Though hip-hop is defined by Webster’s dictionary as “a subculture especially of inner city youths who are typically devotees of rap music,” its beginnings were driven by resisting oppression, according to film historian Rob Price.
“Hip-Hop culture is a continuation of a legacy of resistance by poor and marginalized peoples,” Price said.
According to Price, the hip-hop movement was inspired by the Civil Rights Movement in the 50s and 60s as well as the Black Panthers in the 70s, where the term “hip-hop” first originated.
Price defined resistance as “a consistent pressure, applied by lower economic classes, who are not a part of the power elite, to have their own voices heard publicly and their concerns and needs met by any means necessary.”
According to Price, hip-hop “gave people that voice.”
Price spoke about the origins of hip-hop during the fifth annual Midwest Reel Black History Film Festival at the University of Toledo on Thursday.
The theme of this year’s month-long festival was “Celebrating 40 Years of Hip-Hop History.”
“The major commandment of hip-hop is to ‘keep it real,’ to tell the truth about exciting conditions regardless of the fallout,” Price said.
The festival is being hosted by the Arts Living and Learning Community, the Department of Theater and Film and the Black History Month Planning Committee.
According to the Office of Residence Life’s Web site, ALLC is a first-year student program that allows new students majoring in the arts the opportunity to have shared living quarters and participate in special collective events designed to encourage and stimulate their artistic experience.
Price said one example of the reason hip-hop was created and represented resistance is the sit-in by four college students at the Woolworth’s retail store in Greensborough, North Carolina on February 1, 1960, when they sat at a lunch counter in Woolworth’s reserved specifically for white people.
This protest can be related to the mindset behind the origins of the hip-hop movement, Price said, because the protesters were taking a stand against unfair racial treatment in the South during the 60s.
Price said hip-hop was only a way to express this resistance of oppression through music.
Price also stressed the influence of Robert Moses’ Cross Bronx Expressway on hip-hop music.
This building project in 1963 tore down neighborhoods and “replaced them with a massive network of highways that divided the Bronx, displacing residences into low maintenance high-rise apartments,” according to Price.
“Hip-hop was the answer or the inevitable rage that took place after the devastation,” Price said.
Following Price’s lecture, students watched the film “Tupac: Resurrection,” a 2003 documentary following the life of rapper Tupac Shakur.
According to the documentary, Shakur created the idea of “thug life” to represent the oppression of African-American people in poverty.
Price said Shakur had a big influence on the original hip-hop movement.
According to Price, the “thug life” mentality created by Shakur was a code of ethics for “the streets” to operate and was not intended to be about violence.
“[Shakur] was a black militant in the truest sense of the word,” Price said.
Today’s hip-hop, according to Price, is a continuation of a movement against “hegemony, a faceless power structure; a structure that determines how things are in life.”
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