After the 2015 Grammy nominees were announced via Twitter in December of 2014, TIME Magazine published an interactive map charting the most popular music genres worldwide. Rap, as labelled by the magazine, dominated the United States from Pacific to Atlantic, covering roughly two-thirds of the map and outweighing all other genres, including pop, rock, and country (Feeney). Now, in 2017, hip-hop continues to dominate popular music charts; Apple announced that its most popular album this year was Drake’s playlist More Life (Bhopti). The 2018 Grammy nominees for Record of the Year include two rap records, Jay-Z’s “The Story of O.J.” and Kendrick Lamar’s “Humble,” and the other three nominees – Childish Gambino, Bruno Mars, and Justin Bieber – all have ties to hip-hop (Lynch). Hip-hop, as it continues to expand and experiment as a musical genre, is undeniably dominating popular culture in the United States.

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     As music fans and critics review and analyze the current wave of hip-hop, they confirm that many of the genre’s new sounds and styles are attributed to the influence of another genre – punk. New York Times pop music critic John Caramanica claims, “Hip-hop’s punk moment has arrived” (Caramanica). The current generation of rappers can attribute their success to the internet and online streaming services, and especially SoundCloud, a free streaming site for artists big and small. With more space to experiment on such sites, rappers are searching n for inspiration beyond the rap canon, and they are finding it in punk. However, the intersection of punk and hip-hop is not a new phenomenon. In an essay on New York hardcore, Kelefa Sanneh states, “New York hardcore also cross-pollinated with metal and hip-hop, sending its influence far beyond the East Village” (Sanneh). As hip-hop currently relies on punk sound influences to reach wider audiences, so too did punk rely on elements of hip-hop to rise from the basements of New York to the speakers of music fans across the country.

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     The purpose of this paper is to analyze the relationship between punk and hip-hop from their histories of marginalization to their current roles in popular culture. Both punk and hip-hop act as musical performances of poetry, and both are stereotypically misunderstood and misrepresented by mainstream culture because of their nonconforming aesthetics. The intersection of punk and hip-hop can be understood further through studies of the economic, social, and cultural environments from which they each evolved.

 

     The roots of both punk and hip-hop can be traced back to poetry and the New York underground. Daniel Kane, in his book about New York punk and poetry, cites singer-songwriter Jeffrey Lewis’ claim that “punk began when a mix of folk music, drugs, film, and poetry were incubated in the Lower East Side” (Kane 19). In the sixties and seventies, New York’s popular music venues were sites of harmonious gatherings of poets and punks, inspired by mind-altering substances and intoxicated by avant-garde multimedia experiences. Such performances challenged the popular belief that poetry should lie on paper. Historically, poetry is linked to performance, and when punk and hip-hop emerged in the twentieth-century, they aided the revival of spoken-word, performance-based poetry. Kane, author of Do You Have a Band?: Poetry and Punk Rock in New York City, argues that “any attempts to mark clear divisions between a poem on the page and a performed song, between club space and poetry-reading space, between ‘high art’ and the mass market” are futile (Kane 331). In other words, music and poetry parallel each other as they are written, shared, and marketed, and there is ultimately no need to make distinctions between them for the sake of categorizing art. Just as punk embraces poetry as performance, so does hip-hop.

 

     According to theater scholar Larry Neal, who played an integral role in the Black Arts movement of the sixties and seventies, “The poet must become a performer” (Hoffman 162). The Black Arts movement in poetry was an effort to preserve black oral tradition, in anticipation of its appropriation by white culture (Hoffman 162). Therefore, hip-hop performs poetry in unique ways. Concerning performance of poetry through hip-hop, novelist Gayle Jones states, “Musicians use collections of sounds to communicate to one another things that language cannot adequately convey… feelings and realities; they can more easily create possibilities and transcend audience controversies over definitions of African American reality and character” (Spady 127). The use of sound to create “feelings and realities” is not unique to hip-hop, but it was derived from black oral tradition. This shared history can unify the black community in such a way that the social constructs defining African-Americanism become insignificant.

 

     Some of the core elements of current hip-hop culture appear in pre-colonial timelines. Hip-hop culture extends beyond punk culture, so it is impossible to deny that the punk movement was influenced by black culture. Yet the black culture that influenced 1960’s punk is not the same black culture that originally crossed the Atlantic due to the “limitations of expressing the colonial experience through the language of the colonizer” (Spady 126). In the sixteenth century, European colonists forcibly relocated and enslaved countless Atlantic Africans and consequently redefined and appropriated Atlantic African cultures to further their own identity formation. As the Americas developed and black men and women became slaves, their cultures were re-appropriated to serve the institution of white power. Hip-hop culture evolved from the elements of black culture that endured the transatlantic slave trade “as part of a historical, cultural, and political interchange system” (Spady 128). Cultural interchange is not necessarily mutually beneficial, though, given the historic marginalization of certain demographics despite their contributions to the fluid concept of American culture.

 

     The culture that birthed both punk and hip-hop may be described tumultuous at best. Author Will Hermes defines pre-punk, pre-hip-hop New York as a “cultural dead zone” in addition to claiming that “the seventies had an identity crisis from the get-go” (Hermes 14, 20). In response, punk emerged as an attempt to form a unique identity within an oversaturated cultural climate. Music critic Lester Bangs describes the beginnings of punk “a groovy, beautifully insular hip community, maybe a nation, budding here,” and as a member of this community, he claims, “our art is a celebration of ourselves as liberated individuals and masses of such—the People” (Bangs 40). Such a characterization of punk promotes the solution to social marginalization as inward-focused liberation through unprecedented yet historically dependent aesthetics. Aesthetics therefore influence identity, or they at least promote a unique sense of self.

 

     Similarly, hip-hop also marks an attempt at community identification through distinct aesthetics. The rise of hip-hop in New York was intertwined with the city’s situation of economic crisis, and attempts to rehabilitate the city coincidentally misrepresented and further marginalized the African-American community. The rehabilitation drove marginalization while “neoliberal government reformed, privatized, corporatized, displaced, and dismantled public infrastructures for capital gain” (Calvente 127). The displacement of individual families and communities mostly targeted New York’s urban black population, thus resulting in the black diaspora, which ultimately catalyzed the hip-hop movement. The diaspora forced the black community to re-center their social environments, and hip-hop was a direct result of this new, messy social atmosphere (132). Black youth became the driving force behind the creation of hip-hop as they were introduced to new experiences and new technologies in the wake of the diaspora (133). Feelings of isolation resultant of the diaspora led young people to create music and a culture based on feelings (133). Hip-hop music evolved into a culture of solidarity in which young, black Americans shared experiences of alienation from mainstream, white culture. While punk’s founders were cast out of mainstream social environments, hip-hop’s founders were systematically excluded from the entirety of American mainstreams. Elements of hip-hop certainly influenced the mainstream, but the individuals attributed to such aesthetics of culture were discredited and dehumanized. In summation, while both genres have been geographically traced to New York, there are distinct differences between the New York that influenced punk and the New York that influenced hip-hop.

 

     The unique foundations of each genre can be linked to the founders’ unique racial identities that placed them in distinctly different environments. Punk emerged in the 1970’s with a distinct style among an increasingly diverse musical environment composed of various genres including rock, salsa, and jazz. Jazz, according to Lester Bangs, “was way out front, clearing a path into a new era of truly free music” (Bangs 41). In terms of form, punk is not undisputedly free; it utilizes basic patterns and progressions. Bangs describes the music of iconic punk band The Stooges as “so simple that it seems like anyone with rudimentary training should be able to play it” (Bangs 31). While this newfound musical freedom may not have defined punk in musical terms, the principle of freedom most definitely defined punk culture. British sociologist Dick Hebdige argues, “No subculture has sought with more grim determination than the punks to detach itself from the taken-for-granted landscape of normalized forms, nor to bring down upon itself such vehement disapproval” (Hebdige 19). Mainstream culture – a “landscape of normalized forms” – attempts to suppress subcultural expressions of freedom, but punk challenged this notion.

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     Punk culture welcomes nonconformist expressions of culture, thereby creating a sense of freedom within the subculture that allowed marginalized individuals the opportunity to freely identify themselves. As punk culture expanded and welcomed those rejected by the mainstream, “boys with long hair were no longer shocking, at least in New York. [But] add lipstick, panty hose, and high heels… people noticed” – that is, people outside of the punk community (Hermes 16). Will Hermes’s account of New York punk exemplifies the culture’s history of intersection with other major and minor cultures. Such intersections catalyzed cultural interchanges as well as re-appropriations. Cultural critic Tavia Nyong’o evaluates punk history through its roots in African-Americanism, arguing that contemporary criticisms of punk are marked by punk’s interweaving with race. Nyong’o further explains, “The black inflection on punk has been mainstreamed in contemporary American culture to the point where it may possibly be eclipsing prior associations” (Nyong’o 21). This theory of punk depends upon an understanding of the meaning of “punk” within the black vernacular, and it supports the notion that contemporary punk culture is influenced by historical elements of black culture. Thus, in terms of culture, punk rebels against the mainstream, and hip-hop reclaims its Atlantic African roots from mainstream culture.

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     Today, aesthetics of punk and hip-hop inform mainstream culture through music and fashion. Both genres have historically been associated with unique fashion expressions. The punk movement especially challenged mainstream fashion. Iconic examples of punk’s anti-everything fashion statements include wearing BDSM bondage gear as clothing, destroying articles of clothing, and designing unique outfits and accessories. Punks could easily be identified in twentieth-century New York by their fashion statements. Punk emerged as a response to the marginalization of segments of the urban youth, and it further separated itself from mainstream culture by invoking avant-garde, anarchist clothing styles. Dissimilarly, fashion served the hip-hop community as an entry point to dominant American culture. Today, hip-hop is the deciding force behind fashion trends, and hip-hop personalities appear as faces of iconic high-end, international fashion brands. Community leader Michael Waters characterizes hip-hop as “an indelible part, not just of American culture, but of global culture as well. [It] has utterly broken through from its ghetto roots to assert a lasting influence on clothing, magazine publishing, television, language, sexuality, and social policy” (Waters 6). Nevertheless, hip-hop is commonly misunderstood and misrepresented by the culture that so depends upon its influence.

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     In terms of perception, both punk and hip-hop are often viewed as symbolic and symptomatic of juvenile delinquency. There have been studies conducted to evaluate the behavioral effects of listening to these types of music. Hip-hop is commonly recognized as promoting physical and sexual aggression, misogyny, substance abuse, gang culture, and extreme politics, according to a study of problem music (Lozon, et al. 214). In the same study, punk is reportedly associated with substance abuse, rebellion, violence, and delinquency as well as anti-social and anti-authoritarian behaviors (Lozon, et al. 207). However, punk and hip-hop cultures are neither entirely nor accurately represented by the results of this study of problem music, since the very title of the study is biased due to the use of the adjective “problem.” Both hip-hop and punk music may be used for coping, identity formation, and subculture identification, but the most common positive influences of these genres are entertainment and pleasurable emotions (Lozon, et al. 216). Yet in mid-century New York, hip-hop was viewed as an “urban moral crisis” (Calvente 128), contrary to its beginnings as a socially unifying response to the city’s failing economic situation. Similarly, punk was viewed as a disease-ridden subsection of juvenile delinquents, and punks were considered “exiles from Manhattan’s main stage” (Hermes 24). Although punk and hip-hop are distinctly different cultural movements, they share common struggles of historical marginalization and concurrent misrepresentation.

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     Both punk and hip-hop are reactions to social turmoil and emblems of counterculture. Today they are often misrepresented as problematic genres of music and associated with negative behaviors. However, punk and hip-hop survive and continue to evolve because they fulfill people’s need to identify with groups. The distinct cultures of hip-hop and punk were born out of resistance to the mainstream, but they ultimately fed into the evolution of a mainstream American culture. As hip-hop is experiencing a punk moment, popular culture is experiencing a subcultural moment that may in fact continue to prove itself as more than a single instance of subcultural and pop-cultural intersection. Furthermore, this intertwining of various cultures is in itself a product of black culture, although it was repurposed by white motivations to serve the purpose of dominance over the increasingly diverse and undecided culture of the pre-colonial Americas.

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S O U R C E S . . .

Bangs, Lester. “Of Pop and Pies and Fun: A Program for Mass Liberation in the Form of a Stooges Review, or, Who’s the Fool?.” Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung: The Work of a Legendary Critic: Rock 'N' Roll as Literature and Literature as Rock 'N' Roll, edited by Greil Marcus, Anchor, 1988, pp. 31-52.

 

Bhopti, Vispi. “Apple reveals 2017’s most popular apps, music, movies, and more.” Apple Newsroom, 7 Dec. 2017, apple.com/newsroom.

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Feeney, Nolan. “This Map Shows Which Music Genres Are Most Popular Around the World.” TIME, 5 Feb. 2015, time.com.

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“Hip-Hop’s Punk Moment Has Arrived.” Popcast from The New York Times, 23 June 2017, nytimes.com.

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Hoffman, Tyler. American Poetry in Performance: From Walt Whitman to Hip Hop. Michigan UP, 2011. EBSCOhost.

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Kane, Daniel. Do You Have a Band?: Poetry and Punk Rock in New York City. Columbia UP, 2017, JSTOR, jstor.org/stable/10.7312/kane16296.

 

Lynch, Joe. “Grammys 2018: See the Complete List of Nominees.” Billboard, 28 Nov. 2017, billboard.com.

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Nyong’o, Tavia. “Punk’d Theory.” Social Text, vol. 23, nos. 3-4, 2005, pp. 19-34.

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Sanneh, Kelefa. “United Blood.” The New Yorker, 9 March 2015, newyorker.com/magazine.

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Spady, James G. “Mapping and Re-Membering Hip Hop History, Hiphopography, and African Diasporic History.” Western Journal of Black Studies, vol. 37, no. 2, 1 June 2013, EBSCOhost.

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Waters, Michael W. “Beats, Rhymes, and Life": Hip Hop's Unlikely Movement.” Media Development, vol. 61, no. 4, Oct. 2014, pp. 5-8, EBSCOhost.