Philosophy of hip hop
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Report on Film ‘From Mambo to Hip Hop’ ‘From Mambo to Hip-Hop: A South Bronx Tale’ is an hour long documentary that narrates a story about the inventive life of the South Bronx, starting with the Puerto Rican immigration and the acceptance of Cuban rhythms to form the New York salsa resonance; enduring with the fires that damaged the neighborhood, but not the innovative spirit of its inhabitants; accounting the ascending of hip-hop from the ruins; and finishing with reflections on the influence of the neighborhood’s songs to make sure that the endurance of a number of generations of its people, and, in the course, take the world’s pop customs by storm. ‘From Mambo to Hip-Hop’ dances all the way through the account of a region that took care of two musical movements: the mambo that developed into salsa and the hip-hop that cropped up from the most distressed days of the South Bronx. Created by Steve Zeitlin and Elena Martinez , who are principals in the New York ‘folklore group City Lore’, and directed by Henry Chalfant, who is a longtime speaker of the South Bronx who worked together on a documentary from the early 1980’s “Style Wars,” “From Mambo” dashes by, driven by tempo that varies through the decades. Mambo and hip-hop are the type of dissolving pot experience that New York stirs and heats. Their ancestry is African, refracted through the Caribbean and the town. In their early stages styles also replicated, and disregarded, the ghetto rank and economic worsening of the South Bronx. Mambo was instinctive, refined music that came out after the World War II as Cuban techniques were singled out by Puerto Ricans who blended with jazz musicians, and the Bronx turned into a night life Mecca. The revolutionary big band headed by Machito was labeled the Afro-Cubans, displaying the fact that its musical group was black, and it operated ideas with the era’s beboppers. The documentary has jubilant vintage sections from the 1950’s mambos hey days with bands and particularly dancers who wobbled everything from head to toe whereas timbales and conga drums crackled with Cuban beats and New York violent behavior. A younger invention of musicians, now elders, such as Ray Barretto and Eddie Palmieri and who are interrogated, met live stickball and grew up on mambo, going on to restructure and hone it into salsa. “Salsa could have only occurred in New York and in a place such as the Bronx since the multiplicity of the individuals that were playing it,” as explained by Willie Colón, who is the bandleader and has become a political person in the Bronx. “It’s a reconciliation and inclusion of all the items that we are here, and the Bronx, and the harmony that we made together. We not only required making melody; we had an objective. We sought to express a political and social message, and salsa was very significant for that since it was our voice.” But the elevating expectations of Latinos met desert and worse in the Bronx. The documentary illustrates gang fights, burned down building and other factors such as the Cross Bronx thruway, which destroyed and separated neighborhoods that made the South Bronx a sign of urban wreck in the 1970’s. But in the rubble, hip-hop was being formed. Public neglected buildings and parks were changed into clubs as gang’s sublimated wreck into fight of words and break dance contests. Hip-hop was not made by Latinos. The documentary fails to take into account the strong Jamaican constituent in early hip-hop, but they still remained in the neighborhoods, and they acquired to it rapidly. Conga drumbeats drives break dancers into action, some of them revitalizing the most ostentatious moves of the previous mambo dancers. Even when a lot of the South Bronx was ruins, Afro-Latin coalitions were made and intellectual memory remained strong. From our readings, we learn that culture is a people’s entire way of life. It symbolizes the whole assembly of practices, institutions and attitudes that defines a rational way of living. Communities fight to build and sustain this coherence as the members work to characteristically satisfy aspirations of human to. For instance beauty, order and meaningfulness. Therefore, culture consists of the food that we take and the manner in which we eat them, the holidays that we observe, the decorations we wear on those days, and the political and religious stories that we tell as well as the songs we value. Hip hop is also a culture in this sense, built up just like any other culture, of many different but interconnected social practices. Nevertheless, hip hop has not always been viewed this way. From our readings we also see that hip hop mostly came from brown and black urban populations just like majority of the pundits and the policy makers were deciding that these populations were pathological indications of normal communities. If we were to look at this from a ‘normal’ perspective, the citizens of south Bronx were not conferring meaning on their surroundings and experiences (Smith, 2000). They were not finding significance and joy in their lives by creating new communicative practices. The pioneers of hip hop were not using all that was at their disposal that had been provided by the technological shifts. They were not creating new kinds of lyrics and poetry.

References
Smith, D. (2000). The birth of tragedy from the spirit of music. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
Taylor, P. (2013). Race: a philosophical introduction. Cambridge: Polity.
Taylor, P. (2015). Black Is Beautiful A Philosophy of Black Aesthetics. City: Blackwell Pub.