#daveyd

Hip-hop’s story is the choice to commit to one side of the line or the other…

To get so close to the edge /  you can smell the afterdeath

In hip-hop it smells like cisco and sulfur

Cuz if you don’t commit to spinnin on your head

You WILL break your neck…

  Within the context of hip-hop culture, “old school” is a fixed time in history and it’s Golden Age arguably ended in 1993. So like Sophocles is classic epistemology of Empiric Greece, KRS-ONE is classic folklore of generation me. The Clas/sick Hip Hop series at YBCA has two aims. The first is to eradicate a fear or suspicion of the soulful in our discourse. In fact, we seek to complicate the idea of our contemporary intellectualism through the lens of something reptilian, a jes’ grew balm over the glass and steel City. The second directive is to use the instrument of our downtown geography to further canonize a generational Blues. In our first iteration, we focused on the body in a post-hip hop movement context, and within one Forum, we were able to place masters of hip-hop descended dance forms in a variety of contexts: inside the Club, inside the Battle, inside the Symphony…

Tonight, in addition to the socio-spiritual aspects of the culture, YBCA privileges the text and sound forms from one of hip-hop’s most pivotal aesthetic and commercial years.

Full Disclosure: In the Fall of 1993 I was a Freshman at a Historically Black College in Atlanta, the undisputed capital of African America. 1993 hip-hop smells like Georgia red clay to me, like everything wrong with the world, like maybe if I dance close enough to her I won’t have to summon the courage to ask, we’ll just be dancing together, like a first taste of freedom… Just on the other side of the Sound Scan era, the full corporatization of the culture was being envisioned, but wasn’t anywhere close to the ubiquity of the urban radio format and the homogenization of hip-hop sound that followed. Sampled from a spectrum ranging from Blue Note to kung fu cinema, the music of 1993 was the cross-national, hood-global, teenage soundtrack for the people who brought you Obama.

Most of us who came of age in this era have associative emotional ties of the hip-hop sound to space, but more truthfully, almost all of us have words spoken during 1993 that ‘saved our lives.’ This is where Clas/sick Hip Hop: 1993 edition begins…with the re-imagination of the words spoken that became a generational foundation for code switching, border crossing, linguistic listening, and poetic frame. Saul Williams gave me his first book of poetry on that Atlanta campus in 1993. OutKast headlined the first public party I ever threw. Listen to Souls of Mischief or Wu Tang or De La Soul or Black Moon...something was in the water and found its way to the pens of Black men and women on a scale that could be described as a canonically climactic capstone in the explosion of Black literacy called rap. With Clas/sick Hip-Hop, YBCA challenges a new generation of urban oral linguists to unearth and newly contextualize this seminal moment in African American poetry.

1993 was also the year that the World Trade Center was first bombed. The year of Black Hawk Down…of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell. 1993 was the year Yerba Buena Center for the Arts opened its doors with a promise to be an arts center for ‘the people’ in a rapidly changing San Francisco. In a time of strange prosperity and electoral tumult, we continue to place the reaching of a generational litany within the foci of the loaded frames of ‘classic’ and ‘contemporary’. And we do it while having a GREAT time with two of the Bay Area’s most prodigious musical minds and more than 20 of its most treasured and emerging Masters of Ceremony.  We remind the culture itself that we love it in spite… falling in love like an early 90’s night…but don’t push us / cuz we’re close…