Fluent Essays

The Hip Hop Wars Id like you to think critically about how the authors (Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and Tricia Rose) approach writing the history of hip hop and answer the following questions.   · What historical facts do they rely on to write this history? · What are the political stakes of hip hop, according to each author? · What do the two pieces share in common?  Readings & Film Film link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r3-7Y0xG89Q Readings post file: Article One and Article Two Both of our authors are professors, so after youve named them initially, you can either call them Dr. Gates, Jr. or Dr. Rose (or Professor instead of Dr.) Also, I am not asking you to pit these two scholarly writings against one another or to declare one easier to read than the other, etc. Its not necessarily a compare and contrast (though a little bit of that is fine). Im asking you to be observant of their writing styles and each writers overall approach to chronicling the history of hip hop. Post format · Your first post will be an answer to my discussion question(s). It should be a minimum of two paragraphs. · It’s fine if your initial post is longer than two paragraphs, but please make sure you’ve thought about and answered the question in the most thorough way possible. · Please include at least a 2-3 quotes from the texts in your first post (as evidence for whatever claims you make). · Use MLA style for all citations. I pay attention to whether or not youre making correct references to authors, etc. Copyright © 2008 by Tricia Rose Published by Basic Books, A Member of the Perseus Books Group All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. For information, address BasicCivitas Books, 387 Park Avenue South, New York, NY 10016-8810. Books published by BasicCivitas are available at special discounts for bulk purchases in the United States by corporations, institutions, and other organizations. For more infor- mation, please contact the Special Markets Department at the Perseus Books Group, 2300 Chestnut Street, Suite 200, Philadelphia, PA 19103, or call (SOO) 810-4145, ext. 5000, or e-mail [email protected] Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Rose, Tricia. The hip hop wars: what we talk about when we talk about hip hop / Tricia Rose. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-465-00897-1 (alk. paper) 1. Hip-hop-Social aspects- United States. 2. Rap (Music) - Social aspects- United States. 3. Social change-United States. 4. Subculture-United States. 5. African Americans-Social conditions. 6. United States-Social conditions. 1. Title. HN59.2.R682008 305.S9607301732-dc22 10987654321 2008031637 THE HIP HOP WARS What We Talk About When We Talk About Hip Hop - and Why It Matters TRICIAROSE 8 CIVITAS ilCX)KS A Member of the Perseus Books Group New York Introduction Id like to say to all the industry people out there that control what we call hip hop, Id like for people to put more of an effort to make hip hop the culture of music that it was, instead of the culture of violence that it is right now. Theres a lot of people that put in a lot of time, you know the break-dancers, the graf- fiti artists, theres people rapping all over the world . ... All my life Ive been into hip hop, and it should mean more than just somebody standing on the corner selling dope-I mean that mayor may not have its place too because its there, but Im just saying-I aint never shot nobody, I aint never stabbed nobody, Im forty-five years old and I aint got no criminal record, you know what I mean? The only thing I ever did was be about my music. So I mean, so, while were teaching people what it is about life in the ghetto, then we should be teaching people about what it is about life in the ghetto, me trying to grow up and to come up out of the ghetto. And we need every- bodys help out there to make that happen. -Melle Mel, lead rapper of and main songwriter for the seminal rap group Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five, in an acceptance speech during the groups induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, March 2007 H IP HOP IS IN A TERRIBLE CRISIS. Although its overall fortunes have risen sharply, the most commercially promoted and fi- nancially successful hip hop-what has dominated mass-media out- lets such as television, film, radio, and recording industries for a dozen years or so-has increasingly become a playground for carica- tures of black gangstas, pimps, and hoes. Hyper-sexism has increased 1 2 THE HIP HOP WARS dramatically, and homophobia along with distorted, antisocial, self- destructive, and violent portraits of black masculinity have become raps calling cards. Relying on an ever-narrowing range of images and themes, this commercial juggernaut has played a central role in the near-depletion of what was once a vibrant, diverse, and complex pop- ular genre, wringing it dry by pandering to Americas racist and sexist lowest common denominator. This scenario differs vastly from the wide range of core images, at- titudes, and icons that defined hip hop during its earlier years of pub- lic visibility. In the 1980s, when raps commercial value began to develop steam, gangsta rappers were only part of a much larger iconic tapestry. There were many varieties of equally positioned styles of rap-gangsta as well as party, political, afrocentric, and avant-garde, each with multiple substyles as well. However, not only were many styles of rap driven out of the corporate-promoted main- stream, but since the middle to late 1990s, the social, artistic, and po- litical significance of figures like the gangsta and street hustler substantially devolved into apolitical, simple-minded, almost comic stereotypes. Indeed, by the late 1990s, most of the affirming, creative stories and characters that had stood at the defining core of hip hop had been gutted. To use a hip hop metaphor, they were driven un- derground, buried, and left to be dug up only by the most deeply in- vested fans and artists. Gangstas, hustlers, street crimes, and vernacular sexual insults (e.g., calling black women hoes) were part of hip hops storytelling long before the record industry really got the hang of promoting rap music. Gangstas and hustlers were not invented out of whole cloth by corpo- rate executives: Prior to the ascendance of corporate mainstream hip hop, these figures were more complex and ambivalent. A few were in- teresting social critics. Some early West Coast gangsta rappers- N.W.A., and W.C. and the Maad Circle, for example-featured stories that emphasized being trapped by gang life and spoke about why street crime had become a line of work in the context of chronic black joblessness. Thwarted desires for safe communities and meaningful work were often embedded in street hustling tales. Even- Introduction 3 tually, though, the occasional featuring of complicated gangstas, hus- tlers, and hoes gave way to a tidal wave of far more simplistic, dispro- portionately celebratory, and destructive renderings of these characters. Hip hop has become buried by these figures and the life associated with them. This trend is so significant that if the late Tupac Shakur were a newly signed artist today, I believe hed likely be considered a socially conscious rapper and thus relegated to the margins of the commer- cial hip hop field. Tupac (who despite his death in 1996 remains one of hip hops most visible and highly regarded gangsta rappers) might even be thought of as too political and too soft. Even as he ex- pressed his well-known commitment to thug life, his rhymes are perhaps too thoughtful for mainstream radio friendly hip hop as it has evolved since his death. This consolidation and dumbing down of hip hops imagery and storytelling took hold rather quickly in the middle to late 1990s and reached a peak in the early 2000s. The hyper-gangsta-ization of the music and imagery directly parallels hip hops sales ascendance into the mainstream record and radio industry. In the early to middle 1990s, following the meteoric rise of West Coast hip hop music pro- ducer Dr. Dre and of N.W.A., widely considered a seminal gangsta rap group, West Coast gangsta rap solidified and expanded the al- ready well-represented street criminal icons-thug, hustler, gangster, and pimp-in a musically compelling way. This grab bag of street criminal figures soon became the most powerful and, to some, the most authentic spokesmen for hip hop and, then, for black youth generally. For the wider audience in America, which relies on mainstream outlets for leaming about and participating in commercially distrib- uted pop culture, hip hop has become a breeding ground for the most explicitly exploitative and increasingly one-dimensional narratives of black ghetto life. The gangsta life and all its attendant violence, crimi- nality, sexual deviance, and misogyny have, over the last decade es- pecially, stood at the heart of what appeared to be ever-increasing hip hop record sales. Between 1990 and 1998, the Recording Industry 4 THE HIP HOP WARS Association of America (RIM) reported that rap captured, on average, 9-10 percent of music sales in the United States. This figure in- creased to 12.9 percent in 2000, peaked at 13.8 percent in 2002, and hovered between 12 and 13 percent through 2005. To put the impor- tance of this nearly 40 percent increase in rap/hip hop sales into con- text, note that during the 2000-2005 period, other genres, including rock, country, and pop, saw decreases in their market percentage. The rise in rap/hip hop was driven primarily by the sale of images and sto- ries of black ghetto life to white youth: According to Mediamark Re- search Inc., increasing numbers of whites began buying hip hop at this point. Indeed, between 1995 and 2001, whites comprised 70-75 percent of the hip hop customer base-a figure considered to have re- mained broadly constant to this day. j I am not suggesting that all commercial hip hop fits this descrip- tion, nor do I think that there is no meaningful content in commer- cial hip hop. I am also not suggesting that commercially successful gangsta-style artists such as Jay-Z, Ludacris, 50 Cent, T.I., and Snoop Dogg lack talent. It is, in fact, rappers lyrical and performative tal- ents and the compelling music that frames their rhymes-supported by heavy corporate promotion-that make this seduction so powerful and disturbing. They and many others whose careers are based on these hip hop images are quite talented in different ways: musically, lyrically, stylistically, and as entrepreneurs. The problems facing commercial hip hop today are not caused by individual rappers alone; if we focus on merely one rapper, one song, or one video for its sexist or gangsta-inspired images we miss the forest for the trees. Rather, this is about the larger and more significant trend that has come to define commercial hip hop as a whole: The trinity of com- mercial hip hop-the black gangsta, pimp, and ho-has been pro- moted and accepted to the point where it now dominates the genres storytelling worldview. The expanded commercial space of these three street icons has had a profound impact on both the direction of the music and the conversation about hip hop-a conversation that has never been just Introduction 5 about hip hop. On the one hand, the increased profitability of the gangsta-pimp-ho trinity has inflamed already riled critics who per- ceive hip hop as the cause of many social ills; but, on the other, it has encouraged embattled defenders to tout hip hops organic connec- tion to black youth and to venerate its market successes as examples of pulling oneself up by the bootstraps. The hyperbolic and polarized public conversation about hip hop that has emerged over the past decade discourages progressive and nuanced consumption, participa- tion, and critique, thereby contributing to the very crisis that is facing hip hop. Even more important, this conversation has become a pow- erful vehicle for the channeling of broader public discussion about race, class, and the value of black cultures role in society. Debates about hip hop have become a means for defining poor, young black people and thus for interpreting the context and reasons for their clearly disadvantaged lives. This is what we talk about when we talk about hip hop. The State of the Conversation on Hip Hop The excessive blame leveled at hip hop is astonishing in its refusal to consider the culpability of the larger social and political context. To many hot-headed critics of hip hop, structural forms of deep racism, corporate influences, and the long-term effects of economic, social, and political disempowerment are not meaningfully related to rap- pers alienated, angry stories about life in the ghetto; rather, they are seen as proof that black behavior creates ghetto conditions. So decades of urban racial discrimination (the reason black ghettos exist in the first place), in every significant arena - housing, education, jobs, social services-in every city with a significant black popula- tion, simply disappear from view. In fact, many conservative critics of hip hop refuse to acknowledge that the ghetto is a systematic matrix of racial, spatial, and class discrimination that has defined black city life since the first half of the twentieth century, when the Great Black Migration dramatically reshaped Americas cities. For some, hip hop 6 THE HIP HOP WARS itself is a black-created problem that promotes unsafe sex and repre- sents sexual amorality, infects our culture and society, advocates crime and criminality, and reflects black cultural dysfunction and a culture of poverty. As hip hops conservative critics would have it, hip hop is primarily responsible for every decline and crisis world- wide except the war in Iraq and global warming. The defenses are equally jaw-dropping. For some, all expression in commercialized hip hop, despite its heavy manipulation by the record industry, is the unadulterated truth and literal personal ex- perience of fill-in-the-blank rapper; it reflects reality in the ghetto; its lyrics are the result of poverty itselrz And my favorite, the most ag- gravating defense of commercial hip hops fixation on demeaning black women for sport- well, there are bitches and hoes. What do fans, artists, and writers mean when they defend an escalating, highly visible, and extensive form of misogyny against black women by claiming that there are bitches and hoes? And how have they gotten away with this level of hateful labeling of black women for so long? The big media outlets that shape this conversation, such as TimelWarner, News Corporation, Bertelsmann, General Electric, and Viacom, do not frame hip hops stories in ways that allow for a serious treatment of sexism, racism, corporate power, and the real historical forces that have created ghettos. When well-informed, progressive people do get invited to appear on news and public af- fairs programs, they wind up being pushed into either pro or con positions-and as a result, the complexity of what they have to say to one side or the other is reduced. Although the immaturity of beef (conflict between rappers for media attention and street credibility) is generally considered a hip hop phenomenon, it actu- ally mirrors much of the larger mainstream medias approach to is- sues of conflict and disagreement. Developing a thoughtful, serious, and educated position in this climate is no easy task, since most participants defend or attack the music - and, by extension, young black people-with a fervor usually reserved for religion and patriotism. Introduction 7 Why We Should Care About Hip Hop The inability to sustain either a hard-hitting, progressive critique of hip hops deep flaws or an appreciation for its extraordinary gifts is a real problem, with potentially serious effects that ripple far beyond the record industry and mass-media corporate balance sheets. We have the opportunity to use the current state of commercial hip hop as a catalyst to think with more care about the terms of cross-racial exchanges and the role of black culture in a mass-mediated world. Indeed, we should be asking larger questions about how hip hops commercial trinity of the gangsta, pimp, and ho relates to American culture more generally. But, instead, we have allowed hip hop to be perceived by its steadfast defenders as a whipping boy (unfairly beaten for all things wrong with American society and blamed as a gateway to continued excessive criticisms of black peoples behavior) and charged by its critics as societys career criminal (responsible for myriad social ills and finally being caught and brought to trial). Npt much beyond exhaustion, limited, and one-sided vicious critique, and nearly blind defense is possible in this context. Very little honest and self-reflective vision can emerge from between this rock and hard place. Why should we care about hip hop and how should we talk about it? Serial killer, whipping boy, whatever, right? Its just entertain- ment-it generates good ratings and makes money for rappers and the sputtering record industry, but it doesnt matter beyond that. Or does it? In fact, it matters a great deal, even for those who dont listen to or enjoy the music itself. Debates about hip hop stand in for dis- cussion of significant social issues related to race, class, sexism, and black culture. Hip hops commercial trinity has become the fuel that propels public criticism of young black people. According to some critics, if we just got rid of hip hop and the bad behavior it supports (so the argument goes), theyd all do better in school, and struc- turally created racism and disadvantage would disappear like vapor. This hyper-behavioralism-an approach that overemphasizes indi- vidual action and underestimates the impact of institutionalized 8 THE HIP HOP WARS forms of racial and class discrimination - feeds the very systematic discrimination it pretends isnt a factor at all. The public debates about hip hop have also become a convenient means by which to avoid the larger, more entrenched realities of sex- ism, homophobia, and gender inequality in U.S. society. By talking about these issues almost exclusively in the context of hip hop, people who wouldnt otherwise dare to talk about sexism, womens rights, homophobia, or the visual and cultural exploitation of women for corporate profit insinuate that hip hop itself is sexist and homo- phobic and openly criticize it for being so. Its as if black teenagers have smuggled sexism and homophobia into American culture, bringing them in like unauthorized imports. This conversation about the state of hip hop matters for another reason as well: We have arrived at a landmark moment in modern culture when a solid segment (if not a majority) of an entire gener- ation of African-American youth understands itself as defined pri- marily by a musical, cultural form. Despite the depth of young black peoples love of the blues, jazz, and R&B throughout various periods in the twentieth century, no generation has ever dubbed it- self the R&B generation or the jazz generation, thereby tether- ing its members to all things (good and bad) that might be associated with the music. Yet young people have limited their cre- ative possibilities, as well as their personal identities, to the perime- ters established by the genre of hip hop. No black musical form before hip hop-no matter how much it crossed over into main- stream American culture-ever attracted the level of corporate at- tention and mainstream media visibility, control, and intervention that characterizes hip hop today. It is now extremely common for hip hop fans of all racial and ethnic backgrounds, especially black fans, to consider themselves more than fans. Theyre people who live and breathe hip hop every day. This level of single-minded investment, forged in the context of sustained blanket attacks on hip hop music and culture, makes ob- jective critique nearly impossible. Of course, this investment is itself partly a response to the deep level of societal disregard that so many Introduction 9 young, poor minority kids experience. As Jay-Z says in the remixed version ofTalib Kwelis Get By, Why listen to a system that never listens to me? For anyone who feels this way about anything (reli- gion, patriotism, revolution, etc.), critical self-reflection is hard to come by. The more under attack one feels, the greater the refusal to render self-critique is likely to be. But such fervor is also the result of market manipulation that fuels exaggerated brand loyalty and con- fuses it with black radicalism by forging bonds to corporate hip hop icons who appear to be keeping it real and representing the hood. In turn, the near-blind loyalty of hip hop fans is exploited by those who have pimped hip hop out to the highest bidder. Members of the hip hop generation are now facing the greatest media machinery and most veiled forms of racial, economic, sexual, and gender rhetoric in modern history; they need the sharpest critical tools to survive and thrive. Another reason this conversation is important is that the percep- tions we have about hip hop-what it is, why it is the way it is-have been used as evidence against poor urban black communities them- selves. Using hip hop as proof of black peoples culpability for their circumstances undermines decades of solid and significant research on the larger structural forces that have plagued black urban commu- nities. The legacy of the systemic destruction of working-class and poor Mrican-American communities has reached a tragic new low in the past thirty years. Since the early 1980s, this history has been rewritten, eclipsed by the idea that black people and their culture (a term that is fre- quently used when behavior should be) are the cause of their condition and status. Over the last three decades, the public conver- sation has decidedly moved toward an easy acceptance of black ghetto existence and the belief that black people themselves are re- sponsible for creating ghettos and for choosing to live in them, thus absolving the most powerful segments of society from any responsi- bility in the creation and maintenance of them. Those who deny the legacy of systematic racism or refuse to connect the worst of what hip hop expresses to this history and its devastating effects on black 10 THE HIP HOP WARS community are leveling unacceptable and racist attacks on black people. The generalized hostility against hip hop impinges on the inter- pretation of other visible forms of black youth culture. For instance, black NBA players are tainted as a group for being part of the hip hop generation stylistically, no matter their personal actions. The few who have committed violent or criminal acts prove the whole lot of them worthy of attack. In a league that has mostly black players and mostly white fans, this becomes a racially charged (and racially gen- erated) revenue problem. Such group tainting does not occur among white athletes or fans. The National Hockey League, a league that is predominantly white (in terms of both fans and players) and experi- ences far more incidents of game-related violence (they take time- outs to brawl!) is rarely described as problematically violent. Indeed, no matter how many individual white men get in trouble with the law, white men as a group are not labeled a cultural problem. At a more local level, hip hop gear, while considered tame-even cute- on middle-class white wearers, is seen as threatening on black and brown youth, who cant afford not to affiliate with hip hop style if they are going to have any generational credibility. In short, the conversation about hip hop matters a great deal. Our cultural perceptions and associations have been harmful to black working-class and poor youth-the most vulnerable among us. The polarized conversation also provokes the increasing generation gap in the black community-an age gap that, in past eras, was trumped by cross-generational racial solidarity. But I wonder, too, if the effects of corporate consolidation-and of the new generational and genre- segregated market-niche strategies that dismantled the multigenera- tional and cross-genre formats that defined black radio in the past-have exaggerated, if not manufactured, the development of a contentious generational divide in the black community. Who is hurt by our misunderstandings of hip hop? Surely, all of American society is negatively affected by both the antagonism lev- eled against it and the direction that commercial hip hop has taken. If we continue to talk about black people and race generally in near- Introduction 11 parodic terms, our nation will not overcome its racial Achilles heel; the American democratic promise, as yet unfulfilled, will end up an irreparable, broken covenant. The current state of conversation about hip hop sets destructive and illiterate terms for cross-racial community building. The people most injured by the fraught, hos- tile, and destructive state of this conversation are those who most need a healthy, honest, vibrant (not sterile and repressed) cultural space: young, poor, and working-class African-American boys and girls, men and women-the generation that comprises the future of the black community. They have the biggest stake in the conversa- tion, and they get the shortest end of the stick in it. In this climate, young people have few visible and compassionate yet unflinchingly honest places to turn to for a meaningful apprecia- tion and critique of the youth culture in which they are so invested. The attacks on black youth through hip hop maintain economic and racial injustice. Many working-class and poor black young people have come up in black urban communities that have been disman- tled by decades-long legacies of policy-driven devastation of such communities. This devastation takes many forms, including urban and federal retreat from affordable housing, undermining of anti- discrimination laws that were designed to end structural racism, po- lice targeting, racially motivated escalations of imprisonment, and re- ductions in support for what are still mostly segregated and deeply unequal public schools. Very little of this history is common knowl- edge, and critics avoid serious discussion of these factors, focusing in- stead on rappers and the ghettos they supposedly represent. The defenses of hip hop are also destructive. The same media that pump commercial hip hop 2417 fail to take the time to expose the crucial contexts of post-civil rights era ghetto segregation for hip hops development. Rappers and industry moguls who profit enormously from hip hops gangsta-pimp-ho trinity defend their empires purport- edly in the interests of black youth. The constant excuses made about sexism, violence, and homophobia in hip hop are not just defenses of black people via hip hop; they are hurtful to black people. Corporate media outlets empower these businessmen-rappers, underpromote 12 THE HIP HOP WARS the more sophisticated rhymes, and play down the vigorous and well- informed analysis and criticism. Many fans consume lopsided tales of black ghetto life with little knowledge about the historical creation of the ghetto; some think the ghetto equals black culture. These deci- sions not only dumb down the music but minimize fan knowledge and constrain the conversation as a whole. The public conversation is both an engine for and a product of the current state of commercial hip hop. Driven by one-dimensional sound bites from the polarized camps-a format designed to perpet- uate a meaningless and imbalanced form of presenting both sides - this conversation is not only contributing to the demise of hip hop but has also impoverished our ability to talk successfully about race and about the role of popular culture, mass media, and corporate conglomerates in defining-and confining-our creative expressiOns. Versions of what has happened to hip hop that include both the ways that hip hop reflects black and brown lived experience and cre- ativity and represents market and racial manipulation have been, thus far, destined for media obscurity. It is as if the real sport of our conversation about hip hop is mutual denial and hostile engage- ment. Intelligent, nuanced dialogue has been drowned out by the simple-minded sound bites that sustain this antagonistic divide. Advocates and supportive critics have made a valiant effort to par- ticipate in this conversation in complex, subtle, and meaningful ways. Many writers, journalists, poets, scholars, and activists have made important contributions to the popular, literary, and scholarly treatments of hip hop. Michael Eric Dyson, Davey D, bell hooks, Mark Anthony Neal, Patricia Hill-Collins, Cornel West, Adam Mansbach, Jeff Chang, Dream Hampton, Scott Poulson-Bryant, Oliver Wang, Nelson George, Gwendolyn Pough, Imani Perry, Jef- fery Ogbar, Paul Porter, Greg Tate, Marcyliena Morgan, Lisa Fager Bediako, Angela Ards, Kevin Powell, George Lipsitz, Robin Kelley, Bakari Kitwana, Joan Morgan, and Kelefah Sanneh have all offered insightful reflections on and analyses of hip hop in their respective fields. Several others have contributed blogs and other web commen- Introduction 13 taries that try to sort through the current state of hip hop in a produc- tive way. But these writers and scholars are not being relied upon to frame the mainstream conversation. The terms of this conversation need our direct attention because they keep black youth and progressive thinkers and activists locked into one-sided positions and futile battle. If we fail to address its con- tradictions, denials, and omissions, we will become subjected to and defined by the limits of the conversation rather than proactive partic- ipants in shaping it. I want to delineate the key features-the broad- est strokes-of this conversation, since the microstruggles in which hip hop gets embroiled usually cover up the larger terms that perpet- uate tiresome and disabling conflict. This conversation is an integral … Edited by ADAM BRADLEY ANDREW DUBOIS Foreword by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Afterwords by Chuck D and Common Yale UNIVERSITY PRESS New Haven and London Copyright © 2010 by Adam Bradley and Andrew DuBois. All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, including illustrations, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the US. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press), without written permission from the publishers. Yale University Press books may be purchased in quantity for educational, business, or promotional use. For information, please e-mail [email protected] (US. office) or [email protected](UK. office). Designed by Mary Valencia Set in Minion, Nobel, American Typewriter, and Franklin Gothic type by Technologies N Typography. Interior art and photography by Justin Francis Printed in the United States of America. Library of Congress Cataloging-in- Publication Data The anthology of rap / edited by Adam Bradley and Andrew DuBois; foreword by Henry Louis Gates, Jr.; afterwords by Chuck D and Common. p. em. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-300-14190-0 (hardcover: alk. paper) 1. Rap (Music)- History and criticism. 2. Rap (Music)-Texts. I. Bradley, Adam. II. DuBois, Andrew (Andrew Lee) ML3531.A57 2010 782.42164909-dc22 2010023316 A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper). 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 HENRY LOUIS GATES, JR. The first person I ever heard rap was a man born in 1913, my father, Henry Louis Gates, Sr. Daddys generation didnt call the rhetorical games they played rapping; they signified, they layed the Dozens. But this was rapping just the same, rapping y another name. Signifying is the grandparent of Rap; and Rap s signifying in a postmodern way. The narratives that my fa- her recited in rhyme told the tale of defiant heroes named hine or Stagolee or, my absolute favorite, the Signifyin:g Mon- ey. They were linguistically intricate, they were funny and pirited, and they were astonishingly profane. Soon the stories became familiar to me and I started memorizing parts of them, especially striking couplets and ometimes an entire resonant stanza. But every time my dad re- a version of one of these tales, he somehow made it new reminding me of all that a virtuosic performer possessed: an excellent memory, a mastery of pace and timing, the capac- ty to inflect and gesture, the ability to summon the identities of ifferent characters simply through the nuances of their voices. My father and his friends called their raps signifying or playing the Dozens; a younger generation named them Toasts, and an even younger generation called it rapping: But regardless of the name, much about the genre remained the ame. Since anthropologists tend to call them Toasts; we will mploy that term here. Toasts are long oral poems that had emerged by World War I, shortly after the sinking of the Ti- tanic, judging by the fact that one of the earliest surviving ex- amples of the genre was called Shine and the Titanic. And the act that the French words for monkey and sign are a bit of a visual pun (singe and signe, respectively) also points to a World War I ori- gin of the genre as it would have been revised by returning black veterans from the European theater of war. (My father recalls meeting southern black soldiers at the beginning of World War II at Camp Lee, Virginia, who were barely literate but who could recite acres of verses of The Sig- nifying MonkeY; underscoring the role of the military and war as a cross- pollinating mechanism for black cultural practices. And of these various forms, none would be more compelling, more popular, more shared than signifying.) xxiii All of these sub genres emerged out of the African American rhetorical practice of signifying. Signifying is the defining rhetorical principle of all African American discourse, the language game of black language games, both sacred and secular, from the preachers call-and-response to the irony and indirection of playing the Dozens. These oral poets practiced their arts in ritual settings such as the street corner or the barbershop, sometimes en- gaging in verbal duels with contenders like a lingUistic boxing match. These recitations were a form of artistic practice and honing, but they were also the source of great entertainment displayed before an audience with a most sophisticated ear. And though certain poems, such as Shine and the Ti- tanic and The Signifying MonkeY; had a familiar, repeated narrative con- tent, poets improvised through and around this received content, with im- provised stanzas and lyrics that might address a range of concerns from social and political issues to love, loneliness, heartbreak, and even death. The Dozens and the Toasts were, first and foremost, forms of art, and ev- eryone on the street or sitting around the barbershop knew this. Rapping was a performance, rappers were to be judged, and the judges were the peo- ple on the corner or in the shop. Everyone, it seemed to me as I watched these performances unfolding even as a child, was literate in the fine arts of signification. As I listened to my father delighting us in the late fifties with tales of the Monkey and old Shine, I knew at once that there was something sub- lime, something marvelous and forbidden and dangerous about them. And it was easy to recognize variations on rapping that started emerging in rhythm and blues and soul music in the sixties. I am thinking of James Browns nine-minute rendition of Lost Someone on his Live at the Apollo album in 1963, or Isaac Hayess paradigm-shifting version of By the Time I Get to Phoenix from his Hot Buttered Soul album of 1969. And H. Rap Browns emergence as one of the leaders of the younger black militants of the Black Power movement brought the word Rap and the lyrics of the xxiv Dozens to a generation of black students because he included his most original raps, as a point of pride in his own artistry, in his autobiography, Die, Nigger, Die. (Unfortunately, Mr. Brown did not write as well as he rapped!) A few years later, I would hear echoes of all of these formal antecedents in the early Rap songs hitting the airwaves in the late seventies and early eighties. Melle Mels verse on The Message: A child is born with no state of mind Blind to the ways of mankind God is smiling on you but hes frowning too Because only God knows what youll go through echoes across the decades back to these lines from the toast called Lifes a Funny Old Proposition: A man comes to birth on this funny old earth With not a chance in a million to win To find that hes through and his funeral is due Before he can even begin Despite all that is different about them, these two verses are bound to- gether by both sound and sense. They each insist upon an unstinting and unflinching confrontation with reality, while somehow staving off despair. Great art so often does this, offering expiation and transcendence all at once. As an art form, Rap is defined, like the Toasts before it, by a set of for- mal qualities, an iconoclastic spirit, and a virtuosic sense of wordplay. It ex- tends the long-standing practice in the African American oral tradition of language games. Simply put, Rap is a contemporary form of signifying. By the time I began my first job teaching at Yale while still a graduate student in the mid-1970s, I began to hear about a new music coming out of the Bronx. It was simply called Rap-an old word for those familiar with black slang, but a new form that combined rhythm and rhyme in a style all its own. Like all art-vernacular or high art-it took the familiar and made it unfamiliar again. Raps signature characteristic is the parody and pastiche of its lyrics, including sampling; which is just another word for intertextu- ality. Rap is the art form par excellence of synthesiS and recombination. No one could say that Afrika Bambaataa or Grandmaster Flash was not creat- , ing something new, but each would be quick to acknowledge his forIP.-al debts to other artists, especially to old school musicians from the past. xxv As we have seen, Rap is the postmodern version of an African Ameri- can vernacular tradition that stretches back to chants, Toasts, and trickster tales. It connects through its percussive sensibility, its riffs, and its penchant for rhyme, with a range of forms including scat singing, radio DJ patter, and Black Arts movement poets like Amiri Baraka, Nikki Giovanni, and Jayne Cortez. Its sense of musicality, both in voice and beat, owes a great deal to performers like Gil Scott-Heron and the Last Poets, as well as to funk and soul artists like James Brown, Isaac Hayes, George Clinton, and Sly Stone. Rap is, in other words, a multifarious, multifaceted tradition imbedded within an African American oral culture that itself shares in the rich history of human expression across the ages. At its best, Rap, though a most serious genre, doesnt take itself too self- consciously or try to overburden its lines with rehearsed wisdom, or the cant of ideology. It complicates or even rejects literal interpretation. It de- mands fluency in the recondite codes of African American speech. Just like the Dozens before it, Rap draws strength by shattering taboos, sending up stereotype, and relishing risque language and subject matter. I learned this last lesson firsthand more than two decades ago. In the spring of 1990, after I had published an editorial on the case in the New York Times, I was called to testify as an expert witness before a Florida court in the obscenity trial of the 2 Live Crew. The groups 1989 album, As Nasty as They Wanna Be, with its provocative single Me So Horny; had in- spired such heated response from civic leaders that copies were burned in the streets. At stake was not simply the songs of one group of young black men, but the very freedom of expression at the core of all artistic creation. In my testimony, I stated that in the very lyrics that some found simply crass and pornographic, what you hear is great humor, great joy, and great boisterousness. Its a joke. Its a parody and parody is one of the most vener- ated forms of art: Rap has always been animated by this complexity of meaning and in- tention. This is by no means to absolve artists of the ethics of form, particu- larly in the artists capacity as a role model for young people, but rather to point out that theres an underlying value worth fighting for in defending Rap-or any other form of art for that matter-against those who would si- lence its voice. One of the hallmarks of a democratic society should be en- suring the space for all citizens to express themselves in art, whether we like what they have to say or not. After all, censorship is to art as lynching is to justice. As we have seen, it is not difficult to trace a straight line between the xxvi marvelously formulaic oral tales like Shine and the Titanic and The Sig- nifying Monkey and Rap, and, in terms ofliterary history, it is a short line, too. Rappers often make direct allusions to vernacular culture, as we see on songs like Schoolly Ds Signifying Rapper and Devin the Dudes Briar- patch: Even when the connection is less explicit, it is no less apparent. Its impossible not to hear echoes of H. Rap Browns signifYing virtuosity when reading the lyrics to Smoothe da Hustler and Trigga da Gamblers Broken Language: And there is undoubtedly something of that swaggering folk hero Stagolee in someone like 2Pac, or of that trickster the Signifying Mon- key in someone like 01 Dirty Bastard. Given Raps close connection to the African American oral tradition, it should come as no surprise that it also carries with it much of the same baggage. Misogyny and homophobia, which we must critique, often mar the effectiveness of the music. But as with practices like the Toasts and the Dozens, these influences are by no means absolute. Perhaps one of the most bracing things about reading this anthology is the way that it complicates our assumptions about what Rap is and what Rap does, who makes it and who consumes it. In this anthology, we see Yo-yo going head to head against Ice Cube in a battle of the sexes, or female MCs like Eve and Jean Grae calling attention to issues like domestic violence and abortion that of- ten get left out of Hip-Hop discourse, and artists often associated with gangsta personas or conscious perspecti~es revealing the full range and complexity of their subjectivity. The Anthology of Rap is an essential contribution to our living literary tradition. It calls attention to the artistry, sense of craft, and striking origi- nality of an art form born of young black and brown men and women who found their voices in rhyme, and chanted a poetic discourse to the rhythm of the beat. This groundbreaking anthology masterfully assembles part of a new vanguard of American poetry. One of its greatest virtues is that it fo- cuses attention, often for the first time, upon Raps lyrics alone. This is not a rejection of the music, but rather a reminder that the words are finally the best reason for the beat. One finds in this anthology many lyrics that complicate common as- sumptions about Rap music. And as we might expect, the reader encoun- ters the brutal diction of Gangsta Rap, but also its leavening humor and parody. One finds instances of sexism and homophobia, but also resistance to them. One finds words seemingly intended to offend, but also, some- times, the deeper meanings of and motives for this sort of conscious provo- cation. Raps tradition is as broad and as deep as any other form of poetry, but like any other literary tradition, it contains its shallows, its whirlpools, and its muddy waters. Our task as active, informed readers is to navigate through the tributaries of Raps canon, both for the pleasure that comes from the journey as readers, but also for the wisdom born of traveling to any uncharted destinations of the mind. Adam Bradley and Andrew DuBoiss superbly edited, pioneering anthology makes such a journey possible. xxvii