Whoever writes about hip hop today reveals not so much his race as his age. To like hip hop music in the 21st century reveals nothing about one’s background because it is merely to like one of the most popular forms of music in the world. It has not only topped the charts in its own right, but it has influenced and changed almost every other form of pop music beside it, from rock and heavy metal to even country music, so that virtually every song shows the influence of hip hop music and culture. What began as almost a novelty form of music and an offshoot of the larger downtown art scene in 1970s New York has gone global, and now informs the popular music of a large percentage of nations and cultures.

Since, as its practitioners have always insisted, hip hop is not merely a musical genre but an entire culture, it has the ability to create fundamental changes in a society that imports or adopts it. Hip hop attaches itself to a host culture and changes that culture to accommodate itself. It does not change, it slowly makes the host culture change. Witness the remarkable uniformity of global hip hop music and fashion: wherever it is found, one sees the same clothing styles, the same values, the same attitudes, the same body language, and of course the same music. From America to Brazil to France to Eastern Europe to China and Japan, only the language being rapped in is different. Punk rock had a similar uniformity but never achieved the global reach or musical dominance that hip hop has.

Whether or not you personally like hip hop or “get it” is of no consequence, because hundreds of millions if not billions of others around the world do like it and do get it—or at least think they get it, want to get it, want to be down and cool. There is a genealogical line from the ideas of “cool” and “hip” in the 1940s and 50s jazz scene through to hip hop culture and its influence first on white Americans and then on the entire world. The creation of new musical forms such as blues, jazz, rock n’ roll, and hip hop—and a cultural scene and ethos built around them—have been black America’s strongest rhetorical weapons in their ongoing argument, or battle, with white America. The influence of black intellectuals like Booker T. Washington or W.E.B. DuBois, or their modern descendants like Henry Louis Gates and Cornel West, trained in white schools and essentially speaking the conceptual language of white culture, has always been rather minimal. They are applauded by white liberal book readers, perhaps influence a few politicians, but they have no impact on culture. But art, and especially popular music, can take ideas and energies and translate them, transmute them into a new form with mass appeal and mass influence. The abolitionist movement wasn’t catalyzed by a speech or essay, but by the novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin. The Civil Rights movement of the 50s and 60s would not have succeeded without rock n’ roll, which was the first cultural phenomenon to draw large mixed audiences, who came to see a mix of stars who were both black and white.

When Andrew Breitbart said that politics is downstream from culture, he was simply rephrasing what the Italian communist Antonio Gramsci had realized a hundred years before. But whereas Gramsci theorized a “long march through the institutions,” and his followers then put it into practice by systematically infiltrating and taking over Western academia, the real power has lain in what Theodore Adorno called the “culture industry.” In the 20th century, it has been the audio-visual arts that have influenced culture, and in turn politics, more than anything else. In this ongoing culture war, hip hop has been one of the primary weapons against white and Western culture ever since its ascendancy at the very end of the 20th century. What Jonathan Bowden said of Islam, that it represents a large banner under which many disparate peoples can rally together “against the West,” is doubly true of hip hop, which requires no proclamation of religious faith and which prizes hipness over piety.

Hip hop is not limited or reducible to a mere political discourse, nor even to just a form of music. Nonetheless, it can be and has been used as a vehicle to spread political ideas, and it has proven to be one of the most effective instruments of mass political rhetoric to emerge in the last hundred years. The evidence for that is the amount of cultural change it has wrought globally, but especially in the United States. The reasons why it has been able to do this are simple: the powers of rhythm, repetition and aesthetics. A song is a mnemonic device—just ask a grade school teacher. If you like a song, you listen to it over and over again. You memorize the words even if you don’t try to. If you don’t think about what those words mean, all the better: straight to the subconscious.

Ideas which thirty years ago were limited to the fringe discourses of black nationalism and Afrocentrism, including an entire revisionist history of human life and civilization, have moved to the mainstream of social discourse, and hip hop has been the primary vehicle that brought them there. In the same way that Oliver Stone’s film about the JFK assassination popularized the conspiratorial view of that event more effectively than decades of critical books and documentaries, it is hip hop that has spread the messages and worldviews of the Nation of Islam, the Five Percenters and other black militant groups which can variously be labeled extremist, black supremacist, or just anti-white. (The Five Percenters, also called The Nation of Gods and Earths, is an offshoot of the Nation of Islam that was formed in the late 1960s. If you don’t know who they are or what they believe, there is plentiful information online.)

A hundred years ago, no one would claim that European peoples have no identity or culture of their own, or that they stole all their achievements from Africa and other nonwhite cultures—that they are, as the Nation of Islam states, “a race of devils.” Yet today, this is an increasingly prominent view in the public mind, especially among young people, thanks in no small part to the spread of hip hop music and culture, which has influenced and substantially changed the discourse in academia and mainstream media. (Hip hop is now studied in academia and is the subject of dissertations and publications.) You can point to left-wing teachers who spread these ideas in classrooms, but I guarantee you those teachers first learned them in part from rap music.

To listen to political rappers like KRS-ONE, Public Enemy, Wu-Tang Clan, Poor Righteous Teachers and others is to be gradually immersed in a worldview which is collectively constructed. Like the blues before it, certain phrases and tropes are repeated again and again in rap lyrics, and are woven together—not by any one person or group but by the whole tradition itself—into a cohesive narrative. To hear these “griots” tell the story, black people in Africa had a great civilization of peace and plenty, which was destroyed by European invasion, enslavement, and colonization. After that, “400 years” of nothing but oppression and mistreatment, continuing up to this very day. The white police officer is the descendant of the whip-bearing overseer on the plantation, and the entire American political, economic and social system is designed to keep black and non-white people poor and oppressed. Thus blacks are both naturally superior and unfortunate victims to be pitied.

This political worldview of “conscious rap”—which is a mix of Nation of Islam / Five Percenter ideas, conspiracy theorists like William Cooper, and leftists like Howard Zinn and Michael Parenti—forms the backbone of hip hop, such that even non-political rappers, who are the majority, defer to it. Explicitly political rappers have usually—though not always—had a rather limited audience. But among that audience are the rappers who are far more popular and who cross over into the mainstream. Thus the ideas trickle through. Ice Cube and Jay Z are known primarily as gangsta rappers, but both have associations with the Nation of Islam and the Five Percenters, respectively, and have represented them in public. And they are hardly alone. As RZA told Michael Knight Muhammad, “In a lot of ways, hip hop is the Five Percent.”

Right-wing critics tend to focus on Foucault and postmodernism as influences on the creation of wokeness, but I think the rise of hip hop and its anti-white political worldview have been far more influential.

Why Do White Kids Listen to Gangsta Rap?

The craze for the ‘nigger minstrels’ of the 1840s set a pattern that was later to be repeated several times over. First, genuine Afro-American music is introduced to the white, middle-class public as a shocking novelty. Then it is adapted to their tastes, principally by white musicians. Once this relatively bland, commercial product has won acceptance, the public is ready for a new, darker influx, and the cycle begins again. (Peter van der Merwe, The Roots of the Classical, 2004)

Hip hop, while it is easily the most verbose of all the musical forms, is also among the most emotionally stunted and immature in its lyrical content. Rapping was built almost entirely around braggadocio, and remains so now. There are plenty of exceptions to this, particularly among “conscious” rappers and also among those known as storytellers, who necessarily have to deal with a wider range of emotions in order to be effective in their craft. But a large portion of rap songs have been and continue to be variations of “I have the mic and you do not; I’m cooler than you; I like money and sex; I’m at the club; I have many expensive things that you do not have; I will fucking kill you with my gun, bitch.”

The counter-argument to saying that this is emotionally immature is that it’s also primal and visceral; it’s the male id speaking without a filter. (This is what I said on X and generated quite a bit of feedback.) No matter how “cultured” or smart you are, as a man there is always a part of you that wants to thump your chest like a gorilla and declare your strength to the world. Some of the reason that whites have historically liked black musical and cultural forms is for their perceived closer affinity to primal emotions like this, including primal sexuality. This was a large component of the mid 20th century phenomenon which Norman Mailer called “the white negro”—white hipsters consciously identifying with and trying to emulate blacks because they were seen as more connected to primal nature, less alienated from it than the dominant WASP culture. This “white negro” hipsterism was a development of the “cult of the primitive” which began a century before. The critic Charles Glicksberg wrote: “What the jaded taste of the white intelligentsia craved was excitement, and the excitement was provided in abundance by the pounding rhythm of jungle drums, the fierce tempo of jazz music, the mad glee of tap dancers, the element of sinister magic in the ancestral religion of the Negro. Through the atavistic literature and art of the Negro, might it not be possible to recapture the lost quality of the spontaneous, the instinctive, the primitive? That was the substance of the aesthetic hope.” Part of the reason that white kids in the suburbs became fascinated with gangsta rap’s portrayals of urban black violence in the 80s and 90s has to do with the same primal energies that had white kids fascinated with black sexualized dancing in the 20s, and which created Mailer’s “white negro” phenomenon in the 50s. In those previous cases, the dominant energy was sex. In the gangsta rap phenomenon, sex becomes secondary to violence.

We as a species emerged as the apex predator by mastering violence over other animals and over our fellow man. When anthropologists like Konrad Lorenz and Robert Ardrey first introduced this idea, such as in Ardrey’s book The Hunting Hypothesis, there was a strong reaction against it, but it is now accepted as scientific fact. When we read The Iliad, the oldest foundational text of Indo-European civilization and culture, we are met with a life filled with violence and bloodshed, which stands in stark contrast to our own utterly tame, domesticated, “civilized” lives. What appeals to white kids in gangsta rap is fundamentally what appeals to them in action movies: a return to our origins in violent competition.

Filmmaker John Singleton seems to have intuited something of this appeal for whites. Several years after his debut Boyz N Tha Hood, he released Higher Learning, which dealt with race and gender politics at an American university. (In many ways Higher Learning demonstrates that what is now called “wokeness” was more or less fully present in the 1990s, albeit in a more limited and contained form.) One of the characters in the film is Remy, a white boy from flyover country, played by the insufferable Michael Rapaport who later disavowed the character and said “I’m canceling myself” for playing a racist. Remy finds himself alone and unable to fit in at school. He is taken in by a gang of skinheads, the leader of which is Scott, played by Cole Hauser, who went on to become famous as Rip on Yellowstone. At one point Scott is lecturing Remy and the other skinheads about the coming race war: “You ever shoot someone, Remy? Let me put it another way. You ever shoot a piece of meat? Seen what bullets do to flesh? Those fucking niggers out there, those fucking little monkeys, the gangbangers—they’re training every fucking day and every night, shooting each other. They’re ready for war. But are you?”

Violence, as one of the most primal energies of existence, is something that all men wonder about and either consciously address or unconsciously ignore. At some level all men know—remember from our ancestral past—that as men we are called upon to deal with violence, either to defend ourselves and our loved ones against it or to inflict it on others for various reasons. Every meeting of men involves a sizing up of who could take who in a fight, who is the alpha, even though modern life seldom offers any situations in which this hierarchy becomes tested in this way. Consequently, men have an innate respect for other men who are proficient at violence. Even liberals who claim to abhor violence are often only one step away from fantasizing aloud about how much they would love to see their perceived enemies and inferiors killed and maimed, or even tortured and raped—always by someone else, of course.

With this in mind it isn’t difficult to understand how a boy from a domesticated and tamed “civilized” culture would be fascinated and attracted by a culture which is essentially primitive in its levels of violence, in which violence is necessarily experienced and adapted to. Author Geoffrey Canada wrote a memoir of this process of adaptation to violence called Fist, Stick, Knife, Gun about how kids in ghetto neighborhoods, the types portrayed in gangsta rap and films like Boyz n tha Hood, become acclimated and accustomed to violence by necessity. From an outsider’s perspective, black ghetto life looks like an actualization of all the Darwinian clichés: survival of the fittest, a dog-eat-dog competition in which only the strong survive and the strongest of the strong are the rulers of all. (See, e.g., the Mobb Deep song “Survival of the Fittest,” or for that matter every single song on their album The Infamous.) For a white audience, the black ghetto drama has some overlap with the post-apocalyptic thriller, since both are fantasies of (white) civilizational collapse into anarchy and violence. It is also connected to the prison story genre, which usually features the same kind of reversion to the primitive state as a motif, including the reversion to tribal, i.e. racial, groups.

Higher Learning also makes the connection with Homer. When Remy first meets Scott he is sitting on a staircase alone, reading The Iliad. Scott approaches and befriends him, and when he sees what he is reading, he says, “That’s a good book. Lotta great battles in that book.” The world of Homer is long gone, but gangsta rap and Boyz n the Hood speak of a world of violence (and plentiful sex) which still exists, just across the tracks on the other side of town.

For the white hip hop fan, then, listening to rap music provides a vicarious experience of rough masculinity, or just plain voyeurism into that world. But in addition to the feeling of “I’m a tough guy who has sex with lots of girls and shoots anyone who messes with me,” they also absorb the anti-white worldview which informs the entire genre. And this is what has happened on a mass scale for the last forty years, especially the last twenty-five after rap went mainstream at the turn of the century.

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It’s fitting that the man who ushered rap into the mainstream in the late 90s, Sean “Puffy” Combs, is the same man who may end up being responsible for its downfall. The revelations about the personal lives of many celebrities in the hip hop world have been a public relations disaster for an industry which has long cultivated macho public personas, and which has long placed value on being “real” as opposed to just a “studio gangster,” a guy who isn’t really as tough as he sounds on his records. For a long time, the mystique prevailed.

But even if rap dies in America (highly unlikely), or even if most white kids stop listening to it (possible but also unlikely), the question remains what will happen to the hip hop scenes in other countries. During the Hong Kong protests in 2019, the anthem of the young protesters was a rap song called “Fuck the Popo” (rhymed with “diu nei lo mo”— “fuck your mother” in Cantonese). The city has a thriving hip hop scene, as does mainland China. The Chinese Communist Party initially didn’t know what to do about the rise of rap music and they tried to ban it, but couldn’t, not unlike their efforts to ban porn. So what they decided to do instead is encourage the creation of “patriotic rap” and promote that over other, more subversive material. (Try to imagine an alternate universe where America had a pro-white government, and in response to the growing popularity of rap music they hired and promoted Mr. Bond.) Now China has a tv show called “Rap of China” which is a subset of “Voice of China,” an American Idol style amateur singing competition.

Will hip hop music and culture be the voice of the global south in the 21st century? Or will it fade away like Disco, the genre from which it first derived most of its beats? Or will it, like rock n roll, become essentially severed from its roots and mutate into forms that have almost nothing to do with its origins, such as the explicitly National Socialist rap of Mr. Bond?

Only time will tell.

https://semmelweis7.substack.com/p/hip-hop-as-anti-white-kulturkampf