Bakari kitwana biography definition

The film examines the relationship between the most powerful American cultural movement of the past 50 years and the most powerful position on the planet: president of the United States. Kitwana spoke with UBNow about his involvement in, and the importance of, the new documentary. There is a long history of hip-hop artists interfacing with the White House that goes back to President George H.

Bush and continues pretty much during every presidential administration since. Hip-hop will absolutely play a role inas its presence and impact has continued to play a role, from George H. Bush to President Biden. As candidates try to connect with young voters, hip-hop is a natural fit. GEM: According to Sekou Cooke, every major cultural movement contains musical, dance, fashion, visual, and architectural elements.

While Hip Hop has always critiqued the built environment, a distinctive Hip-Hop architecture is emerging. Do you agree with this assessment? And if you were designing a home or even an entire block what would a Hip Hop architecture look like for you? BK: If there is such a thing as a hip-hop architecture, which on the surface sounds like a very academic and theoretical project to me, it would have to begin with those steeped in hip-hop culture pushing back on anti-humane approaches and the dehumanization of Black life by US capitalistic forces—rather than white elite city planners.

This can often be a problem with hip-hop meets academia. Theaster is not a hip-hop artist per se, but in our collaborations together at the University of Chicago and beyond it became clear to me that he is cut from the same cloth. And if so, why? Hip-hop is here to stay.

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And even though my hope is that a new bakari kitwana biography definition creates its own artistic and cultural and political impulses rather than relying on a corporate, commercial industry to lead. This is where hip-hop began. If we are lucky, we will all see a world enraptured beyond the screen, the money chase and instead reimaging the world.

No serious thinker could imagine that a hip-hop of tomorrow 50 years from now will be a carbon copy of hip-hop yesterday But we can and should expect it to be rooted in study and history, curated and crafted from the best of the genre and informed by the present and anticipating a future. Rakim found his voice rifling through in the music collection of his parents and channeling his inner John Coltrane.

Nas sat at the feet of a jazz master, his father Olu Dara, and listened. Talib Kweli found John Henrik Clarke to be a necessary influence and sought him out. BK: Some music videos are brilliant. Slum Village has a video in circulation some time ago that was amazing and liberating. There certainly is a formula at work that degrades women and reduces them and young black men to the stereotypes that Donald Bogle talks about.

However the issue is the corporate control of media, more so than rap music. But again, although there is a norm, there are exceptions. Tons of the work done by Lauren Hill and others defied the stereotypes. The issue here is corporate control of media that allows for one-dimensional representations of black men and black women. When Senator Packwood sexually harassed countless women when he was in the Senate, no one ever said the Senate was a place that celebrated misogyny.

KW: Do you think that gangsta videos effect the way black people are perceived by people from other cultures? BK: Absolutely. These representations effect how Blacks are seen both nationally and internationally. BK: No. Unfortunately there is a standard set for it that precedes hip-hop. I mean, hip-hop artists are poets. It's no question about that.

But there's a lot more going on in the generational moment of hip-hop as a poetry than, say, what Phillis Wheatley was doing. And so I think that -- we created a whole generation of journalists who began to write because they were writing about the culture that they thought they were a part of, that they were more connected to and knew more about than any mainstream newspaper of publication could tell them.

And a lot of times, like, my first book, The Rap on Gangsta Rapwas about writing about hip-hop and gangsta rap -- what was being called gangsta rap -- because I was tired of people like Henry Louis Gates and Houston Baker being the go-to expertise. They didn't grow up with this music and culture. So I think there's something to be said for people taking ownership of the space and beginning to define how they are living it outside of the creators.

Like, who are the people creating the games? But the people who are playing the games, that's a whole different arena of people activity that in some ways can be arguably more important or as important as the creators. If you don't have an audience, who are you creating for? Sometimes are artists are creating just because they're artists and they like the art.

I think as the industry evolves, it's evolving because there's an audience. I think the audience that serious about a culture has to create a way to talk back to that culture. When I started this, I started by talking to people who lost interest in playing videogames because there's something that says about the culture and how it's losing people, too.

There's gotta be more differences between a year-old gamer and a year-old gamer. That needs to be documented to have a better understanding of the impact that gaming is having on American culture. As rap went mainstream, what are the frictions you remember popping up where it became apparent in the culture that people weren't all on the same page?

In videogames, the creators and the audience and the industry and the media aren't on the same page at all as it's all struggling to figure out how mainstream it wants to be or can be. But what do you remember like that in the rap world? I think from the beginning. So, it's people critiquing a disconnect between a corporate-driven industry and a lived culture.

I think just by virtue of it going mainstream, yeah. And a lot of the origins of hip-hop in these black and brown communities, these poor and working class bakari kitwana biographies definition, a lot of that culture was a very folk cultural experience. The earliest hip-hop that I remember is being at a basement party on the weekend after a basketball game, like, in the seventh grade or something.

So, that live culture experience became the foundation of my hip-hop knowledge that allows for me to offer critique on this corporate manifestation of an artist being published and distributed to by a global multinational corporation. There's a part in the movie where someone is talking about how once you're above 70, units sold, that those are all white hands buying records and that those white hands are the ones that want to hear all the violent stuff in rap.

I'm not asking you to respond specifically to that, but is it irresponsible or inaccurate when people make statements like that? In that book, there's a chapter whose name I can't recall because it's been so long. There's never really been a study on this. That was one of the interesting things about it. There have been -- it's primarily based on conjecture.

The emergence of a company called Soundscan, it's really the foundation of it, and Soundscan, they do over-the-counter sales. That's how they started. So, they were tracing these over-the-counter sales. And what they didn't do was they didn't track demographic data. So what they're basically doing is -- you're in Chicago, you know all kinds of people from all kinds of neighborhood go to the Water Tower.

So, if you go into the Water Tower to buy music, just because the people that live in the Water Tower neighborhood may be predominantly white, it doesn't mean that those are the only white people that are buying the music. But that was one of the measures, was just where people are geographically buying it. The other measure was they did a separate survey of what they considered to be active music consumers.

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These were people who bought anywhere from 15 to 20 CDs a month. I don't know who that would be, but they supplied this survey of these to active music listeners, they determined that the primary listening audience for hip-hop was white suburban teen boys. So that's where this idea came from. There was an attempt by a woman named Wendy Day. Wendy Day, a long-time early pioneer around hip-hop advocacy.

She was an artist first. She started an organization called the Rap Coalitionand I believe Chuck D and Tupac were two of her founding board members. And what they did was the Rap Coalition -- one of the things Wendy Day did was help artists get out of bad record deals. She did a lot of different things. She helped to launch independent hip-hop labels.

One of the things she also did was to go to the music industry major labels executives and say to them, "Hey, you guys really don't know who's buying your music. I can help you to create a study and we should do a study where you really know who's buying this music. They didn't want to do the study. They didn't. They didn't want to do the study and they said, "If it's not broke, don't fix it.

There's no demographic study that's ever been done to demonstrate. I mean, just imagine if the economic source for hip-hop from the beginning was really black and brown people. What does that say?

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I feel that type of conversation, of a white-buying audience for hip-hop has never really been factually proven. I hate asking questions like this, where it's like, "Hey, you remember what you said a decade ago? You were on NPR and I had never heard about this either, where you were talking about white rap fans into white rappers who think they're smarter than black rap fans who listen to black rappers.

Whose show was that? I think there are some parallels there in games, but maybe not split along racial lines. Well, I think that what I was talking about was I wrote an article a little while after -- it probably was about 10 years ago, but Why White Kids Love Hip-Hop came out in Around that same time, I wrote an article for The Village Voice called "The Cotton Club," which was about the politically conscious hip-hop artist whose concert-going audience was increasingly becoming white.

It was predominantly white. I talked about how this evolution had taken place. Alongside that same time, you start to see the emergence of the white independent hip-hop artist and you start to get the emergence of the white middle-class college audience that is, you know, the audience for a lot of these smaller concert venues where those black political hip-hop artists were playing.

And so, people like El-P and some of the folks like that who were emerging around that same time, some of the cats out of Rhymesayers and Minneapolis, some of those groups -- there was another group out of Boston. I can't remember what their name is off the top of my head. But all these other things were emerging and there was this kind of an idea -- we were starting to move into an era where there was a white hip-hop fan who no longer really had to interact with black people.

Whereas before, in the early days of hip-hop, if you were a white hip-hop kid, you had to at least be around black people even to listen to their music. You had to go into black communities, you have to interface with black people. We arrived at a point where you could be a white hip-hop fan and your audience -- your whole social circle could be white, also, but also the artist that you listened to could be white and you didn't really have to have any real engagement with black culture.

And so, that's a different thing than what hip-hop was at its origins for white people. Hip-hop, at its origins for white people -- a political consciousness came with that.

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You had to make a certain kind of commitment to understanding what was happening in the black community and some kind of a commitment to racial justice. And we move into an era where that was no longer a prerequisite. You could be a white kid in hip-hop and not have anything to do with black people, and at the same time imagine that the white rappers that you were listening to were smarter than the black rappers.

I remember one time -- God, I'm trying to remember what was the concert. I was in a debate with someone. They were talking about Jay-Z. It was something about Jay-Z and they were talking about some of the white rappers, and I could just tell that what they really were saying was that they thought that the white rappers were smarter. And this is a complex thing because Jay-Z, like, intellectually is a really complex artist.

You think about the complexity of his intellectualism and the range of it. I think that sometimes people can equate rapping about what was happening in the hood with anti-intellectualism. Well, there's something about it where there's a lack of curiosity about other cultures and subcultures. I've talked to people who teach in academia around videogames who their philosophy is it's a waste of time to read books because literature can't tell you anything about videogames.

At a certain level, you do see that espousement of: Keep your interests narrow, just stick to videogames, don't bother to learn more about it or people who are different from you. Just like what you like. That thing about books is a really egregious example, but sometimes you go to industry events or conferences around videogames and I don't want to be smug but oftentimes it's like, "Man, can we talk about something else other than videogames?

There's a whole other world out there. But for some people it's like, "No, I'm good. I got this, I got my one thing. I'm done growing as a person. You mention you got into a debate. I've talked to some people for this project where they bakari kitwana biography definition about there isn't even a conversation, it's just other people bludgeoning them with their opinions so they shut up.

Well that's, I think, a growing American cultural phenomenon across the board, the idea that your opinion is just as important as the facts, even if your opinion is wrong. We don't really debate facts anymore. It's like, whoever's the loudest. And we have convinced people that their opinions is important -- this is the height of American individualism, to tell people that their opinion is important, even when it's not rooted in any facts and when presented with the facts, they still stick to their guns.

What I see in videogames a lot -- basically, what people are saying is, "As a bigot, you are offending me. You need to be quiet. That, I think, is definitely a trend in American national discourse. I talk about this in my new book, which is Hip-Hop Activism in the Obama Erawhich comes out this summer. I think that what we're seeing is the rise of conservatism in America, and a large part of how it's been able to thrive has been with that very notion.

That your opinion is just as good as the facts and stand on that opinion, don't let people "bully you" with the facts. I remember there was a girl who made some kind of veiled death threat against Obama in Florida. This was a while ago. This was back when I think he was still running for office. And the FBI came and scooped her up or whatever, but her argument basically was: "But that's what I thought.

That was my opinion. It's permeating. It's the way that I think conservatives begin to make these arguments, but it's so permeated mainstream culture. It's so permeated national culture that it's almost become an American phenomenon to stand on your uninformed opinion as an argument that's valid alongside the facts. You mentioned some of your work in courtrooms.

Do you feel like the types of conclusions or things being argued against rap in courtrooms, is it any different than what you see in the mainstream media or on the internet? Is there really any difference? I think that -- no. And we use this narrative over and over and over and over again. And it seems like it because it's so familiar, it worked again.

It's these racist stereotypes that are what people call dog-whistle politics. And I think that we've done that. I think it's almost embedded in American culture.