He said these moments represent the evolution of hip-hop, which has recently culminated in Kendrick Lamar’s recent album “To Pimp a Butterfly.”
These are Coleman’s top five moments in the evolution of hip-hop culture.
1. “Rapper’s Delight” by The Sugar Hill Gang
“For the first time, there was a rap song that people recognized across the country. It was a song that introduced the culture itself to America more broadly. It was the national birth of hip-hop culture even though it had been going on for almost a decade in the Bronx and New York City, Philadelphia and New Jersey, places like that in the northeast. That was the moment that it arrived nationally.”
2. “Do the Right Thing” by Spike Lee
“It was the first time that we saw a series of films where blacks were not depicted in the same stereotypical ways that they had been depicted in the past. It’s not that they didn’t use stereotypes; they just created a new set of stereotypes, if you will, but there were a lot of moments when you saw the black community reflected in ways that it had never been reflected before. You’d see black folk but typically it’s how are they interacting with the rest of American society. It’s very rare to see a feature-length film that featured black people in the black community. True, there are stereotypes, but we saw those communities, some of the intricacies inside of those communities in ways that we hadn’t seen in that venue before. So that was a critical moment in the shaping of the culture.”
3. The rise of Biggie Smalls and Tupac Shakur
“The narrative voice, the power of that individual voice. Before then, you were, as an individual, you were trying to make a living at rap music. With Tupac and Biggie, you saw the power of being able to shift and change the culture with an individual voice. Now they were the voice of east coast (and) west coast, we get that, but they were powerful voices and it demonstrated the overall power of hip-hop culture itself. It also demonstrated that black communities were not homogenous or monolithic. Black communities are diverse ... you had to take black people as individuals, not as a group as a whole.”
4. The launch of “Yo! MTV Raps”
“When Fab Five Freddy brought that to the national airways, MTV (Music Television) marketed that internationally, so it was in Europe as well as in the United States, and it offered for the first time an insider’s view of hip-hop culture and a kind of news and events programming that didn’t exist before, and I think it brought the community together in some important ways.”
5. The 1995 Source Awards
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“Two things happened at that award show. The first thing is, Dr. Dre wins an award and he comes on stage with Snoop and the audience boos. So Snoop says, ‘Y’all ain’t got no love for Dr. Dre and Snoop Dogg?’ and the audience was like no, not really. Some people say that started the East Coast-West Coast war in hip-hop. Andre 3000 says, ‘Y’all gonna hear from the South,” and so at the same time at the Source Awards, you had the declaration of a war between the East Coast-West Coast, but you also had the birth of the Dirty South as its own hip-hop scene.
“We knew from that moment in hip-hop that there was going to be variation and diversity within that culture around the country, and different scenes would be able to have their own. You were no longer defined by how closely you approximated hip-hop being produced in Los Angeles or hip-hop being produced in the Bronx. That was a huge moment.”
Khadijah Jacobs is a freelance reporter for the Daily Lobo. She can be reached at culture@dailylobo.com or on Twitter @DailyLobo.
