The Michael Eric Dyson Reader

by Michael Eric Dyson

  Moreover, many of the same conservative politicians who support the attack on gangsta rap also attack black women (from Lani Guinier to welfare mothers), affirmative action, and the redrawing of voting districts to achieve parity for black voters. The war on gangsta rap diverts attention away from the more substantive threat posed to women and blacks by many conservative politicians. Gangsta rap’s critics are keenly aware of the harmful effects that genre’s misogyny can have on black teens. Ironically, such critics appear oblivious to how their rhetoric of absolute opposition to gangsta rap has been used to justify political attacks on poor black teens.

  That doesn’t mean that gratuitous violence and virulent misogyny should not be opposed. They must be identified and destroyed. I am wholly sympathetic, for instance, to sharp criticism of gangsta rap’s ruinous sexism and homophobia, though neither Dole, Bennett, nor Tucker have made much of the latter plague. “Fags” and “dykes” are prominent in the genre’s vocabulary of rage. Critics’ failure to make this an issue only reinforces the inferior, invisible status of gay men and lesbians in mainstream and black cultural institutions. Homophobia is a vicious emotion and practice that links mainstream middle-class and black institutions to the vulgar expressions of gangsta rap. There seems to be an implicit agreement between gangsta rappers and political elites that gays, lesbians, and bisexuals basically deserve what they get.

  But before we discard the genre, we should understand that gangsta rap often reaches higher than its ugliest, lowest common denominator. Misogyny, violence, materialism, and sexual transgression are not its exclusive domain. At its best, this music draws attention to complex dimensions of ghetto life ignored by many Americans. Of all the genres of hip-hop—from socially conscious rap to black nationalist expressions, from pop to hardcore—gangsta rap has most aggressively narrated the pains and possibilities, the fantasies and fears, of poor black urban youth. Gangsta rap is situated in the violent climes of postindustrial Los Angeles and its bordering cities. It draws its metaphoric capital in part from the mix of myth and murder that gave the Western frontier a dangerous appeal a century ago.

  Gangsta rap is largely an indictment of mainstream and bourgeois black institutions by young people who do not find conventional methods of addressing personal and social calamity useful. The leaders of those institutions often castigate the excessive and romanticized violence of this music without trying to understand what precipitated its rise in the first place. In so doing, they drive a greater wedge between themselves and the youth they so desperately want to help.

  If Americans really want to strike at the heart of sexism and misogyny in our communities, shouldn’t we take a closer look at one crucial source of these blights: religious institutions, including the synagogue, the temple, and the church? For instance, the central institution of black culture, the black church, which has given hope and inspiration to millions of blacks, has also given us an embarrassing legacy of sexism and misogyny. Despite the great good it has achieved through a heroic tradition of emancipatory leadership, the black church continues to practice and justify ecclesiastical apartheid. More than 70 percent of black church members are female, yet they are generally excluded from the church’s central station of power, the pulpit. And rarely are the few ordained female ministers elected pastors.

  Yet black leaders, many of them ministers, excoriate rappers for their verbal sexual misconduct. It is difficult to listen to civil rights veterans deplore the hostile depiction of women in gangsta rap without mentioning the vicious sexism of the movements for racial liberation of the 1960s. And of course the problem persists in many civil rights organizations today.

  Attacking figures like Snoop Doggy Dogg or Tupac Shakur—or the companies that record or distribute them—is an easy out. It allows scapegoating without sophisticated moral analysis and action. While these young black males become whipping boys for sexism and misogyny, the places in our culture where these ancient traditions are nurtured and rationalized—including religious and educational institutions and the nuclear family—remain immune to forceful and just criticism.

  Corporate capitalism, mindless materialism, and pop culture have surely helped unravel the moral fabric of our society. But the moral condition of our nation is equally affected by political policies that harm the vulnerable and poor. It would behoove Senator Dole to examine the glass house of politics he abides in before he decides to throw stones again. If he really wants to do something about violence, he should change his mind about the ban on assault weapons he seeks to repeal. That may not be as sexy or self-serving as attacking pop culture, but it might help save lives.

  Gangsta rap’s greatest “sin” may be that it tells the truth about practices and beliefs that rappers hold in common with the mainstream and with black elites. This music has embarrassed mainstream society and black bourgeois culture. It has forced us to confront the demands of racial representation that plague and provoke black artists. It has also exposed our polite sexism and our disregard for gay men and lesbians. We should not continue to blame gangsta rap for ills that existed long before hip-hop uttered its first syllable. Indeed, gangsta rap’s in-yourface style may do more to force our nation to confront crucial social problems than countless sermons or political speeches.

  Thirty-Two

  WE NEVER WERE WHAT WE USED TO BE: BLACK YOUTH, POP CULTURE, AND THE POLITICS OF NOSTALGIA

  This is my representative statement on hip-hop culture. In this chapter, I range over the various genres of hip-hop in exploring its roots and ramifications in black culture and beyond. I also attempt to situate the development of hip-hop culture in reference to earlier expressions of black pop culture that endured demonization, especially jazz and blues music. I also argue that an older generation has wrongly concluded that black youth are ethically estranged from their elders; too often, older blacks assign to the unavoidable generation gap a morally perverse intent by youth that is dangerous. I argue that the moral vision of many older blacks is clouded by a nostalgic sense of the past that prevents them from identifying with the hip-hop generation—and from identifying their own lapses and failures as well. Finally, I proffer the existence of a “juvenocracy” in urban communities—urban spaces occupied and dominated by black youth under twenty-five. This demographic shift, which also represents a shift in power from older to younger blacks, has had a demonstrable, sometimes devastating, impact on black families. Only by engaging and constructively critiquing hip-hop culture—and not dismissing or denigrating it—can older blacks possibly hope to understand the most influential form of black popular culture of the last quarter century.

  ______________________

  Our present obsession with the past has the double advantage of making new work seem raw and rough compared to the cozy patina of tradition, whilst refusing tradition its vital connection to what is happening now. By making islands of separation out of the unbreakable chain of human creativity, we are able to set up false comparisons, false expectations, all the while lamenting that the music, poetry, painting, prose, performance art of Now, fails to live up to the art of Then, which is wby, we say, it does not affect us. In fact, we are no more moved by a past we are busy inventing, than by a present we are busy denying.

  —JEANETTE WINTERSON

  “ART OBJECTS,” 1995

  I WASN’T EXPECTING THE REBUFF. Its severity underscored the bitterness of the debate that has formed around urban black youth and the cultures they create.

  I had just finished testifying before the United States Senate Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on Juvenile Justice. Illinois Senator Carol Moseley-Braun, along with Maine Senator William Cohen and Wisconsin Senator and Subcommittee Chair Herbert Kohl, had called the hearing in 1994 to discuss “violent and demeaning imagery in popular music.” Predictably, the hearings focused on gangsta rap. While he wasn’t within barking distance, rapper Snoop Doggy Dogg was the shadow figure and rhetorical guest of dishonor at the proceedings. His body of work—like the ra
pper himself, slim but menacingly attractive—was relentlessly attacked by many of the hearing’s witnesses. Snoop was made to appear like hip-hop’s Mephistopheles, seducing black children to trade their souls for the corrupt delights of “G-funk.” The latter is a jeep-rattling, bass-heavy, ripinvention (yes, a mix of ripping off and reinventing) of ’70s funk. Except Snoop and G-funk impresario Dr. Dre’s brand of funk is fused to the gangsterish fantasies of 1990s West Coast black youth culture. After having my say—that the music and its artists are complex, that they must be understood in both their cultural and racial setting even as we criticize their hateful sentiments—I was accosted by another witness’s husband.

  “Don’t you have a Ph.D. from Princeton?” the tall, brown-skinned man brusquely quizzed me.

  “Yes, sir, I do,” I replied.

  “And aren’t you a Baptist preacher?” he asked, with even more scorn.

  “Yes, sir, I am,” I said.

  “You know, for somebody who’s supposed to be so smart, you sure are a dumb ass.”

  At that, he turned and walked off. He had the kind of self-satisfaction that only proud indignity can conjure. (To be honest, my Detroit homeboy roots nearly cracked the surface of my scholarly and preacherly gentility. But since my mama taught me to respect my elders, I kept my mouth shut.)

  There were other times, too, when I caught a glimpse of the hostility between black youth culture and its older critics. Soon after my Washington witnessing, I lectured at Harvard on Malcolm X, ending with a recitation of N.W.A.’s (Niggas With Attitude) rap, “——Tha Police.” After my talk, a seasoned graduate student approached me, I thought, to praise my performance.

  “Your lecture was good, man,” he duty noted. “But why would you end by surrendering the nobility of black folk to that barbaric nonsense?”

  At still another conference, this time at Princeton, I interjected a long snatch from Snoop’s syncopated soliloquy on his and Dr. Dre’s rap, “Nothin’ but a G Thang.” A colleague later reported that a few of the Ivy League’s stuffier types found my juxtaposing of Ralph Ellison and Snoop jarringly profane. And my performance led New York Daily News columnist Playthell Benjamin to label me a “sophist” and a “snake oil salesman.” (Benjamin would later repeat these, and much stronger claims, when we went head-to-head at hearings on gangsta rap before the Pennsylvania State Legislature and on CBS radio’s Gil Gross Show.)

  Admittedly, much of the resistance I’ve encountered may have a lot to do with the fact that I’m a wanna-be rap star. I’ve even been labeled a “hip-hop intellectual.” You see, even when I’m lecturing on dense theoretical issues, like, say, the relation of postmodern notions of identity to African-American culture, I’ve got the grating habit of dropping a line or two—okay, a few stanzas—from the latest rap release. At thirty-seven, I came along a little too late to spend my youth spinning tales about my hood in poetic meters padded by James Brown samples. It’s probably pretty sad, and often maddening, for folk to see a late baby boomer like me—so late that my generation’s been called “’tweeners” because we fit between real baby boomers and Generation Xers—trying to horn in on a younger age group’s territory. It’s probably a pre–midlife crisis, a forward-looking relapse back into a hip-hop youth that was never really mine. Or maybe in the spirit of hip-hop, I’m simply turning the tables to sample the youth of artists who sample the music of my youth.

  Much of the anger I’ve seen directed at black youth, especially from older blacks, is tied to a belief that young blacks are very different from any other black generation. Among esteemed black intellectuals and persons on the street, there is a consensus that something has gone terribly wrong with black youth. They are disrespectful to their elders. They are obsessed with sex. They are materialistic. They are pathological. They are violent. They are nihilistic. They are ethically depraved. They are lazy. They are menaces to society.

  Right away we must admit that some of these complaints form the rhetorical divide that grows between all generations. Some of these cants and carps are no more than predecessor blues. They are the laments of those who come Before judging those who come After. (Such judgments travel a two-way street. Our kids have their share of disgust about the world they’ve inherited.)

  But many of these complaints reflect a real fear of black youth that’s not confined to black communities and not explained by any “generation gap.” It’s hard to open a newspaper or watch television without getting an ugly reminder of the havoc our kids wreak on the streets and the terror they must confront without much sympathy or support. To be sure, the media has irresponsibly painted many of the problems of urban America black or brown. In reality, a lot of our social misery, including drugs, crime, and violence, has a decidedly whiter hue. Still, black youth are in big trouble.

  For many black and white Americans, hip-hop culture crudely symbolizes the problems of urban black youth. The list of offenses associated with hip-hop culture is culled from rap lyrics and the lifestyles they promote. The list includes vulgar language, sexism, misogyny, homophobia, sexual promiscuity, domestic abuse, parental disrespect, rejection of authority, and the glorification of violence, drug use, rape, and murder. And it’s true that even a casual listen to a lot of hiphop will turn up these and other nefarious attitudes. At least if you listen to the style of hip-hop known as gangsta rap. The gangsta rap genre of hip-hop emerged in the late ’80s on the West Coast as crack and gangs ruled the urban centers of Los Angeles, Long Beach, Compton, and Oakland. Since hip-hop has long turned to the black ghetto and the Latino barrio for lyrical inspiration, it was inevitable that a form of music that mimicked the violence on the streets would rise.

  It was just as predictable, though not to the degree that it has happened, that a huge backlash against gangsta rap and black youth would emerge. Among the factors that made black youth culture ripe for such an attack is a general ignorance about the range and depth of hip-hop culture. Ironically, this ignorance helped make gangsta rap an economically viable music. Anti-rap crusader C. Delores Tucker can shout as loud as she wants, and she’s certainly earned the right, but she was nowhere to be found when rap group Public Enemy was at its revolutionary height calling for a united black nation to fight racism and the powers that be. True, their brand of hip-hop brushed too closely to anti-Semitism and they certainly could have used a few lessons in feminist thought. But few people quit listening to Sinatra’s “Fly Me to the Moon” (it was really named “In Other Words,” but Sinatra’s Billie Holiday–inspired phrasing was so impeccably memorable that he shifted the song’s emphasis) because of his occasional racism or his denigration of women as broads.

  The moral of the story is that had more support been given to so-called positive hip-hoppers and to revolutionary rappers who detested body bags and beer bottles; who encouraged black men to “be a father to your child”; who advocated love and respect for black women; who sought to build black communities; and who encouraged youth to study black history, the gangsta rap tide might have been stemmed. At the least, gangsta rappers might have been forced to take the internal criticisms of their hip-hop peers more seriously because such criticisms would have had moral and economic support. After all, it’s easier to get an album made if you’re “pimpin’ hos,” “cockin’ glocks” or generally bitch-baiting your way through yet another tired tale about how terrible it was to come up in the hood without your father while blaming your mama for the sorry job she did, than if you’re promoting radical black unity or the overthrow of white racism.

  This is not to dis West Coast rap. They got big the old-fashioned way: they earned it. Left in the shadow of East Coast rap for years, West Coast rap reinvigorated the hip-hop game by reinventing the premise of rap: to groove the gluteus maximus. As Ralph Ellison said, geography is fate. West Coast hip-hop tailored its fat bass beats and silky melodies for jeeps that cruise the generous spaces of the West. The music appeals as well to fans in the open spaces of the Midwest and the South. The tightly drawn g
rooves and cerebral lyrics of the East Coast have almost become site-specific. East Coast rappers cling to beliefs in their artistic superiority and adhere to the principles of authentic hip-hop. Such beliefs give rise to poetically intense rappers like Nas or the esoteric basement hip-hoppers Wu Tang Clan. For the most part, East Coast rap lags far behind the West Coast in record sales and in popularity. Both brands of hip-hop proved too bruising for the old heads of the black bourgeoisie. The music also escaped the artistic interests of a lot of working-class black parents pulling twelve-hour shifts to keep out of the poorhouse.

  But their children surely got the message. And so did the children of white suburbia. The crossover of hip-hop to white teens is certainly a driving force behind the attack on black youth. Hip-hop’s appeal to white youth extends the refashioning of mainstream America by black popular culture. From sports to fashion, from music to film, innovations in American art owe a debt to the creativity of black culture. For example, twenty-five years ago, it was unimaginable that black basketball stars would make television commercials or have sneakers named after them. Teams like the New York Knickerbockers were derisively dubbed the New York “Niggerbockers” because of their share of the black talent beginning to flood the NBA. Today, the NBA is a black man’s game. Michael Jordan is the most revered and perhaps the richest athlete in the world. Kids of every color lace up his shoes, sport his jersey, and want to, as the ad goes, “Be like Mike.”