Organic Intelligence LVII: The State of Abstract NY Hip Hop

In this month’s antidote to the algorithm, Auden Alsop praises the rappers and producers drilling into the essence of contemporary New York

In Jem Cohen’s 1996 film Lost Book Found the narrator, a pushcart vendor in New York City, meets a man who survives by fishing treasure from the rivers that run beneath the sidewalk grates. The man loans him a book containing cryptic lists of events, addresses, and prices. This haunts him, causing him to question whether there “really [are] any laws and systems, scales, balances? What is the city made of? …the rubble of stories and memories, layers and layers…” Thirty years later, a loose group of musicians are asking the same questions and crafting near-answers out of that same rubble. Their collective work comprises a movement, of sorts, out of which is emerging some of the most vital music being made today. 

It can’t be a coincidence that so-called ‘abstract’ hip hop – a label that may have first been used to describe the style of the Ultramagnetic MC’s in 1988, was codified by the mid/late 90s with groups like Company Flow and Cannibal Ox, and seems today to have largely engulfed what used to be called the underground–is thriving in the same city where hip hop was born just over fifty years ago and where, thirty years before that, the art critic Robert Coates coined the term Abstract Expressionism. There’s a world of difference between Abstract Expressionism and abstract hip hop – two different mediums, not to mention another 80 years of strain under rampant capitalism and the fundamental difference between Black and white experience in America – but the shared term invites intriguing comparisons: the pressure of an inherently (though differently) conflicted American-ness, their diametrically opposed engagement with tradition, a shared reliance on independent venues and routes of distribution as both economic necessities and centers of community, as well as a distinct gender gap ( The work being made by artists like Anysia Kim, DJ Haram, duendita, keiyaA, and Philadelphia’s Moor Mother is incredible and a great sign of progress, but there’s still a lot of room for improvement.)

But why label this music abstract when the materials from which it is constructed – the words a weave of experiences, stories, and memories lived, invented, and ancestral alike; beats pieced together from fragments of old records, each with its own cultural weight – are not? Implicit in the label is a distance from reality which, for the Abstract Expressionists, was the key to their escape into the sublime: a freedom, Barnett Newman hoped, from “the impediments of memory, association, nostalgia, legend, myth.” In today’s media environment, this distance manifests in the relegation of all music to the state of ‘ambient’, fit for comfortable indifference and passive consumption. Abstract hip hop exists in opposition to this distance; its aim is not to escape reality but to rearrange it: to piece together a mirror, however uncomfortable the reflection, rather than attempt to flee to some distant, metaphysical plane of sensory experience. 

The Abstract Expressionists tried, during their brief reign in New York, to step out of time; time will be the judge of their success. Abstract hip hop is, I think, the record of our time: a judgement of history as it appears, now, in the present. In fulfilling this role, it may sometimes sacrifice ease of enjoyment (though not necessarily humour, if you’ve a taste for the bleak) for the sake of honesty, but then isn’t that what we’re looking for, when we go fishing in the digital sewer that is the internet for something with which to feed our souls? (It isn’t all doom and gloom, either – there’s a lot of joy, if you know where to look.)

Abstract hip hop may or may not be abstract (to whom, is the question) but it does touch the sublime: a different, human kind. The sublime of the Abstract Expressionists was that of a time where the willful delusion of a better world’s possibility was at its apex, an understandable rebound from the nadir of human history. The sublime of this music is that of our present where, sinking fast, we are reminded every day by the news that everything we know can either slip away slowly or be lost in a moment. Now is the time.