Rap and Jes Grew

In class this week we discussed what the modern form of Jes Grew would be. I believe that we can find the answer to this question in rap music and more generally in hip-hop culture. The idea of an anti-establishment american art form that has many african roots aligns perfectly with the beginnings of rap and the development throughout the later part of the last century and the early 2000s.

The roots and development of rap also seem to parallel Jes Grew. The beginnings of rap music start with African music, usually in the form of drum beats from places like Jamaica. This influence allows rap to be connected back to Africa is the way Jes Grew is supposed to be. In addition, modern rap samples everything from spirituals to rock-and-roll. By sampling so many different types of music, it invariably samples many traditionally black forms of music, such as jazz and blues, which is an aspect that also aligns rap with Jes Grew. The idea of sampling other art forms also seems to align with Jes Grew’s pervasiveness. As Jes Grew is supposed to be in every living thing, rap takes elements of many different styles and combines them to express something different than each part.

Hip-hop culture also has a long tradition of associated with dancing in the form of break dancing. Similar to Jes Grew,  modern rap is often associated with party and club music automatically associating itself with dance culture as well as the idea of sweeping the nation with dancing. It is listened to by people of all races and seems to have swept the nation like Jes Grew. Jes Grew is said to have have infected all people even though the roots were in African culture, and rap fills a similar role. Although the genre grew in predominantly poor, black neighborhoods, nowadays the genre is extremely accessible to listeners and creators of all races.

The subject matter also deals with similar ideas that Jes Grew and the movement surrounding it were dealing with. During the movement, the idea of western culture taking significant cultural artifacts and parading them in museums is attacked. In a similar way, rap attacks the racial, cultural, and socioeconomic stereotypes that are issues in past and present society. Much of rap is targeted and provocative, simultaneously trying to educate outsiders using an inside perspective as well as attacking the offending party, which in many cases is some form of the government. Whatever rap decides to target, it makes a socially relevant point and tries to spark some sort of change. Jes Grew also has a similar function in which it is trying to change the status quo. A large amount of earlier rap targets police and gang warfare as the main villains in the lives of poor, black children. This idea remains relevant today, but the music and the movement has had some effect on the social climate of the country, similar to Jes Grew’s effect.

Rap also functions as the text for the hip-hop culture. Because rap can be thought of as poetry put to music, the idea of is being the text fits. Although, there is an extremely large amount of variation in the topics and styles of rap, each song contributes something to the cultural movement. Overall, throughout rap and hip-hop’s history and development, is seems to align itself almost perfectly with Jes Grew.  

A Postmodern History

In class, the question of how a postmodern history would be constructed came up. One idea that was thrown out was that the history would be constructed of only primary sources. An even more extreme version might contain only data about events that people know for sure happened.

The issue that comes up when dealing with primary sources is that humans still wrote them. If the object of the postmodern history is to completely eliminate the human aspect of history to make sure that it is completely separate from fiction, even primary sources would have to be questioned. Primary sources are often the best that we currently have to understand history, but the primary sources were written from memory, and memory is a very fickle thing. If the writers of these primary sources were planned to record what they saw immediately, then the record would probably be accurate enough. However, if the authors of the primary sources were only writing about events after they had occurred, even with just a day time difference, could the memories of these authors be trusted? Humans biologically focus more on things like moving objects, so would we really be getting the complete picture from these authors?

If we take primary sources as unreliable, then data seems to be the answer to what we use as the source of a postmodern history. Data about events hopefully has no human element which can invalidate it, barring the obvious fact that humans probably had to write it down. Most importantly, data has no interpretation by the authors. If we use data as the basis for a version of history, I believe that we would come up with an extremely dry set of texts that would be fairly barren in terms of the amount of history that they cover. Without any human interpretation of the events, we would lose a large amount of history as well as any themes that can be drawn. A large amount of the usefulness of history comes from determining the causes for events. Without the cause and effect relationship, we would not be able to use history to prevent further tragedies. By using data as the base for history, we would not have any analysis and therefore could not apply lessons learned from history.

Keeping the criticisms of a primary source based and/or data based history, I believe that the best course of action would be to simply understand how human error and inaccuracies would affect the reliability and validity of the sources. The analysis of data that is present in primary and secondary sources is extremely beneficial to understanding and applying history. If we take the history that we learn today and, in addition, we understand the sources that the history comes from, I think both our understanding of the history would improve as well as the reliability of the history we learn.