The Michael Eric Dyson Reader (77 page)

But nostalgia can’t explain every negative assessment of black pop culture. Even if it did, it wouldn’t mean that such judgments are necessarily wrong, even if they’re made for the wrong reasons. It may be that all the explanations about different artistic ages—and the limitations and possibilities each age presents—simply can’t change the fact that Mary J. Blige isn’t Aretha Franklin. Fine. But that’s not an indictment of hip-hop soul per se. It’s a value judgment about artists exploring similar though distinct genres at different times. I’m simply arguing that we respect the rules of each genre. We should adjust our evaluations of music based on the sorts of achievement that are possible, even desirable, in a given period. That doesn’t mean we can’t rank them. After all, some music is more complicated than other music. Some art forms take more mastery than others. But we should rank these different styles of music fairly. As important as it is, complexity of achievement is not the only value worth recognizing or celebrating in art. Plus, there are many kinds of artistic complexity that merit our attention.

After all, our age has seen the likes of Whitney Houston, Anita Baker, and Mariah Carey, gifted artists of a greatly changed black sound, whatever that means, whose skills of delivery and interpretation far exceed the schlock that riddles so much contemporary black pop. (Still, each has contributed her fair share of misfires, as is true, of course, of the inimitable Ms. Franklin.) Contemporary hip-hop soul has also brought forth artists like D’Angelo. His young career holds promise for melding the wispy melodies of ’70s soul to hip-hop rhythms and occasionally raunchy sensibilities. And male groups Boys II Men and Jodeci, and female groups En Vogue and SWV rise above the mediocrity of their chosen idioms.

But that’s just the point. Aretha outdid most of her peers whose names we have long since forgotten. Their failures, or better still, their relative successes, don’t invalidate the genres of black music in which they strived to make sublime art. Soul music is judged by its brilliance, not its blight. It is measured by its supreme visions, not its short-sighted trends. Like all great music, it is measured by the size of its aspirations—which are measured by the aspirations of its greatest artists, even the unsung ones—not simply by artists who managed to make the charts or to win the awards. (Donny Hathaway was never justly recognized for his extraordinary genius as a composer, artist, and musician. And Little Willie John was one of the greatest—some argue,
the
greatest—R&B singer, but few people know his name or work, except as it’s drained of its pathos by more famous but less gifted white artists.) Hip-hop is no different. It’s not the mindless, numbing pornography of the notorious 2 Live Crew that is the measure of hip-hop’s vitality, but the rhetorical, lyrical ingenuity of Rakim or Nas. Snoop Doggy Dogg’s seductive and highly accomplished rhyme flow, and Ice Cube’s narrative powers—plus Dr. Dre’s pulsating, harmonically complex G-funk—define gangsta rap’s metier. Not the mediocre rants of the late Eazy-E—although his brilliance as impresario and record producer, even talent scout, is undeniable. A lot of hip-hop is okay, more of it is good, and a little of it is great. Just like any other music.

(Crouch, Marsalis, and other critics have argued against hip-hop even being called serious music. Of course, these critics hold the same grudge against latter-day Coltrane, Eric Dolphy, Ornette Coleman, Cecil Taylor, Albert Ayler, Archie Shepp, Don Cherry, and almost any avant-garde jazz artist who championed unorthodox harmonies, departure from chord-based improvisations, atonal “noise,” and dissonant melodies. Neither Ellington nor Armstrong, heroes for Crouch and Marsalis—and for me, too—would be today what they were when they played. To be sure, they’d still be geniuses. But the character of their genius would be greatly altered. Their relentless reach for the edge of experience pushed them to keep growing, experimenting, and improvising. Conservative advocates of jazz end up freezing the form, making jazz an endless series of explorations of already charted territory. It’s a process of rediscovering what’s already been discovered. Such a process led Gary Giddins to remark that the problem with so much of contemporary neotraditionalist jazz is that Thelonius Monk couldn’t even win the annual contest that’s sponsored in his name! The very spirit of jazz—its imperative to improvise, which can often lead into dangerous, unmapped territory—is thus sacrificed in the name of preserving the noble, heroic traditions that grow out of a specific time in jazz’s history. What’s really being preserved is the product, not the process, of improvisation. But that’s another book.)

At base, the perception of the aesthetic alienation of hip-hop culture is linked to a perception that black youth are moral strangers. I mean by “moral strangers” that black youth are believed to be ethically estranged from the moral practices and spiritual beliefs that have seen previous black generations through harsh and dangerous times. The violence of black youth culture is pointed to as a major
symptom of moral strangeness. Heartless black-on-black murder, escalating rates of rape, rising incidents of drug abuse, and the immense popularity of hip-hop culture reinforce the perception of an ethical estrangement among black youth. In arguing the moral strangeness of black youth, many critics recycle bits and pieces of old-style arguments about the pathology of black urban culture. Widely popularized in Daniel Moynihan’s famous 1965 study of the black family—whose pathology was partially ascribed to a growing matriarchy in black domestic life—the notion that black culture carries the seeds of its own destruction is an old idea. The argument for black cultural pathology is really an updated version of beliefs about black moral deficiency as ancient as the black presence in the New World.

More recently, Cornel West has attempted to explain the problems of black culture by pointing to its nihilism. Since the nihilism argument has been used by many critics to prove the moral strangeness of black youth, I’ll explore it in some detail before arguing for an alternate perspective.

For West, nihilism is “the profound sense of psychological depression, personal worthlessness, and social despair so widespread in black America.” West wants to unblinkingly stare down the problems of black culture, and to call a spade a spade: black crime is increasing, suicide is rising, hopelessness is spreading, and ethical surrender is pandemic. Yet liberals, West argues, simply close their eyes or believe that if they say what they see they’ll be thought of as cold conservatives. West also knows that mere moral corrosion, as argued by conservatives, is not large enough an explanation for what’s going on in black culture. West seeks to avoid the pitfalls of both conservative behaviorists and liberal structuralists by arguing for a complex vision of black culture that takes into account the “saturation of market forces and market moralities” in black life, while highlighting the crisis of black leadership. For West, such a strategy allows us to be frank in our discussions of black moral and spiritual collapse while refusing to scapegoat those blacks who are victimized by dehumanizing forces.

West is right to grapple with issues of morality and behavior, matters that are largely taboo for the left. He’s also right to zoom in on the market forces and market moralities that besiege black culture. Still, as an explanation for what ails us, nihilism has severe problems. First, nihilism is seen as a cause, not a consequence, of black suffering. The collapse of hope, the spiritual despair that floods black America, the clinical depression we suffer, are all the pernicious result of something more basic than black nihilism: white racism. (The list includes economic suffering, class inequality, and material hardship as well, but I’ll get to those in a bit.) I don’t mean here just the nasty things many white folk believe about black folk. I’m referring to the systematic destruction of black life, the pervasive attack on the black sense of well-being, the subversion of black self-determination, and the erasure of crucial narratives of black self-esteem that are foundational to American versions of democracy. Nihilism is certainly self-destructive. That’s because black folk were taught—and have had it reinforced across time, geography, and ideology—that our black selves weren’t worth loving or preserving. Nihilism
is the outgrowth, not the origin, of such harsh lessons. Without the destruction of white supremacy, black nihilism will continue to grow.

Then too, nihilism shifts the burden for getting black America back on track to suffering black folk. That seems an awful tall order for a people already strapped with sparse resources and weighted down with nihilism. West argues for a politics of conversion, where a love ethic is central. As a Baptist preacher and former pastor, I am deeply sympathetic to this. The logic of such a duty, however, might be questioned. Love without resources will not ultimately solve the problems black folk face. With enough resources—employment, education, housing, food—black folk will have the luxury, the leisure, the reasonable chance to love themselves. Of course, I’m not suggesting that poor black folk without such resources don’t or can’t love themselves. But I am suggesting that love alone, even a complex, socially rooted understanding of love, cannot provide the material basis for the permanent high self-regard that will need to be in place for black folk to stop snuffing one another out. The presence of such resources cannot by themselves guarantee a good outcome. But we can be reasonably assured that, without such resources, a bad outcome is highly likely.

Plus, if black nihilism is really that pervasive, can nihilists resolve nihilism? Can folk for whom hope has been eclipsed really muster the moral might to throw off the psychic chains of their suffering? Conversion—which leads me to believe that this is in part a project of self-help—is a necessary, but insufficient, basis to turn back the nihilistic tide. While Martin Luther King wanted to convert white racists, he also wanted to put in place a structure of laws, duties, and obligations that had the power to change behavior. Given the choice of love and power, King took power, and let the love come later. (King said, for instance, that the law may not make whites love blacks, but it could stop them from lynching blacks. Of course, it is a dialectical process: love insists on the right laws, and the right sort of laws provide a framework for—one hopes—the eventual development of love, which could, in turn, obviate the laws. These poles are united in King’s beliefs.) True enough, King’s life and ministry were regulated by a love ethic. But he saw righteous power, that is, power linked to justice, as the imperfect but indispensable social translation of love.

Finally, West’s theory of nihilism is driven by a nostalgic vision of black life. West says that “the genius of our black foremothers and forefathers was to create powerful buffers to ward off the nihilistic threat.” West also argues that our foreparents were equipped with “cultural armor to beat back the demons of hopelessness, meaninglessness, and lovelessness.” The armor included “values of service and sacrifice, love and care, discipline and excellence.” Black religious and civic institutions helped black folk survive.

West is certainly right that black folk kept on keeping on, that they refused to give up. But for my money, those things haven’t gone away. It’s too early to tell if black folk have surrendered the fight. But I guess I just don’t see where nihilism is winning, where the attempts of black folk to make a way out of no way have ceased. The black church continues to thrive against tremendous odds. Black
families continue to strive to make a lie out of the vicious rumors of their inherent pathology. Poor black folk—well, it’s a wonder that more haven’t given up, surrendered to a life of crime and moral mischief.

The real miracle of contemporary black life is that there are still so many sane, sensible, struggling, secular, sanctified, spiritual, and spunky black folk who just said no to destruction way before Nancy Reagan figured out what crack was. In other words, those black folk of the past are us black folk of the present. Our black youth are not a different moral species than the black youth of the past. They are not moral strangers. And as the quote from Du Bois and Dill above proves, black folk are always worried about their kids. We always romanticize our past, partly as a way to jump-start our flagging efforts in the present. That’s certainly okay. It’s when nostalgia is used to browbeat and thrust a finger in the face of black youth in an effort to convince them that their moral makeups are grievously defective that nostalgia becomes destructive.

In the end, it may be that the concept of nihilism is symptomatic of the disease it aims to highlight. It may be that a belief in nihilism is too hopeless about the black future, too out of touch with the irreverent spirit of resistance that washes over black culture. A belief in nihilism is too, well, nihilistic. But nostalgia can do that. By viewing the black past as morally and spiritually distinct from the present, we lose sight of the resources for ethical engagement that are carried forward from the past into our own thinking, believing, hoping, praying, and doing. It would be good to remember black preacher and theologian Howard Thurman’s wise words, from his book of sermons,
The Growing Edge
:

A belief in nihilism may make us prisoners of present events. A belief in the indomitable spirit of hope that thrives even when things are at their darkest for black folk may be the real link to a powerful black past.