< From 'fight the power' to advertising for the power: hip-hop turns 50

B A PARKER, HOST:

You're listening to CODE SWITCH. I'm B.A. Parker.

GENE DEMBY, HOST:

And I'm Gene Demby.

PARKER: So by now, we all kind of know the so-called origin story of hip-hop, right? Because it's become something of an American myth.

DEMBY: So this is the way the legend typically goes, right? It was five decades ago - five decades ago this week, as a matter of fact - on a hot-a** August day in 1973 in the South Bronx.

PARKER: A neighborhood full of Black, Caribbean and Latino immigrants.

DEMBY: Yep. And everybody is turning up at this party, and somebody starts rhyming over a breakbeat of a song that a DJ is playing.

PARKER: Shout-out to D.J. Kool Herc.

(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "IT'S YOURS")

T LA ROCK: (Rapping) Breakdown, breakdown, breakdown, breakdown.

DEMBY: And in the five decades since that eureka moment - or I guess that yo moment - hip-hop has morphed and expanded. It's birthed all kinds of subgenres and regional variants and reshaped our language and fashion and politics. You got hyphy and jerking and chopped and screwed and trap and drill. I mean, is reggaeton hip-hop? Like, what about trap EDM?

PARKER: I mean, hip-hop is many things. It's the music. It's a product. It's a culture. It's even a kind of shorthand for Blackness. And as hip-hop evolves, the contradictions within it become more obvious, right? So hip-hop is fight the power. And at the same time, it's used to advertise for the power. Hip-hop is critical of injustice while still being deeply enthralled by capitalism, sometimes in the same verse.

DEMBY: Right. And hip-hop is 50, so it's a whole middle-aged person, yet it's still somehow persistently young people music. And there's this endless churn of ambitious, very creative, very braggadocious young people who want to hear it and who want to make it.

PARKER: And on this episode, which coincides with hip-hop's unofficial but sort of official 50th birthday, we're going to get into some of those tricky contradictions and how they play out in the ways hip-hop goes beyond the borders of the United States.

DEMBY: You know what, Parker? I remember reporting, like, years ago about these kids from Pakistan whose families had immigrated to Sweden, and they were making hip-hop in Urdu, but it was peppered with African American vernacular English.

PARKER: It's funny that you mention that, Gene, because I just talked to a guy from Syria who learned to speak English by listening to American hip-hop.

DEMBY: Huh.

PARKER: His name is Mohammed Abu Nasser (ph).

MOHAMMED ABU NASSER: What does he say? Since I'm in a position to talk to these kids, and they listen, I ain't no politician, but I'll kick it with them a minute 'cause, see, they call me a menace, and if the shoe fits, I'll wear it. But if you don't, then ya'll swallow the truth, grin and bear it...

(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "RENEGADE")

JAY-Z AND EMINEM: (Rapping) Now who's the king of these rude, ludicrous, lucrative lyrics? Who could inherit the title...

ABU NASSER: Right? Like, this whole thing - he goes all the way to the end. It's amazing.

(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "RENEGADE")

JAY-Z AND EMINEM: (Rapping) ...His views and his merits? But there's a huge interference - they're saying you shouldn't hear it.

DEMBY: Maybe it's hatred I spew. Maybe it's food for the spirit. Maybe it's beautiful music I made for you to just cherish. I can't believe that that was the Eminem verse that he chose. 'Cause that's a really difficult verse to remember. I still struggle with it. It's from Jay-Z's song "Renegade." It's, like, really impressive - the degree of difficulty in that - that he did that in one pass. Anyway, go ahead, Mohammed. I see you.

PARKER: Right? So Mohammed lives in Germany now, but grew up in Syria before the war. And Eminem was his gateway into hip-hop more broadly.

DEMBY: By the way, we should just lampshade the fact that Eminem is white. Eminem was his first contact with hip-hop, like, from the United States. We know there's a lot of stuff to unpack in there. We know. We know. We know, y'all.

PARKER: We just don't have time to get into it today. But yes, Mohammed would methodically go through rap lyrics on what was then called Rap Genius to figure out what rappers were saying. He remembers even grammatically breaking down the word I'ma (ph).

ABU NASSER: I was like, yeah, what is this? What is he saying? What's I'ma? Because then I - oh, OK. So it's, I'm going to, and then, like, if you shorten it, it gets, I'm gonna, and then if you're rapping, it's, I'ma, right?

DEMBY: Oh, my God. I feel like this is kind of a universal experience. Like, I remember being 13 and coming home from school and furiously writing down the lyrics to A Tribe Called Quest's "Midnight Marauders" in a composition book 'cause I was trying to make sense and decipher their weird - to me, anyway - New York slang. And I was reading those lyrics like it was the Talmud or something (laughter).

PARKER: Same, but mine was to break down Twista lyrics because he was talking too fast.

DEMBY: Right (laughter).

PARKER: So Mohammed would look up these lyrics and not only learn the words in English, but also the context of those words.

ABU NASSER: Oh, so these guys are not just saying anything. No, they're - like, this is what I learned, you know, about wordplay and puns and double-entendres and quadruple-entendres and all of that.

PARKER: Mohammed was this kid in Syria where, unlike here, there isn't an open internet.

DEMBY: So he couldn't just, like, hop online and do a search for information.

PARKER: Right. And the government strictly controlled what people could access. But he started listening to rap music after getting a thumb drive full of songs from one of his friends.

DEMBY: So hip-hop was kind of being smuggled into Syria like contraband?

PARKER: Exactly.

DEMBY: Huh.

PARKER: But he started listening and started to learn some things about the U.S.

ABU NASSER: Before discovering hip-hop, I didn't know much about America. I mean, America was America, right? It was the country that invaded Iraq. But then with hip-hop, they talk about politics. And they talk about, you know, their experiences and police brutality and, you know, racial discrimination or racial profiling in America. And, yeah, I just learned a great deal about the U.S. from rap. And, you know, eventually, of course, it influenced the way I see the world.

PARKER: Mohammed said, in Syria, he mostly listened to Arabic music, which was mainly love songs and patriotic songs.

DEMBY: Huh.

PARKER: Then hip-hop enters his life, and, all of a sudden, he's learning there could be music calling out the police or societal ills or just talking about family drama.

ABU NASSER: The guy that I discovered rap through, Eminem - the guy didn't even graduate high school. He probably dropped out in the ninth grade or something, right? But then he is, you know, celebrated as a modern-day poet. And he even, like, has - like, the word, you know, stan is in the dictionary.

PARKER: And this was another thing Mohammed said blew his mind - that a lot of the people he was listening to tended to have grown up as poor kids and didn't have much education. They could become world famous, multimillionaires, invent new words that can get put into the dictionary.

DEMBY: So Mohammed is basically, like, getting the entire mythology of the American dream, huh?

PARKER: Yeah, exactly. And Mohammed said that one of the biggest things he learned from hip-hop was hustle culture - of people grinding to become rich however they could.

DEMBY: It's kind of wild when you think about how pervasive that messaging is in hip-hop. Like, everyone - even rappers that we know grew up with money rap about overcoming the odds and how their haters didn't believe in them. Like, it's actually kind of hilarious at this point. Like, be for real, Jaden Smith. But I guess those ideas are really portable.

PARKER: Yeah. Like, one of the most exported tenets of hip-hop culture that's reached other places has been this bootstrap capitalism ideology. Basically, 50 Cent's "Get Rich Or Die Trying," which I know is a dated reference, but you get it. And I have mixed feelings about this - that this is what hip-hop has to offer globally.

DEMBY: I mean, it's not great.

PARKER: Yeah. And I talked to someone who had a lot of thoughts about all this.

A D CARSON: I think that there are people who maybe even believe the promise of the United States of America. I don't believe it. Like, I believe the promise is a lie and very often experience the dream as a nightmare.

PARKER: That's A.D. Carson.

CARSON: I'm not going to knock somebody for believing in the promise because I guess that's the kind of thing that keeps hope alive.

DEMBY: All right, Parker, who is A.D.?

PARKER: A.D. is a professor of hip-hop at the University of Virginia.

DEMBY: Wait. Wait, wait, wait. Professor of hip-hop - that's a thing?

PARKER: Gene, you're about to learn about a lot of hip-hop jobs you haven't heard before today.

DEMBY: OK. OK.

PARKER: A.D.'s doctoral dissertation was actually a hip-hop album.

DEMBY: Wow. Now I'm imagining the erstwhile rapper Cornel West picking up the mic and getting at A.D. and them having beef.

PARKER: I mean, the first rap battle to include bibliographies.

DEMBY: Right.

PARKER: Anyways, A.D. talks a lot about the inherent contradiction of hip-hop being a product of American culture, which is oppressive to Black people who created hip-hop.

CARSON: The conditions that create hip-hop in this country have always been folks working against the odds - sort of, like, speaking out against whatever the dominant narrative might have been - and then at some point folks realizing that they might be able to take that product and then make that product into a bankable commodity because lots of people want to hear it, and then, in certain ways, like, whitening it up, even while keeping Black faces associated with it.

DEMBY: Yeah, I guess we got to remember, too, that the only experiences that most people have with Black folks are not happening IRL. Like, they're mediated through popular culture and things like hip-hop.

PARKER: Right. And A.D. talked about how, because hip-hop often functions as a shorthand for Black people broadly, it's used a lot for what he calls rap washing, which is when people or institutions use hip-hop as a way to grant themselves a kind of credibility or coolness to paper over the stuff they're doing that's problematic. Like, Gene, remember the Super Bowl halftime show from 2022?

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

KENDRICK LAMAR: (Rapping) We going to be all right. We going to be all right. We going to be...

DEMBY: Oh, God. Yes, I do.

CARSON: I mean, that was a case of rap washing at its finest. They just took rap music and then, like, sort of swaddled the whole halftime show in it.

PARKER: And if you don't remember the context, that halftime show was during the ongoing controversy around Colin Kaepernick.

DEMBY: OK. Explanatory comment time, and this time, there's a side-eye that is very strongly implied. Kaepernick, of course, was an NFL quarterback. He kneeled on the national anthem to protest police violence. And not long after he started doing that, he found himself out of a job while the NFL cracked down on similar protests by other NFL players.

PARKER: So his alleged blacklisting had loomed over the NFL. There were calls for and by some big-name Black musicians to boycott performing at the halftime show in solidarity with Kaepernick. And then that hip-hop halftime show happened. Here's A.D. again.

CARSON: And then, like, folks somehow lost the critique of the NFL without the NFL having to do anything but hire Mary J., Snoop, Kendrick, 50 and Eminem kneeling with his fist up. And it's like, yeah, they all good now, man.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

DR DRE: (Rapping) Got love for the streets. It's the D-R-E.

SNOOP DOGG: (Rapping) Representing for the gangsters all across...

DEMBY: Yeah, it was kind of wild to see that happening in real time. Like, people were so amped during and after that performance, like, yea, hip-hop finally center stage at the Super Bowl, the most watched concert in America. Oh, my God.

PARKER: Yes. And around that time, Jay-Z had already stepped in as a kind of ambassador between hip-hop and the NFL. He even said, we've moved past kneeling.

DEMBY: Yes. And I remember that he also conveniently announced an initiative with the NFL called, quote, "Inspire Change," for which Jay-Z and the NFL released a line of T-shirts.

PARKER: You don't want to inspire change, Gene?

DEMBY: What does that even mean? Like, we're not even doing the change, we're just inspiring it. It means less than nothing. Oh, my God.

PARKER: Yeah. So the NFL basically got to turn the page on the whole Kaepernick saga with the rubber stamp of some of the most influential names in hip-hop. That's rap washing.

CARSON: You know, like, are you mad at them for doing that? Folks are like, no, because I guess everybody, you know, is sort of programmed like, get money. But at the same time, who is going to be harmed because of this concession that we've made?

PARKER: I mean, and now, Jay-Z's production company has managed every Super Bowl halftime show for the past four years.

DEMBY: I mean, I know A.D. was kind of asking a rhetorical question, the - who is going to be harmed? But somebody was materially harmed by that, right? Like, Colin Kaepernick's protests got commandeered by the NFL, and of course, he never got rehired to play in the NFL. And the NFL got to dead any discourse about the fact that that was happening. And it's kind of wild that the first time hip-hop artists headlined the Super Bowl - that they were doing so in the service of brand maintenance for this giant corporate behemoth.

PARKER: Well, it's in service to the institution. I talked to A.D. about how you'll have something like Kendrick Lamar winning a Pulitzer Prize for his album, "DAMN.," which, on the surface, is something groundbreaking. I mean, that's envious prestige. But A.D. isn't so sure.

CARSON: I think the Pulitzer got a Kendrick rather than Kendrick got a Pulitzer.

DEMBY: Right. Like, the Pulitzer committee is benefiting as much from Kendrick's cachet as he is from theirs.

CARSON: Because they purport to, like, say, that hip-hop started - like, it was in the sewer, and then it was, like, sort of, you know, like, rescued from whatever, you know, horrible places that it had been and is now sitting in the hallowed halls of where, you know, Pulitzers be.

PARKER: Exactly. Kendrick can still be considered avant-garde while the Pulitzer committee can seem cool and progressive. It's a win-win.

DEMBY: Well, I mean, Parker, A.D. is saying that about the Pulitzer committee, but he is a professor of hip-hop.

PARKER: Yeah, at the University of Virginia, no less.

DEMBY: Right. This fancy school that was founded by Thomas Jefferson and built by the enslaved people that Thomas Jefferson owned. So, I mean, I wonder how he feels about the fact that UVA is kind of rubber-stamping hip-hop sort of, too.

PARKER: I had the same thought, Gene. So I asked A.D. if it felt like progress that he could get a job like that in 2023.

CARSON: Yeah, but the progress ain't hip-hop's progress. The progress is the institutions in the country. We've got 50 years of hip-hop, and, like, now we have a professorship of hip-hop. When people say it's hip-hop that evolved or hip-hop that, like, sort of has, like, come up, what they're really doing is letting the institutions in the United States that have consistently got it wrong forever - finally, like, getting it a little less wrong, you're letting them off the hook.

DEMBY: And I guess there's not just University of Virginia and the Pulitzers or the NFL.

PARKER: Yeah, the U.S. government does it, too.

(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "GIVING ALL I GOT")

ARLONDO SUTTON AND JASON LOCKE: (Rapping) Let's go. Join A-R-M-Y, giving all I got, I ain't never gonna stop. Army changed my life, life, gave me a new clock.

PARKER: Like this Army recruitment video that A.D. told me about.

(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "GIVING ALL I GOT")

ARLONDO SUTTON AND JASON LOCKE: (Rapping) Electric bill, paid for. Water bill, paid for. Living quarters, ha, paid for. Loyalty, duty, respect, selfless service, earn more. Don't be a hostage to college.

PARKER: (Laughter) Don't be a hostage to college.

DEMBY: Bro, these Department of Defense a** bars (laughter). Hey, yo, I'm feeling wavy. I just joined the U.S. Navy. Like, you need Steve Buscemi holding a skateboard like, what up, peeps? Military service is lit. Oh, my God - so corny. That's so bad. Anyway, sorry.

PARKER: We're going to get into that a little more. Put a pin in that.

DEMBY: OK, OK.

PARKER: But coming up, ask not what your country can do for hip-hop, but what hip-hop can do for your country.

TONI BLACKMAN: Well, I am Toni Blackman. I'm the first official U.S. hip-hop ambassador.

DEMBY: Wait. That's an actual job?

PARKER: I told you, there's a whole world of hip-hop jobs that will blow your mind.

DEMBY: I guess you got to apply on, like, monster.com but the one with Nicki Minaj's photo on the homepage.

PARKER: That's coming up. Stay with us.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

PARKER: Parker.

DEMBY: Gene.

PARKER: CODE SWITCH. Now, we've been talking about how hip-hop has been embraced by powerful American institutions and exported around the world.

DEMBY: And the way that many of those institutions use hip-hop to rap wash their images and to lend an air of authenticity to their exploits and shenanigans.

PARKER: One way this happens is through a program of cultural diplomacy - when governments intentionally use arts, or artists and creators, to build networks and goodwill in different countries.

DEMBY: And I guess it's not always clear who that goodwill and those networks redound to.

PARKER: Well, yeah, the United States has a long history of this, and in looking into that history, I discovered a job that I didn't know existed before - the U.S.'s hip-hop ambassador.

DEMBY: I still can't believe that's a real thing. Who knew? Who knew?

PARKER: Yeah. You can be a hip-hop professor. You can be a hip-hop ambassador.

DEMBY: You live in New York. You've got Eric Adams as your hip-hop mayor, Parker.

PARKER: No comment. But the first ever hip-hop ambassador for the U.S. State Department is a woman named Toni Blackman. She's also an MC.

DEMBY: I mean, I would hope so.

PARKER: And she's been rhyming since she was a kid.

BLACKMAN: Well, I just have - it's a rhyme I still say. (Rapping) Listen to these words, and the words that I'm saying. The name is Toni Blackman, and there won't be no delaying.

DEMBY: It's funny how those rhymes you make up as little kid always stick in your head, like - (rapping) my name is G.D., and I'm here to say...

Anyway, hip-hop ambassador - what a world. What does that even entail exactly?

PARKER: So Toni was hired by the State Department to represent the U.S. abroad through hip-hop, which makes Toni a part of a long-standing tradition of this kind of diplomacy. It started with jazz in the 1950s where the government would send musicians overseas to perform and foster better relations with other countries.

(SOUNDBITE OF BANJO PLAYING)

PARKER: There's even bluegrass diplomacy where, like, Iranians were invited to the U.S. to learn how to play the banjo.

DEMBY: Parker, weren't you learning how to play the banjo? Like, you trying to line up a side hustle as a banjo diplomat? Let me find out.

PARKER: I learned to play the banjo because it's cool. But it's real.

DEMBY: 'Cause it's cool. OK (laughter).

PARKER: That's jealousy. Anyways, there was also the U.S.'s attempt at ping-pong diplomacy in the '70s, like in "Forrest Gump."

(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "FORREST GUMP")

TOM HANKS: (As Forrest) Somebody said world peace was in our hands, but all I did was play ping-pong.

PARKER: And now there's hip-hop diplomacy.

DEMBY: How does one become a hip-hop diplomat? Does, like, Secretary of State Antony Blinken call you into his office, you got to spit a hot 16 or something like that?

PARKER: I mean, I'm sure that would make briefings more lively, but...

DEMBY: Oh, for sure.

PARKER: ...Not quite.

DEMBY: (Laughter).

PARKER: So in early 2001, the State Department wanted to start some kind of hip-hop diplomacy project. So they went looking for rappers to rep the U.S. That's when they found Toni. At the time, she was an MC that was teaching kids in D.C. to freestyle...

DEMBY: Right.

PARKER: ...Until she got a call from someone at the State Department.

BLACKMAN: And she asked, would you like to go to West Africa with us? I just said, yes. Yes, I'm going. Yes. So that was my first time ever in West Africa, which was also deep as a West African descendant, you know?

DEMBY: For a lot of people, that's a really profound experience - going to West Africa.

PARKER: It was. And according to Toni, hip-hop helped bridge the gap between the American Toni and the Senegalese community she was in.

BLACKMAN: At that time, like, Senegal was reported to have at least 2,000 rap groups. And there was no music industry. These are hip-hop heads who are ecstatic to connect with a hip-hop head from America.

DEMBY: If there was already hip-hop in Senegal, what was she sent there to do?

BLACKMAN: Well, at that time, the objective was to create positive relations with the United States so that they would have a positive image of the U.S. That was the goal.

DEMBY: How do you promote the U.S.'s image abroad, though? Like, what does repping the U.S. via hip-hop look like in practice?

PARKER: Well, one thing Toni told me about was being sent to Kinshasa to create songs with Congolese women who'd been used as war weapons, like the song, "Invisible Woman."

(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "INVISIBLE WOMAN")

BLACKMAN: (Singing in non-English language).

PARKER: So you can't argue that teaching women to advocate for themselves through music is a bad thing. There's value in that.

DEMBY: Yeah, but it's also a project wrapped up in American power and projecting that influence and power out into the world, you know?

PARKER: Yeah. Well, one thing I have a difficult time reconciling is the use of Black culture and the people who make it being deployed abroad to promote America because Blackness is so fraught here.

DEMBY: But I guess you could see how there are specific ways that Blackness is fraught, and hip-hop as a kind of vessel for that might make it really useful for something like this, right? There's a kind of credibility that is implicit if these international connections are being made by people who have been historically marginalized here. Like, if they are vouching for the United States, then it must not be that bad.

PARKER: Yeah, I mean, it does make sense. And I actually asked Toni about this. And she told me about a time when she was on South African radio, and someone called in to ask her how she could do this work. And this is how she remembers responding to that caller.

BLACKMAN: Would you rather someone else do it other than me? I justify doing this work as an American not to say I'm here as a proud American, but to say that my grandfather and my great-grandfather built the country that you come to know as America. And I come as a representative of my ancestors.

PARKER: So you've got someone like Toni who's out there as a Black woman doing formal diplomacy in the name of America. But then there's A.D. Carson, the rapper and professor of hip-hop I spoke with. He took the album he submitted as his dissertation to South Africa in another version of cultural exchange. And I asked him if he would consider that to be diplomacy.

CARSON: Yeah, but, you know, like, that's working with the people. We didn't go there to meet with the local government. We went there to meet with the artists on the ground at that space.

PARKER: You could say Toni was working with the people too, but she had the stamp of the State Department hanging over her. A.D. also had that American pedigree lording over him while he was in South Africa, and that stung.

CARSON: And they were like, oh, you're American? And then, like, your heart just sinks. Like, well, yeah, I guess so. And the woman says to me, I thought you were from the neighborhood. And I'm like, no. It feels like it, but no, I'm not. And, like, I held that. That was in my head. It's still in my head right now.

PARKER: Why is it still with you?

CARSON: Because it's just - it's uneasy. I'm not even there - like, I'm not even there on the United States' dime. And, like, it still resides in that way because the United States might look at me and be like, oh, I thought you wasn't from here, knowing d*** well I am from here, and I was born down the street 'cause that's the treatment that I get every day in this country.

PARKER: So in that moment, you feel like a man with no country?

CARSON: Yes. Yeah.

PARKER: So you can imagine, Gene, that when the State Department asked A.D. to become a hip-hop ambassador similar to Toni, he didn't go for it. But he gets why someone would do that work.

CARSON: It's hella (ph) people who rap, who DJ, who do any - like, who make any of the kinds of art that is - are associated with hip-hop. And most of us ain't famous, ain't never going to be famous. How do we make a living doing that? The State Department's stamp goes - like, it reads really nicely on a resume, so I understand. I totally understand why a person would do those things.

DEMBY: I guess one way of looking at it is, all right, being a government-funded rapper today - that's such a weird phrase to say out loud. But it's like one of those New Deal programs where the government paid artists and writers to just create stuff, you know, just so they could have some means to make a living. You know what I mean?

PARKER: Yeah. Like, for Toni, this is a job. And hip-hop is a tool for connection, another Black art form that is being used by the U.S. government.

BLACKMAN: Well, at one point, jazz was the tool. At one point, Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington were the folks - Stan Getz were the people who were doing what I do.

PARKER: So you know how before I mentioned jazz diplomacy?

DEMBY: Yes, I do.

PARKER: Well, it's a good example of the disparate motivations of the cultural ambassadors and the country they're representing.

DEMBY: OK.

PARKER: So during the Cold War, this kind of outreach was a big deal. Dizzy Gillespie, Dave Brubeck, Louis Armstrong were sent overseas for what they called a cultural exchange.

DEMBY: So those are some heavy hitters. Wow. Wow.

PARKER: We're talking true jazz greats.

DEMBY: OK. So was it like "The Spook Who Sat By The Door" where they were, like, pretending to work for the government but actually dissidents inside the government trying to shake up the American machine?

PARKER: Well, it was mostly pretty straightforward. They showed up in places like Greece that were near the Soviet bloc and played music. But Louis Armstrong refused to go on the first trip. He didn't want to represent America when the Little Rock Nine were being harassed for desegregating their high school. And so Dave Brubeck and his wife Iola - both white - knew that it was complicated for Armstrong and other Black musicians. They actually wrote a musical about Louis Armstrong's experience as a jazz emissary. It was called "The New Ambassadors."

(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "THE REAL AMBASSADORS")

LOUIS ARMSTRONG: (Singing) Though I represent the government, the government don't represent some policies I'm for. Oh, we learned to be concerned about the constitutionality. In our nation, segregation isn't a legality. Soon, our only differences will be in personality. That's what I stand for. Who's the real ambassador?

DEMBY: Louis Armstrong still did these tours, right?

PARKER: Yes, he did. And this is where it gets complicated and dark. In 1961, Louis Armstrong went to the capital of the Congo, to what was then called Leopoldville.

DEMBY: Today, that's Kinshasa, where Toni did some of her outreach work, right?

PARKER: Right. And back when Louis was still there, it was during a civil war. The story goes that people on both sides in that conflict were so excited to see him play that they called a temporary ceasefire so that he could perform.

DEMBY: Wow.

PARKER: Here's Louis talking about that experience on "The Mike Douglas Show" back in the 1970s.

(SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, "THE MIKE DOUGLAS SHOW")

ARMSTRONG: And there was fighting, and they stopped the war because I was playing it that night.

MIKE DOUGLAS: Oh, now that's great.

UNIDENTIFIED PERSON: He stopped the war...

PARKER: But what he didn't know and couldn't have known was that during his official visit, the CIA was using him as cover to spy on Patrice Lumumba, the first democratically elected leader of the Congo. Just a few months later, Lumumba was assassinated with help from the CIA.

DEMBY: Oh, my God. I had no idea that those things were connected at all.

PARKER: Neither did Louis. So Gene, do you remember that famous photo of Louis Armstrong playing the trumpet for his wife, Lucille, in front of the Sphinx in Egypt?

DEMBY: I don't, I don't think, but refresh my memory. Like, what's happening in that picture?

PARKER: So in the picture, Louis has got his cheeks puffed out as he blows...

DEMBY: Of course.

PARKER: ...While Lucille is sitting on a rock and just swoons up at him. It's a very romantic photo, and the Sphinx of Giza is their backdrop. It's kind of wild. But that photo was taken on another stop on Louis' State Department-funded tour just 11 days after Lumumba was assassinated in the Congo.

DEMBY: Wow.

PARKER: Yeah. And so depending on how you look at that picture, it's either a really sweet image or really messed up because of the broader context of that trip. And in talking to A.D. Carson, the hip-hop professor, a story like Louis' isn't surprising.

CARSON: The U.S. is really interested in promoting the myth of America. And the way that you promote that myth is by using Black bodies, by using Black art, by using Black cultural production and then pretending as though those things aren't produced in the context that create them.

DEMBY: Right. And, I guess, those are the same dynamics that are still true today, like, while hip-hop is being exported in similar ways.

PARKER: Yeah. Remember Mohammed, the guy who learned how to speak English from listening to hip-hop?

DEMBY: Yes, I do.

PARKER: What compelled Mohammed about hip-hop was the rebellious and frank nature that he hadn't experienced before. So in that respect, it speaks to something that A.D. said is unique to hip-hop.

CARSON: I think that, like, that hip-hop works a kind of magic that very few art forms are able to put into existence. But that's the work of hip-hop. That's not the work of the United States. That's, like - that's what hip-hop, like, has at its essence because of coming to existence through these conditions in this place.

PARKER: So in a lot of ways, hip-hop exists despite America. It's an art form built around what people have been deprived of. Like, the originators of hip-hop, those kids in the Bronx who first freestyled didn't have the money for instruments, but they had some records and a microphone.

DEMBY: Yeah. And hip-hop was also forged in this very American context, though, right? Like, the legend goes that at that party - the one we talked about at the very beginning where hip-hop was born in 1973 - they had to borrow - wink, wink - electricity from the streetlights outside to power all that DJ equipment. And it's worth noting that that neighborhood in the South Bronx where that party happened was, for decades, the single poorest congressional district in the entire United States. So it's a place that had been systematically cut off from all sorts of resources and investments and just generally neglected.

PARKER: Right. And to this day, invoking hip-hop can suggest that you are without in some way. That feeling is braided through its DNA. And now America claims hip-hop as if that deprivation was some kind of blessing.

CARSON: I mean, my challenge to the United States government or, you know, whoever it may be, like, so you mean to tell me in the same place where y'all are saying that we can't even say slavery happened or that racism is systemic, you want to turn around and say that the best of us can be seen in rap music? And so there's no way that the United States turning around and saying look at this beautiful thing that we created can be a salve for the wounds that it created.

PARKER: I get what A.D. is saying. There's something twisted in the relationship between hip-hop and American institutions. It's been co-opted in so many different ways by the State Department, the Defense Department. President Obama was even known as the hip-hop president, whatever that means.

DEMBY: Hip-hop is this deeply American thing, though. Like, even if hip-hop artists and hip-hop heads don't really like to hear that - right? - this relationship that hip-hop has the Blackness gives it a sheen of being transgressive and rebellious and dangerous because of the things we associate with Black people. But so many of the themes in popular hip-hop are not transgressive at all. It's kind of why it translates so well to the rest of the world, why it travels so well. It's a lot of people rhyming about how they worked really hard and grinded and how they came up.

PARKER: Or are grinding and will eventually come up.

DEMBY: Exactly. Like, you know, they're fly. They're doing better financially. All this stuff, like - it's almost secular prosperity gospel. The rags-to-riches stuff? That's all deeply American.

PARKER: And it's one of the things that Mohammed said really resonated with him when he was getting rap smuggled to him on thumb drives in Syria.

DEMBY: Right. It's really hard - really hard - to separate the spread of hip-hop from Americanism and America's global power and tentacles, you know.

PARKER: Yeah. They've created this sort of strangely toxic, codependent relationship. It's almost appropriate that hip-hop starts in this place of, like, just a makeshift dance party in 1973 and has now reached all the way to global imperialism.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

PARKER: And that's our show. You can follow us on Instagram - @nprcodeswitch. If email is more your thing, ours is [email protected]. And our newsletter is back. You can subscribe by going to npr.org/codeswitchnewsletter. You can subscribe to the podcast on the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts.

DEMBY: I just wanted to give a quick shout-out to our CODE SWITCH+ listeners. We appreciate y'all. We thank you for being subscribers. Subscribing to CODE SWITCH+ means getting to listen to all of our episodes without any sponsor breaks. It also helps support our show, so we appreciate that. So if you rock with us, please consider signing up at plus.npr.org/codeswitch.

PARKER: This episode was produced by Courtney Stein and edited by Dalia Mortada. Our engineer was Maggie Luthar.

DEMBY: And we would be remiss if we did not shout out the rest of the CODE SWITCH massive. That's Christina Cala, Jess Kung, Leah Donnella, Veralyn Williams, Lori Lizarraga and Steve Drummond. Special thanks to Dr. Cheryl Keyes and Kim Izar. As for me, I'm Gene Demby.

PARKER: I'm B.A. Parker.

DEMBY: Don't be a hostage to college. Be easy, y'all.

PARKER: Hydrate.

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