by BAR columnist michael hureaux perez
“KRS One gave the best definition when he said rap is something you do, hip hop is something you live,” says Alonzo Ybarra, a prime mover in Seattle’s chapter of the Zulu Nation. “ Ybarra is determined to chart a positive course for the chapter, but he’s realistic about hip hop’s vulnerabilities. “I think rap in general has been commercialized, it’s probably one of the easiest cultural art forms to take on, certainly you don’t have to be in particularly great shape to think that you can rap, you certainly don’t have to be in very good mental condition to make words rhyme, so it’s no wonder that, very often in pretty much any community you go to in the United States, you’ll go out and hear rot as rap.”
Eshu’s blues: Zulu Nation in Seattle Takes a Big Step Forward
by BAR columnist michael hureaux perez
“The positive images and messages of hip hop don’t all reach the mainstream, they’re not pushed through the media, and they’re not celebrated by the mass culture at all.”
Somewhere it’s been observed that when an empire begins to collapse, we can expect alchemy to appear in its ghettos. The creation of light within leaden experience rings true for most urban youth in this country – and internationally, for that matter – in the cultural forms created by Hip Hop DJs, MCs, Graffiti Writers and B-Boys. If anyone ever knew about making a way out of no way, it was DJ Kool Herc, Afrika Bambaataa, Grandmaster Flash and the many others who created Hip Hop in the rubble of the South Bronx thirty years ago.
The longtime energetic pioneers and associates of this cultural trend make up a national unity of locals, or chapters that call themselves the Universal Zulu Nation, which, loosely speaking, is an assembly of street artists who have forever talked the gospel of personal discovery and autonomy over outward political organization as the key to cultural renewal. Whatever roles they openly take on as the bankster empire moves towards its penultimate savagery, Hip Hop artists are and will be some of the more important urban leaders to emerge in the coming period – even when they don’t personally identify themselves as such. Our times will require the leadership and wisdom of people who know how to make a way out of no way.
“Alonzo Ybarra, or Big Zo, as he is known to his compatriots, was a central organizer of the Hip Hop Summit.”
Several weeks ago, the Zulu chapter in Seattle (206 Zulu) hosted a national Hip-Hop summit, which involved the energies of local Hip Hop artists and a roster of legends in the disciplines of Hip Hop artistry; dance, poetry, scratching and visual art. Ambitious in scope as a promotional venture, the summit also aimed to offer youth in Seattle and the King Country region a celebration of a way of life that seeks to rise above the contradictions of inner city experience. Alonzo Ybarra, or Big Zo, as he is known to his compatriots, was a central organizer of the Summit. He spent a little time one afternoon answering a few questions about the broader aims of the Zulu effort. This is part one of an interview that will run in two parts.
mhp: Tell us about Zulu Nation in Seattle.
Ybarra: The Zulu Nation has been around for 35 years, and it has always had a mission. The mission has changed a bit over that time, but basically its components are to protect the integrity of Hip Hop as a culture, one that embraces peace, unity, and having fun as a way of encouraging people to change negative into positive. So today you can find Zulu Nation chapters in Poland, Korea, Japan, the UK, and all over the United States. We were founded here about five years ago by King Khazm and his whole idea was to mobilize like minded hip hop artists and activists and supporters to accomplish a positive image of hip hop in the Seattle community. Traditionally, chapters celebrate anniversaries. We decided to act, bring the chapter together, remind people that we’re here. And so this fifth year anniversary, we decided to really step it up, push as far as we possibly could, to walk the ledge so to speak, in terms of organizing this event.
“You can find Zulu Nation chapters in Poland, Korea, Japan, the UK, and all over the United States.”
mhp: This next question is pretty pedestrian, but it ties into this cultural integrity piece you mentioned. A lot of people don’t understand the difference between rap music and hip hop as a culture. Since you’ve already defined the defense or celebration of hip hop as a culture as part of the mission of Zulu Nation, could you take a second and break that down?
Ybarra: KRS One gave the best definition when he said rap is something you do, hip hop is something you live. There might be a whole lot of brothers out there writing lyrics on a lined pad who write some rhymes and spit them out on a tape recorder to a beat and call themselves rappers, but who have no ties or experience in hip hop culture. And how that might come out, for example, is in making a record that comes out making music that when it’s listened to, could be perceived as anti-human, negative, celebrating the worst in humanity, celebrating anti-social behavior and murder. Which is not to say that gangsta rap, as we now know it, stands completely outside of hip hop, it knew its foundations in hip hop. But the whole point of gangsta rap in the eighties and nineties, was to document the realties of life on the street, don’t do as we say we’re doing; there’s sort of a moral lesson involved in it.
I think rap in general has been commercialized, it’s probably one of the easiest cultural art forms to take on, certainly you don’t have to be in particularly great shape to think that you can rap, you certainly don’t have to be in very good mental condition to make words rhyme, so it’s no wonder that, very often in pretty much any community you go to in the United States, you’ll go out and hear rot as rap. But hip hop as a culture, the rapper mcs, tend to be bound by a love for the culture, they come from all walks of life, they represent different perspectives, their music is very diverse, there’s no pigeon holing of things, everyone tends to fall back on an idea of respect. You definitely can tell an mc who has been proud of the culture because they’re multi-talented, they are more than just rappers in the studio, they are performers, they can spontaneously move a crowd, they can become the middle man between the dj and the crowd at a party, which elevates the enjoyment of everyone at a party, they are positive people.
“
You can find Zulu Nation chapters in Poland, Korea, Japan, the UK, and all over the United States.”
mhp: Maybe you’ll unpack this business of what the “positive” is for me a little more now. I have some small exposure to hip hop culture, and don’t know anything about it really, but what I have seen from some of the guys I’ve seen up in this over the last 15, 16 years is that it contains pretty universal elements, a few taken from what used to be called “secret societies,” so this business of the positive: is that a spiritual feature, is there a political philosophy beyond the party or celebration? Could you be called a secret society, or are you more open than that?
Ybarra: There are certain actions that are kept private for good reasons, but I wouldn’t say that we fall into the category at all of a secret society because what we strive to do is be out in front of the public doing good things. So it seems to me that if you were a secret society, you’d be striving not to be seen so much. There might be times when we have to have members-only meetings, that doesn’t mean that it’s a secret society, but here in Seattle, we have a monthly meeting, and that meeting is always kept open to the public. It’s no big problem. So if anyone wants to come into the Zulu Chapter, bring issues to the forefront, maybe sometimes people will come to our meetings to propose that we get involved in something they’re doing, something to that effect, and we’ll work with them.
But, I think there are lessons that anyone can go too far, for example, there are lessons that we call public lessons and there are others that people can find that are passed down from the beginning, by the founders of the Zulu Nation, that are messages to the followers to keep quiet, it’s almost like parables or something, I guess the best way to describe those lessons are as words of wisdom, once you understand them, they should reinforce the goodness, which is what it’s all about. The idea would be that there are some people in the chapter, there’s a lot of people in hip hop in general who didn’t necessarily get the best educational opportunities, so the quieter elements of the chapter are there to give people a chance to stop and reflect, think a little about the bigger human ideas, to contemplate larger concepts. You can call this spiritual, you can call it political (laughs), I definitely don’t like to pigeonhole it.
“What we’re focused on the most is trying to figure out how to make this chapter accountable to the community.”
It means different things to different people, but it’s universal, meaning there’s no dominant religious angle involved. There’s no doubt if you do research you’ll find there are a lot of people at the forefront, putting a lot of political and spiritual stuff together, and they share that, but I don’t spend as much time focusing on that sort of thing as I do focusing on what we do here in Seattle. And what we’re focused on the most is trying to figure out how to make this chapter accountable to the community, and as active as possible without burning ourselves out doing community service.
mhp: As regards community service, once of the concerns you and I have spoken about recently as you and your folks have been organizing this summit has been the emergence of the small gang war that was going on here for a few weeks. At one point, you were speaking of the potential of hip hop culture in intervention with youth violence. Is that one of the things that was brought to the table?
Ybarra: Well, you know, in commercial music, one of the ideas that is pushed through the mass media, commercial media, violence, anti-social behavior is glorified, there’s definitely a lot of negative energies being pushed upon young people. There’s got to be a reason for this, I mean, obviously you can’t blame any one thing, you can’t blame just the media or just music for the way young people behave, it’s just as much the fault of a situation wherein people are having to live with poverty, there’s no jobs, obviously these things play a part in the escalation of violence. And a lot of people in this town would like to tie this mess to hip hop. In fact, it has nothing to do with hip hop. If a kid decides to kill a kid, it has very little or nothing to do with hip hop.Anything from mental illness, completely falling off the planet emotionally and psyche wise, these things are real, and the last thing a lot of kids like this are thinking about is a rap song.
“If a kid decides to kill a kid, it has very little or nothing to do with hip hop.”
At the same time, kids who join a gang, or aim to do violence, they’re going down a path. And as they’re going down that path, they encounter music and images that celebrate that path. Whereas, the positive images and messages of hip hop don’t all reach the mainstream, they’re not pushed through the media, and they’re not celebrated by the mass culture at all. There are various reasons for that, I think most of it has to do with, at some point corporate America decided they didn’t want to support positive images of black people, people who lean to celebration of the worst sides of gangsta rap, celebration of negativity just to be negative.
But here in Seattle, what the Zulus wanted to do was set positive examples, the best things we can do and bring to this town with its small growing music scene. But there’s not enough people in this town, in this city, in this government, in our school system, supporting the possibility that positive hip hop can exist. So we took it upon ourselves to put together a demonstration of what we can do without any direct support from these institutions. We wanted to make the event free We had to take it upon ourselves to fundraise, to put together a weekend of activities all rooted in hip hop culture and keep it free, so that wide numbers of youth could come in and experience that kind of energy.
“At some point corporate America decided they didn’t want to support positive images of black people.”
mhp: Who did come forward to support you all? Was there anybody at all from media, were there corporate sponsors of any kind, what about labor or community organizations?
Ybarra: We had a couple of corporate donors, some of whom wanted it to be kept on the quiet, as they didn’t think it fit their marketing, but we didn’t care, just the fact that they were giving us money was a good thing. We got fairly good support from the city, indirectly, in that we were part of Festival Sundiata so we were approached by some folks from Festival Sundiata, which is a large black cultural festival in Seattle. But I don’t know that we got any support from the city directly. A lot of persons, small businesses that have connections to hip hop came out for us, but no, I wouldn’t say we got any union or labor support, though we did put some calls early on out there.
mhp: I sent a few emails out myself asking for support of the hip hop summit effort from factions in black organized labor, one of which included the press package you all created, to the local leadership of the A. Phillip Randolph Institute in the King County Labor Council, but I got no replies or acknowledgement from anyone in APRI and you certainly didn’t. Did you get any support from James Bible of the NAACP or the Urban League?
Ybarra: No, not from James or the NAACP – though James has been to some of our events in the past and in fairness to the NAACP, they were working on a big legal thing in town much of the time we were preparing. The Urban League, no. Labor unions, no. On the flip side, I suppose we could have been more aggressive in seeking that kind of support, but we had to execute this thing, and we didn’t have time to do too much lobbying. We had a pretty nice press package that we sent out that went out all over, but that was pretty much all we could do to reach as many people as possible in the short time we had.
(End of part one)
BAR columnist michael hureaux perez is a writer, musician and teacher who lives in southwest Seattle, Washington. He is a longtime contributor to small and alternative presses around the country and performs his work frequently. Email to: [email protected]