The Michael Eric Dyson Reader

by Michael Eric Dyson

  Mos Def, praised as one of the leaders of “conscious rap,” refuses to think in such narrow terms. “They’ve got their little categories, like ‘conscious’ and ‘gangsta,”’ says Mos Def. “It used to be a thing where hip-hop was all together. Fresh Prince [Will Smith’s old moniker] would be on tour with N.W.A. [Niggas With Attitude, featuring Dr. Dre and Ice Cube]. It wasn’t like, ‘You have got to like me in order for me to like you.’ That’s just some more white folks trying to think that all niggas are alike, and now it’s expanded. It used to be one type of nigga; now it’s two. There is so much more dimension to who we are. A monolith is a monolith, even if there’s two monoliths to choose from.” Mos Def sees the danger, however, in having only one dimension of the black experience get airplay, which in present terms is usually of the bling-bling or thug variety. “I ain’t mad at Snoop. I’m not mad at Master P; I ain’t mad at the Hot Boyz. I’m mad when that’s all you see. I would be mad if I looked up and all I saw on TV was me or Common or the Roots, because I know that ain’t the whole deal. The real joy is when you can kick it with everyone. That’s what hip-hop is all about.”

  Another rapper lauded for his rhetorical brilliance and revolutionary passion, Common, similarly sees the virtue of the range in hip-hop. “I can’t put a line between us,” Common says about the difference between him and hardcore rap. “Because we are speaking our experiences and we are speaking our voice in hiphop. Tupac was talking about smoking weed, guns, and so on, and we can’t ignore that. I talk about other subjects [than hard-core rappers], but [conscious rappers] still have flaws, and we are not afraid to show those flaws.” Mos Def is careful to avoid accepting the praise—and the typecasting—of corporate interests that deny the complexity of black identity and culture. “They keep trying to slip the ‘conscious rapper’ thing on me,” he says. “I come from Roosevelt Projects, man. The ghetto. I drank the same sugar water, ate hard candy. And they try to get me because I’m supposed to be more articulate, I’m supposed to be not like the other Negroes, to get me to say something against my brothers. I’m not going out like that, man.” In light of his thug persona, it may be hard to consider Tupac a “brilliant poet as great as any medieval writer,” as he is regarded by Arvand Elihu, a talented young graduate student who taught a course on the felled rapper at the University of California–Berkeley.

  There is another dimension to the debate as well: Some of the best-intentioned hip-hop, politically speaking, is simply boring or lyrically void of imagination or inspiration. Or it is just musically dead, a real drawback to what folk in the midst of heated argument often forget is first and foremost a musical form. And some of the most apolitical rap is lyrically clever and musically compelling. (Why should it be any different in hip-hop than it is in, for instance, R&B, where Luther Vandross’s ethereal love notes rise higher than a musical complaint about racism, though few folk assail that branch of black music for its bourgeois sensibilities that are decidedly apolitical, noninterventionist, and downright misleading in its portrayal of romantic love?) It may well be that we should expand our understanding of what politics is, since hip-hop as an art form has been embroiled in the politics of culture and the culture of politics since its beginnings. In light of Senate hearings about rap’s violent effects, it has little choice but to be political, even when its politics have to do with its right to exist at all.

  The debate about hip-hop’s complexity as well as Tupac’s role in rap underscores the need for genre justice. We ought to recognize that there are all sorts of rap music, that not all of rap can do what some of it can do, and that the best rap is the rap that sticks to what it does best. The power of Tupac’s raps is that they encompass a variety of hip-hop genres. One of the liabilities of blanketing rap in general terms is that we fail to recognize its diversity. That means that we also fail to see how many of the debates we try to force on hip-hop culture from outside are occurring with regularity on the inside. Take, for instance, the bravado and posturing that clutter hip-hop and the profanity that is often mistaken for authenticity, for keeping it real. Lauryn Hill, as a member of the Fugees, offered a biting commentary in as brilliant and pithy a fashion as might be imagined when she rhymed: “And even after all my logic and my theory / I add a ‘muthafucka’ so you ignorant niggers hear me.” There are many moods and styles in hip-hop. There is griot rap, including figures like Common, Mos Def, Talib Kweli, Bahamadia, and the Roots. There is radical rap, characterized by the Coup and most recently by Dead Prez. There is materialistic/hedonistic rap, presented by Juvenile, Cash Money Millionaires, and a hundred offshoots. There is ghettocentric hip-hop, including figures as diverse as Jay-Z and the WuTang Clan. There is gangsta rap, including Snoop Dogg and Dr. Dre. There is pop rap, symbolized most powerfully by Will Smith. There is Bohemian hard core, as glimpsed in Outkast and Goodie Mobb. And of course some of these figures and groups bleed into several genres. And many of these genres can be divided not only by theme and style but also by region. So the Dirty South of Atlanta’s Outkast and Master P of New Orleans can be contrasted to the West Coast rap of South Central’s Ice Cube or Compton’s DJ Quick or the Upsouth rhymes of Nelly of St. Louis.

  Our expectations of hip-hop’s genres should be rooted in an appreciation of their intents. We should not expect pop rap to give us a peek into the inner workings of capitalism or white supremacy. Will Smith will never be Dead Prez. At the same time, Will Smith can beautifully celebrate fatherhood and welcome us to Miami (and to the dance floor) with his delightful pop confections. And that doesn’t mean that we cannot be rocked by Dead Prez’s brilliant critiques of racial amnesia and cultural genocide in black American life. It’s not either-or. And we must not be afraid to enjoy the many intriguing transgressions of Lil’ Kim and Foxy Brown, even as we lament their lyrical existence almost exclusively in sexualized zones. Not only are there many genres of hip-hop, but one artist can give us many different looks, feels, sensibilities, styles, and themes. Tupac could both “get around” by sexually exploiting his star status (a fact that hardly makes him unique) and admonish poor young women to “keep ya head up.” The edifying and terrifying in this singular artist lived on the same block.

  Like Tupac, perhaps its most embattled icon, hip-hop culture lives in conflict and thrives on contradiction. It is both a highly commercialized, corporatesponsored venture as well as an indigenous art form that reflects (on) the brutal realities of black youth existence. That white corporate types have gotten into the mix doesn’t negate the ghetto sensibilities and themes that drive—and sometimes drag down—hip-hop. As Toni Morrison says, “The fact that rap is so attractive to white kids in the suburbs is the risk that all discourses that black people invent have.” Hip-hop is a barometer of black youth taste, style, and desires—as they are created and disseminated in local communities and by force of corporate distribution. It is also a sure test of our ability to embrace the best of our youth while engaging in critical conversations about their future. Given its universal popularity and its troubling effects, hip-hop is a vital cultural language that we had all better learn. To ignore its genius, to romanticize its deficits, or to bash it with undiscerning generalities is to risk the opportunity to engage our children about perhaps the most important cultural force in their lives.

  Tupac may be the most influential rapper to have lived. His voice rings through our cultural landscape and hovers over our spirits with formidable intensity. Nearly five years after his death, his posthumously released double compact disc, Until the End of Time, dwarfed its nearest competition and sold over 400,000 copies in its first week of circulation. It may be that Tupac’s bold voice is more necessary now than when he lived. He embraced the history of rap and operated within its limits while always pushing against them, reshaping rap’s conventions while blurring the lines between his art and life. His stunning baritone was filled with surprising passion and urgency. He narrated his life as a road map to suffering, wrenching a brutal victory from the ghetto he so loved, a
nd the fame and fortune that both blessed and cursed him. As the supreme symbol of his generation, he embodied its reckless, audacious liberties and its ominous hopelessness. Above all, he was as truthful as we can expect any human being to be about his evolving identity and his expanding artistic vision. “My music is spiritual, if you listen to it,” Tupac said in his prison interview. “It’s all about emotion; it’s all about life. Not to dis anybody, but where other rappers might paint a perfect picture of themselves, I would tell my innermost, darkest secrets. I reveal myself in every one of my records. From ‘Dear Mama’ to ‘Shed So Many Tears,’ I tell my own, personal problems, and people can relate to what I believe.”

  PART TEN

  CINEMA NOIR

  In the mid-eighties, a new era in black cinema dawned. Director, actor, and writer Spike Lee led the way with his provocative, brilliant, and idiosyncratic films, including the highly charged racial drama, Do The Right Thing, and his masterpiece, the bio-picture, Malcolm X. Not far behind Lee were Reginald and Warrington Hudlin with their fresh, hip urban musical, House Party; John Singleton, with his poignant and moving coming-of-age film, Boyz N The Hood; Mario Van Peebles and his riveting drug drama, New Jack City; and Ernest Dickerson’s powerful urban morality tale, Juice. These figures were joined by Euzhan Palcy, Julie Dash, Matty Rich, Leslie Harris, and other black directors eager to explore the complex dimensions of black life that have been historically neglected on film. Twenty years later, a new stable of supremely gifted directors, including Kasi Lemmons (Eve’s Bayou), Carl Franklin (Devil in a Blue Dress), Millicent Shelton (Ride), Gina Prince-Bythewood (Love & Basketball), F. Gary Gray (Set It Off), Theodore Witcher (Love Jones), Malcolm Lee (Best Man), Rick Famuyiwa (Brown Sugar), and Antoine Fuqua (Training Day) have expanded the cinematic canvass on which black life is drawn.

  Twenty-Three

  SPIKE LEE’S NEONATIONALIST VISION

  When I went to see Spike Lee’s brilliantly disturbing film Do the Right Thing in New York, the tension in the theater was palpable. After all, warnings had gone out that the film might provoke racial melees because of its volatile topic and approach. Of course, nothing of the sort happened. However, the June 1989 film proved to be a powerful conversation piece in the culture, especially in light of racial tragedies connected to white ethnic New York neighborhoods in the recent past (the infamous Howard Beach incident, where twenty-three-year-old Michael Griffith was chased to his death by white teens pursuing him with baseball bats and tree limbs) and in the near future (the murder of sixteen-year-old Yusuf Hawkins in August 1989 in Bensonhurst, shot twice in the chest by a white youth who was part of a mob assembled to seek revenge for a neighborhood girl’s interracial dating). This review of Lee’s film, originally published in Tikkun magazine, charts his attempt to meld two competing ambitions: to narrate the complex humanity of black folk and to specify the political implications of his neonationalist perspective. Although I emphasized Lee’s tremendous strengths while pointing to the film’s flaws, in retrospect, I think Do the Right Thing, and Lee, deserve even more praise than I gave them fifteen years ago. I think it is perhaps his second greatest movie—the greatest is the monumental Malcolm X, which is still in my mind underrated—and a signal accomplishment in American film. As critic Roger Ebert wrote at the time, Do the Right Thing “comes closer to reflecting the current state of race relations in America than any other movie of our time.” It is a tribute to Lee’s huge gifts and aesthetic courage that the film remains a provocative portrait of its times. It is also a warning against the racial amnesia that clouds our national racial memory and threatens true racial harmony and equality.

  IN 1986, A DISTINCT PHASE IN CONTEMPORARY African-American cinema commenced. Spike Lee wrote, produced, directed, and acted in She’s Gotta Have It, an independently made sex comedy that cost $175,000 but grossed over $6 million after distribution by Island Pictures. Since then Lee, and an expanding cadre of black filmmakers, including Robert Townsend, Keenan Ivory Wayans, and Euzhan Palcy, have written and directed a number of films that explore various themes in black life. Lee in particular creates films that are part of a revival of black nationalism (neonationalism), a movement that included provocative expressions in the cultural sphere (elements of rap music, the wearing of African medallions), interesting interventions in the intellectual sphere (articulation of Afrocentric perspectives in academic disciplines), and controversial developments in the social sphere (symbolized by Louis Farrakhan’s Nation of Islam ideology, which enjoys narrow but significant popularity among blacks). Lee, foremost among his black director peers, is concerned with depicting the sociopolitical implications of his Afrocentric film aesthetic and neonationalist worldview.

  But he is also determined to display the humanity of his characters, and he insists upon exploring the unacknowledged diversity and the jarring and underappreciated contradictions of black life. Lee, however, is confronted with a conflict: how to present the humanity of black folk without lapsing into an ontology of race that structures simplistic categories of being for black people and black culture that are the worst remnants of old-style black nationalism. Such constructions of black character and culture fail to express the complex diversity of black humanity.

  On the one hand, because Lee is apparently committed to a static conception of racial identity, his characters appear as products of an archetypal mold that predetermines their responses to a range of sociohistorical situations. These characters are highly symbolic and widely representative, reflecting Lee’s determination to repel the folkloric symbols of racism through racial countersymbol. On the other hand, Lee must revise his understanding of racial identity in order to present the humanity of black characters successfully. He must permit his characters to possess irony, self-reflection, and variability, qualities that, when absent—no matter the high aims that underlie archetypal representation—necessarily circumscribe agency and flatten humanity. It is in the electric intersection of these two competing and at times contradictory claims, of black cultural neonationalism and black humanism, that Lee’s art takes place.

  In Do the Right Thing, Lee’s black neonationalism leaps off the screen through brilliant cinematography and riveting messages. As most Americans know, Do the Right Thing is about contemporary racism. The film’s action is concentrated in a single block of Brooklyn’s “Bedstuy” neighborhood on a scorching summer day. The heat, both natural and social, is a central metaphor for the film’s theme of tense race relations. The pivotal place of social exchange in this compact, ethnically diverse, and highly self-contained community is Sal’s Famous Pizzeria, the single vestige of white-owned business in Bedstuy. Sal (Danny Aiello) owns and operates the restaurant along with his two sons, Pino (John Turturro) and Vito (Richard Edwon), proud Italians who make the daily commute from the suburb of Bensonhurst. Lee plays Mookie, the hardworking but responsibility-shirking delivery man for Sal’s and the primary link between the community and the pizzeria. Mookie seems able to maneuver easily between two worlds—until late in the film, when the community erupts in a riot at Sal’s, prompted by an egregious instance of police brutality.

  In choosing to explore the racial tension between Italian-Americans and African-Americans, Lee makes explicit reference to Howard Beach, employing it as an ideologically charged conceptual foil for his drama about American racism. Lee makes allusions to the Howard Beach incident throughout the movie: Sal brandishes a baseball bat in conflicts with various black patrons; the crowd chants “Coward Beach” at the riot. Lee wants his movie to provoke discussion about racism in the midst of a racially repressive era, when all such discourse is either banished to academia (although not much discussion goes on there, either) or considered completed in the distant past. Lee rejects the premises of this Reaganera illogic and goes straight to the heart of the mechanism that disseminates and reinforces racial repression: the image, the symbol, the representation. Do the Right Thing contains symbols of racism and resistance to racism, representations of
black life, and images of black nationalist sensibilities and thought.

  Lee creates symbols that reveal the remorseless persistence of racism in quotidian quantity, exposing the psychopathology of everyday racism as it accumulates in small doses, over the course of days not unlike the one we witness in Do the Right Thing. Lee shows us the little bruises, the minor frustrations, and the minute but myriad racial fractures that mount without healing. There is the riff of the prickly relations between the black residents and the Koreans who own the neighborhood market. There is the challenge of Radio Raheem (Bill Nunn), a menacing bundle of brawn who wields his boom box as a weapon to usurp communal aural space as he practices his politics of cultural terrorism. But the central symbol of racial conflict is the ongoing tiff between Buggin’ Out and Sal over the latter’s refusal to place photos of black people on Sal’s Wall of Fame, reserved for the likes of DiMaggio, Stallone, and Sinatra. Sal and Buggin’ Out’s battle over the photographs, over the issue of representing black people, makes explicit the terms of the film’s representational warfare.