Urban Think Tank Contextualizing
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Contextualizing the UTT
A Short Essay by Anitta
To understand the Urban Think Tank, we must look at it's context. The
first question is to ask: why does a think tank around the Hip Hop
generation emerge at the turn of the century, in the year 2000? Let's
think about the year 2000. It's an election year. Gore and Bush are
battling it off over tax cuts and health care. And another huge
battle is the battle over Napster. What kind of force is music
becoming when one of the biggest national court cases is over music?
All of which brings our attention to the music of 2000, specifically
hip hop. In the year 2000, Hip Hop is celebrating its 21st birthday
as a recorded genre. The year 2000 also saw a rise of hip hop
following. It was reaching a wider demographic, rising in suburbia
and in adults over 25. Hip hop was growing and its generation was
maturing. The year 2000 was a year when music was becoming such
hallmark of the current culture and hip hop, particularly, was growing
and thriving even within and perhaps through the internal tensions in
the genre. The year 2000 was also one the most important elections
for the future of the nation. And hip hop, turning 21 in 2000, is
also at voting age for its first Presidential election. In this
context, the founding of UTT in the year 2000 makes perfect sense. A
generation was growing in social power, and the platform issues of the
2000 election--health care, social security, etc.--were still centered
on the baby boomers. The UTT emerged to unleash and educate the
electoral power of this new generation, recognizing that the new
social power that the nation had to come to terms was the hip hop
generation.
The UTT, however, has a deeper historical context. In 1935, on the
brink of, again, an election year, a conference was held in Washington
University out of which the National Negro Congress emerged. The
Congress united various activist groups, religious and secular, and
was most notable for its inclusion and intense cooperation with the
black Communist Party. The workings of the NNC, throughout the 30s
and 40s show a growing convergence between black activist goals and
communist goals. The NNC focused on organized labor, the battling of
fascism that was predominating abroad, and the empowering of the black
electorate. When we understand the context of NNC, we understand the
context of the 1936 election, the election of F.D.R. and the New Deal.
Similarly, when we understand the context of the UTT, we understand
why both Bush and Kerry this year were scrambling for musicians to
join their campaign, P. Diddy's Vote or Die Movement, and the Rock the
Vote tour.
In her article "New Political Thought in Hip Hop," Yvonne Bynoe,
former president and founder of the UTT, roots UTT in an ever deeper
history. The history of connect the artist, the scholar, and the
activist, she argues, extends back to David Walker with his appeal, to
Frederick Douglass as orator, writer, and activist, to Ida B.
Wells-Barnett as scholar and activist. The public intellectual and the collectives that create public intellectuals have always been a part of the African-American struggle.
Within the context of our modern political arena and the potential power of the new, coming of age, electorate, the hip-hop generation, the UTT seeks to educate the generation on the political arena so that the hip hop generation in turn can educate the political arena on its issues. With organizations like the UTT, the next election will hopefully be more than politicians hosting concerts and superficial pandering to the musicians and music lovers, but will in fact, face the music, and begin putting the hip hop generation's issues on the platform.