You may recall a post regarding an article on music website Pitchfork (above) in relation to Ireland’s rap scene and, specifically, how the children of African migrants and asylum seekers in Ireland have ‘legitimatised’ the scene.
Further to this…
Derek Hopper writes:
Love it or loathe it – and as many people loathe it as love it – Pitchfork is the millennial generation’s MTV. The hipster’s bible of all things musical, it reaches millions of fans every month and is so influential that its rating system has even been the subject of an hilarious hatchet-job by those masters of satire The Onion (“Pitchfork gives music 6.8”).
That’s why it was so troubling for me to read their article about up-and-coming Dublin hip-hop acts who just so happen to comprise young black men.
The headline read “Meet the African Immigrants Who Are Legitimizing Ireland’s Hip-Hop Scene”.
Legitimizing Ireland’s hip-hop scene.
Not “contributing to” or “improving”, both of which would have been fine and probably true. No, apparently they’re “legitimizing” it.
That’s the first problem. How exactly are Irish people of Nigerian (i.e. a country in Africa some five thousand miles from The Bronx) parentage “legitimizing” the Irish hip-hop scene?
Hip-hop’s exact origins are the subject of some debate but everyone accepts that it is an American art form, just like jazz or the blues. And the vast majority will agree that it has been predominantly an African- American music. Not African. Not black. But African-American.
Pitchfork’s article was no doubt well-intentioned, but it betrays a troubling ignorance of black America in its failure to distinguish between black people in the United States and black people in Africa and elsewhere.
Believe it or not, this isn’t the first time someone has conflated “African-American” with “African”. The legendary drummer Art Blakey and many other jazz musicians had to regularly contend with this blunder too, when white critics sought an absurd and patronising link between jazz and the “natural rhythm” of the dark continent’s noble savages.
Blakey stated, “No America, no jazz. I’ve seen people try to connect it to other countries, for instance to Africa, but it doesn’t have a damn thing to do with Africa”. Sorry Pitchfork and sorry Dublin rappers, but it’s the same thing with hip- hop.
What is it that makes hip-hop “legitimate”?
If it’s poverty then these guys are in the wrong place, because they left actual hardship back in Nigeria. Many will acknowledge that much of modern hip-hop is founded upon a sense of victimhood.
If your mom was a crack-whore and your dad abandoned you as a toddler and your brother was shot by a racist cop and you grew up in the Baltimore projects it means you’re genuine. You’re street.
But Ireland has a humane welfare state. The cops don’t shoot black people. Lame, I know, but cops in Ireland don’t even carry guns. When you’re poor in Ireland you get free healthcare and free education.
So where’s the edge going to come from if you want to be the Irish Kendrick Lamar? You don’t sell records rapping about the injustice of water charges.
The article goes on to talk about “entrenched racism” in Ireland and in the same breath mentions the country’s skyrocketing Nigerian population.
As a white man I’m not going to say black people in Ireland don’t experience racism from time to time, but don’t insult my intelligence and the reputation of the Irish people by suggesting that Africans are immigrating to a country that treats them like garbage. That’s not how humans operate.
Forgive me also for finding rather dramatic Dah Jevu’s burning of a KKK-style mask, which they say is symbolic of their rejection of Irish racism.
The average joe in the street may be forgiven for thinking the Klan were simply a bunch of assorted white racists who took pleasure in lynching black folk, but hip-hop heads can’t be given carte blanche, especially when they’re putting the KKK and Ireland in the same postcode.
If they want to spit political venom they have a responsibility to read their history books, and if they did that they’d quickly learn that the Klan were no friends of the Catholic Irish. History is rarely as black and white as the narrative in people’s heads.
It seems that Pitchfork wants to define hip-hop not as a uniquely African-American music and an art-form born of the black experience in the United States, but as something centred on the melanin content of a person’s skin.
Hip-hop’s origins are in 1970s New York, yet many of the “New Irish” – whose roots are in African countries like Nigeria and Zimbabwe – are being viewed as bona fide producers of hip-hop music because they happen to look like black people in America.
This is ridiculous. It is also racist: it posits the existence of a single, global “black people” of uniform experience while totally ignoring the specifically African-American reasons for hip-hop’s efflorescence at a particular time and place.
This new generation of Irish hip-hop acts may be black, and they may be talented, but the truth is they have no more legitimacy than the white Irish rappers who came before them.
Previously: Decent Irish Rappers
