“We don’t live for hip hop, it lives for us.”

Photo by Ben Wiens on Unsplash

Hip-hop legend Talib Kweli summates the relationship that the artist and the audience share with hip-hop in this simple line from the song “Soul Rebels”. This genre has always been a powerful medium for the voices of the oppressed and the marginalized, voicing their frustrations towards a system that just doesn’t care about them.

The genre’s history can be traced back to the late 1970s, when disenfranchised Latino and African-American youth in New York City began ‘MC-ing,’ rhyming the ends of their sentences to entertain people, eventually forming cohesive songs. This music became a way to document oppression and its ramifications on them. ‘Hip-hop’ as it was now called, observed the reality of the unstable, threatening environments they lived in. But by expressing it, it became a healing force in the midst of the chaos of their surroundings, channelling their helplessness and anger.

Its use as a therapeutic tool for trauma has only been explicitly explored in recent times. An exemplification is Sgt. Anthony Bunch who was convicted in a drive-by shooting in 2007. The judge, a former marine, offered him a unique choice — jail or war. He chose the latter.

The job involved manning a spotlight and looking for explosives on the ground for the convoy vehicles behind him. The responsibility was stressful, and the tour left him with severe physical injuries, including traumatic brain injury. Bunch often thought he was going to die soon. An avid hip hop fan since childhood, he said,

“Every time I would get myself in a situation where I’m like, damn, what am I doing? I would always pen something about it, it was therapeutic.”

He wasn’t the only one. When things got worse in Iraq, Bunch and a friend set up a Conex shipping container as a makeshift studio with equipment they bought online. More soldiers got in on it, and the senior officers even got them to practice during routine drills. Their shared experiences and love of the genre brought them together in venting their frustrations and achieve some collective catharsis. In talking about their reality, and facilitated by genre’s format — their verses weren’t facetious — talking about “I’m gonna take your bitch and I got eight bitches.” It was their fear and apprehension phrased with raw emotion. “Send me home. Get me out of this. Fuck this shit.”

While recovering, Bunch penned his raging thoughts and traumatic memories, focusing his pain into a cohesive song — titled “What it’s like.”

“Those lyrics were my suicidal thoughts; they were me trying to rationalize my deployment, what I did over there, what it was like for me. It was a relief, man. I was literally shedding tears.”

But trauma isn’t bound to military service. Violence in urban communities was one of the kick-starters to the hip hop movement becoming a socio-political force. It can cause trauma on the same level as with Sgt. Bunch, but not everyone finds a healthy outlet for that pain. South Central LA rapper Murs knows this all too well.

“I realized [that I had PTSD] when I moved from Los Angeles to Oakland, I was like, wow, we’re from a fucked-up place because it almost feels fucked up that we don’t have to watch out for police and rival gang members.”

Hypervigilance is a common symptom of PTSD, except it affects people in the modern world trying to survive and belong, not just in the army, where it’s part of the job. Murs met an Iraq war vet like Bunch, through his wife. The vet displayed symptoms of PTSD common between him and his own friends “with felonies.” These were people who couldn’t find a way to express their pain, and it had started to consume them. “He couldn’t get a job.” Murs says.

“His wife was telling us that he sat around and drank and played Call of Duty all day. And I said that’s what my homies do. This is a right-wing, conservative, upper-class man who served in the Army, and my friends are Crips with felonies, but they were exhibiting some of the same extreme symptoms.”

Trauma can severely hamper day-to-day functioning, whether from gang violence, military service, or any high stress and high-risk environment. Murs’ experience demonstrates universal symptoms of PTSD and the need for a healthy outlet for this pain.

Now, imagine Murs’ ‘homies’ but they’re young kids growing up in an unforgiving environment and looking for a sense of belonging. This is a sad reality for many, who can be swept up in violence and other high-risk behaviour easily — being affected by it — then often perpetrating it. A vicious cycle. The need for a positive outlet is imperative to provide a healthier way to deal with what’s inside them before it consumes and overtakes the rest of their sense of self. Rap therapy started with that motive in mind.

Oakland-based organization Beats, Rhymes and Life Inc. is a prominent example of the community trying to reach the youth and give them that positive outlet, especially those who feel they have no choice. The founder, Tomas Alvarez was a social worker at Berkeley High School, who noticed the kids he worked with were “unresponsive” in sessions. But during lunch they would gather in a cypher — a cyclical freestyle rap session where one can rap about anything — foregoing the negativity associated with battle rap. They opened up. He built on this with friend and fellow hip hop head Rob Jackson, creating a 16-week workshop where they could express themselves in a way they felt comfortable. He reports kids coming in, barely talking to anybody, but then rapping on stage by the end. Rob Jackson and Tomas Alvarez term hip-hop as ‘the voice of the oppressed.’ The program provides a healthy outlet to the youth — helping them face the effects of a lifetime of oppression — their trauma.

In the New Visions school in New York, rap therapy has become a part of school culture. It developed from an after-school program in 2014 by school counselor Ian P. Levy, who was creating a model for rap therapy as part of his doctorate research. Thirty kids write and record in a corner of his office, with $3,000 worth of crowdfunded recording equipment. “When traumatic events happen, it’s important that students have a space to digest them,” says Levy. The students once created some 20 songs in response to police killings of unarmed black people, on a Soundcloud-released album aptly titled “Social Justice.” The creative space of hip hop can help young people deal with the trappings of their environment without being consumed by it, while in turn, opening up the conversation on important socio-political issues.

Nicole Hodges Persley, one of the founders and associate director of the Hip-hop Archive and Research Institute at Harvard University and teacher of Hip Hop and Theater at Kansas University understands this too well.

“Looking at early hip-hop through the golden era through today — you have this sonic archive that covers trauma, it covers happiness, you know, triumph over adversity …”

“But trauma is definitely a through line,”

Kendrick Lamar, a famous social and politically vocal rapper knows “triumph over adversity” and its grim reality all too well. He knows that he’s lucky to be alive, and that he doesn’t deserve his “triumph” any more than the countless good people lost to senseless violence. He tells their stories, humanizes their trauma and shows us how important life is because it’s fragile.

On his debut album, good kid m.A.A.d city, the song “Sing about me, I’m Dying of Thirst” is a collection of true stories that depicts them as victims of circumstance — “good kids” in a “mad” city.

The chorus is Kendrick begging his listeners to “sing about” him, as he does for these people, knowing he could go at any moment like they did.

The people in the song were killed for seemingly no reason, Nicole Gonzalez was shot by her boyfriend’s sixteen year old brother in a room full of her friends. Kendrick’s friend Dave was killed and his brother exacted vengeance in kind, only to see the error of his ways, as he was perpetuating the cycle of violence that took Dave away in the first place. Kendrick honestly portrays their circumstances and the emotions surrounding it in a way only someone who has experienced them could. There is an inherent power in this brand of hip hop, as instead of covering his own trauma, he covers the often untold traumatic events of those around him and how its a part of a paradigm reliant on this cycle of suffering. All he can do now is “sing about” them to bring our attention to the bigger picture.

While hip-hop can’t solve every problem plaguing every part of the world, immortalizing our own memories in verse or expressing one’s identity is a start. It allows the oppressed to keep living and find resilience within their own stories. This also has a generational effect, as the next generation learns how to express itself in a healthy way and find a way to heal from their own traumatic experiences. It breaks the cycle of hatred that took people like Dave and Nicole away. So, a lot of us live for what hip hop can give us, but hip hop itself lives for us. It helps us deal with the world around us and show people that there’s always a choice.

Either let your pain consume you, or express it — and with that — you can inspire others to do the same.

Let hip-hop live for you.