Darby Wheeler, dir. Hip-Hop Evolution Banger Films, 2016. Streaming

Abstract

In the spring of 2019, the second time I offered the undergraduate course Music and Culture of Hip-Hop at the College of William and Mary, the waitlist was more than three times the capacity of the course, demonstrating students’ overwhelming interest in the material. At the end of the first class meeting, in which I introduced students to early hip-hop culture and the context surrounding its development, a student who was on the waitlist came up to me to express his disappointment that he couldn’t enroll, but he also marveled at how closely my narrative had followed one he had seen on television: “This is exactly what they talked about in Hip-Hop Evolution!” I was a bit miffed that a student would compare my class to a television docuseries, but indeed, he was in some ways correct. The first episode of Hip-Hop Evolution follows a familiar narrative, tracing the beginnings of the genre as a youth party culture in 1970s Bronx in which early DJs developed new turntable techniques in a symbiotic relationship with b-boys (with no mention of b-girls or dancers of other genders). The show touches on many of the same themes and events that I introduce in my opening lecture, but it also contributes to the problematic framing that many retellings of hip-hop’s origins tend to reinscribe—it fails to position women and girls and LGBTQ+ practitioners as central to the genre’s development. As hip-hop courses have become increasingly prevalent in universities, especially in undergraduate music curricula, a hip-hop canon has developed. Loren Kajikawa reminds us that the incorporation of hip-hop within the academy is not always as inclusive as it may seem. In adding this music culture into our curricula, we must ask: What narratives are told, and from whose perspective? Hip-Hop Evolution falls into the familiar trap of utilizing a Great Man approach to the canonization of a farreaching genre at the expense of women and other marginalized practitioners. Hip-Hop Evolution is a four-season Canadian docuseries that originally aired on HBO Canada in 2016 before it was added to the streaming platform Netflix. Hosted by Canadian rapper Shad (Shadrach Kabango), the series features in-depth interviews with artists, journalists, and other industry professionals and seeks to tell the story of the genre as it evolved in the United States. Each season consists of four episodes ranging from 36 to 51 minutes in length, each with a focused theme. Season 1 focuses on the genre’s development in broad strokes from the 1970s to the early 1990s. Seasons 2 through 4 expand on this narrative with emphasis on specific regions (such as New York City, the Bay Area, and the South more generally; more specifically, there are also individual episodes on Atlanta and New Orleans).