Columbia Undergraduate Journal of History

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t is a summer Sunday night, but First Avenue’s main room iscrowded. Muja Messiah, a Minneapolis rapper who has been calledthe “proudest to be from Minneapolis,” is releasing his ﬁrst full-lengthalbum.

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MCs I Self Devine and Brother Ali, two of the Twin Cities’most successful rappers, have been hyping the audience between acts,including local rap stars like M.Anifest and Maria Isa. Brother Alispeaks of the support, both ﬁnancial and emotional, that is essentialto maintain a local scene. Though he does not mention them here,his words bring to mind the lyrics of his song “Pay Back”: “You lovethis human expression and they gave you that, and so the least y’allcan do is try to pay ‘em back.” Muja Messiah has the support of theentire building tonight—the big name rappers who have toured the world and come home to Minneapolis, the members of his groupRaw Villa who continue to have his back, and the men and women of all colors who have come to have a good time with one of the TwinCities’ most dynamic entertainers. As Muja Messiah takes the stage,the crowd is ready for him. Clad in a shirt that spells his own nameacross his chest, Muja’s stage presence suggests that he takes his roleas a “Messiah” seriously and is prepared to take Twin Cities hip hopto a higher level while keeping it uniquely Minnesota with songs like“U Betcha”. Muja and his crew rap the acronym they have coined forMinneapolis, “MPLS—Money, Paper, Loot, Scrilla” (which Muja hasproudly tattooed across his neck) and something I have never before witnessed in Minneapolis occurs. Someone in the front row begins totoss up ﬁstfuls of cash. As the bills rain down on the audience like a

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I Self Devine, interview by author, Minneapolis, MN, April 18, 2008.

Mapping the City One Rap at a Time: Placeand Hip Hop in Minneapolis, Minnesota

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Lil Wayne video, I pocket forty dollars, thinking that, in a truly healthy rap scene, the payback goes both ways—rappers and city in a symbioticrelationship.In any good narrative, authors and rap musicians alike agree, detailsare essential. Rap music is the ultimate urban narrative, speaking forthe streets and for the oppressed, marginalized voices seldom heard.Rap music demands to be turned up, to be pumped loud until it is feltdeep in the heart, vibrating through the very streets themselves untilall can hear its story. Rap lyrics can, of course, paint an exaggerated orover-negative picture of the city, like the blinged-out ghetto fabulousor descriptions of gloriﬁed gang culture in the hood. But hip hop hasbecome inseparable from the inner city experience and even changed the very urban fabric it arose from, creating identities for places dismissedby outsiders. Words can transform a song into a map, a geographicalmythology, holding the archival memory of a place at a certain time. This is the story of one such place. It is a story that has been spatand rhymed, painted and etched, spun and scratched, beat and dancedacross and into the streets of a city. Local hip hop has been writing and telling the story of neighborhoods in Minneapolis, Minnesota forthe past two and a half decades. By analyzing rap lyrics and the wordsof local hip hop participants, this paper will examine the geographicalhistory of the Minneapolis hip hop culture, paying close attention tothe ways in which place and hip hop intersect.

Hip Hop Is Where It’s At

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ip hop has from its inception been heavily place-based. “Hiphop,” a name taken from the scat-like lyrics of one of the ﬁrstrecorded rap songs, “Rapper’s Delight,” has been applied to a culturedeﬁned by four distinct elements.

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These four elements include grafﬁtiart, break-dancing, DJing, and rapping, though hip hop has since grownto include additional cultural dimensions such as fashion and language,encompassing an entire way of life. The culture that became hip hop was born in a seven-mile ghetto in the South Bronx, New York in themiddle of the 1970s. Twin Cities rapper I Self Devine has an interesting explanation for why New York was the perfect birthplace. “Hip hop had

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Jeff Chang,

Can’t Stop, Won’t Stop: A History of the Hip Hop Generation

(New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2005).

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COLUMBIA UNDERGRADUATE JOURNAL OF HISTORY

to start where there was water,” he says, citing the necessity of the portin bringing in new ideas and cultures.

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Hip hop’s founding generation was inﬂuenced equally by the lively styles and rhythms transplanted by Jamaican and Puerto Rican immigrants and the devastating conditionsof the South Bronx, which many blamed on the destructive urbanplanning of Robert Moses, speciﬁcally the Cross Bronx Expressway, which tore apart the neighborhood.

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Hip hop’s first participantssought to assert their importance in a city that persistently ignored andoppressed their voices. These marginalized, disenfranchised youth took their new modes of expression and went All-City, covering buildingsand trains with painted declarations of their self-worth, turning streetsand parks into dance halls, and firing up sound systems loud enough tomake the air tremble with excitement. The message on the streets wasclear: hip hop is where it’s at. And where it was at was the Bronx, where very little had ever been “at” before. Hip hop was giving the residentsof this community a sense of place and pride in their neighborhoodfor the first time. Arising out of an era when gangs were asserting their territorialinfluence over New York’s neighborhoods, and residents were segregatedaround the city by class and race, hip hop was born into a community where place meant everything. Grandmaster Flash, a pioneer fromthe early New York scene, describes the ways in which the founding fathers of hip hop, like DJ Kool Herc, Afrika Bambaataa, and himself,held influence over the streets as being very similar to the gangs. “Wehad territories,” he says, explaining, “Kool Herc had the West Side.Bam had Bronx River… Myself, my area was like 138 Street, Cypress Avenue, up to Gun Hill, so that we all had our territories and we all hadto respect each other.”

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Hip hop, however, unlike gang culture, didn’tlimit itself to such narrow spatial boundaries. Scenes began to uniteas these neighborhoods realized their commonalities and the ultimategoal became partying and getting down together.Hip hop could not be conﬁned to the South Bronx for long. The “journey from the seven-mile world to Planet Rock”, as hip hophistorian Jeff Chang describes it, was inevitable, and hip hop began to

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I Self Devine, interview with author, Minneapolis, MN, March 11, 2008.

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Jeff Chang,

Can’t Stop, Won’t Stop.

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Murray Forman,

The ‘Hood Comes First: Race, Space, and Place in Rap and Hip- Hop

(Wesleyan University Press, 2002), 69.

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MAPPING THE CITY ONE RAP AT A TIME