Hip-Hop Aesthetics
Philip Bither, Senior Curator, Performing Arts, Walker Art Center, interviewed Marc Bamuthi Joseph via Skype on April 1, 2011.
In the way the Civil Rights era, or the Vietnam War, or any number of climatic global or localized cultural events have shaped the ideology and aesthetics and morals and morale of folks born at those times, I was born in the same place at the same time that hip-hop culture was born, I was born in a time of AIDS, born in a period of Reaganomics. Hip-hop music and aesthetics formed the soundtrack for all things for me. My political consciousness was formed through hip-hop music and hip-hop culture, through the work of Chuck D and Public Enemy, KRS-One and Boogie Down Productions. They gave me vocabulary to articulate political positions and language to locate myself socio-economically.
I think about hip-hop culture not only in terms of its aesthetic manifestations, not only in terms of B-boying or MC-ing or DJ-ing or graffiti, I think about energetic reciprocity. I think about ritual and (in)visibility. I think about the idea of the break and sampling and style. These are my antecedents.
Absolutely true.
The hallmark of hip-hop culture is energetic reciprocity, that kind of call and response that is an active element in so many cultures around the world. Though I'm active in solo performance, I'm not a solo performer in this sense: the work doesn't have agency unless it is responded to or integrated within a more circular relationship with audience. Though my work is written, and, in some cases, anthologized, the work's not real, it's without power, unless it's in the context of the collective. The collective is what gives it life.
In the late 1990's, I knew there were guys like Danny Hoch and Will Power and Jonzi D, but there wasn't a platform with great visibility though it was produced and presented by folks with a deep aesthetic understanding of what we were doing. The people at the Hip-Hop Theatre Festival, which was first produced in 1999, were hugely influential. I credit Danny Hoch and Clyde Valentin and Kamilah Forbes, and Roberta Uno, the founding Artistic Director at New World Theatre, and Mark Russell at PS 122 for pioneering spaces for a number of us to enter into the world of theatre. Without them we were just these disparate bodies, disparate writers performing in a vacuum. They gave us platforms to discuss the work, to deepen the work; they worked hard in getting younger urban audiences into theatre that also had an appreciation of this ethos of energetic reciprocity. So, the work lived in its element, in a really spectacular way.
I'm curious about the balance between maintaining street cred while at the same time functioning within the towers of high art and the halls of academia. You approached some of those themes beautifully in the breaks. What's it like to live in multiple worlds at the same time?
I think part of 21st Century survival is the capacity to engage multiple platforms.
The generational code of ethics persistent among my peer group is to be able to sit on either side of the table and perform adeptly. I'm a child of multi cultural America, part of the generation that began to have less respect for boundaries and borders, and embraces hybridity. Being able to code switch used to be a kind of clandestine endeavor, and now it's embodied by our current head of state.
What Obama's election forced us to do is speak plainly to as many different kinds of folks as possible and that's been both the source of his success and in some cases the source of countless peoples chagrin. My way isn't so different and I count myself among many. If you can't navigate multiple systems, you find yourself boxed in or isolated or marginalized. For my generation the means of coming to center is to understand the margin and bring the margin to the core. That's what our collective empowerment is about.
I often feel like I'm the ambassador for a new modality. It's like showing up to the prom without a date, wearing jeans. You may be self-assured enough to be at the party, but still kind of self conscious looking around thinking, 'hmm, it's just me.' In fact, 'The Breaks' came out of that tension of falling in between. It's our generational dilemma to navigate the in between. So, yes, I learn these lessons daily, but try to manifest them with some level of integrity and articulation.
"...Hip-hop is...a folkloric medium enjoyed by billions of people all over the planet that is rooted in the idea of movement."
Total Chaos: The Art and Aesthetics of Hip-Hop, edited by Jeff Chang