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In infamous Newsweek In March 1990, journalist Jerry Adler described the prosecution case under the slogan "Rap Rage". He pleaded in favor of the accusation against the corrupting influence of hip-hop which, even at this point, had become too familiar for his many fans. The broad brushstrokes of the accusations were wisely satirized later, in the voice of Marge Simpson: "Rap is part of the trash: it encourages punches, fame and rudeness to hoes." But In the middle of this archetypal George Bush era of moral panic, the article was making another criticism that sounded a little more specific. Adler wrote scathingly: hip-hop is "such a post-industrial music that it is almost never played, but reconstructed from prerecorded sound clips." In the Chicago-based writer, Roy Christopher's Dead Precedentswe have a funny and pithy account of why this is not a criticism at all.
Written with the pbadion of a zine publishing fan and the acuteness of an academic (he is at once), Christopher explores the idea of hip-hop as "black cyberpunk" ". His argument is that rap and cyberpunk were twin movements, in which technologically liberated renegades created the future by reinventing the past, building new worlds using DIY ethic and DIY freewheeling. Like hip-hop itself, his book is superimposed with references and superimposed allusions, quotes and "samples" that stand proudly on the shoulders of giants.
A typical chapter takes us on a tour around four less discussed pillars of hip-hop: recording, archiving, sampling and intertextuality (MC-ing, DJ-ing , B-boying and graffiti is the clbadic quartet) – and inspires references as broad as Edward Snowden, Walter Benjamin, De La Soul (pictured) and Blade runner, to discuss computer hacking, reworking and the conflictual relations that rap has with history, memory and the vast libraries of cultural products that can now be relied on. Maybe we are all working in the same way now. Maybe we are all cyberpunks, constantly reconfiguring an archive of clips, excerpts and sounds unstable and half-remembered.
Christopher quotes Adbusters The founder of the magazine Kalle Lasn, who goes further in this badertion, claims that digital citizens have been subjected to brainwashing caused by the attack on mainstream capitalism. This refusal to believe that young adults have the agency – and cynicism – to criticize, let alone transcend, the bombardment of messages that were launched to them in the twenty-first century would at least explain why its magazine is full of sixth form, Banksy -some "subvert". Christopher knows better than that and sees DIYers as pioneers, not dupes.
Christopher's goal is to prevent the links between his two big interests, hip-hop and cyberpunk, from being forced – and to be honest, they really do not need to be. They appeared in the same context of the 1980s, at a time of strong post-industrial decline and technological upheaval; they are both dependent on a base of 'codes and signs to hack [and] meaning to divert "- as acts of subversion, whether they are playful or polemical. There is even the Afro-Futurist style of early hip-hop: its goggles, gloves, mohawks and leathers; seems to be "paved with fragments of past fashions and fashions" – appearing in the New York of Robert Moses, a South Bronx with broken windows and social decadence, devastated by a "white flight on the highway". When Ronald Reagan went on the campaign trail in August 1980, he said the region appeared to have been hit by an atomic bomb. Looking back, it makes sense that the first two Mad Max films were released on both sides of this visit and the US presidential election of the time.
Dead Precedents is almost a length of pamphlet, barely 150 pages long – though it is accompanied by voluminous notes, a bibliography and an in-depth listening, but it is no less categorical to say that the twenty-first century has truly begun with these twin movements. And even though the cyberpunk moment embodied in the thrilling writings of William Gibson, Rudy Rucker and Bruce Sterling is over, his spirit lingers in Janelle Monáe's Afrofuturist R & B or the Flying Lotus rhythms, Boots Riley's films. , the Afropunk Festival and a thousand other flowers of the hip-hop bionic flowering culture. And this before even contemplate what young people grow up Black Panther will continue to create. Grandmaster Flash was "the first hip-hop hacker, his first cyberpunk," says Christopher at one point. he will not be the last.
Dan Hancox is the author of Inner City Pressure: The History of Grime (HarperCollins)
• Dead Precedents: How Hip Hop Defines the Future by Roy Christopher is published by Repeater Books (£ 10.99). To order a copy, go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK postage from £ 15 (online orders only). Minimum Phone Orders £ 1.99
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