Paul Gladstone Reid MBE has been an advisor on the Street Summer season and is the creative force behind the Rap Beatbox Choir project.
When we were planning the Street Summer season, no one could have predicted that it would be launched in the midst of a national crisis, involving some of the audiences and demographics that are featured in this season.
Some ask if the music, culture, art and lifestyle of Britain's youth was in many ways responsible for the outbreak of violence and carnage.
Yet the social history and circumstances from which hip hop and street culture has emerged can not be summed up or aligned in anyway with the recent breakdown of law, order and civil society.
Instead, I suggest we look to the social, economic, psychological and political realities which have driven a diverse and sporadic collection of people to the precipice of depravity and into a state of temporary insanity, acted out through an outburst of rage.
But, hip hop and street culture have been the vehicle, which have channelled artistic and creative responses to the very same social, economic, psychological and political realities that have caused anger and despair.
Over the past 30 Years, Hip Hop and Street Culture have played a positive role in addressing civil unrest, caused by injustice. These art-forms have, in the passed, been a catalyst for channelling anger, frustration and victimhood away from violence and criminality towards articulate acts of creativity.
Unfortunately, the positive sides of hip hop and street culture are not regularly celebrated in the mainstream media, or backed by corporately-owned media and entertainment conglomerates.
Instead, we are bombarded by a steady stream of titillating glamorisations of sex and violence. Channel 4's Street Summer (and Southbank Centre's Intelligent Movement Festival), goes some way to address this state of affairs.
What is hip hop? And what is culture?
The etymology of the term, 'hip hop' comes from the root word, 'hippy', a Wolof word, (Wolof being the dominant linguistic group in Senegal, West Africa), which means to open one's eyes and see.
Hop, the English word meaning to spring, leap or dance, illustrates an act of joyous movement, the raising of the body in the imitation of flight.
When these two words are put together: hip and hop, we can approximate a meaning of hip hop as a shamanistic movement of music, art and culture, that opens the mind and enables people to perceive the nature of reality with heightened perception.
The word, 'culture', refers to the precepts, processes and practices which tend to the cultivation of mind, intellect, emotion and sensual awareness. These faculties of mind are the building blocks of thought and behaviour.
Therefore a culture must catalyse music, art and ritual with philosophical poise, towards stimulating and refining human expression.
According to this definition, hip hop and its art-forms should constitute a Culture which is led by an 'Intelligent Movement' intent of the raising of consciousness and the evoking of innate wisdom, which education should also aid us in remembering.
There are times when this ancient African Wisdom tradition has been embodied in the contemporary culture of the African Diaspora in The Americas and Europe, even in situations and circumstances where the impositions contain people in a state of poverty.
But true artists do not simply reflect the world around them, they engage the external world in an intimate dialogue with the inner-world, challenging the nature of reality and time and bringing, from within themselves, visions which can be articulated to affect the world without.
The music and cultural traditions of the African-Diaspora have contained this vitality and actualised the best of its collective ancestral culture to bring inspiration to contemporary conditions which challenge the human experience.
With all this being said, this Intelligent Movement has not been televised for quite a while. Their voices are drowned out by the bling and bang of stylised poverty, where mental slavery is transformed into a fetish to feed the appetite of the salivating recipients of their issues.
Through them, black music, culture and arts and (indeed, black people), represent the agencies of vice, where ritual enactments of sex and violence perform a bacchanalian feast actualising Dionysian potential.
Out of the poetics of degeneration emerges an Intelligent Movement which is constantly involving, a movement that is striving to once again touch on the virtues and values of an ancient tradition which can speak to our contemporary times.
And it is to this Intelligent Movement, within hip hop, street art-forms and youth culture that we need to look to for the transmutation and metamorphosis of the maddening stream of bread and circuses, to speak to the ills within ourselves and within society and provide the tonic, the solutions to our current problems and also to evoke and invoke from within us the actualisation of our highest potential as human beings.
We Are The People who must not be overcome by fear, rage and anger, but must bring light into the darkness. This light is not from the establishment or the ivory towers, but from the heart and soul of hip hop and street culture, articulated through our music, culture and art.
I hope and trust that you will find in this Street Summer season, insights that may lead to knowledge, wisdom and understanding that can speak to our moment of crisis and find from the grit and grime the fertile soil from which flowers will grow.
NB: The views and content of the Street Summer season are not representative of PGR's opinions or worldview and he cannot be held responsible for the content of the whole season.
