The Michael Eric Dyson Reader

by Michael Eric Dyson

  White kids are also adopting the dress, diction, and demeanor of urban black youth. From baggy pants to oversize shirts, the “gear” of hip-hop culture has been mass-produced and worn by youth of every ethnic and racial group. The slang of hip-hop is now widely used. “Yo” and “Whassup?” are part of our common cultural parlance. The Arsenio Hall Show was an extended hip-hop anthem, a limited scope of themes pegged to samples of existing material that are endlessly remixed. Perhaps that’s why Hall’s show lasted as long as the average rap career, proving that the genre’s virtue is its vice. Even the New York Times regularly uses “dis” in its articles. The swagger of black youth, the sultry way they combine boasting and self-confidence, has influenced the styles of upper-middle-class white youth. For many white parents, however, such a trend is cause for concern. While white youth already face their version of the generation gap—they’ve been dubbed “slackers” and “Generation X”—emulating the styles, speech, and behavior of urban black youth is even more menacing.

  Of course, there’s nothing new about white kids imitating black kids. Neither is this the first time that white panic has followed white teens’ adoration of black stars. When Sam Cooke’s mellifluous voice and flawless good looks sent white girls screaming in the ’50s, it caused an uproar among white adults. And now that white girls are driven crazy by Snoop Doggy Dogg’s canine comeliness, especially when there’s no doubt about what he wants to do in his dog pound, rap and the culture that produces it are found wanting. It wasn’t until rap made a huge impact on white kids that the music was so roundly attacked. As long as the “bad” effects of rap were restricted to black kids, its menace went undetected, unprotested, or it was flat-out ignored.

  Among many black adults, hip-hop culture represents a tragic rejection of the values that prevailed in black communities years ago, at least during their youthful watch on the wall of black progress. To hear legions of black adults tell it, there was a time when a black child could be disciplined by any adult in the neighborhood if he or she did wrong. Such a story is meant to show the strength, unity, and durability of black communities of the past. It is also meant to underscore the weakness, fragmentation, and collapse of black communities today. (Once, when I visited a university to lecture, I heard this same story repeated by a black youth, all of eighteen years old, who included her generation among the duly disciplined children. Most blacks would say that her generation is unfamiliar with such an experience. That gave me a clue that such stories are, in large part, rhetorical devices that transmit folk wisdom from one generation to the next. Such stories help us define the limits of acceptable behavior.)

  It’s clear that the rise of hip-hop culture has provoked a deep black nostalgia for a time when black communities were quite different than they are now. When children respected their elders. When adults, not young thugs, ruled over neighborhoods. When the moral fabric of black communities was knit together by a regard for law and order. When people shared what they had, even if it was their last crust of bread or drop of soup. When families extended beyond blood or biology to take in young people in need of rearing. When communication between blacks on the street was marked by courtesy more than cursing. When black folk went to church, and even if they didn’t, respected the minister as a source of moral authority. And on and on.

  There’s little doubt that black communities of the past were sharply different than they are now. But black communities weren’t the idyllic places that nostalgic black folk make them out to be. Nostalgia is colored memory. It is romantic remembering. It re-creates as much as it recalls. The political force of black nostalgia—built on a vision of the black past as a utopian, golden age—is harmful to debates about black youth. Every culture, age, and generation has a high point whose benefits are unsurpassable. Such utopias and golden ages, and the benefits they bestow, are usually realized after the fact. Indeed, they have to be. It takes decline to highlight a pinnacle. But when blacks use nostalgia to make moral distinctions between the sort of people black communities produced Then and produce Now, we unravel the very fabric of racial memory that we claim our youth desperately need.

  A cure for such nostalgia can be found in works like Morals and Manners Among Negro Americans, edited in 1914 by W.E.B. Du Bois and Augustus Dill. Du Bois and Dill surveyed hundreds of leading blacks about the “manners and morals” of black youth. Wouldn’t you know it? Many black leaders lamented the negative impact of popular culture on black youth. One leader blamed moral decline on movies, which “have an unwholesome effect upon the young people. Roller skating, ragtime music, cabaret songs, and ugly suggestions of the big city are all pernicious. The dancing clubs in the big cities are also vicious.” Another leader worried that black youth “hang around the corners in great numbers, especially the boys. Many of them are becoming gamblers and idlers.” Keep in mind that these degenerate black youth make up a generation now praised for its high morals. That should stop us from writing the epitaph of what has been mislabeled a lost generation of black youth. (Even here, racial distinctions prevail. If white kids are demonized as “slackers,” at least they’re seen to be slacking off from a Protestant work ethic they can recover through hard work. What can you do when you’re lost? Often, you get written off. That happens to too many black youth.)

  The relation of nostalgic blacks to hip-hop culture can be viewed in the following way: there is a perception of aesthetic alienation and moral strangeness in black youth. Both of these perceptions, I believe, depend on a denial of crucial aspects of history and racial memory. Amnesia and anger have teamed up to rob many blacks of a balanced perspective on our kids. With such balance, we might justly criticize and appreciate hip-hop culture. Without the moderating influence of historical insight, joined to what might be called the humility of memory, we end up mirroring the outright repudiation our kids face across this country.

  Since so much of the politics of nostalgia are about how things used to be, we’ve got to understand a bit better how things actually were. Now, I don’t harbor any illusions about being able, as we used to say in my black ghetto neighborhood in Detroit, to get to “wie es eigentlich gewesen,” or, “how it really was.” (Me and my boys repeated that line from nineteenth-century historian Leopold von Ranke when we were frustrated in our quest for eighteenth-century philosopher Immanuel Kant’s “ding an sich,” or, “the thing in itself.” Yeah, we had it like that back in the day. No wonder my generation wants our kids to be just like us!) But we must escape the awkward burden of remembering only what we choose to believe by getting a more insightful account of things as they happened. The past should be a fountain of wisdom and warning. It is inevitable that fictions attach to what used to be. But it is immoral to make those fictions the ground of harsh judgments of our children.

  The aesthetic alienation of hip-hop has partly to do with perception. Rap is seen as wildly differing from the styles, themes, and tones of previous black music. Well, that’s true and not true. Certainly the form of hip-hop is distinct. The skeletal rap crew is composed of a DJ (disc jockey), a producer, and an MC (master of ceremonies, or rapper). (Technology has enhanced, occasionally blurred, and sometimes redivided the crew’s labor over the last fifteen years.) In many cases, there are at least a couple of rappers. In some cases, there are several. The DJ commands a pair of phonograph turntables. Among other functions, the DJ plays fragments of records through a technique called scratching: manually rotating a record in sharp, brief bursts of back and forth rhythmic movement over isolated portions of a song, producing a scratching sound.

  The producer has several devices at her command, including a beat box and a digital sampler. The beat box, or drum machine, is an electronic instrument that simulates the sound of a drum set. A digital sampler is a synthesizer that stores in its computerized memory a variety of sounds (a James Brown scream, a TV theme song, a guitar riff, a bass line) that are reproduced when activated by the producer. The DJ and the producer work together in laying down back
ing tracks for the MC. The tracks consist of rhythms, scratches, beats, shrieks, noises, other sound effects, and loops, which are fragments of existing songs reworked and repeated in new musical contexts.

  The MC, or rapper, recites lyrics in a rhythmic, syncopated fashion. The rapper’s rhetorical quirks, vocal tics, rhyme flow, and verbal flourishes mark his or her individual style. In the early days of rap, MCs often simulated sonic fragments with their voices, causing some rappers to be dubbed human beat boxes. Rappers can use a variety of rhyme schemes, from couplets in tetrameter to iambic pentameter. Their rhyme schemes can employ masculine and feminine rhymes, assonantal and consonantal rhymes, or even internal rhymes. Rappers may use enjambment, prosody, and sophisticated syncopations to tie their collage of rhymes into a pleasing sonic ensemble.

  But hip-hop’s form joins features of black oral culture, especially toasts (long narrative poems) and the dozens, to a variety of black musical styles. As Gil Scott-Heron once remarked, hip-hop fuses the drum and the word. Blues music is the style of black artistry most closely associated with hip-hop. The blues spawned stock characters within its lyrical universe, including the hoochie-coochie man, the mojo worker, the lover man, and the bad man bluesman. Their relation to hip-hop’s (and ’70s blaxploitation flicks’) macks, pimps, hustlers, and gangsters is clear. Plus, the rhetorical marks and devices of blues culture, including vulgar language, double entendres, boasting, and liberal doses of homespun machismo, link it to hip-hop, especially gangsta rap. And in case you’re thinking, “Yeah, but the blues and early jazz weren’t nearly as nasty as rap”; think again. There are lyrics contained in the songs of the great Jelly Roll Morton, for example, that would make Snoop Doggy Dogg wince in embarrassment. You can read Morton’s lyrics in their most distinguished place of storage, the Library of Congress. (Does this mean in the next century that that august institution will house the Dogg’s Magnum Snoopus, “Doggystyle,” for future generations to lap up or howl at?) Modern technology, together with the urban and secular emphases of black culture, has helped expose localized traditions of vulgar black speech—including agrarian blues, signifying, toasts, and the dozens—to a worldwide audience. And millions of blacks are angry and ashamed.

  It’s clear, too, that ’50s rock and roll, ’60s soul music, ’70s R&B, ’80s new jack swing, and ’90s hip-hop soul have touched on themes that rap has addressed, though often in a dramatically different style. Some of the most important black music of the ’60s and ’70s, for instance, attempted to reconcile the political demands of a new black consciousness with the changing rules of domestic life. This music attempted to join erotic desire to its political ambitions. Thus, Marvin Gaye followed his 1971 masterpiece “What’s Going On” with his brilliant 1973 release “Let’s Get It On,” moving from the social to the sexual sphere in exploring the complex dimensions of black culture. While hip-hop addresses these same concerns, its ideological orientation, and therefore its artistic direction, is almost reversed. With the increasing attacks on the black family as an unreliable space to shape sexuality in socially acceptable forms, a lot of hip-hoppers try to join politics to erotic desire. Many artists move from the sexual center of rap to the varieties of political consciousness hip-hop manages to embrace along its cutting edges.

  Still, there’s no doubt that older styles of black music have provoked their own controversies. But depending on which black generation you speak with, each style represents the golden age of black music. In fact, hip-hoppers themselves have more than a little nostalgia, particularly for ’70s culture and music. Their nostalgia is even more ironic, indeed laughable, because of hip-hop’s grand claims to authenticity, to “keeping it real.” Meaning their music won’t sell out by pandering to the styles or themes of R&B. Right. Hip-hop still depends on existing black music even as it reshapes, often brilliantly, the grooves it steals. Without its creative uses of past black music, rap would be a museum of speech with little to inspire us to conserve its words, much less heed its warnings and many lessons.

  The technical devices of hip-hop accent its ambiguous relation to history. Through sampling, hip-hop revives and reinvents what has been forgotten. Sampling allows hip-hop to reshape what’s been neglected by removing it from the context—the actual album, the network of cultural nuances, the time period—in which it originally came to life. What hip-hop gives with one hand, it takes back with the other. While they make fresh use of a Parliament-Funkadelic beat or a Leon Haywood loop, hip-hoppers often have little awareness of the musical traditions those artists fed on. Such awareness might make rappers’ creative piracy much more compelling. How? The rhetoric of rap could rework, satirize, or play off of the intellectual visions of some of the songs it lifts. What rap does so brilliantly with form it might be able to match with content.

  Paying more attention to black music’s intellectual traditions might keep hip-hop from completely turning its machinery of mythology on itself. Hip-hoppers get misty-eyed about the “old-school” and what happened “back in the day.” There is already growing up around rap a wall of myth that excludes crucial features of hip-hop’s own history. For instance, its devotees largely contend that hip-hop originated in the black (including West Indian) and Latino working-class ghetto of the South Bronx with block parties in the early ’70s. But others have recently argued that hip-hop was bom in the West Bronx. More significantly, hip-hop cannot be divorced from its roots in Jamaica. In the 1960s, sound system operators hauled massive speakers in wooden carts in working-class communities during backyard dances attended by “rude boys,” the Caribbean counterpart to hip-hop’s “b-boys.” Also, the Jamaican dance hall was the site of a mixture of older and newer forms of Caribbean music, including calypso, soca, salsa, Afro-Cuban, ska, and reggae. One of the first great pioneers of hip-hop, DJ Kool Herc, was a West Indian immigrant to the West Bronx who brought with him a hunger to recreate the memories and mood of Jamaican dance hall music. Those roots nourish rap.

  Hip-hoppers often forget that hip-hop was initially patronized by average working-class and middle-class kids, not gangsters or other members of the hardcore scene. Afrika Bambaataa, another old-school pioneer who created hip-hop standards like “Looking for the Perfect Beat” and “Planet Rock,” also founded the Universal Zulu Nation. True enough, the organization grew out of South Bronx gang life (Bambaataa was a member of the notorious gang Black Spades). But Universal Zulu Nation was committed to peace, unity, and self-knowledge. And neither was hip-hop an exclusively black affair. African-Americans, Afro-Caribbeans, Latinos, and progressive whites all shared in the Bronx parties where hip-hop was spawned in the States. Hip-hop’s multiethnic audience helped energize its free-form expression. Old-school legends like DJ Grandmaster Flash experimented with a wide range of music, from Frank Sinatra to Thin Lizzy.

  It may not be altogether unfitting that hip-hop is partially cut off from the roots of even its own history. After all, with its impulse to create sonic collages, its sampling of existing music, its disregard for musical conventions, and its irreverent pairing of the culturally sacred and profane, hip-hop is thought to be a striking instance of postmodernism. And according to critic Fredric Jameson, the lack of a sense of history rests squarely at the center, if it can be said to have one, of the postmodern moment. While it’s easy to see why hip-hop is deemed a postmodern art form—quotation, pastiche, contingency, fragmentation, and the like help define its presence—it may be that its homegrown nostalgia and hunger for purity and authenticity betray modernist obsessions.

  In other words, the postmodernism of hip-hop may show that we’re trying to get rid of, or, at least, get over modernism too quickly. Postmodernism may turn out to be modernism in drag. At its heart, modernism looks back to move forward. Modernism is obsessed with critically reexamining the ground of its origin—which, in its advocates’ minds, turns out to be our culture’s origins—so that its foundations are secured. Modernist discussions are caught up in the rapture of renewal, recovery, return, an
d renaissance, all in the name of progress, of moving forward. The new is valuable precisely because it is formed out of reappropriating the original. The great paradox of modernism, for some critics, is that, in order to outdo it, one must hold that whatever will succeed modernism, say postmodernism, is rooted in a ground of thought that is more original than the modernist ground it criticizes. Ironically, that’s a modernist move. As a result, one ends up replacing the content of modernism, but not the form of modernism itself. That’s why critic Theodor Adorno said that there was no overcoming modernity.

  The question of whether hip-hop is really postmodernist or modernist is, at some levels, a strictly academic affair. In other ways, the debate may help us understand the conflicts, and the hidden ties, between hip-hop and forms of black music that have modernist elements. It may shed light on the uses black folk make of their past, and the difference those uses make in how we view black youth.

  If black nostalgia has distorted the relation of postmodern black youth culture to a complex black past, this is nowhere more powerfully glimpsed than in comparing hip-hop with a high point of black modernism: jazz music and culture. Critics like Stanley Crouch and musicians like Wynton Marsalis have relentlessly attacked hip-hop culture for its deficits when compared to jazz. In conversations—in truth, they were Herculean arguments between us that raged for hours at a time—neither of these gifted gentlemen has had anything good to say about hip-hop culture.

  Crouch maintains that hip-hop is, in a memorable phrase comparing rap to the infamous, racist 1915 D.W Griffith film, “Birth of a Nation with a backbeat.” Marsalis thinks rap reflects a fascism that mars humane art. Plus, rap is rooted in a banal, mindless repetition of beat, signaling a lack of musical imagination and invention. Inspired by the likes of Ralph Ellison, but especially by Albert Murray, Crouch and Marsalis argue that the artistic possibilities of jazz—its heart pumping with the blood of improvisation, its gut churning with the blues—embody the edifying quest for romantic self-expression and democratic collaboration that capture Negro music and American democracy at their best. For Crouch and Marsalis, hip-hop negates everything jazz affirms.