Rebroadcast: Hip Hop

Click to Listen to the Show (24 MB MP3)

Open Source is off this week, so we’re re-broadcasting five shows we developed in the months after Katrina hit as part of an ongoing series on race and class. Tonight: Race and Class: Hip Hop.

From Chris’s original billboard:

A quarter century before Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans, hip-hop music had become a sort of advance soundtrack of the storm. In that sense, Katrina and its revelations about race and class realities in America fit into a series of a hip-hop moments in our modern history, up there with the burning of the Bronx in the 70s, with Spike Lee’s “Do the Right Thing?? hit movie in the 80s, with the Rodney King beating, trial and riots in Los Angeles in the early 90s: all of them markers of rage at a color line that’s officially not there, rage at injustice and now at abandonment. Hip hop began as both the protest poetry and the danceable entertainment version of an evolving African-American take on life after the civil rights movement. By now hip-hop refers to a generation, a dress code, an attitude, a galaxy of stars and a cultural bridge for kids of all colors that makes all of their parents a bit nervous.

Chris Lydon, Open Source, December 12, 2005