Hip-hop is as American as apple pie. That doesn’t seem to be the take of presidential inauguration planners, as they explained why rapper Kanye West wasn’t invited to perform for this weekend’s festivities.
“He’s been great. He considers himself a friend of the president-elect, but it’s not the venue,” Tom Barrack, chairman of the Presidential Inaugural Committee, said on CNN. “The venue we have for entertainment is filled out. It’s perfect. It’s going to be typically and traditionally American.”
That West is unfit for the event that is “typically and traditionally American” runs counter to hip-hop’s place within history and this country’s identity. Hip-hop culture – which encompasses not just music but also dance, fashion and visual arts – came out of an experience and context specific to this country, first appearing in Bronx house parties and playgrounds and forged by black and brown youths facing the socioeconomic forces of the 1970s and 1980s that defined urban America.
MOST READ ENTERTAINMENT NEWS THIS HOUR
Now, decades after kids began rapping over records at house parties in New York, hip-hop stands as one of America’s most influential pop culture exports. Its impact stretches from Beijing to Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. You can find break-dancers in Tel Aviv and Tupac murals in Cape Town, South Africa.
And it’s also completely revolutionized American popular music. In 2015, researchers at Queen Mary University of London and Imperial College London published a study after digitally analyzing audio features such as chord patterns and tonal shifts of 17,000 U.S. pop chart songs between 1960 and 2010. They concluded that “the rise of hip-hop in the early 1990s [caused] the largest pulse in new sound.”
“Hip-hop is the single greatest revolution in the U.S. pop charts by far,” co-author Armand M. Leroi told the Los Angeles Times.
Hip-hop was also formed the way so much of American popular culture has, by combining influences from elsewhere and creating something new. The banjo, now inextricably tied to country music, is an African instrument. Rock music essentially came from mixing black American traditions of blues and gospel, which also have old and faraway origins. Rap music has been taken to ever-expanding creative limits, and it can be both party and protest music – sometimes in the very same song. Subgenres, from gangsta to trap to conscious rap, continue to emerge.
And while hip-hop was initially dismissed by the mainstream as a fad, its enduring appeal became evident; commercial forces eventually used rap in advertisements and movies to turn a profit.
Barrack’s comments about West elicited a wave of criticism on social media and elsewhere questioning why inauguration concert acts Toby Keith and 3 Doors Down somehow epitomized American culture but not Kanye West.
Public Enemy’s Chuck D had a brutal, succinct response. “We are entering a ‘daft’ period,” he wrote in a message to The Washington Post. “As in Dumb As F– Today, Dumb As F– Tomorrow in a Dumb As F– Tyranny.”
Others criticized the remark “typically and traditionally American” as code for white. (The inauguration did have other performers of color on the slate, such as Sam Moore).
Perhaps Barrack’s comment that the inauguration was not the venue for West had more to do with the artist, specifically, than hip-hop generally.
Even so, West is also a quintessential American public figure. He was an unknown kid from Chicago whose mastery of soulful samples and clever lyrics led him to become one of the biggest names in music.
He’s both criticized and embraced capitalism and is a pop culture icon who married the world’s most prominent reality TV star – before a less-famous reality TV personality became president.
In “Made In America,” Kanye raps, “I told my mama I was on the come up/She said, ‘You going to school, I’ll give you a summer.'”
He continues: “Then she met [producer] No I.D. and gave me his number. Ten years later, she driving a Hummer.”
And what’s more American than that?
RELATED STORIES:
Kanye West not ‘traditionally American’ enough to perform at Trump inauguration, hints organizer
Donald Trump, Kanye West hold meeting in New York
Finding truth in Kanye’s ‘rants’
More Top Picks How Much Walking Per Day For Heart Health
Who had a better year: Chance the Rapper or Kanye West?
.galleries:after {
content: ”;
display: block;
background-color: #144A7C;
margin: 16px auto 0;
height: 5px;
width: 100px;
}
.galleries:before {
content: “Entertainment Photos and Video”;
display: block;
font: 700 20px Georgia,serif;
text-align: center;
color: #1e1e1e;
var playlist = ‘chi_ent_movie_trailers’,
layout = ‘autoblurb’,
iu = ‘%2F4011%2Ftrb.chicagotribune%2Fent’;
Watch the latest movie trailers.