What is Hip-Hop?

          Hip-hop is a culture of entrepreneurial thinking and doing.  In a society where many African-Americans feel disenfranchised and underrepresented, those people turn to entrepreneurial endeavors as a method for getting out of the ghetto and achieving success. By becoming a hip-hop artist, someone from the hood can establish him or herself as a self-made man or woman, an entrepreneur.  However, as with start-ups, the vast majority of hip-hop artists are not success stories.  Moreover, once again like start-up companies, most successful hip-hop artists don’t reign for long.  Hip-hop is about the next.  And if you’re not next, you’re nothing.  It doesn’t matter if someone sits on the throne today.  If that person doesn’t stay hot, then they can get knocked off the throne tomorrow as quickly as they were put there yesterday. 

            Furthermore, hip-hop is a culture of invention and reinvention.  Once again, it is easy to see the connection between hip-hop and entrepreneurship.  In order to make it to the top, or stay there once you’ve made it, it takes a quick-witted mind to not only set the trends, but follow them.  Every great hip-hop mogul has this in common.  Whether it’s Jay-Z, Eminem, P-Diddy, Dr. Dre, Kanye West, or any other major player in the hip-hop world, all of them understand how to do the three things any great entrepreneur must know how to do.  They know how to provide something that is well-received by their audience, they know how to observe the trends that their audience follows and stay relevant by doing so, and they know how to build upon the artists that came before them.  Typically, any new idea is born from one of the following two purposes: providing a want, or alleviating a pain.  Either an entrepreneur is creating something entirely new that the market wants, but doesn’t know it yet, or he or she is fixing or improving upon an existing idea.  Invention, and reinvention.  We see those exact things in the world of hip-hop.  Those people that I mentioned earlier are experts at not only creating, but recreating the work that preceded them.

            Examining further the concept of invention and reinvention, providing a want and alleviating a pain, it brings me to what we discussed in class about the phrase, “necessity is the mother of invention.”  We noted that in today’s day and age, it is oftentimes the other way around.  After all, we never really needed a search engine that makes navigating the internet easier.  But most of us couldn’t fathom a world without Google.  We never needed state-of-the-art smartphones, laptops, or other electronics that many of us use today.  Yet think about how many people rely so heavily on their Apple or Android phones, their Macs or PCs.  With that in mind, it seems as though invention coupled with clever marketing is what creates necessity, not the other way around. 

However, hip-hop is where that phrase can go both ways.  A certain element of novel invention is required of any great hip-hop artist.  Without creating something unique, an artist simply cannot be recognized as one of the best.  In that respect, invention leads to necessity in hip-hop.  But on a macroscopic level, the entire culture can be viewed as a byproduct of necessity.  After all, without disenfranchisement and underrepresentation, would African-Americans conceive of such a culture?  If whites were oppressed and black people held the power in the United States, would there be a white version of hip-hop?  I think that hip-hop is cut from the same cloth as the gun violence on the streets of Chicago.  We talked in class about how people in the city feel as though the world has forgotten about them, so they turn to gun violence.  I think that the creative expression of hip-hop is the benevolent form of reacting to that same feeling.  If you are the type of person who holds grudges and harbors anger, then maybe violence is what you turn to when it seems as though the rest of the world has forgotten about you.  But if you have talent, ambition, and a strong work ethic, then maybe you’ll create something new that the world has yet to see, and you’ll remind the world that there are geniuses in the ghetto too.  And that’s what hip-hop is all about.