Urban Music Scene
The urban music scene in America, particularly during the post-war movement, was marked by a period of transition and reconstruction. Significant parts of the country experienced the development and shift of the musicculture to create one that greatly resonated with the issues of post-war America. Some of the factors that pushed for this shift, both in the urban areas and the suburbs, included the rise in gang culture as an identity, residential segregation, and the social construction of race, gender, and class.Although the post-war saw the birth of four distinct music movements in the country, each with its agenda, the scene was primarily influenced by the need to reconstructAmerican society. The grunge rockmusic genre was influenced by the rise of urbanization and residential segregation, the old school hip hop scene in the South Bronx was influenced by the social construction of race, and the need to embrace diversity, while the hardcore punk in the Los Angeles suburbs, as well as the gangster rap in Los Angeles, resulted from the need to maintain residential segregation and to promote urban renewal, respectively.
Following the end of the American war, there was the need to create a revolutionary society, not only in terms of political and economic development but also in the culturalconstitution, hence the development of the urban music scene as a tool to preach the social constitution of race.D.J.s in the South Bronx laid the foundation of America’ship-hop in the 1970s through the method of sampling, which was the technique of isolating one sound and reusing it in another song. This technique heavily borrowed the Jamaican hip-hop, fusing it into the American culture to promote racial construction in the country. DJ Kool Herk was the first American D.J. to use this technique by a sound system used to D.J. a party.
The development of old school hip hop in the South Bronx not only promoted the social construction of race by borrowing the DJing technique from Jamaica, but it also promoted cohesion. At the time this technique was picking, America as a nation was on the forerun establishing systems and mechanisms that would bring people from various races together to live in harmony. Therefore, old school hip hop was not only a musical movement but a tool to promote social cohesion that would, in turn, improve the growth and development of society politically and economically as well. Musically speaking, Herk contributed immensely to the development of this genre by inventing the technique of breakbeats by playing James Brown’s “Give It Up or Turnit a Loose” on two turntables while spinning one of the records repeatedly back to the beat. This form of fusion led to the creation of non-violent hip hop crews in the Bronx, such as the United Zulu Nation.
While old school hip hop in the South Bronx was leading a social construction revolution, in Seattle, things were slightly different, with the emergence of the grunge music genre promoting suburbanization. While urban cities had established themselves economically after the American war, the suburban saw the need to detach themselves from these centers to create not only their independence but also their economic and political developments. The grunge music emerged during the mid-1980s in Seattle and nearby suburban towns, which revolved around Seattle’s Sub Pop, an independent record label in Seattle that controlled the region’s underground music scene. Some of the notable musicians of this time included the Green River band, which was arguably Seattle’s grunge trailblazers. Other groups included Pearl Jam and Mudhoney, although Green River also featured members of Mudhoney.
The grunge music genre was more of an identity for the Seattle suburban culture as much as it represented any other region. The music was defined by the Seattle suburban culture of the sludgy electric guitar with a rolled-off treble tone. The sound was distinctivelysuburban in the sense that while most urban areasadopted the hard and violent hip hop and rap culture majorly advocating for violence as a means of solving conflict, grunge took the subtle approach of using music to advocate for more considerate ways of conflict resolution. Therefore, the movement from the subculture to the popular culture in the 1990s for the Seattle music scene meant embracing ideologies they were not accustomed to. Although most of the American music scene was adopting the popular culture at this time, it felt for Seattle as if it was giving up its cultural identity, not only in terms of the ideology it adopted in solving conflict and other social problems.
The hardcore punk in the Los Angelessuburbs was slightly different from the suburbculture of grunge music in the sense that although it demarcated the local culture from the urban one, hard punk was more of a residential segregation strategy. Hardcore punk emerged in 1978 in Southern California as a movement against the otherwise popular and equally violent gangsta rap culture in urban Los Angeles.Although hard punk culture formed in the broader South Carolina suburb, the genre widely drew younger hardcore bands and fans who came mainly from the suburban Los Angeles areas of the South Bay and Orange County. Given that these youngsters were in direct rivalry and competition of the older L.A. punk scene, they drew hate and discrimination from the earlier artsy Hollywood scene who considered them musically narrow and violent.
The hardcore punk music scene in suburban L.A. was largely aggressively and had a widespread reputation for violence as a means to solve issues. This reputation was superseded by the fact that America’s reconstruction had created social classes and various categories, in which the low-class population of any society was treated unjustly. The hardcore punk in the suburban was mainly a revolutionary call against these oppressive systems of administration, both politically and judicially, and the fact that these youngsters took the law into their hands was prejudicated by the lack of fair and openrepresentation. Hardcore punk was also a mark of generationalsegregation and distinctiveness. This culture was characteristic of the younger generation who were more energetic hence the aggressive music. While the older L.A. art-punk scene was more laid back and reserved, this new generation was wild, seen in the wild energy of bands like the Middle Class and the Circle Jerks.
While hardcore punk in the suburbspromotedresidential segregation, their counterpart, gangsta rap in the heart of the Los Angeles urban scene, was the epitome of urban crisis. This genre was a style of hip hop that was heavily characterized by themes and lyrics that emphasized the gangsta way of life and upheld violence and lawlessness as the ideal lifestyle. The thug-life lifestyle evolved from the hardcore rap that developed in the late 1970s at the suburban, which had promoted violence as the answer to the contemporary political and judicial discrimination. However, gangsta rap took the latter genre to a new level by portraying thug life as an institution on its own that couldprotect and care for all the races and communities that had been sidelined by the political and judicial system currently in place in America. Rappers such as Ice-T popularized this genre in the mid-1980s before rap groups like the N.W.A took the craft to higher heights in the latter part of the 1980s. Gangsta rap had started as an underground and alternative genre of hip hop. However, it quickly received national attention, which promoted it to become the most commercially lucrative subgenre of hip hop in America. The success of this subgenre was deeply rooted in the fact that it highlighted the dark side of the national reconstructionAmerica underwent following the end of the war.
In conclusion, the music genres of old school hip hop, hardcore punk, gangsta rap, and grunge were directly influenced by the post-war need to reconstructAmerica’s social, economic, and political spheres to embrace national development. Although this new dawn brought along positive changes to the community, there were downsides such as the establishment of biased judicialand political systems ofgovernance, which greatlyexploitedminority groups. Genres such as gangsta rap and hardcore punk arose to decry this reality, determined to establishalternative forms of management for the marginalized sections of the community. on the other hand, grunge developed to become the suburban identity of Seattle while old school hip hop was part of the project to promote the social construction of race.