Spring 2009

New America:
Marc Bamuthi Joseph and
Jeff Chang in conversation

Stephanie Shonekan, director of Black World Studies at Columbia College in Chicago, conducted an interview with USA Ford Fellow Jeff Chang and USA Rockefeller Fellow Marc Bamuthi Joseph at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, on February 28, 2009. Chang is the author of the hip-hop cultural history Can’t Stop Won’t Stop and, most recently, the anthology Total Chaos: The Art and Aesthetics of Hip-Hop. Joseph is a performer who blends Haitian and African American history with spoken word, dance, music, and ritual in powerful works that meld autobiography and social issues. He will be performing his piece the break/s in several cities around the United States this spring, including Chicago and Los Angeles.

This was edited from an audio recording of “New America: Marc Bamuthi Joseph and Jeff Chang in Conversation,” a public program presented by the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, on February 28, 2009. Transcript edited by United States Artists. The whole conversation can be heard here.

Stephanie Shonekan: I want to talk about Obama and the hopes and challenges of where we are right now. How can the hip-hop generation be inspired to embrace the consciousness of civic engagement at this moment? How do you, Bamuthi, talk to your mentees, your young artists, about this particular moment?

Marc Bamuthi Joseph: In this moment, regardless of ideology or practice, there’s a great model for us that’s present in our leadership—that eloquence and command of language, and the respect to just speak to people as if they can handle what it is that you’re about to say. One of the great moments in the campaign was the speech that President Obama—and it feels really good to say that—the speech that he gave in Philadelphia on race. I think it is and it isn’t a big deal to talk about race; but to treat people with enough respect to believe that perhaps we as a country or as individuals, or as a collective of individuals, are prepared to have that discussion in a passionate and intellectually responsible way was a great step forward for the country.

So what we do at Youth Speaks—and for those who don’t know, it’s a nonprofit organization based in the San Francisco Bay area with affiliates around the country. We do after-school and in-school residencies; we work with just about every public and/or private high school in the San Francisco Bay area. We provide performance opportunities, recording opportunities, and publishing opportunities. So that’s one part of what we do. Another part of what we do is to convene several hundred young poets from nearly 50 cities around the Western Hemisphere—45 cities in the U.S., but also Trinidad and Tobago and Leeds, England—and we convene them every year in a festival called Brave New Voices, which this summer will be here in Chicago. And then we have an interdisciplinary element of our program, the Living Word Project, which is both interdisciplinary and intergenerational. We see folks locally; we open them up to a broad network of young poets aged 13 to 19 who are doing similar things, and then we also provide opportunities for folks to develop within the program and present urgent theater in the voice of our times. So all that work, if I were to boil it all down, is really about enabling young folks to address one another respectfully and intelligently in a way that identifies, that finds, that publicly presents and applies voice in very powerful ways.

This is an investment in the quality of voice, language, literary performance, and leadership for the next generation. I think that’s what hip-hop gives us, because there are a zillion kids running around who can rattle off lyrics in a way that was not possible two generations ago. There’s more language per square meter, per square measure, in your average hip-hop song than there is in a blues song.

So here’s a whole generation that has an attenuated listening skill, an access and command over language. How do you handle that responsibility? Hip-hop, how do you manage that responsibility? Youth Speaks is one of the answers to that. How to manage language responsibly in a way that treats the listener with respect and pushes the listener to service and to action: that’s what I think hip-hop needs to do and is doing right.

SS: What about you, Jeff?

Jeff Chang: Well, what I see is sort of an ongoing building of engagement, of commitment, in the body politic. But one thing that’s been interesting is to see how, over the last 12 or 15 years, there’s been this real arc of development toward participation at all these different levels.

For us, we came up during the time of “Why should we trust government? Why should we vote? What good is that going to do for us?” So that was why I think a lot of us were like, “We’re going to go local.” Youth Speaks came out of that as well as the League of Pissed Off Voters, the League of Young Voters, all of the national hip-hop political conventions came out of that. In 2004 we brought out a record surge to the polls of young people because the Democrats weren’t organizing us.

I just think that it is a really interesting thing that all of this stuff has occurred under the radar, because all that people see are the pop cultural artifacts of what youth are supposed to be about. You look at 2008, and the number of folks between 18 and 24 alone were what gave Obama the victory in Iowa, and that began the process toward where we are now. I claim the victory of Obama for hip-hop every chance I possibly can. And I think that, in a lot of respects, hip-hop is that space that allowed the imagination of the country, or sort of forced the imagination of the country to change in this post-civil rights era, and where it goes now is really interesting. All those years that we couldn’t get political change, that we had racial justice movements basically being pushed back, we moved into the pop culture and were able to transform the culture in a lot of respects. It’s crucial for folks who are progressives to be able to understand that—to understand that we did that on a grassroots level, but what could we do if we actually had a policy around culture that didn’t leave everything up to the marketplace? People complain about the popular culture that we have. Well, this is what happens when you allow the popular culture to be left up to the marketplace completely. You get corporatized culture.

The other thing that I think needs to be noted is that Obama made this new coalition, he created a new majority—or we created a new majority for Obama, I should say it that way. It was young people and communities of color, and it was progressives. So we should be there in the process. I mean, why isn’t there a hip-hop generation bill, you know, for full funding for education? Reversing youth unemployment, which last summer reached the highest level it ever hit since they began recording unemployment levels for youth? Why isn’t there a discussion about the juvenile justice system, and more schools, less jails? Why isn’t that part of the discussion at all? We were the folks who put Obama into office in a lot of respects. So I think that that’s the challenge going forward on a programmatic level, to really go all the way there with this. Our imagination has been changed, in large part due to the fact that we were able to liberate all these stories. Well, now that we know all these stories, what are we going to do with them? I think the stories add up to something, and they’re all cries for improving our society. So how do we make good on that is the question.