HOW DEFUNDING THE SCHOOL SYSTEMS SHAPED HIP-HOP CULTURE

The Miseducation of America Has Helped Define Our Current Culture

Growing up in Brooklyn circa early ‘70s my junior high school in East Flatbush had a glee club, a robust music program, and annual music performance. The school was in a changing neighborhood with white ethnics moving out and black Americans and Caribbean families moving in. I went to high school across the street from my junior high, so I watched this shift happen over a seven-year period.

By the time I was graduating school in 1976, the city was in crisis on a several levels. The white flight I was witnessing had a devastating effect on the city’s tax base and budget. The infamous ‘New York City: Drop Dead’ Daily News headline wasn’t just some period detail me to. I saw its effects firsthand. The kind of music program that I experienced was one of the first things to go (along with art appreciation.) When Ronald Reagan assumed the Presidency in 1980 his administration executed massive cuts to the kind of music and arts that had nurtured generations of singers and musicians.

Bassist/composer Marcus Miller recalls being an event not long after Reagan took office. A white woman supported told Marcus, who was a product of the city’s public school music programming, that there was no need for the government to pay for music education. “If they really want to make music, they’ll find a way,” she told him. This GOP woman probably knew nothing about drum machines, but she was prophetic. Cutbacks in public education, inadequate funding for after school activities, and structural racism has disconnected several generations from the tools needed for harmonic innovation.

Filling this musical gap was technology. Who needed to learn composition, musical notation, or sharps and flats, when with a TR 808 drum, a few very basic keyboard programs, and sampled old vinyl, you could make commercial recordings? Armed with these tools, and a lot of ingenuity, hip hop entered its golden age of beats and rhymes, of boom bap, with another generation’s melodies, choruses, and grooves reshaped. In the imaginative hands of the Bomb Squad or Prince Paul, sampling became a new sonic language, where the rules of music were ignored.

Saxophonist/bandleader Branford Marsalis, a true jazzman who’s collaborated with the Bomb Squad as well as DJ Premiere, once told me that hip hop producers don’t hear in notes or chords that progressive forward, but sounds stacked up atop each other, so that much of hip hop exist as an unending loop with harmonic interest only possible by lowering or raising the levels of sounds. Over time the rampant sampling of the ‘80s and ‘90s has given way to a reliance on sounds downloaded on computers, and even smart phones, to make “music.” Trap music and crunk, both products of Atlanta’s vibrant music scene, has never been as sample heavy as NYC boom bap or West Coast G-Funk.

But there are severe limitations to “laptop” music made by folks with little or no musical education. The late Bernie Worrell, who’s Moog synthesizer lines helped define G-Funk, told me that while the down loadable programs make record making easy, they don’t help enrich the sonic palate of the music maker. “You could get to the note E using them,” he said, “but if they don’t know about E flat or E minor, there’s a whole world of options” they couldn’t employ in their productions. With some wonderful exceptions, like the work of Robert Glasper on his series of “Black Radio” albums, there’s a real divide between those who have access to all the tools of music and those that don’t. Chris Brown’s “Who’s Robert Glasper?” reaction to the pianist’s Grammy win reflects how the gap between the two aesthetics.

But it isn’t just the sonic intelligence of black music that has been altered by the destruction of American education in the public schools. Reading levels and college admissions of African-American males have been on the decline for several generations. MC’s from the Kool Moe D/Kurtis Blow generation into the Native Tongues and right through Outkast delivered rhymes full of references, from Shakespeare to black nationalism or alternative culture. With some notable exceptions, the emphasis on “lyricism” that drove so much commercially successful and thematically ambitious, hip hop records has been in retreat. Who needs a rhyming dictionary, simile or “sticking to theme,” as Moe Dee once argued, to be a successful 2023 MC?

America has been dumbed down. Hip hop lyricist are as much a product of our national declining vocabulary as our electoral politics, news coverage, and our overall civic discourse. Old heads who bemoan the beats and rhymes of contemporary hip hop have to bear in mind that hip hop is a byproduct of the same forces that are impacting every aspect of this country. For me the destructive decisions that have hampered education over several generations is at the heart of so much domestic discontent. It feels like people have a weakened ability to reason and will grab onto a simple set of assumptions because it keeps them from dealing with the contradictions of life. As hip hop celebrates fifty years of existence, it’s important to make note of the social and political forces that shape the mentality of its makers and audience.

Put bluntly if people want better music and more poetic lyricism from this particularly potent branch of culture, teachers and students need support and not blame, and not just money, but love too.