The Michael Eric Dyson Reader (72 page)

We’ve got to remember that all black art at one time or another has been similarly attacked, and that the effort to legislate against black music’s alleged moral perversities is nothing new. Not only jazz in the early teens and 1920s, but rockand-roll music in the 1950s—of course, it’s hard to imagine that “Work With Me Annie,” a hit for Hank Ballard and the Midnighters, caused consternation, but “work” was euphemistic for a sexually suggestive motion of the pelvis—and rhythm and blues in the 1970s were lambasted. The attempt to censor black
music was the attempt to censor black bodies, black voices, and black identities unleashed in the naked public square. For blacks to join Senate hearings aimed at suppressing speech, policing art, and reinforcing our second-class citizenship as producers and even consumers of music, is, I think, tragically mistaken.

We need Senate hearings, instead, into the causes and conditions of economic and racial desperation that drive some of our youth to express themselves with profanity and vulgarity. Until we do that, the real vulgarity is not the curse words that pepper hip-hop lyrics, but the stigmatization and criminalization of our youth that leads to a precipitous hike in incarceration rates. The raison d’être of hiphop’s vocation of angry articulation may lie in the lyrics of one of its greatest poets, Notorious B.I.G., or Biggie Smalls, when he declares in his song “Things Done Changed”: “Back in the days our parents used to take care of us, Look at them now, they’re even fuckin’ scared of us/Calling the city for help because they can’t maintain, Damn, things done changed.” That entire song to me is a translation of Weber’s conception of theodicy, which, as ethicist Jon Gunneman argued, expresses the disjunction between destiny and merit, between what you get and what you think you deserve.

I think in its clever rhymes is contained a sophisticated social analysis of the conditions under which young blacks and Latinos mature in postindustrial urban spaces, especially those enclaves of civic terror called ghettos and slums. Plus, Biggie noted the shift in power from older to younger people in what I have elsewhere termed a juvenocracy, or the rule, and in some cases, tyranny of younger people over social and economic resources in domestic and public space. Many black critics in particular have wrongly concluded that black youth are in such terrible shape because they are somehow morally alienated or ethically estranged from the legacies that produced them. While there’s no denying the huge generational gulf between older and younger blacks, we must, in searching for an explanation of what’s gone wrong, think about the ready availability of guns, the ever growing economic and social inequality in black communities, and the political economies of drugs that prevail when aboveground economies fail. In the final analysis, we’ve got to help connect our youth to meaningful cultural traditions while respecting—and hence, engaging and critiquing—their own newly developing aesthetic aspirations and cultural articulations.

Comment on the likening of jazz to a boxing match.

The first thing that comes to mind is that, like a boxer, jazz music, as well as most black music at one time, has been counted down and out. For instance, some people say that the blues is down and out, complaining, “Blues culture is mostly listened to and appreciated by white Americans.” Well, B.B. King thanks you, white America, and so does Bobby Blue Bland, and Denise La Salle and Koko Taylor, because they’re trying to get paid and stay on the road, and they don’t care who supports them, because black music fundamentally embraces whoever will listen.
But that’s not to deny that blacks have not appreciated crucial elements of our culture, including urban blues, or for that matter, some agrarian forms of the blues that have more in common with what we call country music than some music executives of Nashville might want to acknowledge. So I think black music is always down and out, always against the rope. But like Muhammad Ali, black music does the rope-a-dope: It just keeps on taking the punches, and when it looks as if you’re about to destroy it, it takes your worst—appropriation, commodification, ghettoization in narrow categories on the radio—and wears you out. It turns the energy of your opposition against you, like some aesthetic jujitsu, and strikes the fatal blow, like Ali striking George Foreman down in that invigorating, mythological contest between black masculinities—the “appropriate” and American-flagbearing one (remember Foreman at the 1968 Olympics?), and the outlandish, outlawed Muslim-informed one.

Of course, in a sense, Ali was a great jazz performer, because his movements were like extended riffs on the great themes of grace, power, and precision. But he was also symbolically precious, and the metaphoric value of his craft was hardly lost on his legions of followers, as he “floated like a butterfly,” like a solo jazz melody arching effortlessly above the backdrop of supporting instruments keeping time and pace. Except, of course, Ali was a one-man combo, varying his pitch, and punch, and the velocity and force of his delivery, “stinging like a bee,” to razzle his opponents and dazzle his fans, much like Miles Davis as he switched from
Kind of
Blue
to
Bitches Brew
. And in his flight, in his mobility, Ali also struck symbolic blows against the demobilization of black culture and the restriction of our unique voices, as did so many great jazz instrumentalists and vocalists, from Satchmo to Prez, from the Duke to Bird, from Lady Day to Sassy. And this is where, perhaps, we can see the relation between jazz and hip-hop, too, at least in Ali’s artistry, because when Ali came out with his doggerel disguised as edifying ring rhetoric—“rumble, young man, rumble” and “I’m pretty” and “I shook up the world . . . I’m a bad man”—his braggadocios behavior prefigured rap rhetoric.

But when you think about the metaphor of boxing and fighting as jazz, and jazz as fighting and boxing, we’ve also got to focus on the serious sense of contest at the heart of both. Not only two pugilists testing their ring generalship, but two or three or four or more instrumentalists in the “cutting sessions” where they lift their level of play and vision by virtue of engaging their fellow artists in friendly competition—and maybe here is where, like all analogies, the one between boxing and jazz breaks down, ‘cause there ain’t nothing friendly in boxing until the match is over, and sometimes not even then. But if we compare jazz and boxing, we might also compare jazz and running, since black music is truly engaged in a race. But it’s a marathon, not a sprint, since jazz and black cultural products are about the long haul.

One of the advantages of the long view in black culture is that it allows us to comprehend the durability and resilience of black music. Despite its appropriations, imitations, dilutions, and domestications, black musical creators are perennially preoccupied with the next thing. You can trace the anatomy of innovation within given genres, and in looking at how one form gives way to another. For instance, as proof of the former, think of the varieties of what we know today as jazz. To name a few changes within jazz, termed America’s classical music, look at the progression. First there’s blues; after blues, there’s ragtime; after ragtime, there’s Dixieland; after Dixieland, there’s swing; after swing, there’s bebop; after bebop, there’s hardbop; after hardbop, there’s postbop; after postbop, there’s avant-garde; after avant-garde, there’s fusion; after fusion, there’s smooth jazz. Of course, each of these musical expressions survives, in varying degrees of intensity, but they symbolize the restless evolution of black musical forms.

And when we examine the historical development of genres of black music, we observe a constant engagement with innovation, progression, and expansion, from the spirituals, blues, ragtime, jazz, gospel, rhythm & blues, rock & roll, soul, funk, disco, hip-hop, house, go-go, new jack swing, techno-soul, acid jazz, bass and drum, and on and on. And when these forms are occasionally, almost unavoidably, appropriated, imitated, diluted, and domesticated in mainstream culture, black folk are on to something else. With black creative cultures, it’s always about the great next. Indeed, the great next is the secular telos that pulls black America forward, even as we reappropriate what has been appropriated and generate the next form of creativity. The great next stands as the sign of an inexhaustible black possibility and fecundity that spawns newer forms of cultural expression.

“Next” is surely one of the key words in the vocabulary of black improvisation, related to and driven by what the French anthropologist Levi-Strauss calls bricolage, making do with what is at hand. For black culture, the great next and bricolage is about the possibilities inherent in taking the fragments, the leftovers that are both literally and symbolically at hand, and doing something imaginative and substantive with them. In one sense, black cultural creativity, the great next, is driven by what may be termed the political economy of chitlins: taking the most unsavory element of an already undesirable entity and making a living from commodifying, marketing, and consuming it. A leftover becomes a lifesaver, in the case of many blacks who had little to nurture their hunger beyond pork bellies, which later became an item sold on Wall Street. Black artistic expression often involves taking the sonic fragments and cultural leftovers of dominant culture and making a black cultural product that is desirable, even irresistible, to the margins and the mainstream. The beauty of black culture is its ability to re-create and reinvent itself as the great next thing in the long evolution of creative possibilities, at precisely the moment it’s being written off.

Interview by Maria Agui Carter and Calvin A. Lindsay Jr.
New York, New York, 1999

I have been christened “the hip-hop intellectual” in publications such as
U.S. News & World Report
and
The Chronicle of Higher Education.
Although most of my scholarship has not addressed hip-hop culture—
but black religion, black leadership, black moral and political
thought, and various dimensions of black popular culture—I have gladly
identified with the younger “hip-hop generation.” I have used frequent
references to hip-hop culture in my lectures, sermons, and public addresses,
and I have written a book about the greatest icon in hip-hop—Tupac
Shakur. I have done this in hopes of using whatever intellectual and cultural
influence I possess to combat unjust appraisals of hip-hop music, and
to encourage older folk to listen to the cries of hurt and desperation—and
help—that ring across the culture’s lyrical landscape. Furthermore, I have
testified twice before Congress in the effort to forge greater awareness of
the genre’s brilliant social criticism and aesthetic achievements, while defending
the most politically vulnerable and underrepresented group in the
country—poor black and brown urban youth. Hip-hop culture is the most
explosive, engaging, and controversial form of (black) American pop culture
to find global circulation and acclaim in the last quarter century, and
is worthy of serious critique and investigation.

FROM THE VERY BEGINNING OF ITS RECENT HISTORY, hip-hop music—or rap, as it has come to be known—has faced various obstacles. Initially, rap was deemed a passing fad, a playful and ephemeral black cultural form that steamed off the musical energies of urban black teens. As it became obvious that rap was here to stay, a permanent fixture in black ghetto youths’ musical landscape, the reactions changed from dismissal to denigration, and rap music came under attack from both black and white quarters. Is rap really as dangerous as many critics argue? Or are there redeeming characteristics to rap music that warrant our critical attention? I will attempt to answer these and other questions as I explore the culture of hip-hop.

Trying to pinpoint the exact origin of rap is a tricky process that depends on when one acknowledges a particular cultural expression or product as rap. Rap can be traced back to the revolutionary verse of Gil Scott-Heron and the Last Poets, to Pigmeat Markham’s “Here Come de Judge,” and even to Bessie Smith’s rapping to a beat in some of her blues. We can also cite ancient African oral traditions as the antecedents to various contemporary African American cultural practices. In any case, the modern history of rap probably begins in 1979 with the rap song “Rapper’s Delight,” by the Sugarhill Gang. Although there were other (mostly underground) examples of rap, this record is regarded as the signal barrier breaker, birthing hip-hop and consolidating the infant art form’s popularity. This first stage in rap record production was characterized by rappers placing their rhythmic, repetitive speech over
well-known (mostly R&B) black music hits. “Rapper’s Delight” was rapped over the music to a song made by the popular ’70s R&B group Chic, titled “Good Times.” Although rap would later enhance its technical virtuosity through instrumentation, drum machines, and “sampling” existing records—thus making it creatively symbiotic—the first stage was benignly parasitic upon existing black music.

As rap grew, it was still limited to mostly inner-city neighborhoods and particularly its place of origin, New York City. Rap artists like Funky 4 Plus 1, Kool Moe Dee, Busy Bee, Afrika Bambaata, Cold Crush Brothers, Kurtis Blow, DJ Kool Herc, and Grandmaster Melle Mel were experimenting with this developing musical genre. As it evolved, rap began to describe and analyze the social, economic, and political factors that led to its emergence and development: drug addiction, police brutality, teen pregnancy, and various forms of material deprivation. This new development was both expressed and precipitated by Kurtis Blow’s “Those Are the Breaks” and by the most influential and important rap song to emerge in rap’s early history, “The Message,” by Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five. The picture this song painted of inner-city life for black Americans—the hues of dark social misery and stains of profound urban catastrophe—screeched against the canvas of most suburban sensibilities:

“The Message,” along with Flash’s “New York, New York,” pioneered the social awakening of rap into a form combining social protest, musical creation, and cultural expression.

As its fortunes slowly grew, rap was still viewed by the music industry as an epiphenomenal cultural activity that would cease as black youth became bored and moved on to another diversion, as they did with break dancing and graffiti art. But the successes of the rap group Run-D.M.C. moved rap into a different sphere of artistic expression that signaled its increasing control of its own destiny. Run-D.M.C. is widely recognized as the progenitor of modern rap’s creative integration of social commentary, diverse musical elements, and uncompromising cultural identification—an integration that pushed the music into the mainstream and secured its future as an American musical genre with an identifiable tradition. Run-D.M.C.’s stunning commercial and critical success almost single-handedly landed rap in the homes of many black and nonblack youths across America by producing the first rap album to be certified gold (500,000 copies sold), the first rap song to be featured on the twenty-four-hour music video channel MTV, and the first rap album (1987’s
Raising Hell
) to go triple platinum (3 million copies sold).

On
Raising Hell
, Run-D.M.C. showcased the sophisticated technical virtuosity of its DJ Jam Master Jay—the raw shrieks, scratches, glitches, and language of the street, plus the innovative and ingenious appropriation of hard-rock guitar riffs. In doing this, Run-D.M.C. symbolically and substantively wedded two traditions—the waning subversion of rock music and the rising, incendiary aesthetic of hiphop music—to produce a provocative musical hybrid of fiery lyricism and potent critique.
Raising Hell
ended with the rap anthem, “Proud to Be Black,” intoning its unabashed racial pride:

At the same time, rap, propelled by Run-D.M.C.’s epochal success, found an arena in which to concentrate its subversive cultural didacticism aimed at addressing racism, classism, social neglect, and urban pain: the rap concert, where rappers are allowed to engage in ritualistic refusals of censored speech. The rap concert also creates space for cultural resistance and personal agency, loosing the strictures of the tyrannizing surveillance and demoralizing condemnation of mainstream society and encouraging relatively autonomous, often enabling, forms of self-expression and cultural creativity.

However, Run-D.M.C.’s success, which greatly increased the visibility and commercial appeal of rap music through record sales and rap concerts, brought along another charge that has had a negative impact on rap’s perception by the general public: the claim that rap expresses and causes violence. Tipper Gore has repeatedly said that rap music appeals to “angry, disillusioned, unloved kids” and that it tells them it is “okay to beat people up.” Violent incidents at rap concerts in Los Angeles, Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Atlanta, Cincinnati, and New York City have only reinforced the popular perception that rap is intimately linked to violent social behavior by mostly black and Latino inner-city youth. Countless black parents, too, have had negative reactions to rap, and the black radio and media establishment, although not as vocal as Gore, have voted on her side with their allocation of much less airplay and print coverage to rap than is warranted by its impressive record sales.

Such reactions betray a shallow understanding of rap, which in many cases results from people’s unwillingness to listen to rap lyrics, many of which counsel antiviolent and antidrug behavior among the youths who are their avid audience. Many rappers have spoken directly against violence, such as KRS-One in his “Stop the Violence.” Another rap record produced by KRS-One in 1989, the top-selling
Self-Destruction
, insists that violence predates rap and speaks against escalating black-on-black crime, which erodes the social and communal fabric of already debased black inner cities across America:

Despite such potent messages, many mainstream blacks and whites persist in categorically negative appraisals of rap, refusing to distinguish between enabling, productive rap messages and the social violence that exists in many inner-city communities and that is often reflected in rap songs. Of course, it is difficult for a culture that is serious about the maintenance of social arrangements, economic conditions, and political choices that create and reproduce poverty, racism, sexism, classism, and violence to display a significant appreciation for musical expressions that contest the existence of such problems in black and Latino communities. Also disappointing is the continued complicity of black radio stations in denying rap its rightful place of prominence on their playlists. The conspiracy of silence and invisibility has affected the black print media as well. Although rapper M. C. Shan believes that most antirap bias arises from outside the black community, he faults black radio for depriving rap of adequate airplay and laments the fact that “if a white rock ‘n’ roll magazine like
Rolling Stone
or
Spin
can put a rapper on the cover and
Ebony
and
Jet
won’t, that means there’s really something wrong.”

In this regard, rap music is emblematic of the glacial shift in aesthetic sensibilities between blacks of different generations, and it draws attention to the severe economic barriers that increasingly divide ghetto poor blacks from middle- and upper-middle-class blacks. Rap reflects the intraracial class division that has plagued African-American communities for the last thirty years. The increasing social isolation, economic hardship, political demoralization, and cultural exploitation endured by most ghetto poor communities in the past few decades have given rise to a form of musical expression that captures the terms of ghetto poor existence. I am not suggesting that rap has been limited to the ghetto poor, but only that its major themes and styles continue to be drawn from the conflicts and contradictions of black urban life. One of the later trends in rap music is the development of “pop” rap by groups like JJ Fad, The Fat Boys, DJ Jazzy Jeff and The Fresh Prince, and Tone Loc. DJ Jazzy Jeff and The Fresh Prince, for example, are two suburbanites from Southwest Philadelphia and Winfield. (For that matter, members of the most radical rap group, Public Enemy, are suburbanites from Long Island.) DJ Jazzy Jeff and The Fresh Prince’s album,
He’s the DJ, I’m the
Rapper
, sold over 3 million copies, boosted by the enormously successful single “Parents Just Don’t Understand.” This record, which rapped humorously about various crises associated with being a teen, struck a chord with teenagers across the racial and class spectra, signaling the exploration of rap’s populist terrain. The
Fresh Prince’s present success as the star of his own Quincy Jones–produced television series is further testimony to his popular appeal.

Tone Loc’s success also expresses rap’s division between “hardcore” (social consciousness and racial pride backed by driving rhythms) and “pop” (exploration of common territory between races and classes, usually devoid of social message). This division, while expressing the commercial expansion of rap, also means that companies and willing radio executives have increasingly chosen pop rap as more acceptable than its more realistic, politically conscious counterpart. (This bias is also evident in the selection of award recipients in the newly created rap category at the annual Grammy Awards.) Tone Loc is an L.A. rapper whose first single, “Wild Thing,” sold over 2 million copies, topping
Billboard
’s “Hot Singles Chart,” the first rap song to achieve this height. Tone Loc’s success was sparked by his video’s placement in heavy rotation on MTV, which devotes an hour on Saturdays to
Yo! MTV Raps,
a show that became so popular that a daily hour segment was added.

The success of such artists as Tone Loc and DJ Jazzy Jeff and The Fresh Prince inevitably raises the specter of mainstream dilution, the threat to every emergent form of cultural production in American society, particularly the fecund musical tradition that comes from black America. For many, this means the sanitizing of rap’s expression of urban realities, resulting in sterile hip-hop that, devoid of its original fire, will offend no one. This scenario, of course, is a familiar denouement to the story of most formerly subversive musical genres. Also, MTV’s avid acceptance of rap and the staging of rap concerts run by white promoters willing to take a chance on rap artists add further commentary to the sad state of cultural affairs in many black communities: the continued refusal to acknowledge authentic (not to mention desirable) forms of rap artistry ensures rap’s existence on the margins of many black communities.

Perhaps the example of another neglected and devalued black musical tradition, the blues, can be helpful for understanding what is occurring among rap segments of the black community and mainstream American society. The blues now has a mostly young white audience. Blacks do not largely support the blues through concert patronage or record buying, thus neglecting a musical genre that was once closely identified with devalued and despised people: poor southern agrarian blacks and the northern urban black poor, the first stratum of the developing underclass. The blues functioned for another generation of blacks much as rap functions for young blacks today: as a source of racial identity, permitting forms of boasting and asserting machismo for devalued black men suffering from social degradation, allowing commentary on social and personal conditions in uncensored language, and fostering the ability to transform hurt and anguish into art and commerce. Even in its heyday, however, the blues existed as a secular musical genre against the religious traditions that saw the blues as “devil’s music” and the conservative black cultural perspectives of the blues as barbaric. These feelings, along with the direction of southern agrarian musical energies into a
more accessible and populist soul music, ensured the contraction of the economic and cultural basis for expressing life experience in the blues idiom.