We often
hear the same words being used over and over again to describe hip-hop. People often
use terms such as: lifestyle, power, inspiration, poetry, struggle, culture and
beat to describe this complex form of music. Even though these words have a
direct correlation with hip-hop and all that it encompasses. I recently came
across a new word that was used a long time ago to describe blues music that I believe
could also be used to describe hip-hop music today.
The
word that I am referring to is matrix. It was used in1984 by Houston Baker, American
scholar specializing in African-American literature, in his book “Blues,
Ideology, and Afro-American Literature: A Vernacular Theory”. In this book Baker
elaborated on his idea about blues geographies. He also touched on the topic of
orality, which is thought and verbal expression in societies where different types
of literacy, like writing and print, which are unfamiliar to most of the
population. Baker argued that blues is a
“"matrix", a code that acts as the foundation for African American
artistic production insofar as blues music synthesizes numerous types of early
African American oral genres”.
The
part of this theory that I mainly want to focus is where Baker says that “blues
synthesizes numerous types of early African American oral genres”. This is
exactly what hip-hop is today. If you were to go back to the time when hip-hop
first started and listen to the music chronologically to now, you would hear a
story being told, which is what blues music did. A perfect example of this
would be songs that were made during the Harlem Renaissance. Some songs almost
remind me of keepsakes or mementos, as if they were created for my generation
to tell me about what was happening back then. That is why I feel like hip-hop
is so relevant today, it has the power not only to tell stories form decades
ago but also to bring people together from all walks of life to hear these
stories and learn from them today.
Baker also described a
matrix as “a point of ceaseless input and output, a web of intersecting, crisscrossing
impulses always in productive transit”. As I read this description I could not
help but think about how this sounded so much like hip-hop music. There is
always a constant flow of songs and messages being exchanged in hip-hop. And it
is amazing because regardless of the message that is being delivered the
audience can always learn from it which creates the productive transit that
Baker used to describe blues. Blues and hip-hop are two different oral genres
but they have a lot of things in common that I did not pick up on before
researching Houston Baker and this theory of the blues matrix. This blog post
and the research it required shows how we are still learning from hip-hop music
and all of the different forms it comes in, wither it be an actual song, the
analysis of that song, or theories about hip-hop.
Work Cited
