The Michael Eric Dyson Reader

by Michael Eric Dyson

  Contemporary rap is filled with stirring reminders of why the marriage of the spoken word to music has revolutionized black culture. Figures like Lauryn Hill, Common, Mos Def, Talib Kweli, and Bahamadia generate black noise to spur the eruption of social conscience. Gifted wordsmiths like Jay-Z, Nas, DMX, and the assorted rappers of the Wu-Tang Clan use their pavement poetry to probe urban existence in gripping detail. But there is still strong criticism of rap’s musical vampirism and its dulling repetitiousness. Those who claim the mastery of instruments through the production of original music is the only mark of genuine artistry offer the first criticism. Such purists ignore the severely depleted funding of arts in public schools since the late 1970s, a fateful development that kept many inner-city students from learning to play musical instruments. The critics also overlook the virtuosity implied in the technical manipulation of existing sounds to create new music. Although hip-hop was vulnerable to the claim that it lacked original music at its birth, Tupac was fortunate to have producers who gave melody to his rage. The sounds that bathed his beautiful baritone were often striking. “I loved the kind of tracks that were put together for him to rap over,” says contemporary jazz musician George Duke. “They had a lot of the oldschool vibe in there. I thought what he did was interesting in terms of the chords. It just felt like something I could play over.” Moreover, the fact that so many rappers repeat tired formulas that have been successful for other artists cannot possibly distinguish rap from, say, contemporary rhythm and blues or rock music. And neither can the gutless, uninspiring imitation on which too many raps thrive be said to be unique to hip-hop. After all, contemporary American classical music and smooth jazz—a misnomer worth fighting over, according to jazz purists—do the same.

  To be sure, there are more serious criticisms of hip-hop. It is easy to understand the elements of rap that provoke consternation: its violence, its sexual saturation, its recycling of vicious stereotypes, its color-coded preference for light or nonblack women, its failure to engage politics, its selling out to corporate capitalism, and its downright ugly hatred of women. Tupac has come to symbolize the blights on hip-hop’s troubled soul. His self-destructive behavior and premature death inspired a great deal of hand-wringing over hip-hop’s influence on black youth. Unfortunately, many critics divide the wheat from the chaff in hip-hop by separating rap into its positive and negative expressions. That distinction often ignores the complexity of hip-hop culture and downplays rap’s artistic motivations. Instead, rap is read flatly, transmuted into a sociological phenomenon of limited cultural value. Rap is viewed as a barometer of what ails black youth. It is apparent that a great deal of bitterness and anger clutter the disputes between rap’s advocates and its critics. It is equally obvious that black youth are under attack from many quarters of our culture. In hip-hop, as with most youth music, that is nothing new. “All art created by young people is despised by adults,” says Toni Morrison. “Whether it’s Mozart or Louis Armstrong, if it’s young, it always has to fight . . . . And what shakes out of that, of course, becomes the best.” From its origins, rap music was dismissed or denigrated, even by blacks. The point here is not to berate blacks for missing the boat on what has turned out to be one of the most popular, creative, and commercially viable art forms in many decades. I am simply suggesting that there was a love–hate relation between many black folk and hip-hop culture long before Tupac and long before rap’s controversial headlines, its tragic deaths, and its worldwide influence.

  Early seeds of suspicion have often bloomed into outright rejection of hip-hop as a vital source of art and imagination for black youth. That is why black wags of every stripe have stepped up to denounce the music as misguided, poisonous, and inauthentic, since music that gyrates into the spotlight has little truck with the revolutionary thrust of, say, Gil Scott-Heron or the Last Poets. In other words, hip-hop is not really black music. On such a view, hip-hop is but the seductive corporate packaging of the vicious stereotypes black folk have tried to defeat since our ancestors were uprooted and brought to America in chains. Except now, critics of hip-hop claim, the chains that bind us are more mental and psychological than physical. And the great-great-great-grandchildren of slaves who fought to be free and who hoped that their seed would escape rather than embrace enslavement create the images that destroy our standing in society. “Thanks to music videos, the image people all over the world now have of African Americans is of violence-prone misogynists, preoccupied with promiscuous sex and conspicuous consumption,” says writer Khephra Burns. “Despite years of striving to distance ourselves from the negative ways in which white folk once portrayed us, we have come at last to the point of portraying ourselves to the world in this way.” Stanley Crouch sees an even more sinister effect of the relentlessly negative and stereotypical portrayal of blacks. “You can talk to people who have traveled around the world, and they’ll tell you the contempt that has developed for black people over the last twenty years is mightily imposing,” he says. “You and I might have a completely different experience, but if we were in our early twenties, that’s another vibration. People would say, ‘Uh-oh, here they come,’ and people would be suspicious and cross the street. That’s going on all over the world.”

  Burns and Crouch make powerful arguments about the lethal consequences of flooding the airwaves and video screen with self-defeating visions of black life. There is little doubt that the effect is exactly as they describe it, with the caveat, however, that the global portrayal of black life surely cannot rest on the images or words of barely postadolescent entertainers. This is not to deny that a single video by a rap artist can more successfully shred international boundaries than a hundred books by righteous authors. Neither is it to deny the huge responsibility such artists bear in confirming or combating hateful and ignorant beliefs about black folk that circulate around the globe. But that is just it: These beliefs are part of the ancient legacies of colonialism, racism, and regionalism, legacies that persist despite the efforts of intellectuals, artists, and leaders to destroy them. Is it fair to expect DMX to achieve what W E.B. Du Bois could not, or for Tupac to succeed where Archbishop Tutu failed? The complex relationship between art and social responsibility is evident, but we must be careful not to place unrealistic, or even unjust, demands on the backs of artists. Their extraordinary influence cannot be denied, but the very argument that is often used against them—that they are not politicians, leaders, or policymakers, just entertainers who string together lines of poetic meter—is often conveniently forgotten when it might work to hiphoppers’ advantage.

  This recognition does not discount the troubling manifestations of youth culture that merit consideration. One such instance is Tupac’s vigorous embrace of “thug life.” In the interview taped in 1995 when he was in prison, Tupac explained that “it’s not an image; it’s just a way of life; it’s a mentality.” He claims that thug life is “a stage that we all go through. It’s just like that for white kids and rich kids. They get to go to the military academy or ROTC, or they take all the risk, energy, and put it into the armed forces. And for a young black male, Puerto Rican, or Hispanic person, you’ve got to put this in the streets; that’s where our energies go.” Speaking of his thug life mentality, Tupac says, “The way I was living and my mentality was a part of my progression to be a man.” In outtakes from an interview he did with Snoop Dogg for MTV, Tupac clarifies what he means by “thug life.” “It’s not thugging like I’m robbing people, ’cause that’s not what I’m doing,” Tupac said. “I mean like I’m not scared to say how I feel. Part of being [a thug] is to stand up for your responsibilities and say this is what I do even though I know people are going to hate me and say, ‘It’s so politically un-correct,’ and ‘How could you make black people look like that? Do you know how buffoonish you all look with money and girls and all of that?’ That’s what I want to do. I want to be real with myself.” Tupac’s thug life mentor, West Coast rapper Big Syke, eloquently and simply defined for me
“thug” and “outlaw,” another word Tupac embraced and transformed. “I call thugs the nobodies,” Syke says, “because we really don’t have nobody to help us but us. And then outlaw is being black and minority. Period.”

  In a conversation with cultural critic Vijay Prashad, I learned a great deal more about the complex roots of thug. “It’s very clear that the word ‘thuggee’ is a north Indian word,” Prashad tells me. “Probably from Murati, from western India, but it’s not clear.” A British man by the name of General Sleeman made it his mission to eradicate thugs in India. During the early years of the British Empire, there was an increase in the trade of bullion, and brigands roamed the countryside robbing merchants and stealing revenue transactions. Sleeman claimed these thugs were the disciples of the goddess Kali. The thugs used to attach themselves to merchant caravans, claiming to have some talent, like cooking or preparing drinks. They would often drug the merchants and then strangle them with a handkerchief called a rumal, leaving a mark on the necks of the victims. Prashad conjectures that there are three possible ways the word entered the United States. “The easiest way is that Sleeman’s work was well-known in the U.S.,” Prashad says. Sleeman authored a popular nonfiction account of India. But this was mainly to the white mainstream. Prashad thinks the word may have reached black audiences through excerpts in the Colored American and other newspapers that were tied in some way to the black church, as the black religious press was deeply interested in India. The third way is through the Caribbean, since there was a large transit of people from eastern India coming into the Caribbean after the 1840s. Given the strong link between black and eastern Indian religions—between Rastafarianism and Shavism, the worship of Shaiva—there were also cultural exchanges, with “thug” passing into the Caribbean lexicon.2

  In light of the heavy Caribbean influence on the development of rap—its founding light, D. J. Kool Herc, emigrated from the Caribbean to the Bronx, where he transplanted West Indian outdoors parties to the backyards of his American neighborhood—the word “thug” has a specific resonance in black popular culture. “It sounds perfect, in musical terms,” Prashad says. “It is better than gangster, which puts you too much in the lineage of the Mafia. This is an alternative kind of thug; it’s ‘our’ kind of thug. It’s a unique word; it is known and not known at the same time. It has a flavor to it.” When I tell Prashad that Tupac had actually made an acronym of “thug life” (“the hate you gave little infants fucks everyone”), he is in full agreement with the rapper’s forcefully subjective interpretation. “It is beautiful, because the word, even though it is an indigenous word to these fellows who were out there to begin with, means the ‘hate you gave.’ After all, it’s the currency transactions that begin because of the empire’s influence that will bring the brigands. There is truth there.” Prashad ends our conversation by telling me of his experience with some African-Caribbean and African-American youth. They were sitting on his porch when one of them said, “I’m thugged out.” It caught Prashad’s attention. “I remember having a chat with them, saying, ‘Do you know this word? It’s familiar to me.”’ The youth were making fun of Prashad’s eastern Indian accent, and as a result Prashad and the students began “playing around with words and language.” Prashad gave them a brief history of the word they were using, the word that bound at least three cultures together. “They found it fascinating, the story I told them, and we had this interchange, and I said, ‘We are inside each other.’”3

  Toni Morrison, too, has “respect for the genre, because of what it does with language.” Morrison is not oblivious to the “bad influence” of “people who are driving [rap] to make it sensational,” but she understands the crucial role to youth of an art form that transmits important information. “It is a conversation among and between black youth from one part of the country to another: ‘What is it like in Detroit, as opposed to L.A., as opposed to New York?”’ Morrison’s view of hip-hop is admirably international, giving her an appreciation of the genre’s inspiring, and subversive, global reach. “Just seeing what happened to it in Europe is astonishing,” Morrison told me. “When I was in Frankfurt—the center of rap music in Germany—I got some unbelievable rap discs from a Turkish girl who was singing in German.” Morrison argues that what unifies hip-hop throughout the world is its emergence from “the ‘others’ within the empire”—for instance, the Turks in Germany and the Algerians and North Africans in France—who ring profound changes in the nation’s discourse. “First of all, they’re changing the language, although nobody admits it,” she says. “But that’s where the energy comes from . . . . It is the necessity for young people to talk to one another in language that is not the fake language of the press. That sort of conversation curtails thought altogether. So it is a dialogue.” But Morrison does not neglect the essential musical element that frames the use of language. “The fact that it also is the music you can’t sit down to—you really do get up—is what has made it so fetching.” Morrison is, of course, completely aware of the controversial subject matters broached in hip-hop. “It is always up for grabs about sexuality and violence,” she says. Morrison argues that the establishment accepts such discourse only when “it’s separate, like when Shakespeare does it, or Chaucer, or Boccaccio—those are the most outrageously provocative stories and language in the Decameron. They say they want safe language, but that’s just the way the establishment is: It [rap discourse] wouldn’t be outlawed or policed unless it had that quality.” As a parting thought, Morrison raises an intriguing question—humorously, to be sure, as she chuckles all the way through it, but, as is evident, it seizes me by the pen. “Are there any other groups of gangsters or robbers or whatever you want to call them who made music? The whole notion of making an art form while you’re doing it is . . .” Before she can finish, we’re both cracking up at her brilliant thought, her deliriously righteous question, which she caps with a nod to the genius of the folk. “I mean only black people could figure that out. I don’t know how far you can go with that! There are sagas about medieval thugs and Robin Hood, but [it’s fascinating] to actually invent your own art form while you’re in the life, so to speak.”4

  Tupac, Syke, Prashad, and Morrison bring to light the complex fashion—one full of signification and play—in which the thug, the outlaw, the pimp, and the like are evoked in hip-hop. It is true that Tupac tried to make the world believe he really was who he announced on his albums. But at some levels—it is important to stress some levels—even that was an act, in the best sense of that word, an ingenious artistic strategy to create a persona. Persona making, after all, is the province of art—and of politics, preaching, and every realm where performance is crucial to self-definition and the transmission of ideas. Too often, however, we deny the artistic milieu in which rappers operate and descend instead into a thudding literalism. The historian Robin Kelley makes this point when discussing Miles Davis and the necessity of a more complex vision of art and persona, even those involving controversial figures like the pimp. “Why is it that we still love Miles despite the fact that he’s such an evil figure?” Kelley asks. “It’s because the stuff that’s so romantic, and evil, can be reconciled in the pimp. And so my thing is, turn the mirror around and look at yourself when you look at the music. And it’s deeply romantic, because that’s what the pimps are, the great ones.” Kelley is not offering an apology for pimping. Instead, he is suggesting that cultural creations have multiple meanings, none of which can be exhausted or suspended by appeals to the responsible behavior of the artist. (Indeed, many of art’s meanings exist beyond the intent or desire of its creators.) “I guess I’m tired of this question of what’s redeeming or problematic,” Kelley says. “We don’t have to go to hip-hop to find it. We can actually invent something.” Kelley contends that an artistic representation “does both of those things simultaneously” and that a more important question is “Why are we still drawn to it?” As Kelley says, “moralizing [and] saying there’s nothing redemptive about
this, so therefore we should just critique it, doesn’t really tell us anything about how people are thinking.”5

  Taking the time to learn what our youth are thinking and why they create the art they do demands a capacity for deferred justification that most adults lack. They seek to ensure the legitimacy of their moral critique by rendering quick and easy judgments about the art form. Many critics of hip-hop do not have the ethical patience to empathize with the formidable array of choices, conflicts, and dilemmas that many poor black youth confront. Tupac is deeply attractive to millions of young people because he articulates the contradictory poses of maturing black identity with galvanizing exuberance and savage honesty. “Most of my music [tells the truth],” Tupac says in the interview he did in prison. “I’m just trying to speak about things that affect me and about things that affect our community. . . . Sometimes I’m the watcher, and sometimes I’m the participant, and sometimes it’s just allegories or fables that have an underlying theme.” Tupac’s allegories and fables largely estranged his elders, underscoring how the generation gap has grown more menacing.

  By almost any measure, the gaps between older and younger blacks are flagrant, even frightening. To be sure, there have always been skirmishes between the generations. Many older blacks have often found the dress, language, and hair of younger blacks offensive. In turn, many younger blacks have often soured on the conservative values and accommodating styles of social existence favored by a majority of their elders. These tiffs have certainly not disappeared. Indeed, every era seems obligated to draw from local circumstance and color in painting a fresh picture of generational malaise. Where the Afro hairstyle raised dander in the ’70s, the ’90s outbreak of hair twists and braids provoked dread in corporate and conservative colored circles alike. And as if the boom in ’70s clothing had not already offended by dredging up bell-bottom pants and platform shoes, the baggy fashions sported by youth—oversized shirts, unlaced shoes, beltless pants sagging to the upper gluteus for maximum exposure—have riled their seniors, especially since such styles are purportedly inspired by prison gear. Although the specific circumstances of black life in the new millennium—unprecedented growth of the black middle class, devastating expansion of the ghetto poor, restructuring of industries that employ large numbers of blacks, sustained drug and criminal activity, capital flight, increased technologization of the workforce—shape our understanding of these conflicts, they appear, in one form or another, in each generation.6