Red Pepper » Kaspar Loftin

The Afrikan Hip Hop Caravan: an alternative vision of hip hop

admin — Fri, 22 Mar 2013 22:54:10 +0000

Performing with the caravan. Photo: nmarais
The Afrikan Hip Hop Caravan, a collective of conscious hip hop artists and activists, is currently making its way across Africa. Its mission: to use the genre of hip hop music to address social problems and ‘build continental-wide movements’ for social change.
It has visited six major cities around the continent, giving two performances in each, one in a working-class community and another in the city centre. The movement will also provide a symposium for debate on the relevance and contribution of hip hop to community struggles. The final caravan will finish at the 2013 World Social Forum in Tunisia this month.
The potential power of rap music for social change has long been forgotten. In the USA, mainstream hip hop, like mainstream cinema, is very much in the hands of the industry. Gone are the freedoms of the 1980s and early 90s when the movement had had its very own ‘auteur’ era. During this period rap artists held relatively limitless creative control and their music was both organic and unique. Image and sound was dictated by the artists and resulting themes were often politically conscious. Watchers of mainstream television YO! MTV Raps could see left-field, jazzy acts A Tribe Called Quest, Latin and rock influenced Cypress Hill and boom-bap street-music Gang Starr all on one channel.
Despite originally ignoring the genre, towards the end of the 1990s US major labels claimed hip hop for themselves. The majority of mainstream rappers were either bought out, or their albums were shelved for not conforming. Here was an industry, with a growing global market and susceptible youth audience, that corporate America would not miss the opportunity to buy out.
Politics sidelined
As a result, political content was sidelined, sexism was bolstered and violence was encouraged. The movie-gangster persona created by early artists Kool G Rap and Big L, or the street-conscious voices of Nas and Guru were rebranded, as the classic-liberal drug-dealer model, currently glamorised by rapper Rick Ross.
Tupac’s ‘thug life’ mantra was remarketed as an advocation of thuggery, appealing to racial stereotypes of black people as violent and over-sexualised, when in reality ‘thug life’ was a movement fiercely against this depiction. Labels took advantage of a large white, middle-class fan-base and general male desires for cathartic violence and crime fantasies and also exploited poorer listeners’ escapist dreams of wealth and fame.
However, hip hop is much more than the plastic-rapper you see on the TV, or hear on the radio. The culture runs deep – it is one of musical anthologising, camaraderie, competition, debate, escape, innovation, poetry, representation for the unrepresented, showmanship and wordplay. At its core is an environment that in nature encourages unity. It is totally meritocratic: it ignores class boundaries, gender and racial differences and usurps continents – as long as you have the skills you can collaborate. It is a genre so globally appealing that a fan from Eastern Europe will know every single (New York based) Wu-Tang Clan lyric and a movement so powerful that a rapper from Egypt can encourage thousands of people to stand up for democracy with one song.
Hip hop and the market
Sadly the majority of current mainstream hip hop music sounds like a combination of an urban Fifty Shades of Grey and a nouveau riche shopping list – largely a result of undisclosed product placement deals and weak ‘sex sells’ agenda, mirroring much of Hollywood cinema. Funnily enough, the American right never ceases to criticise rap music but is also quite happy to profit from its billion-dollar revenues. The hip hop market is a carefully constructed industry that uses the rapper as a shield for negativity; criticism falls upon the mainly black/working-class performer, and as result black/working-class society, whilst rich white label owners cream off profits behind the scenes.
Ironically the unfortunate aesthetic of mainstream hip hop, a result of the above corporate intervention, has actually allowed the genre to remain one of the most popular music genres amongst young people. Despite being some 30 years old it still retains its young audience, which is largely because adults find it offensive. Whilst other once-political musical styles punk, folk etc became accepted as an artistic force and accordingly lose their edge, hip hop remains cool.
What the Afrikan Hip Hop Caravan is doing in Africa, the native soil of all black music and a continent symbolic of corporate greed and exploitation, is a revitalisation of hip hop’s original political power. We have already seen its influence on many of the North African uprisings, with numerous young people citing local, political rap music as the inspiration in their fight for democracy. In Kangemi, Kenya, for example, more than 2,000 hip hop fans turned out.
Evidently hip hop is a language that young people understand and an effective medium of political communication and engagement. As the caravan tours a number of schools, community centres and public spaces across Africa, the foundations are being laid for a new generation of politicised youth and social activists.
To read more about the caravan and for updates on its progress see afrikanhiphopcaravan.tumblr.com

A Black Thursday for Walmart

louise — Fri, 30 Nov 2012 16:13:07 +0000

Photo: UFCW International Union/Flickr

There’s no better day to strike against an oppressive commercial employer than on Black Friday, the day after Thanksgiving in the US, and possibly the biggest exhibition of fervent consumerism and Capitalist triumph bar Wall Street. A notoriously aggressive event; consumers flock to stores for discounted goods and half-price sales. Past years have seen assaults, stampedes, stabbings and shootings, occasionally resulting in both employee and customer fatalities.

Up until the late 2000’s retailers had opened their doors at 6.00 am; the day after Thanksgiving. However, in the past few years opening hours have reached new lows and by 2011 a number of large retailers including; Target, Kohls, Macy’s and Best Buy lured customers in at midnight on Thanksgiving. Not to be outdone, this year Walmart, the biggest private employer in the world, announced it would be opening its stores at 8pm on Thursday, Thanksgiving evening. Barely would its workers, or ‘associates’ as Walmart rhetoric labels them, have time to swallow their turkey dinners before they’d have to leave family homes and confront thousands of frenzied shoppers, some who’d been camping outside stores since Wednesday night.

Walmart has a well-known flagrance for the treatment of its staff, operating an almost autocratic in-store infrastructure; women and ethnic minorities are often subject to harsh treatment from a mainly white, male management. Employees are regularly required to work without meal breaks and often off-the-clock hours without overtime pay. A 2004 New York Times report found extensive violations of child labour laws, including minors forced to work shifts late into school nights. The zenith, or rather nadir, of the corporation’s disregard for its staff was exposed in its ‘Dead Peasants Insurance’; policies taken out on a number of low level workers in an attempt to profit from their deaths. Walmart’s ill-treatment of employees has prompted a number of documentaries, including the critically acclaimed ‘Walmart: The High Cost of Low Price’ and numerous books such as ‘The Wal-Mart Effect’ by Charles Fishman.

Akin to most major corporations in the US, the nation’s biggest employer also operates a rigid anti-union policy; including heavy managerial surveillance and pre-emptive closures for those stores attempting to unionise. Walmart responds that is not anti-union but ‘pro-associate’, unions are an unnecessary third party medium when the managerial door is always open. According to company policy, workers are entitled to discourse with the highest stratums of the corporate ladder.

Interestingly, when butchers in Jacksonville, Texas voted to unionise in the year 2000, Walmart decided to eliminate every in-house meat cutting department across America. This year, despite Walmart’s policy of anti-unionism, United Food & Commercial Workers, a long standing, but largely ineffectual opponent of Walmart, and OUR Walmart, decided to implement ground-breaking protests on the eve of Thanksgiving. Launched in June 2011 OUR Walmart is an organisation labour historian Prof. Nelson Lichtenstein describes as not ‘looking for legal certification’ or claiming ‘to represent everyone’, but simply ‘a minority that is willing to stick their necks out’. Our Walmart effectively unionised employees using clever social media strategies including a powerful YouTube Video with the tagline ‘Stand Up, Live Better’, a play on Walmart’s own slogan, ‘Save Money, Live Better’. Their aim was simple, not to dent Black Friday profits, as this was seemingly impossible, but rather to raise awareness of the unfair labour conditions faced by some 1 million hourly store employees. These issues range from low wages, increases in health insurance premiums, unfair scheduling, managerial bullying and of course the heartless Thanksgiving evening-shifts.

On the eve of Thanksgiving 22nd November, or Black Thursday as it became known, hundreds of Walmart workers, all risking retaliation for their actions, alongside general members of the American public, protested outside over 100 stores across the USA. Rallies took place in Dallas, Los Angeles, Miami, Milwaukee and Washington D.C. and picket signs could be seen outside scores of Walmart stores across Chicago, California and Texas. Walmart executives underplayed and even outright dismissed the actions of the strikers; Bill Simon, CEO and president of Walmart arrogantly stated ‘We estimate that less than 50 associates participated in the protest nationwide. In fact, this year, roughly the same number of associates missed their scheduled shift as last year. Walmart’s vice president of communications added that ‘the number of protests being reported by the United Food and Commercial Workers Union are grossly exaggerated.’ However, OUR Walmart Campaign Director Dan Schlademan argued that striking Walmart employee numbers reached well into the hundreds and hailed the event as the “largest U.S. strike in the history of Walmart’.

As of yet, the actual physical effects of the strike remains to be unseen, and indeed the dismissive rhetoric of Walmart executives suggest that nothing will change in the immediacy. However, requested police presence that prevented protesters entering retail car parks at stores in Chicago and Texas imply that executives were clearly anxious at the threat of far more than 50 strikers.

Furthermore, the fact that the dissent actually took place at all, and at present there have been no mass sackings, is a huge success for the future of Our Walmart. Interestingly many Black Thursday shoppers sympathised with the protesters, the majority of those desperate enough to partake in the sales are similarly low-waged individuals all probably experiencing similar working conditions and with little or no representation. Sadly the vicious cycle of poverty forces individuals, too poor to shop at more expensive alternatives, to support the corporations that oppress them.

As members of a relatively unskilled labour force, for Walmart workers the threat of another individual more than willing to take your job should you have any complaints, hangs in the balance. However, the biggest positive to draw from the Black Thursday walkouts is that a segment of employees were brave enough to challenge authority so-far without backlash, and can be the inspiration for many more. This is clearly only the beginning for labour change and Walmart’s first real union. In an interview with The Huffington Post Texan Colby Harris, Walmart employee and OUR Walmart activist stated, ‘Walmart thinks that after all this blows over we’re going to give up. We will continue with our fight… until changes are made. You can’t continue running from the problem, otherwise it’ll never be fixed.’