My mama told me/Six years ago/There was a lady/Knocking at the door/Saying “ooh, ahh”/I want a piece of pie…” It wasn’t until I was eight years old—when one of the local Black radio stations began playing a song called “Rappers Delight” by The Sugar Hill Gang in late summer 1979—that I started to think that this might be something different.

My aunt Darlene and cousins Dawn, Jimmie, and Lamont were all living with my mother and me temporarily, in the South Brooklyn housing projects I grew up in. My cousins had heard the song before I did because they were outside when someone was blasting it from their boombox. Music was always communal in those days before the Walkman, portable CD players, iPods, and smartphones. My cousins excitedly relayed to me how the song sounded, that it was “talking, not singing.” And they recited some of the lyrics they remembered:

“A hip hop a hibbit…”

It wasn’t too long after, maybe the next day, that I heard the song for myself. I was too young to understand the significance of the moment. All I knew was that the song sounded like “Good Times” by Chic, but was much more fun, and definitely had lyrics that I was going to try my best to memorize because they were groovy and hilarious, and seemed to be more interested in kids like me than adults.

And I was right. Before it was called rap or hip hop, it was really just house-party music specially made by and for young people of the African diaspora. I make note of that last bit because there’s a popular but false notion that hip hop is not a diasporically created art form. But I was actually there when it was created, so I know that’s a lie. I witnessed, with my own two eyes, how it sprung out of the minds and mouths of Black people from New York and New Jersey, whose roots were in Barbados, Jamaica, Mississippi, Puerto Rico, and more—all influenced by West African musical sensibilities and traditions. We were all in it together. So, the modern-day territorial battles over which Black people “own” rap music strike me as not only unnecessarily divisive, but absolutely ridiculous.

I get it, though: Somebody from somewhere is always telling one group of Black people or another how terrible we are; how we have no intelligence, no souls, no art, no value, and no humanity. So, we fight, viciously, over any recognition of our worth—from the very people who are telling us to our faces that we ain’t worth shit—that we can scrape up.

Sometimes, we tell each other that we have no intelligence, no souls, no art, no value, no humanity. For instance, I remember the days when we, as collective Black people, relentlessly bullied, ganged up on, and looked down upon Haitians—the people of the only Black nation to free itself from the shackles of slavery (and who have been paying the price for that triumph ever since). It seems to me that we’re encouraged by nefarious forces (and unhealed self-loathing) to do that. Turning the Black diaspora against Haitians is a white supremacist strategy to ensure that the majority of Black people will never even dream of following Haitians’ revolutionary example. And so far, the plan has worked.