Becoming Hip Hop

Talking Points #4

A Style Nobody can Deal With: Policies, Style and the Postindustrial City in Hip Hop
By Tricia Rose

“Hip Hop emerges from complex cultural exchanges and larger social and political conditions of disillusionment and alienation.” (Rose, 412).


After reading Tricia Rose’s A Style Nobody can Deal With: Policies, Style and the Postindustrial City in Hip one word that jumps out at me is “cultural expressionism” (Rose, 409). Rose explores this term further throughout the body of her essay. She allows her audience to learn the social, political, emotional and physical aspects of hip-hop and its influence on the African American youth in New York. She invites us to all learn about the social and cultural identity associated with the history of the hip-hop nation.

As a culture all of its own, hip-hop was built from the ground up and is best known to some people today as ‘rap.’ Rose teaches us that these fast rhymes that make us want sing and maybe even “pop and lock” our hips all come from a powerful history of struggle and oppression (Rose, 410). We learn that hip-hop has been passed down from earlier Afro- Caribbean and Afro- American cultures. Their special traditions have built the language, dances and visual traditions that we call ‘hip hop’ today. Rose remarks about the fundamentals of the tradition, “hip hop combines elements of speech and song, of dance and display, to call into being through performance new identities and subject positions” (Rose, 402). The founders of hip-hop emerged with the help of urban inner city youth in New York.

Hip Hop is more than just music it is art, and a voice of a culture. Rose invites the reader to think about the meaning behind the lyrics of their songs. I enjoyed learning how music was their outlet of expressionism. The “themes and styles” born during this time in the 1970s continues on to today’s musicians, “ even as today’s rappers revise and redirect rap music, most understand themselves as working out of a tradition of style, attitude and form which has critical and primary roots in New York City in 1970” (Rose, 403).

I also learned a lot about the social and political history that involved the cultures within the city. Rose teaches us how families of all nationalities were evacuated from their homes due to changes in city policy and a huge push for commercial building. We learn how these families living in urban New York were greatly affected by the economic and social reform, “ urban job opportunity structures, have exacerbated long standing racial and gender based forms of discrimination and have contributed to increasing multinational corporate control of market conditions and national economic health” (Rose, 403).

So what does this all mean? Well, for one Rose allows us to learn that President Fords “dramatic social service cuts were felt most severely in New York’s poorest areas and were part of a larger trend in unequal wealth distribution and were accompanied by a housing crisis which continued well into the 1980” (Rose, 404). Rose teaches us that this huge economic and social reform might have segregated cultures but help to unite youth in Urban America. Inner city youth began to ‘divide and conquer’ authority. Their voice became what we know today as hip-hop. Families who were kicked out of “their houses due to these drastic cuts in city policy began building their own cultural networks” (Rose, 407). The media might have portrayed “these black and Hispanic neighborhoods [as] drained of life, energy and vitality. [However] the message was loud and clear. Like Christensen and Hine, Rose teaches us that these visions of loss and futility became defining characteristics, the youngest generation of South Bronx exiles were building creative and aggressive outlets for expression and identification” (Rose, 407). The youth of the South Bronx “answered back” (Rose, 407). Hip Hop has certainly created its own “tenor and energy” throughout the ages and into today’s music world (Rose, 413). These three authors all reinforce the idea that teenagers can make a voice for themselves and when they speak, we need to listen. We must make their voices known! The vibrant style that we call hip-hop is truly a “cultural expression” that carries with its own voice of struggle and accomplishment (Rose, 409).
Rose’s piece over all was very interesting at that! However, there were various paragraphs were I questioned the context of the point Rose was making due to the vocabulary. Overall, a great read with lots of plentiful information about the ‘becoming of hip hop.’ However, I definitely needed a dictionary near by.