Hip hop, the most popular cultural export of the United States, emerged out of the uniquely devastating conditions of deindustrialization and the criminalization of poverty

This year marks the 50th anniversary of the “birth of hip-hop” on August 11, 1973 a somewhat mythological date which marks when DJ Kool Herc held a “jam” in the rec room of the 1520 Sedgwick Ave apartment building (located in the Bronx, New York) for his sister’s back to school party. At the “jam” DJ Kool Herc used a turntable to extend the instrumental beat so that people could dance for longer, rapping over the extended beat. According to many, this signaled the birth of hip hop, a genre that would extend beyond music and extend into visual art, dance, language, politics, and every element of culture. Today, hip hop is a global phenomenon, an artform practiced in the mountains of Nepal to the fields of rural China, in the islands of Cape Verde, and to almost every corner of every continent. Often hip hop is the first thing that comes to mind around the world when one thinks of popular culture in the United States.

Hip hop is a unique export of the US. It does not carry the same negative connotations as commercialized products such as Coca-Cola, which has depleted the water supply of communities in the Global South, or Nike, which operates sweatshops in the world’s poorest countries. Hip hop has, of course, to a large extent become itself a commercialized product. But its origins are rooted in the desperate cries of some of the most oppressed communities in the country, and now, throughout the entire world, that legacy is carried on today.

The legacy of state repression Although it is impossible to pinpoint an exact date for the birth of an entire genre, 1973 in the Bronx was a unique turning point in the economic history of the United States. The previous two decades had seen the beginning of the precipitous decline in union membership in the country from its peak in 1954. The 50s and 60s had also seen the rise of some of the largest social movements in the country’s history—the women’s movement, the Civil Rights movement, the Black liberation movement, the gay rights movement, the Puerto Rican independence movement, and many more. The late 60s and early 70s had also seen the attempted annihilation of those movements, through methods such as the strategic assassinations of political leaders such as Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, and Fred Hampton. Much of the US working class entered the early 1970s cut off from its political leadership.

Another way in which the actions of the state destabilized social movements was through incarceration. Many other social movement leaders, such as Mumia Abu-Jamal, Jamil Abdullah al-Amin, and Leonard Peltier, became political prisoners when they were arrested on widely disputed charges in later years. One of the most well-known ex-political prisoners (now escaped) is Assata Shakur of the Black Liberation Army, aunt to Tupac Shakur, one of the most famous rappers of all time.

In 1971, US President Richard Nixon declared a “war on drugs,” in which the state’s apparatus of policing was used to jail poor people specifically for drug offenses. As a result, the male incarceration rate skyrocketed in the 1980s, generating the epidemic of mass incarceration that we see today. Crack cocaine, the drug of choice for the poor and oppressed, was heavily criminalized, while the much more expensive powder cocaine was not. From the late 1980s onwards, drug offenses became the largest increase in the amount of people incarcerated. The Black community was hit especially hard by the drug war.

One of the most influential rap songs in the genre, N.W.A.’s “F-ck tha Police,” released in 1988, is a raw description of the realities of mass incarceration in the Black community. “F-ck the police comin’ straight from the underground/A young n— got it bad ’cause I’m brown,” read the first two lines. The song continues to describe the criminalization of drugs and its connection to structural racism: “Searchin’ my car, lookin’ for the product/Thinkin’ every n— is sellin’ narcotics”

The 1993 song “Sound of da Police,” by Bronx rapper KRS-One, possibly refers to the scandal of the US government’s role in trafficking crack cocaine into Black neighborhoods: “Policeman come, we bust him out the park/I know this for a fact, you don’t like how I act/You claim I’m sellin’ crack/but you be doin’ that”