The Michael Eric Dyson Reader (59 page)

Although youth music has always outraged parents who refused to listen—because it was morally offensive or sexually suggestive, from jazz to rock—the depressing note of hatred and fear of black youth that is being sounded has dire consequences. Sadly, it suggests there is agreement between the regressive forces that target black folk in general—conservative critics who decry our moral laxity, our sexual looseness, our racial obsessions—and black folk who think that hip-hop channels our pathologies into broad daylight. Many older blacks fail to see that the same folk who thought it was just fine to keep black life segregated and economically inferior are now leading the charge to incarcerate their children. And often, with a black authority figure standing literally or symbolically in tow, they point to hip-hop’s excesses to justify their actions. Tupac was an irresistible example of how self-destructive and utterly irredeemable our youth had become. Too often the explanations we seek for the disturbing behavior of youth like Tupac are insufficiently sophisticated. As proof we bog down in the understandable but lamentable question: Has hip-hop caused or reflected the violence we should detest?

Even that question buys into the either-or worldview that undermines a sane response to our predicament. Of course hip-hop has become intoxicated with danger, as Tupac’s life and career amply testify. Its violent metaphors, profane lyrics, and real-life embodiment of thug fantasies are at some levels chilling. It does no good to reprimand black youth for their addiction to violence. Our nation suffers the addiction in spades, as even a cursory read of pop culture suggests. But it is not just pop culture that is implicated. American society was built on violence, from the wholesale destruction of Native American culture to the
enslavement of Africans. “It’s violence in America,” Tupac says in his interview from prison. “What did the USA just do, flying to Bosnia? We ain’t got no business over there.” Comparing America’s actions to the destructive effects of gang violence, Tupac argued, “America is the biggest gang in the world. Look at how they didn’t agree with Cuba, so . . . [they] cut them off.” That is surely no justification for hip-hop’s artistic elevation of gang-banging or murder, as glimpsed in Tupac’s lyrics. “As a rapper, Tupac represented many of the most despicable elements of America’s youth on account of the Afro-American extension of what I call anarchic individuality,” Stanley Crouch says, “which is: me first.” For Crouch, Tupac’s anarchic individualism showed most destructively in the glamorization of the gangster in lyrics promoting murder and mayhem, thereby lowering the threshold of resistance for impressionable youth. “You can’t pile all of this on Tupac,” Crouch says. “But I’m saying that his life and his death and his behavior and the behavior of the people in his circle represent something deeply disturbing.”

Crouch’s argument underscores the urgent need to address not only rhetorical but literal violence, the causes of which cannot be exclusively or primarily located within hip-hop culture. Although Crouch is tough on Tupac, he avoids blaming him directly for the scourge of violence in the culture or even in black communities. “None of this is to say that there shouldn’t be some voicing of the terrible ways in which certain people in this society have to live due to poverty,” Crouch says. “That’s not something that’s supposed to be ignored. That’s absolutely irresponsible.” Blaming black youth for social violence reeks of the worst kind of scapegoating. Since hip-hop culture is barely a generation old, and black violence is much older, the charge that hip-hop jump-started violence lacks merit. But even if hip-hop didn’t invent violence, it can be held accountable for promoting violence. Indulging violence as a reaction to more lethal but less visible forms of violence (for instance, racism and economic inequality) is not excusable, but it is surely a reason to tackle the issues to which black youth are responding.

Neither should we overlook the double standard that prevails in addressing societal violence or its pop culture parallel. It is by now a cliche to state that Bruce Willis, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Tom Cruise, and a host of other big white stars don’t come in for nearly the rhetorical drubbing that hip-hop stars regularly endure. “Like with Quentin Tarrantino, when he puts out his pictures, they’re all gangster pictures and they’re all good and they’re all critically acclaimed . . . and they’re very creative,” Tupac said in the outtakes from his 1996 MTV interview. “But when we do that same thing without the visuals, all wax, just as compelling . . . we get treated like the bad messengers and he gets treated like King Solomon.” Tupac also spoke of the video he was directing for the rap song he did with Snoop Dogg, “2 of America’s Most Wanted.” Tupac said the video’s concept drew from the criticism he and Snoop received for portraying gangsters and
dirtying the airwaves with their gangsta rap. “We wanted to put the mirror up to show you where we got these gangster ideas,” Tupac said. “So we took all these scenes out of classic movies with gangsters in them . . . not gangsters named Doo Dirty and Snoop and Tupac . . . but gangsters named Lucky Luciano and Don Corleone and John Caddy, Al Capone and Smitty.”

The ready response, of course, is that these white stars don’t seek to imitate the roles they play in real life. “James Cagney, Edward G. Robinson, Clint Eastwood, John Wayne, Sylvester Stallone, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Bruce Willis, not one of them has ever had one bullet fly at them in public,” Crouch says. When I bring up
The Sopranos,
the hugely successful and much beloved cable television series, Crouch pounces immediately. “Tony Soprano remains a monster from the first episode to last night’s episode,” he says. “See, the brilliance of it is he shows you, yes, this man is a human being, but he’s a sociopath. He’s a predator. He’s sadistic. He’s a murderer. [Series creator] David Chase doesn’t duck any of that, and he doesn’t make it seem to you that you’re supposed to like it. It’s just you see the complexity of what’s going on.” Crouch contends that Tony Soprano, the lead character in the series, is full of angst about the life he leads. “He still has all of this guilt, because what he’s doing is fundamentally fucked up. But none of that justifies what he does.” Crouch presses me. “I mean, you’re an expert on this material. There’s nobody in rap that I’m aware of in which real questions are asked by the rappers themselves about what the hell they’re doing.”

Taken in his full lyrical sweep, I maintain that Tupac is such a figure. One of the reasons he stands out in rap is precisely because he offered such a powerful, complex, panoramic view of the young black experience. “If you were going on the path of a social activist, there is something for you in his lyrics,” says Everett Dyson-Bey, a Moorish Temple minister and prisoner. “If you were on the path of a straight thug, there is something there for you, too. So to bridge that gap from one end to the next, to run that polarity, from the positive to the negative, spoke to so many people of so many different backgrounds.” But Tupac constantly questioned his direction by filling his lyrics with characters who were both the victims and perpetrators of crime, characters who were thugs begging God for guidance through the minefields of self-destruction, characters leaving the ghetto while others stayed, characters who asked why they suffered even as they imposed suffering. In that haze of morbid contradictions, Tupac shone the light of his dark, brooding, pensive spirit, refusing to close his eyes to the misery he saw, risking everything to bear witness to the pain he pondered and perpetuated. In a word,
The Sopranos
offers, in Ernest Becker’s term, an “anthropodicy,” where we hold each other accountable for the suffering and evil imposed, whereas Tupac wrestles with a theodicy, the effort to square belief in God with the evil that prevails, which is at root an attempt to explain the suffering of those he loved.

Crouch may be right about the motley fellowship of gangster actors who never saw a gun aimed at them off-camera, but it is likely that just as great a percentage of white actors and singers get into trouble with the law as do black rap artists. The list includes Robert Downey Jr., James Caan, George Michael, Hugh Grant, and Axl Rose, among countless others. And in case Tupac and Biggie seem totally anomalous, one must remember James Dean, Sal Mineo, Kurt Cobain, and Bob Kane. And earlier black stars that are now revered had their troubles, including Little Willie John, Frankie Lymon, and Sam Cooke. In their personal foibles and destructive habits, Flavor Flav, Old Dirty Bastard, Bobby Brown, and their cohort have got nothing on legends Marvin Gaye, Wilson Pickett, or for that matter James Brown. None of this explains away the undeniable sadness of the violent captivity of segments of hip-hop culture. It simply gives a broader context to our concerns and cautions against seeing hip-hoppers as uniquely plagued. It is true that the violence that increasingly gets spoken about in hip-hop is self-inflicted and racially perpetuated. Then, too, the violence is so cartoonish and caricatured that fewer and fewer vulnerable minds take it seriously, at least not literally. The biggest knock on hard-core hip-hop may be its tired, cliché-ridden exploration of a subject that demands subtlety, artistic courage, and the wisdom to refrain from using a sledgehammer where a scalpel will do. But the big picture must not be neglected: The real-world violence too many hip-hoppers and black youth confront is so much more troubling than the violence they romanticize, even eroticize, on records and screen.
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Needless to say, the rhetorical violence that is directed at black women is altogether troubling. To be sure, there is a great deal of parody, signifying, and raucous humor that fills a lot of hip-hop’s more vulgar lyrical traditions. Those who believe that hip-hop invented these practices have only to listen to blues music from the early twentieth century. Old-school blues bawdiness was every bit as vulgar and sexually explicit as what disturbs contemporary defenders of black morality. Many critics now claim that black youth have lost their way by forsaking earlier visions of ethical caution and racial care. But a review of the concerns of black leaders in the early 1900s confirms that many of them thought their youth were just as morally wayward as the youth of our day. And many of those leaders indicted popular culture for its vicious effects on black youth. The remarkably humbling point to remember is that those youth who were seen as heading to hell in a hand basket became the grandparents and great-grandparents whose behavior is held up as the example we should aim for.

Still, the crude misogyny and sexism that are rampant in hip-hop are deeply disturbing. The sheer repetition of “bitch” as the proper name of females is not only distressing but destructive. It sends the message to young girls and women that their price of admission to hip-hop culture is the acceptance of self-denigration. Unlike the use of the word “nigga” in hip-hop, “bitch” fails to come across as resistant. An argument can be made that the circulation of variants of “nigger” serves to deprive the term of its negative meanings. “You my nigga” becomes a way of bonding around a term that was historically used by whites to degrade blacks. Thus, it deprives racist whites of the prerogative of naming blacks in harmful ways, since blacks have adapted it to their culture in playful or at least signifying fashion. Of course many black folk disagree and insist that the word can in no sense be redeemed. But the logic of those who contend that the word has use is clear, if unacceptable. The use of “bitch,” by contrast, is less compelling. The majority of those using it are the men who continue to dominate hip-hop culture. Thus, its negative meanings are largely held in place. Even when males intend “bitch” to be positive, such as Notorious B.I.G.’s “Me and My Bitch,” the term is still loaded with hurtful connotations. It is not clear that women in hip-hop who use the term have sought to use it in ways that question male power or perspectives on women. Their use of bitch usually does little more than second the female bashing of their male counterparts.

Likewise, the sexual saturation of hip-hop reflects the sexual obsessions that haunt the culture. It seems that nearly every rap video has a stock character: a woman bouncing her bosom, gyrating her gluteus, or otherwise occupied in fulfilling the sexual fantasies of millions of adolescents and adults. Such a specter surely degrades women by reducing them to their lowest erotic denominator. It also suggests to young women that the only viable assets they can exercise are their behinds and not their brains. Hence, Lil’ Kim and Foxy Brown spin lustful, lascivious tales that rival their male counterparts in raunchy abandon. Place that in the company of hustling, drug-selling, death-dealing, sex-crazed lotharios who increasingly dominate the imagination of hip-hop and, well, the picture is rather grim. For many critics, it simply repackages the stereotypes that black folk have spent centuries resisting: the whorish black woman, the studly black man. The cruel caveat, however, is that now these stereotypes are brashly amplified in the mouths of history-starved misfits whose political illiteracy masquerades as defiant art. Of course there is some truth to this rather harsh, dismissive, and unjust diatribe. Too many black youth have no idea where black folk have been and only dimly know what we’ve had to do to get where we are. But it isn’t primarily their fault. We have reneged on our responsibility as black adults to keep the culture vital by making it relevant to contemporary struggles. That means translating the terms of past struggle into present action. Instead, older blacks often nostalgically rehash romantic memories of the past, failing to acknowledge just how remarkably similar our failures and prospects for triumph are to those of the hip-hop generation.

That shouldn’t stop us from admitting that we are much more attracted to the basest, simplest elements of our artistic makeup than to its brightest, most demanding features. This is true for the culture as a whole. That is why
Mission Impossible
outpaces Boys
Don’t Cry
and why Britney Spears outsells Bonnie Raitt. The fact that Common, Mos Def, Talib Kweli, Bahamadia, Black Eyed Peas, Jurassic
Five, and the Roots don’t chart as highly as Jay-Z, Juvenile, Master P, or the latest posthumous effort by Tupac is certainly a problem. But is it hip-hop’s problem or ours? Another way of putting the question is to ask whether that trend doesn’t reflect a general resistance to art that is explicitly political, sharply critical of the status quo even inside black life, and self-reflective in a way that only mature art will risk. There is no denying that the ethical aspirations of Mos Def, for instance, directly counter the corporate capitalism that commits bigger budgets to market and distribute the latest butt-shaking record. Or another tired, trite, and uninteresting “bling-bling” (the sight produced by light reflecting off diamond-laced or platinum jewelry) video lauding the virtues of material or commercial culture. In that sense, there is a real war going on in hip-hop. On the one side are purists who stake the future of the form on lyrical skill, narrative complexity, clever rhymes, and fresh beats. On the other side are advocates of commercialized hip-hop, marked by the mass production of records that sell because they are crassly accessible. They neither challenge their audience nor move them to reflect on social, racial, or cultural ills. But the issue has never been as simple as politics versus art or positive versus negative.