It's Like That

Fifty years of HIP-HOP in a world that could not exist without it

- By Tressie McMillan Cottom

Salt-N-Pepa, 1988, photograph by Al Pereira

Turning 50 years old is a celebration, especially if you are Black and you aren’t supposed to live that long. And the parties are popping off for hip-hop’s 50th anniversary.

First up was Questlove’s masterfully orchestrated Grammys compilation this year. The Fashion Institute of Technology with its “Fresh, Fly, and Fabulous: Fifty Years of Hip Hop Style” exhibition. The New York Public Library is not letting attack politics stop its system-wide celebration. If you don’t want to leave home, there is enough content to program your own hip-hop festival. Showtime has a hip-hop library. PBS has Chuck D’s four-part documentary. A&E gives you a season of Nas voicing Origins of Hip-Hop, an episodic bio series of the genre’s legends. Whether you want high or low culture, you can find it—symposia, concerts, symphonies, retrospectives, block parties, and more, all across the country. Not bad for a genre some people declared a bunch of noise lacking originality or artistic vision when it was first beamed from the Bronx in the 1970s.

With such a rich archive being built, when I talked to people about hip-hop turning 50, I expected them to talk about, well, parties. But all anybody wanted to talk to me about was God.

I’M NOT TALKING about the god MC, Rakim, but the actual creator of the universe. Religion. Faith. Life. Death. How we survived getting here, “here” being hip-hop’s global domination.