In 2023, New York City celebrated the 50th anniversary of Hip Hop. The festivities were largely presided over and ordained by the self- assigned master of ceremony, Cop mayor Eric Adams. This entire premise, at first glance, might appear to be absurd. Hip Hop, a cultural offensive which developed on the margins of this neoliberal petri dish came into being very much in contention with the state apparatus and its ruling class hell bent on the destruction of its creators; The Black, Puerto Rican and West Indian industrial migrants who made New York home.
The generation that created and reproduced Hip Hop did so in the midst of many plagues. After decades of working in precarious factories and no access to the union jobs hoarded by the white working class, deindustrialization left them facing a new level of poverty. By the mid 1970s, neoliberalism had thrown down the gauntlet of austerity, resulting in what Ruthie Gilmore calls organized abandonment in the form of municipal disinvestment 1 which could only have led to racist landlords burning down whole neighborhoods to collect fire insurance money. This generation endured an opioid epidemic carried via the veins of returning Vietnam vets with massive trauma, followed by a crack epidemic, the consequence of a manufactured narcotics economy planted by the feds which on the surface was a placebo effect on austerity and deindustrialization but ultimately set us up for the war on drugs and mass incarceration.
How then do we come to a point where 50 years later, we are witnessing that generation’s assimilation and absorption into the state and their complicity with the hegemonic power of its institutions? This is not new. The past and present are filled with recycled iterations of this tendency. Namely, how a subjugated people becomes complicit in their own unfreedom. No one is exempt. Not even those Black, Puerto Rican and West Indian kids who survived the atrocity of racist capitalist neoliberal violence executed via the settler colonial logic of elimination and created hip hop in its wake. 2
The filtered images of lavish lifestyles that accost us all for the most part live in the realm of fantasy. For poor and underemployed people, it’s a kind of expensive cosplay. The influencers and social media personalities of the culture industry, as Adorno described it, are always the ideal types of
the dependent middle class. 3 But, when lottery tickets are scratched and played, there might be a BBL in the budget –but, for the most part, the desire is profoundly a cliché middle class one. A home with a backyard. A two-car garage. A vacation. Tuition money. It isn’t the villas and penthouses of the ruling class that is desired. It’s a miniature kingdom, in the realm of the plain. This is what upward mobility looks like for the average Black, Puerto Rican and West Indian New Yorker. The white flight dream of Long Island and Westchester with plenty of clean air and open waterfronts. This might no longer qualify as a middle class possibility, but at one point, it did. The life that the cops and firemen and white workers with the good union jobs were able to live. Union jobs that historically were denied to the Black, Puerto Rican and West Indian migrants. The white working class in New York City, forever a racialized migrant town, violently held a monopoly over these industries leaving the rest to get by on precarious factory jobs.
The pathway to the middle class opens up after President Franklin D. Roosevelt issued Executive Order 8802, banning discriminatory employment practices by federal agencies and all unions and companies engaged in war-related work. Black, Puerto Rican, and West Indian industrial migrants in New York go to work for the government, where they cannot be denied by law. What does that look like today?
In a city that employs roughly 370,000 workers, 51% are Black & Latinx. 4 Jobs in the public sector encompass a wide variety of bureaucratic positions, from the Department of Motor Vehicle, Social services, the Post Office, Corrections officers, the courts and of course, the Police department where the current mayor got his start. The great lane carved for some Black, Puerto Rican and West Indian industrial migrants to barely enter middle class status was a bureaucratic one, as middlemen, gatekeepers, and enforcers, administering the mundane and often violent policies on behalf of the state. There is a kind of class split that happens as these antagonisms begin to play out. The bureaucratic authority granted to some of these workers functions like a kind of hierarchy drenched in respectability over their neighbors, or people who could easily be from their community. For example, the welfare case manager decides to withhold the benefits of the woman’s daughter who works in the bodega on her block. What attitudes and interactions they must have when they encounter each other around the way? Or the feeling of submitting paperwork at housing court over an eviction notice to the judgmental clerk, who happens to also live in your building. In this case, I am freeing the constitution of “class” from the old school way we might know it as Marxists. Not middle class or proletariat or poor. Just straight up, who has a steady job and maybe some
benefits and who doesn’t.
These antagonisms however, haven’t been enough to separate the Black, Puerto Rican and West Indian barely middle class from their less employed counterparts. As Stuart Hall explains while breaking down Gramsci, “the diversification of social antagonisms, the dispersal of power, which occurs in societies where hegemony is not sustained exclusively through the enforced instrumentality of the state but, rather is grounded in the relations and institutions of civil society,” 5 (i.e. family, school, church, hood politics, ethnic nationalism), fuck us up. There are a dozen ways we continue to remain connected over and above this particular line in the sand. Hence the correction officer takes off his uniform and smokes a blunt after work with the cousin of the inmate he violated at work earlier in the day. Hegemony, to give a quick definition, is the political, economic, military, social and
cultural domination activated on a subjugated class. It’s the social and cultural that we are focusing on here that muddies the water. Still make no mistake about it, that line in the sand is a ravine. Capitalism is always poised to employ one half of us to humiliate, hunt, beat, arrest, and kill the other half, and colonization makes every baton swing pregnant with the certitude of its own perceived inherent righteousness. It creates the illusion of power and the illusion of a secure place in the bosom of the ruling class, or the state. It is no different than how Fanon describes colonial subjects in the
urban centers of Martinique and Algeria, “The workers, primary schoolteachers, artisans, and small shopkeepers who have begun to profit—at a discount, to be sure—from the colonial setup”6 and its exactly how El Hajj Malik Shabazz explains it in Harlem and in Detroit, where he delivered his metaphor on the house and field dichotomy in the antebellum south.
The dilemma is reflected in the numbers. Black and Latinx people make up 90 percent of jail admissions, but we comprise just 52 percent of New York City’s population. The bureaucratic administration and maintenance of the cages are also overwhelmingly Black and Latinx. Of the 17, 045 civilians employed by the NYPD, 46.4% are Black and 22.6% are latinx. Uniformed Black cops make up 15.9% while Latinx double that number at 31.4%.We are the muscle of the state. We are the cattle and its fodder. 7
Now, after almost 100 years since Executive Order 8802, this barely middleclass Black, Puerto Rican and West Indian workforce has assimilated into the cultural fabric of the settlers and Ellis Island whites. The Yiddish “Oy” is inverted and yelled as a “Yo” now on any given street corner. Here Gramsci serves up the logic once again. If we are the muscle of the state, then we also come together alongside those Italian, Irish and Jewish New Yorkers to form the guts of civil society. Civil society is how we meet each other. How we clash and coincide to create “culture” which becomes what Stuart Hall called “the grounded terrain of practices, representations, languages, and customs of any specific historical society.”8 When Gramsci says “civil society,” he means “the public sphere where ideas and beliefs are shaped and the hegemony of the ruling class is reproduced in cultural life through the media, universities and religious institutions to manufacture consent and legitimacy”9 Hegemony is the “scaffold” around the skyscraper baby. Where the ruling class peers down with a bird’s eye view, bobbing and weaving as needed to retain power. As Gramsci so eloquently spelled out for us in those prison notebooks, “the traditional ruling class is able to quickly recapture power when it is slipping from its grasp, by making sacrifices and exposing itself to an uncertain future with demagogic promises”10 adapting the morals, ethics, politics, culture, etcetera of the broadest masses to keep the machine of the economic apparatus of production cranking.
In other words, the ruling class can afford what appears to be concessions or even make themselves in our likeness. Because these gestures are always enacted to solidify power. And what is this cultural scaffold or as Gramsci called it, “national-popular culture” made of? It’s the Yankee baseball cap and the Brooklyn Nets, a dollar slice of pizza, the collective dissatisfaction with the MTA and the collective grief around 9/11. It’s the Cyclone in Coney Island, the Rockefeller Christmas tree, and the spectacle of Times Square. Its Frank Sinatra and Jay Z. Its green beer for Saint Patrick’s Day and Salsa music at Orchard Beach in the Bronx. It’s a citywide celebration of the 50th anniversary of Hip Hop.
“And so, I need to say to you, hip hop, you must identify where you are right now. 50 years later, from block parties to carrying crates of records, to music in the park, to having to draw your own flyers, to doing the $5 events… Look at 50 years later. The mayor of the most powerful city on the globe is a hip hop mayor… The mayor of Chicago, hip hop. The mayor of Atlanta, hip hop. The mayor of Los Angeles, hip hop. We finally have reached where now the police commissioner, the first Puerto Rican police commissioner, it’s a hip hop commissioner…And I want us to know that you are now in Gracie Mansion. That’s how good God is. 50 years could have fallen when another mayor was here. God made the intersectionality of 50 years of hip hop to be at the time that Eric Adams, the hip hop Mayor, is in office.That is the significance of the moment.” 11
-Mayor Eric Adams on the 50th Anniversary of Hip Hop
It wasn’t difficult his summer to run into billboards across the city with big drippy graffiti style letters announcing the multiple celebrations of the 50th anniversary of hip hop. An irony considering the city’s ongoing hostile relationship with the artform. Still, while nearly every museum and institution got in on the festivities hosting numerous concerts, events, and exhibitions, the transit museum continues to blatantly ignore these iconic happenings, rejecting the conservation and archiving of graffitied trains as its official policy.13 Their relationship to this pillar of hip hop culture is an honest one. The cultural offensive that birthed hip hop was an enemy of the state, even if some of its soldiers defected. In his remarks on the 50th anniversary of hip hop, Adams points to the Black mayors of Los Angeles, Chicago, and Atlanta and labels them “Hip Hop mayors.” His laughable use of the term intersectionality one assumes references their blackness, their being of the generation that created and reproduced Hip Hop, and their occupation as highest ranking official in municipal government. Indeed, all of these mayors have been courting rappers and following the Adams blueprint, hosting citywide Hip hop festivities and bestowing honors on their favorite rappers while their homeless populations swell and they beef up their police departments. Cop City in Atlanta is a glaring example. But the love between rappers and the state is happening both ways. Lil’ Wayne has always been vocal about his love of police. Wayne serenaded Kamala Harris with his hit song “Mrs. Officer” at her Hip Hop anniversary bash.
We also saw the Bronx bootlicker himself, Fat joe declare former President Bill Clinton and chief architect of the 1994 mass incarceration crime bill an honorary member of his crew, while gifting him a pair of Terror Squad x Nike Air force Ones. Fucking weirdos. We can dismantle the bloated pageantry of Adams and his cohort quite easily in a few ways. One, its important to challenge the notion of the “pioneer,” already a violent colonial term. This is not to say that Grand Wizard Theodore didn’t scratch the first record. But viewed through a feminist lens grounded in community, we would first say, that the scratch required his scolding mother to enter the room. We would notice that she provided a room for him, giving him the time and space to
develop his craft. Kool Herc needed the people to lend their ears and bodies to the dance. The Hoe Avenue Peace Treaty needed to happen in order to ease gang tensions enough to allow the thing to flourish. Social reproduction. Secondly, on some occasions, it is necessary to confiscate the thing that was created from its creator. The vessel in which the thing emerged from is only a vessel. Its why we can still recite the lyrics to “Fuck The Police” even if we’ve discarded Ice Cube who is busy in his new lane as right wing media commentator alongside the likes of Joe Rogan and Tucker Carlson. Lastly, we would have to recognize the ineffectuality of nostalgia, which is often removed from context, steeped in selective memory of “the good ol’ days, and a proven device of manipulation. It was nostalgia that put Trump in the White house and sent his army charging on January 6th. It is nostalgia keeping the mayor afloat.
Adams, who was born in Brownsville Brooklyn and grew up in Southside Jamaica Queens, graduating from the New York City Police Academy in 1984, certainly bore witness to Hip hop’s emergence even as he hunted down ‘perps” who were also b-boys and b-girls, graff writers and emcees in his role as a pig. This nostalgic embrace of hip hop by the state as I have laid it out before you is further evidence of how Black, Puerto Rican and West Indian New Yorkers who oversaw the creation of Hip Hop have adopted every hallmark of what we recognize as a reactionary conservative right wing white middle class teetering on fascism. Whether they vote democrat or republican is beside the point. Adams, who unsurprisingly enjoys far reaching
endorsements and support from this barely middle class Black, Puerto Rican and West Indian workforce himself was a registered Republican between 1997-2001 flip flopping back & forth as a political chess move. By now it is well understood that the essential role of the Democrats is to implement whatever draconian policy Republicans flagrantly impose by creating the bureaucracy around it. Democrats are public relations experts. The labels left or right just confuses things. The character of the people is heavily Christian, pro-police, pro real-estate development, anti-immigrant, and anti-poor. And where might we witness this spirit? On the radio.
The radio receiving set develops the sensorial, intellectual, and muscular powers of man in a given society. The radio in occupied Algeria is a technique in the hands of the occupier.
-Frantz Fanon, A Dying Colonialism
New York City has three Hip Hop and R&B radio stations, two of which are considered sister stations, owned by Mediaco Holding and operated by Emmis Communication, Hot 97 (97.1) and WBLS (107.5). Advertising on both radio stations are repetitive and essentially the same. Seminars to learn to flip real estate, injury lawyers, car salesman, or the fearmongering “make a deal with the IRS” or “consolidate your debt” commercials but the culture of the stations are decidedly different and the character and demographics of the stations are very defined. Hot 97 plays newer music, and caters to a younger crowd while WBLS plays throwbacks and is geared towards middle aged folks and elders. In fact, many of the deejays, like Bugsy and Red Alert moved to WBLS as they aged out of Hot 97. In addition, WBLS has a more talk radio like character with a more conservative Christian bent. Radio hosts like comedian Steve Harvey could be heard offering relationship advice and setting a moral tone. On Sunday mornings, one can tune into OpenLine, a radio call-in show which has long been viewed as an important forum for the black community. Created by its host Bob Slade in 1989, Open Line was a political voice, taking sharp positions on issues such as advocacy for the Central Park Five and Black Lives Matter.14 While Slade, who passed away in 2019, opened the airwaves for critical debate during his tenure, what the audience has continuously revealed over time is its gradual assimilation into the psychological pitfalls of the same middle-class values of white flight New Yorkers. What began as a space for Black voices to be heard, and to resonate across the city, has now become a hegemonic device reinforcing the power of the state.
Quite literally as in the case of Norman Seabrook, the powerful and corrupt Ex-Union boss of the Corrections Officers Benevolent Association (COBA) who held court on WBLS on Sunday evenings from 7pm-9pm where he spoke out on behalf of his constituents, against the closing of Riker’s Island. 15 COBA is a standing army of 20,000 active and retired members, 82% of which are Black and latinx. 16 Open Line continues to air on Sunday mornings from 8am-9am with replacement hosts. The show is followed by talking head Rev. Al Sharpton whose show “Keeping it Real” occupies the air waves from 9am-10am. Every other Sunday, Sharpton is followed by a thirty-minute segment called, “Hear from the Mayor.” The Hip Hop mayor himself Eric Adams takes over the airwaves to talk to “the people.” 17 According to WBLS’s operations manager, about 60,000 people tune in to Open Line each week. As it stands now, this time slot, historically transformed into a community forum by the late Bob Slade, is one potential site for struggle. Currently, it functions as an echo chamber for those barely middleclass Black, Puerto Rican and West Indian New Yorkers who I have defined by their adjacency to the emergence of hip hop. The dilemma forces us to draw on Fanon once again, as he observed the Algerian relationship to the radio and its useful transformation in the anticolonial fight. For them, it was a wholesale rejection of the device as a way to reject the colonial French voice of Radio-Alger. It isn’t until the establishment of The Voice of Fighting Algeria that the tides change, becoming as Fanon says, “of capital importance in consolidating and unifying the people.” 18
In such a context, “I can’t Live Without My Radio” by LL Cool J, who has played a cop on a police soap opera since 2009 comes to mind.
Its almost as if the colonial sounds of Radio Alger has penetrated us deeply, bursting through our boom boxes, taking on our appearance and stride. How might we begin to form an equivalent to The Voice of Fighting Algeria to drown them out? Where else might their ideals be challenged and replaced? What if there was a dedicated swarming of callers every Sunday clogging those lines, challenging this hegemonic fuckery by setting the tones of those discussions, presenting new ideas and better common sense that are anti-capitalist, anti- imperialist, anti-colonial and abolitionist for the aunties and uncles who tune in? What if we rendered the bullhorn of this cop mayor (and any mayor who follows him) useless as a war of manoeuvre? What is clear, and 90’s rap duo Mobb Deep warned us, is that “there’s a war going on outside nobody’s safe from.”