The Recession

Hip hop music has only two essential ingredients: a beat and a voice. These ingredients are extremely inexpensive. A beat can come from a turntable, a trashcan, a beatboxer, or any other available source of rhythm. And a voice can come from anyone. No purchase necessary, no batteries required.

It is no coincidence that good hip hop can be produced at so little cost. In the urban areas where hip hop first developed, there was no money for violin lessons, guitar strings, or sheet music. The residents of these neighborhoods, driven by the quintessentially human desire for self-expression, developed hip hop as an inexpensive way to meet this need.

But hip hop wasn’t merely a compromise. No one thought of hip hop as a sorry substitute for more desirable but prohibitively expensive forms of culture. To the contrary, hip hop had certain qualities that few other art forms could match. The minimal costs of producing hip hop meant that anybody could participate. The best rapper won the mic, simple as that – meritocracy at its purest. Plus, hip hop was portable. You could create hip hop music anywhere – in the park, the gymnasium, even the school yard. In short, unfortunate financial circumstances did not impose limitations on hip hop so much as contribute to its greatest assets.

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In the opening song of his latest album, aptly titled “The Recession”, Young Jeezy raps, “It's a recession. Everybody's broke.” Though Jeezy certainly exaggerates here, who can blame him? It’s become impossible to pick up a newspaper, turn on a television, or surf the Internet without being bombarded by more terrible news about the economy. Another 100,000 people out of work; another corporate behemoth brought to its knees; another $100 billion government bailout.

So yes, Jeezy, it is a recession. The next several years look increasingly grim, and there’s probably not much anyone can do about it at this point. This is, without a doubt, cause for despair.

OnHipHop does not mean to minimize the negative effects of this country’s economic struggles. Nor do we mean to suggest that widespread anxiety over the economy is unjustified. We merely point out that some of this country’s greatest cultural treasures were born during difficult economic times. Furthermore, these treasures were born not just despite the depressed economy, but at least in part because of it. Just consider hip hop.

Perhaps this is cause for reexamining cultural responses to prior recessions. Or perhaps this is simply cause for some consolation in the face of today's recession. To quote Young Jeezy’s lyric in its entirety: “It's a recession. Everybody's broke. So I just came back – to give everybody hope.”