RAP
WHEN THE WHITE CITIZEN’S COUNCIL in Birmingham, Alabama, failed in its attempts to ban rock ’n’ roll in 1956, some of its members instead went to a Nat King Cole concert, dragged him off the stage, and beat him. The White Citizen’s Council was in an uproar about “nigger music” and its corrosive influence on white youth. It’s probably nitpicking to point out that Cole did not play rock ’n’ roll. After all, he was black.
The North had its own antirock campaigns, equally racist in their rhetoric. Boston’s Norman Furman decried the “jungle rhythms,” and concerts were canceled throughout the Northeast in fear that youth would be driven to riot by the propulsive beats. New York’s Daily News was especially critical of rock ’n’ roll. The openly sexual nature of the music was threatening, and its black roots were obvious. It was one thing for blacks to have their own music, clubs, and record labels. It was another to have them embraced—and played—by white youth.
Black music has always been considered both “other” and dangerous by the dominant culture in the United States. And although it has achieved a level of critical and institutional acceptance, to the point where the Wall Street Journal could announce “That Tuition Check May Pay for a Course on Rock ’n’ Roll,” the old myths persist. Only recently, in April 1989, the Daily News, in banner headlines, claimed a connection between a bestselling rap record and a vicious gang rape in New York’s Central Park.
Rock ’n’ roll has long since become the domain of white culture, however, and the somewhat diverting tirades of Tipper Gore aside, rock has been replaced by rap music as the locus of white critical fear and longing. But unlike rock ’n’ roll, whose early adherents and supporters within the culture industry consisted of only a few devoted disc jockeys and farsighted record company executives, rap has been taken seriously from the start by a variety of cultural critics, each with their own agenda. The field includes enthusiastic and relatively uncritical advocates, both journalistic and academic; the fanzines, like Rap Beat and Word Up, which sell as many as 200,000 copies per issue to urban teenagers; the “concerned journalists”—concerned in the case of the New York Times that they may have missed a major sociological trend, or, like the Daily News, about the presumed relationship of rap to street crime; sociological journalism, which includes some of the best early writing about rap and hiphop by Sally Banes and Steven Hager in The Village Voice; and finally, a handful of academic theses about hiphop, and occasional references to rap in contemporary critical theory. It’s worth mentioning here that rappers have taken up, and commented on, all these levels of discourse in their raps, and it is in part this knowingness, this reflexivity and irony, that I believe draws academics and other writers to the subject.
But, apart from the appropriation of black street culture by certain writers who want to take it, nonethnographically, as an example of a kind of native post-Modernism, most writing about hiphop is by urban folklorists and students of African-American art history. For the emerging field of cultural studies, and even for writers in Essence and Vogue, the most common line of inquiry or explanation has to do with the African-American cultural tradition, showing rap as the modern avatar of the praise song, the dozens, Cab Calloway and Louis Jordan, inheritor of call-and-response, and an accented, rhythmic organizing principle. Rap is also described as part of a tradition of musical subcultures within a larger ethnic subculture, and as therefore expressive of forms and beliefs that are inherently critical of, in opposition to, the ethos of the dominant culture. To some extent all of this is true. But it is not the whole story.
Of course there are good historical, political reasons to identify the Ibo and Yoruba rhythms (as in a recent Essence article) and other cultural antecedents: namely, the intellectual exclusion of blacks and of African-American cultural production in general. There is also a nationalist pride, as in Nelson George’s The Death of Rhythm and Blues, 1988, where he meaningfully sorts those pop musics that are really black and those that aren’t black enough. And there is the role of scholarship itself, which functions so often to direct, taxonomize, categorize, and essentialize.
This line of inquiry, or argument, which stresses especially the continuity of cultural identity, appears in both the most academic and the most popular publications, and whether presented by black or white or Latino critics, it carries a deeper message: these African-American kids are just unconsciously recapitulating the traditional street taunt, phallic boast, pattin’ juba, or the praise song. What gets lost in this otherwise provocative approach is a sense of the present material circumstances of those creating the music. The point is that this is a complex urban music, being made by people with decades of recorded music and a variety of cultural experiences at their disposal—and by musicians who are not just unconscious savants, but professionals, makers of history, participants, at this point anyway, in a great big commodity-producing international entertainment industry. Urban and technological complexities are now just as much a part of African-American experience as, say, call-and-response. Chuck D of Public Enemy, for example, described rap as black television, saying that he didn’t used to know what brothers in Houston or Los Angeles were doing, how they lived, but that now they have a network for communication. Cultural critics are in danger of favoring an antiquating model of black culture while perpetuating a discourse that deemphasizes the current economic and social positions of the producers; emphasizes otherness as a racial or deep-cultural trait, at the expense of analyzing contemporary segregation in schools, media representations, etc.; and often plays down participants’ own histories, as they tell them.
Along with the immediate socioeconomic contexts of rap are the issues raised by the music itself. A more interesting question to ask than is this DJ from L.A. reproducing an inherently African form? is, What have rap artists done to our conception of “songs” as discreet, copyrighted entities, or of “composition” as the arrangement of harmony and melody to fulfill the listener’s expectations of a particular genre? And how did they raise our tolerance and understanding of “noise” and disjunction faster than any number of modernist composers—and still make the music so funky? In other words, how does their production interact with the complex multiculture at large, and what do we—who are not rappers—learn about our own cultural assumptions in the process? Because popular musics carry such strong social messages in their structure, as well as in their contents, these questions have significance beyond mere formalism.
Rap is, indeed, a very political music, and cultural studies is going to be way behind if it sticks to the “symbolic resistance among marginal subcultures” and “magical solutions to real contradictions” theses, which were usefully developed around some other working-class subcultures. More interesting, then, to look at the Stop the Violence Movement, at Public Enemy’s assertive nationalism, at their dismissal of group member Professor Griff for anti-Semitic pronouncements (and the media swirl surrounding the event). At Melle Mel’s raps about Jesse Jackson, cocaine addiction, and WW III. MC Lyte’s rap about crack. And all the raps, on the other hand, that do glorify violence, guns, and drugs. And the relationship of these artists to the constituencies, to use an electoral term, from which they’re presumed to come. Beyond the codifying and valorizing of cultural difference, a position that can be used to oppress as well as to analyze or liberate, cultural criticism must look deeper into the complex relations among cultures, communities, and commodities.
David Sternbach is a writer and poet living in New York, and an editor at Pantheon Books. His most recent collection of poetry is Swell.
