The Michael Eric Dyson Reader

by Michael Eric Dyson

  Director Mario Van Peebles’s cinematic choices in New Jack City expose as well the vocabulary of overlarge and excessive cultural representation that characterized many ghetto films of old. Van Peebles’s ghetto is a sinister and languid dungeon of human filth and greed drawn equally from cartoon and camp. The sheer artifice of New Jack City’s ghetto is meant to convey the inhuman consequences of living in this enclave of civic horror, but its overdrawn dimensions reveal its cinematic pedigree that can be traced more easily to ’70s blaxploitation flicks than to the neorealist portrayal of carnage wreaked by the ghetto’s bleak persistence presented in other recent black ghetto films.

  As a black gangster film, New Jack City links its genre’s appeal to the Cagneyization of black ghetto life, the inexorable force of women bashing and partner killing sweeping the hidden icon of the people to a visible position larger than life. Thus Nino Brown (Wesley Snipes) reigns because he tests the limits of the American Dream, a Horatio Alger in blackface who pulls himself up by forging consensus among his peers that his life is a ghetto jeremiad, a strident protest against the unjust limits imposed on black male material flourishing. As Nino intones with full awareness of the irony of his criminal vocation: “You got to rob to get rich in the Reagan era.”

  But it is the state of black male love that provides the story’s unnarrated plot, its twisted pursuit ironically and tragically trumped by boys seeking to become men by killing each other. Thus, when a crying Nino embraces his teary-eyed closest friend and partner in crime, G-Money, on the top of the apartment building that provides the mise-en-scène for the proverbial ode to an empire gone, destroyed by the fatal winds of undisciplined ambition, Nino hugs G-Money tight, avowing his love even as he fills his belly with steel as recompense for G-Money’s treacherous disloyalty. It is the tough love of the gang in action, the logic of vengeance passing as justice in gang love’s final fulfillment of its unstated but agreed-upon obligations.

  The mostly black and Latino gangs have also recaptured the focus of American social theory and journalism in the past decade. Urban sociologists such as New York’s Terry Williams, in his important Cocaine Kids, and Los Angeles’s Mike Davis, in City of Quartz, have written insightfully about the economic and social conditions that have led to the emergence of contemporary black and Latino gang culture, citing especially the yearning for love and social acceptance that animates such aggregation. And former-model-turned-journalist Leon Bing has interviewed Los Angeles gang members, who speak eloquently about their own lives in words as moving for their emotional directness as their honesty about the need for affection and comfort that drives them into mutual association. In Straight Out of Brooklyn and Ernest Dickerson’s Juice, the theme of black male love in the ghetto filtered through the prism of gang or crew association looms large.

  In Brooklyn, Rich presents a loosely associated group of three black male teens, including Dennis, Kevin (Mark Malone), and Larry (played by Rich), who are frustrated by poverty and the closure of personal and vocational horizons that lack of money has come to signify. Whereas in Juice the crushing consequences of capital’s absence is more skillfully explored through the interactions between the characters—its damning effects as subtly evoked in the resonances of anger and gestures of surrender and regret weaved into the moral texture of the film’s dialogue as they are dramatically revealed in the teens’ action in the streets—in Brooklyn, money’s power more crudely signifies in the lifeless representation of large material and sexual icons that dominate the landscape of dreams expressed by Dennis and his friends: big cars, more money, and mo’ ho’s.

  The lifelessness of the ghetto is reified in the very textu(r)al construction through which the movie comes to us: Although it’s in color, the film seems eerily black and white, its crude terms of representation established by its harsh video quality and its horizontal dialogue. Of course, the film’s unavoidable amateur rawness is its premise of poignancy: After all, this is art imitating life, the searing vision of a nineteen-year-old Brooklyn youth, with little financial aid and the lastminute gift of film roll from Jonathan Demme (himself a renegade of sorts before his Hollywood breakthrough with the troubled Silence of the Lambs), committing his life to a film drawn partially from real-life events. This is the closest derivation in film of the guerrilla methods of hip-hop music culture, the sheer projection of will onto an artistic canvas constituted of the rudimentary elements of one’s life in the guise of vision and message.

  In Brooklyn, the triumvirate of teens is not a roving, menacing crew engaging in the business of selling crack rock and duplicating capitalism’s excesses on their native terrain. Rather, they are forced by desperation to a momentary relief of their conditions by robbing a dope dealer, an impulse that is routinized and institutionalized in the crack gang, whose cannibalistic rituals of gunplay and murder feed on the lives of opponents out to seize their turf in the harrowing geopolitics of the drug economy.

  The anomie and alienation produced by everyday forms of capitulation to despair, and the spiraling violence of Ray, force Dennis from his family to affectionate camaraderie with Larry and Kevin, and with Shirley. All other hints of family are absent, save Larry’s barber uncle, who unwittingly provides the ill-named getaway car for their ill-fated heist. But the existential vacuum at home for Dennis is made more obvious by Ray’s attempt to preserve the disappearing remnants of a “traditional” family, angrily reminding Dennis after he misses dinner that his empty plate on the table symbolizes his membership in the family. But Rich shatters this icon of familial preservation into shards of ironic judgment on the nuclear family, as Ray breaks the dishes and beats Frankie each time he becomes intoxicated.

  Dennis’s only relief is Shirley and his crew. When Shirley disappoints him by refusing to buy into his logic about escape from the ghetto by robbery, he turns to members of his crew, who in the final analysis leave Dennis to his own wits when they agree that they have stolen too much cash (“killing money,” Kevin says) from the local dope dealer, an act whose consequences roll back on Dennis in bitter irony when the heist leads to his father’s death. The film’s dismal and inescapable conclusion is that black men cannot depend on each other, nor can they depend on their own dreams to find a way past their mutual destruction.

  In Juice, the crew is more tightly organized than in Brooklyn, although their activity, like the teens from Red Hook, is not regularized primarily for economic profit. Their salient function is as a surrogate family, their substitute kinship formed around their protection of each other from rival gangs and the camaraderie and social support their association brings. But trouble penetrates the tightly webbed group when the gangster ambitions of Bishop threatens their equanimity. Of all the crew—leader Raheem (Khalil Kain), a teen father; Q (Omar Epps), a DJ with ambitions to refine his craft; and Steel (Jermaine Hopkins), a likable youth who is most notably “the follower”—Bishop is the one who wants to take them to the next level, to make them like the hard-core gangsters he watches on television.

  Viewing Cagney’s famed ending in White Heat and a news bulletin announcing the death of an acquaintance as he attempted armed robbery, Bishop rises to proclaim Cagney’s and their friend’s oneness, lauding their commendable bravado by taking their fate into their own hands and remaking the world on their own violent terms. Dickerson’s aim here is transparent: to highlight the link between violence and criminality fostered in the collective American imagination by television, the consumption of images through a medium that has replaced the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence as the unifying fiction of national citizenship and identity. It is also the daily and exclusive occupation of Bishop’s listless father, a reminder that television’s genealogy of influence unfolds from its dulling effects in one generation to its creation of lethal desires in the next, twin strategies of destruction when applied in the black male ghetto.

  Like the teens in Brooklyn, Juice’s crew must endure the fatal consequences of their failed attempt at
getting paid and living large, two oft-repeated mantras of material abundance in the lexicon of hip-hop culture. After Bishop’s determination to seize immortality by the throat leads him to kill without provocation or compunction the owner of the store they rob, the terms of his Faustian bargain are more clearly revealed when he kills Raheem, destroying all claims of brotherhood with a malicious act of willful machismo, succeeding to Raheem’s throne by murderous acclamation.

  Dickerson, who has beautifully photographed all of Spike Lee’s films, uses darker hues than characteristic of his work with Lee, but nowhere near those of the drained colored canvas on which Brooklyn is drawn. Dickerson’s moral strategy is to elaborate to its fatal ends the contradictory logic of the gang as a family unit, a faulty premise as far as he is concerned which overlooks the lack of moral constraints that ultimately do not work without destructive consequences. His aesthetic strategy is to move the cameras with the action from the observer’s frame of reference, borrowing a few pages from Lee’s book without mimicking Lee’s panache for decentering the observer through unusual angles and the fast pace of editing. Like Rich in Brooklyn, Dickerson wants the impact of his message to hit home, but he employs a less harsh method, a gentler but insistent drawing into his moral worldview, an invitation to view the spectacle of black male loss of love by degrees and effects.

  In Juice, the ghetto working-class family is much more visible and vital than in Brooklyn. Mothers and fathers wake their children in the morning for breakfast and make certain they take their books to school. The extended family is even given a nice twist when Q fetches a gun from one of his mother’s old friends, a small-time neighborhood supplier. And Dickerson draws attention subtly to the contrasts between the aesthetic and moral worldviews of the generations, and the thriving of an earlier era’s values among the younger generation, at the dinner at Raheem’s family’s house after Raheem’s funeral. As snatches of gospel music float gently through the house, Q and Steel pay their respects to Raheem’s family.

  When Bishop arrives, the rupture between generational values forces to the surface the grounds of choice upon which each of the remaining three crew must stand. Q and Steel are offended at Bishop’s effrontery, his mean-spirited and near demented hypocrisy leading him to violate Raheem’s sacred memory with this latest act born of unbridled machismo and hubris. For them, the choice is clear. The religious values signified in the quiet gospel music seem no longer foreign, gently providing a vivid counterpoint to the hip-hop aesthetic of violent metaphors in the service of greater self-expression.

  Instead, the gospel music and the world of black respectability it symbolizes carry over into their grieving acknowledgment of the bonds between them and their departed friend, a sure sign of their surviving religious sensibilities bred from birth and inbred for life, no matter how distant they appear to be from its central effects. Bishop’s traduction of Raheem’s memory and family signify the depth of Bishop’s moral failure, the unblinking abandon to which his wanton acts of violence have given portentous license. Unlike the black teens in Brooklyn’s ghetto, the black males can depend upon one another, but only after being forced to acknowledge their debts to the moral infrastructure given them by a predecessor racial culture, and only after discovering the limits of their freedom in destructive alliance with each other.

  Unquestionably, the entire contemporary debate within black culture about black film and its relation to enabling or destructive representations of black males, and the consequences of the cinematic choices made about black females vis-à-vis these representations, started with the meteoric rise of Spike Lee, a key flashpoint in the resurgence of black nationalism in African American culture. With Lee’s groundbreaking She’s Gotta Have It, young black men laid hold of a cultural and artistic form—the Hollywood film—from which they had with rare exception been previously barred. By gaining access to film as directors, young black men began to seize interpretative and representational authority from ostensibly ignorant or insensitive cultural elites whose cinematic portrayals of blacks were contorted or hackneyed, the ridiculously bloated or painfully shriveled disfigurements of black life seen from outside of black culture. Lee’s arrival promised a new day beyond stereotype.

  What we get with Lee is Jungian archetype, frozen snapshots of moods in the black (male) psyche photographed to brilliant effect by Ernest Dickerson. Lee’s mission to represent the variegated streams of black life denied cinematic conduits before his dramatic rise, has led him to resolve the complexity and ambiguity of black culture into rigid categories of being that hollow his characters’ fierce and contradictory rumblings toward authentic humanity. And after She’s Gotta Have It, black women became context clues to the exploration of black male rituals of social bonding (School Daze), the negotiation of black male styles of social resistance (Do the Right Thing), the expansion and pursuit of black male artistic ambitions (Mo’ Better Blues), and the resolution of black male penis politics (Jungle Fever).

  It was precisely Lee’s cinematic representations of black male life that occasioned the sound and fury of proleptic criticism over his latest and most important project: his film biography of Malcolm X. Writer and social critic Amiri Baraka drew blood in a war of words with Lee, claiming that Lee’s poor history of representing black men suggested that he would savage the memory of Malcolm X, a memory, by the way, to which Baraka presumed to have privileged access. This battle between the two diminutive firebrands, ironic for its poignant portrayal of the only logical outcome of the politics of more-black-nationalistthan-thou, a game Lee himself has played with relish on occasion, was but a foretaste of the warfare of interpretation waged in light of Lee’s portrait of X.

  Malcolm X is the reigning icon of black popular culture, his autobiography the Ur-text of contemporary black nationalism. His legacy is claimed by fiercely competing groups within black America, a fact certain to make Lee’s film a hard sell to one faction or the other. More importantly, X’s complex legacy is just now being opened to critical review and wider cultural scrutiny, and his hagiographers and haters will rush forward to have their say once again.

  To many, however, Malcolm is black manhood squared, the unadulterated truth of white racism ever on his tongue, the black unity of black people ever on his agenda, the black people in ghetto pain ever on his mind. Thus, the films that represent the visual arm of black nationalism’s revival bear somehow the burden of Malcolm X’s implicit presence in every frame, his philosophy touching on every aspect of the issues the films frame—drugs, morality, religion, ghetto life, and especially, unrelentingly, the conditions of being a black man. For many, as for his eulogist Ossie Davis, Malcolm was the primordial, quintessential Real Man.

  But, as with the films of Dickerson, Lee, Rich, Singleton, and Van Peebles, this spells real trouble for black women and for an enabling vision of black masculinity that moves beyond the worst traits of X’s lethal sexism. Gestures of X’s new attitude survive in the short hereafter Malcolm enjoyed upon his escape from Elijah Muhammad’s ideological straitjacket. Malcolm’s split from the Nation of Islam demanded a powerful act of will and self-reinvention, an unsparing commitment to truth over habit. Lee’s film reflects this Malcolm, though not in relation to his changed views about women. Although there are flashes of a subtly nuanced relationship between X and his wife Betty in Lee’s film, as usual, Lee is silent on the complexities of black female identity.

  Only when black films begin to be directed by black women, perhaps, will the wide range of identities that black women command be adequately represented on the large screen. Powerful gestures toward black feminist and female-centered film production exist in the work of Julie Dash in Daughters of the Dust and especially in Leslie Harris’s Just Another Girl on the IRT. Less successful is John Singleton’s flawed Poetic Justice. But until the collapse of the social, cultural, and economic barriers that prevent the flourishing of black female film, such works threaten to become exceptional, even novelty items in the black c
ultural imagination. In the meantime, black male directors remain preoccupied, even trapped, by the quest for an enabling conception of black male identity. But its full potential will continue to be hampered until they come to grips with the full meaning of black masculinity’s relationship to, and coexistence with, black women.

  PART ELEVEN

  THE SOUL MUSICS OF BLACK FOLK

  Black music is at the heart—some would argue, it is the heart—of black existence, providing rhythms of consolation and inspiration to the sometimes harsh, dispiriting experiences of a despised and troubled people. Gospel music expresses the spiritual genius of black survival, while soul music articulates the desire for freedom and black self-determination as the civil rights movement unfolded. Rhythm and blues has captured the gritty realities of secular black culture, while jazz music embodies the democratic yearnings and improvisational urges of black life. Hailing from Detroit, music of all sorts pulses through my blood, and I have taken special delight in writing about it as both a scholar and critic—and best of all, as a fan.

  Twenty-Six

  THE PROMISE AND PERILS OF CONTEMPORARY GOSPEL MUSI

  This chapter was first published in the New York Times (1991) and probes the controversial rise of contemporary gospel music. I mention the work of the contemporary gospel groups the Winans brothers, Take Six, Commissioned, and the solo artist Tramaine Hawkins, before discussing at greater length the pioneering work of Edwin and Walter Hawkins, and the superb artistry of Be Be and Ce Ce Winans. Such controversies in the gospel music world in the late 1980s and early 1990s were glosses on earlier tensions present at the birth of gospel music when Thomas Dorsey introduced blues chords and jazz syncopations—as well as choir groups featuring women—into traditional black religious music in the 1920s. The irony is that even traditional gospel music was seen at its inception as a sacrilegious departure from the edifying quartet a capella singing of male groups. If I were to write this article today, not much would have to change, except the addition of contemporary gospel luminaries like Kirk Franklin, Donnie McClurkin, and the brightest star of all, Yolanda Adams.