We can thank President Nixon Reagan for the rise of Hip Hop…

…well not quite. But the statement does serve to highlight the role that “Neoliberalism” played in the crack-**** epidemic that hit New York in the 1970’s and the cultural manifestations that occurred in the lower African-American class.


Neoliberalism is the current form of socio-politico-economic philosophy that runs our societies. It’s pretty much just a really extreme form of capitalism that grew out of the mellower “mixed economy” that everyone was fucken with after World War II (for more, wiki “Keynesian Economics”).

Some of things Neoliberalism aims to do (beginning most notably under Thatcher in the UK and Reagan in the US):

**** municipalities, **** professionals and their associations and **** unions
Dismantle commitments of the welfare state
Privatization of anything – including social housing
Reduce taxes
Encourage entrepreneurial initiative
Create the best business climate possible for foreign investment (for example CETA bill in Canada)
*(see Harvey below)

By now most developed countries are dippin with this philosophy – which might help you Canadians better understand where the **** Canada has gone in the last 30 years. The answer is to the extreme end of Neoliberalism (starting with Mulroney and reaching its current apex under Adolf Harper).

So what does this have to do with Duckdown, Mobb Deep, CNN and Cam’ron? Well a little bit to a lot. Like most other western cities in the 70’s New York was going through a “stagflation” – your parents likely remember this time as “when the jap cars came in”. The world was growing smaller and “deindustrialization” (moving jobs to China) was **** NYC over which meant civil unrest. People got poorer and the city went bankrupt (forced into bankruptcy rather, by Citibank). NYC got a bailout – but it went to pay off bondholders. This means powerful unions got ****, wages froze and there were cutbacks in almost every public employment sector (education, public health, transportation). This mounted as Harvey puts it, “to a coup by big business financial institutions against the democratically elected government of New York City.”


FYI kids – this is when Corporations started to really gain ground in our communities AND what a lot of what Occupy Wallstreet stood for was curtailing this trend. ANYWAY within a few years a lot of the historic achievements of working class New York were undone. New Yorkers got **** out of a lot of the consensus, union-derived power they had achieved and big business was hell bent on making NYC a “Good Business Climate”. An at home example of making this “climate” is like using public resources to build a huge pipeline that goes all the way through British Columbia so we can suck up Chinese dollars in the most unsustainable and destructive way…

Oh right, hip hop – out of all this corporatization grew an elite class (whose wealth increased the gap between rich and poor, 30% higher than it had been since the 1960’s)

These ruling elites aimed to open cultural milieus and create a cosmopolitan paradise by promoting art which led to a “Neoliberalization of art”- obviously can still be found there today. Working-class and mostly ethnic minority, marginalized peoples were thrown back into the dark – gated off into ghetto communities; Franklin ave, Highbridge, Marcy, Queensbridge, Staten….the list goes on.

In the early 80’s these black communities (albeit with other minority populations– however mostly all minority) were then afflicted with severe crack **** epidemics followed by AIDS epidemics. This not only propagated more racism from the upper and middle classes but left so many young people dead, incarcerated and homeless.

Now the purposes of expository was to not actually link the success of NY hip hop to Neoliberliasm (although if I wanted to, I could merely suggest that unlike Hennessy Youngman I don’t think art is only about beauty – and that the torments of Neoliberalism have had a profound effect on the poetic devices used as creative outlets for young black Americans), rather I wanted to suck you in and show how our current socio-economic-politico system of Neoliberalism has been naturalized or rather, we think of Corporate control as “normal”. But it’s NOT normal – it’s only 30-years-old and in that time has managed to turn the world upside down. I’m not saying we go back to the New Deal or Trudeauesque Keynesian policies. I’m just saying that the couch is comfy until you get bedsores…and boo- we getting bedsores.