Hip-hop, in its purest form, has always been a language of resistance. In the Bronx in the seventies, verbal battles served as a slick substitute for violence, and the quickest minds and mouths came out on top. Since then, emcees have been wielding that language to resist intolerance/injustice/inequalities. The first step to resisting wrongs is to name them, to bring them into public consciousness, to expose them for what they are. Words may have the power to obscure, shrouding skewed systems in rhetoric; but they also have the power to clarify, to reveal our realities.
More than that, words have the power to structure our futures.
Saul Williams (poet, emcee and hip-hophilosopher) writes that “Language use is a reflection of consciousness… as we become more aware of our existing reality, it becomes clear that we live with the power to dictate our given situations and thus the power to determine our future.” He’s not saying that we’re totally in control of our life-situations — but through language, we define more of our reality than we realize. Rapping and writing about our potential futures is step-one to making them real.
In his self-titled track, Songa raps about how words can seem impractical, even useless: Baba ananiambia, maneno hayavunji kuti/ Sawa nachana, ila mbona flow zangu hazifumi suti? But he ends the same verse with some fighting lines, cause he knows about the real returns of words, the coming harvest: Hii mic ni shamba na mimi ndio mkulima/ Navuna ninachopanda na ulimi ndio unalima. Words are of infinite importance, cause they are the manifestation of our thinking patterns, and what we think defines what we do and who we are.
Guru of Gang Starr got it right when he told his audience to “Listen to the words I manifest” — he knew that lyrics don’t just stay on the radio. Once spoken, they gain flesh and blood and a beating heart, they become our modes of thinking and living.
When Williams looks at hip-hop through the decades, he sees evolutions and revolutions of style and skill, and yet a consistency of lyrical content: “Vivid, descriptive narratives of ghetto life seem to have come at the cost of imaginative or psycho-spiritual exploration. In other words, niggas have come up with amazing ways to talk about the same ol’ shit. The problem is, when we recite the same ol’ shit into microphones which increase sound vibration, the same ol’ shit continues to manifest in our daily lives, and only gets more deeply embedded. But of course employing one’s imagination is problematic when the aim is to keep it real.”
When we rap only about what already is instead of what could be, when we describe our fetters instead of the freedom we want, we solidify our current situations (both mental and material). We (t)rap ourselves in dictation. We live out what we rap about, and we rap about how we’re living: recycled reality. We can’t ignore the wrongs of the present moment, since “the aim is to keep it real,” but we can do more than just describe those wrongs; we can envision a way out of them. Hip-hope.
The things we talk, write and rap about will become our future realities. Williams asks, “If Biggie’s album hadn’t been titled Ready to Die, would he still be alive today? Did his vocalized profession dictate his destination? The fact that we were so ready to hear about how he was ready to die increased the sound vibration of his recitation through playing it on a million radios and televisions, to the point where it affected our reality and his.” It’s unlikely that Biggie’s death was just a sound-translation, but some ideas do become manifest through mass audio-play. Women tolerate brutality from their men cause they’ve heard it sung a million times; kids are down with jail time, cause rappers come out proud to spit their cell stories. Maybe it’s time for some new words, and some new futures.
MC Bonta, in his song “Bwana Malaria,” describes the shidas of the TZ healthcare system and the trend of malaria over-diagnosing. But he also imagines an alternative, placing the responsibility on himself and his listeners: “Inaanzia kwako, inaanzia kwangu.” We can use language to deny or to glorify our realities, but that gets us nowhere. Or we can use language to alter the here-and-now — to redeem it. Our words define our thoughts, and our thoughts determine our realities, so our choice of words means everything.
One last WORD to all the rappers and poets:
With the command of beautiful language comes extraordinary influence. Emcees with flow and flexibility can rap about almost anything, and their words will be heard, (un)consciously internalized, and translated into thousands of real lives. If an emcee’s work is marked by negativity, it’s like the message is Konyagi and the words are Tangawizi/ when the words are sweet enough, the poison go down easy. Recognize that when your thoughts are packaged in rhythm and rhyme, they’ll spread further and last longer. Rap responsibly.
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