The day millennials' hip-hop went to the Klan's ball

Al Jazeera

27-01-2025

A few years ago, when reports came out that The Office star Ellie Kemper was crowned at the Veiled Prophet debutante ball, what critics called a Klan's ball, I turned over and went back to bed. A week ago, when TikTok gushed over Donald Trump and did as much of a digital soft-shoe as possible, thanking the soon-to-be president for saving its presence in the United States, I blew out my lamplight and slipped back under the sheets. But it was something about 90s hip-hop stars joining the queue to kiss the ring at Trump's inaugural balls that still keeps me up at night.
For many of us Black millennials – especially those raised in working-class neighbourhoods – hip-hop was the oxygen of our childhood. It documented every inch of our lives, reflecting back to us the sounds and feelings of our existence in a way that no one else could or cared to. Our ordinary lives wer mirrored in music even as it was demeaned or thought of as on the margins of real society.
It was also a window to what we could be. It lit the path to a fate that was beyond the minimum-wage job or the waste of our lives in the ' second childhoods ' laid out before us. It let us fantasise about being conquerors of the straits of lumpen and working-class life. To dress well, to be gangsta or appealing, and have respect.
More than that, it was a mind. It did not merely reflect the conditions of the neighbourhood, it was a conference of thought and clashing debates. We heard encouragement and a critique of intra-class antagonism when Aaliyah told us we 'don't need no Coogi sweater'. We saw visions of escape in Rich Boy's Throw Some D's and forced into quiet introspection after watching Pac's Brenda's Got a Baby and Latifah's U.N.I.T.Y. One hour we were trying to commit to memory the adrenaline-rush poetics of Bizzy Bone's entire Heaven'z Movie album and the next we were psyching ourselves up to meet the high school or street corner bully with Mobb Deep's Shook Ones.
We used this art as a soundtrack to what we knew they thought of as our disposable lives. It was the most accessible evidence to prove to ourselves that the world was lying to us about the 'inferiority of Black people'. We didn't need that well-intentioned white lady teacher pitying us for being Black, holding a poster with George Washington Carver with a jar of peanut butter, saying we, too, 'contributed'. We had her on mute, the CD player spinning as we busily tried to decipher the hieroglyphics of Wu-Tang.
So it was something else to see the intensity of our ghetto beauty being forced to fiddle for the discombobulated dancing of rich frat boys. To see our griots crouch to pick up dollars under the lowest of all intellectual ceilings: racism. To see it was our thinkers, too, who would play the white liberal game, squinting, pretending they could not tell if a Nazi salute is a Nazi salute. Turning their coat without being asked. Leaping even before the Anti-Defamation League at the chance to give white supremacists the benefit of the doubt.
Of all the daily bombardments of racism that have come to define this decade of settler supremacist resurgence, turncoat rappers have left the rawest wound. It is not easy to recover from witnessing our biographers reduced to being stool pigeons on a burning cross.
Excuses were preemptively flowing. It was said 'a check is a check'. It was said 'this isn't politics'. It was pretended that they don't know what MAGA stands for and is trying to achieve. As if we didn't know hip-hop is more university than the university.
I remember in the past scanning the channels and landing on Fox News mocking rappers' dancing. Now, Fox News is reporting that Snoop Dogg ' wows the crowd' at a pre-inauguration event. I remember Snoop Dogg talking about 187 and now I worry about the day I will see him waving a Blue Line Flag.
In the 90s, white power campaigned to ban hip-hop. How complete is its victory that now it has it rubbing its feet? Nelly said but 'he is the president'. But this is the point. There is no paucity of tracks that speak about our not being cool with presidents. One can start from any track by Dead Prez.
In 1988, the grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan entered the US presidential race. If he had won, then, were we to expect Eric B and Rakim to perform Microphone Fiend for 'fans' in white hoods because 'we support the troops'? How near are we to the day cop freestyle ciphers break out at a lynching?
We may not have known it then, but it wasn't only Black and Latin working-class life in North America that was carried along in the music. It was played in the Black poor's spaces in South America, Africa, Europe, Asia and Australia. It was the music of the slums, the colonised's counter-ideological weapon against the prison they kept us in.
So it is a stomach stab to see our culture and lives being put to the service of the men who shout we steal pets and call our demand to be allowed to live 'terrorism'. It trods on the morale of the people when our defenders are now tap-dancing for those who spray firehoses at the 'woke' and stand back up the monuments to Confederate generals.
You can only put so many more extensions on your pool house. Only drive so many cars in your lifetime. But ' what does it worth ' to sell your soul at the price of a noogie? To sign on to doing what they do, knowing your gifted mansion will never be more than massa's outhouse?
Of course, a few rappers taking photo ops with boys who no one would bet did not do blackface is not representative of all millennials' hip-hop. But it's not just them. Chuck D is fighting off the people coming for Elon Musk as he puts a spark plug to apartheid. Eve can't get out of a still of Downton Abbey. Nor can Common from commercials. Nor can our beloved Black Thought, caged-bird singing from the ' gilded cage ' – the people's oracle reduced to 'the entertainment' for fascist-petting Jimmy Fallon.
Still things fall apart and I should count my blessings. I would likely never get out of bed again if I saw Dead Prez or Lauryn Hill grab a fiddle. But it shouldn't have been any of them. It was art for us, by us. It is heart-wrenching to witness our secret inner lives laid at the feet of empire, alongside our bodies.
They stole woke from Erykah Badu and beat us down with it. And now they have our master teachers abandon their posts to bounce baby settler supremacists on their laps. It is heartbreaking to see so many of our epic poets fall in line to kiss the ring of Jim Crow society's warrior king.
But maybe it is better this way. When Nas said hip-hop is dead, it may have been a prophecy. Or at least these 'uncs of rap' may have outlived their relevance in the era of globalised apartheid. They are now rich and compromised. Millennials may have to abandon them and explore the colonised sector's new music and new generation of artists, here and abroad, where, for now at least, we are nowhere close to radical Palestinian rappers being caught moonlighting as court jesters for Benjamin Netanyahu.
Gen Z has spent half their lives staring directly into the eyes of open fascism and has been forced out to witness the public, viral lynching of the Black innocent daily. I see them every day. Nobody is tap-dancing.
Their 'mumble rap' – which we 'old heads' have mocked – is not only more developed but more coherent than any rapper who says 'f*** the police' from one side of their mouth and 'let's give the Confederacy a chance' from the other. As for drill, anticolonialism misdirected as horizontal violence in drill lyrics is more useful to Black liberation than a conscious rapper trying to find nuance in colonialism.
Millennials' hip-hop may abandon the slum, but the slum will have its day. It made hip-hop once; it can make another hip-hop. And when it does, it will stand over colonialism's body, Buggin Out's boombox on its shoulder, singing that old Black colonised sector's spiritual, 'It's bigger than hip-hop. '