Hip hop’s early years were defined by precarity Hip hop, like every element of culture, is a product of its economic conditions. And as a cultural product of the oppressed, hip hop tells a tale of economic despair.

The precarious economic conditions of the 1970s and 80s marked the earliest era of hip hop. Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five, a Bronx-based hip hop group, released their hit song “The Message” in 1982 that captured the neoliberal collapse around them.

So goes the first verse:

“Broken glass everywhere/People pissing on the stairs, you know they just don’t care/I can’t take the smell, can’t take the noise. Got no money to move out, I guess I got no choice/ Rats in the front room, roaches in the back/Junkies in the alley with a baseball bat/I tried to get away, but I couldn’t get far/’Cause a man with a tow truck repossessed my car”

And the chorus quite clearly names the increasingly precarious conditions of the working class: “Don’t push me ’cause I’m close to the edge/I’m trying not to lose my head”

The 1970s inaugurated the era of neoliberalism, which in the US was defined by the movement of manufacturing jobs out of the country and into nations where corporations could pay workers less. These jobs began to decline in the US in 1979.

Productivity had been keeping up with hourly compensation in the workplace up until 1979, when the paths abruptly diverged. Productivity continued to rise as wages stagnated, leaving us where we are today, in which workers are paid less for more work. 1973 also marked an enormous capitalist crisis as an oil embargo by the Organization of Arab Petroleum Exporting Countries (OAPEC) caused the price of oil to rise by 400% in the United States.

Neoliberalism was the capitalist response to crisis, says Claudia De La Cruz, a South Bronx native and popular educator. “Capitalists tend to build a lifeboat for themselves. Neoliberalism was the lifeboat for capitalists in that moment.”

The Bronx, which anchored this early era of hip hop, was particularly devastated by the economic era of neoliberalism. Deindustrialization and residential segregation policies led white residents to “flee” the Bronx in droves, taking much of the wealth out of the area. Beginning in 1972, entire neighborhoods in the South Bronx were set on fire by landlords who judged that they could make more money off of the fire insurance money for their properties than by renting them out. Bronx residents were left abandoned in a burned down “war zone”, heavily patrolled by police who often harassed the largely Black and Brown residents.

The Cross-Bronx Expressway, designed by urban planner Robert Moses to facilitate travel into and out of the Bronx, displaced over 1,500 families during its construction in the late 40s and early 50s. The highway contributes to the high rates of asthma in the Bronx, which are three times higher than the national average.

Ice-T’s 1986 classic “6 ‘N the Morning,” one of the earliest “gangster rap” songs, references close encounters with the police, criminality, and conditions of despair. His song tells the story of someone who escapes police time and time again, is locked up for several years, only to return to a community even more devastated than the one he left. Ice-T refers to police battering-rams used during drug raids and crack “rock”: “The batter-rams rolling, rocks are the thing/Life has no meaning and money is king”

The Bronx today still remains the poorest congressional district in the United States, with 60% of residents living below the poverty line according to statistics from 2017. Since the era of neoliberalism, inequality nationally has only increased. But the music that originated from the poor and dispossessed of that New York City neighborhood not only lives on, but thrives in every corner of the globe.