Act Like You Know: African-American Autobiography and White Identity, by Crispin Sartwell:
Chapter Five: Rap Music and the Uses Of Stereotype
Hurston resisted epistemic power by rejecting all cultural constructions of herself, by refusing to allow herself to be made comprehensible through the technology of race and its representational regimes. And she resisted the constructions imposed by the black community as much as those imposed on it. This resistance is both problematized and intensified by her celebration of black southern culture. One transgressive aspect of Hurston's work and self-presentation is a strategic deployment of stereotype; Hurston's work alternately deconstructs and reconstructs the architecture of race; it is a rhythmic coalescing and fragmentation of racial signifiers as the materials of the self. Some rap music, I will suggest, represents a similar move, one that synthesizes Hurston and Malcolm X: It uses the materials of the representational regimes that manufacture race as nodes of resistance.(1)
Even the very use of music here, and my own focus on it as a locus of black expressivity, is in a problematic but also potentially subversive relation to stereotype. For of course black folks are supposed to be musical, and the aesthetic products of black culture that have been known best and appropriated most by white culture have been black musical forms. For such reasons, Michele Wallace, in emphasizing black visual culture, writes:
There is by now too vast an array of compelling narratives in which African-American music is the founding discourse of the African-American experience. Indeed, African music is the founding discourse of the diaspora, and that is probably as it should be. But, for my part, I am at war with music, to the extent that it completely defines the parameters of intellectual discourse in the African-American community.(2)
One senses from this passage that Wallace is just sick of hearing about it; she wants to talk about something else. And certainly African-American visual culture is an incredibly rich field for investigation which is still largely unexplored, especially given the vexed history of visuality in relation to race, which we have discussed at length already. For the emphasis on music in this chapter, then, I cannot exculpate myself, and as I say, I, like a lot of white folks, have been fascinated or even obsessed with black music since I was a child. It should be noted, however, that rap also, in the era of the music video, is to some extent a visual form. And it is an incredibly dense semiotic textual form. In fact, the first criticism of rap by those who hate it (mostly white people, in my experience) is that it isn't music at all, because it is not sufficiently melodic. Rather, it is held to be a style of declamation or speechifying. That criticism is wrong: Much rap is intensely melodic. But it contains a grain of truth: In rap, the text (which must be understood as a spoken and recorded form, not as a written form) is the thing. And if what I am saying about the use of the stereotype as a weapon is right, then all of this must be factored in about rap: That it is music, that it is spoken, and so on.
Where Hurston simply professes disregard for whether she is confirming stereotypes, rap often seizes the stereotype and wields it directly, self-consciously, as a weapon. Rap transforms oppression into resistance, and it does so in a way that makes the conceptual structure of that oppression (the structure I have described as ejected asceticism) absolutely clear. This is an extremely hopeful moment, it seems to me, because in order for the dichotomy of race to be overcome, it must first be made visible. And it must be made visible not once or twice or here or there or in general; it must be made visible over and over again in as many locations as possible and with total specificity.
Rap is, among other things, music, poetry, fiction, autobiography, advertising, philosophy, commodified spectacle. As philosophy, rap is simultaneously assertion and demonstration, theory and enactment. As autobiography it is description, but also performative self-creation; it re-makes the life that is described, as the rapper tells us what she is doing right now as she raps (smokin suckaz wit logic, perhaps). Rap as autobiography and as fiction takes up experience into narrative, but it also transforms the life that is being narrated. And it interrupts or transgresses narrative with what exceeds narrative. As spectacle, it both participates in and alters the racializing transaction of ejected asceticism by seizing power at key points in the structure of exchange and the circulation of commodities.
The music that underlies rap--hip hop--is a quintessential postmodern form; it consists of snatches of appropriated songs. This point is developed in some detail by Houston Baker, who says that "By postmodern I mean the nonauthoritative collaging or archiving of sound and styles that bespeaks a deconstructive hybridity. Linearity and progress yield to a dizzying synchonicity."(3) Hip hop takes up the songs it samples uses them, but also transfigures them, or reduces them to single essential gesture, or ridicules them, or turns them against themselves. The entire history of recorded sound is available to be sampled; the instrument of hip hop is the history of recorded sound. Rap as poetry drives rhythm into speech, investing the act of speaking with a very pure power. One thing that is inevitably missing from a written discussion of rap is that recorded or performed rap is presented as spoken (usually) by the voice that composes it; it is not primarily a written form. Thus it relies on, indeed is inconceivable without, the dissemination of sound on the vinyl record, the audio tape, the compact disk. Any written discussion of rap needs to acknowledge that the form must be heard as recorded or rather that the form is itself recording, and that transcriptions of rap inevitably lose much of its artistic power.
Rap does not speak with one voice. It is tenaciously multivocal, often within the same song. The early rappers--The Furious Five, The Sugarhill Gang, and later Run DMC and Whodini, for example--rapped in crews or tag teams, each voice as identifiable by its preoccupations as by its timbre. Albums such as Dr. Dre's The Chronic or the Notorious B.I.G.'s Ready to Die are sprawling collaborations of voices: male and female, tough and tender, violent and mellow. The musical styles appropriated on these disks--soul, jazz, advertising jingles, funk, rock--reflect a similar diversity, as do the lyric themes in rap generally: everything from the politically charged philosophy of Public Enemy to the evocations of sex and violence by the Los Angeles gangsters to the out front feminism of Queen Latifah to the celebratory bawdiness of Salt 'n Pepa or Positive K. There are regional differences and identifications: from the staccato attack of New York to the slow melodic groove of LA to the southern rural orientation of Arrested Development to Fesu's tales of Houston housing projects. Thus, if there are generalizations in what follows, I warn you in advance to take them with a grain of salt.
I think it is fair to say that all of the themes of the earlier chapters--truth, double consciousness, self-loathing, self-assertion, fragmentation, and the desire born of fragmentation--are explored in rap from a variety of angles. But there is a further element in rap that I want particularly to develop by the end of the chapter. Some rap plays with race in a way that betrays both awareness of the power of race in the American experience and an ability to wield that power, an empowerment over that power
Rap is, often enough, precisely about power (one of the defining moments for the form was Spike Lee's use of the Public Enemy song "Fight the Power" at the opening of Do the Right Thing). But the content of that "about" is of interest. Rap often asserts superiority: the superiority of black over white, man over woman (or woman over man), or the personal superiority of the rapper over other rappers, or other people in general. But as a rapper describes the superiority of her skills, she does so by displaying those very skills. Rap, then, becomes a very particular sort of speech act; it has a ceremonial force. It effects power by incantation. The fact that my voice is coming out of your speakers shows that there is a particular power in what I am doing, and that very voice as it comes out of your speakers is telling you that there's a particular power in what I am doing. If rap asserts the superiority of black over white culture, it mounts a demonstration precisely within that assertion. Another common assertion of power is the rapper's claim to move the bodies of the audience, to produce words and rhythms that possess the listeners' bodies, making them dance. The creativity of the slang and word play, the profundity of the poetry, the engagement of the body by the beat: these are aspects of this particular African-American cultural production that show you, as they tell you, that black culture has power. (And these are, by the way, precisely the aspects of African-American art that Hurston celebrated.)
Thus, the rap speech act aspires to, asserts, but also enacts a reversal of cultural and personal domination. Here's a typical enactment of personal power by MC Lyte:
Moonroof open in the BM,
Windows tinted they can't see in.
They know it's me though.
MC Lyte she's bigger than bolo.
Gusto gusto I got so much so
You can have some; you just lay low.
Do as I do don't try to fess.
Do whatcha wanna just clean up the mess.
I'm here kickin in the rear.
Rhymes and rhymes and rhymes I got to spare.
So act like you know.
The things that I do just ain't for show.
This is my livin, so I am givin
Everything I got if not a lot more
For the people, for the buyers,
For all of those that seem to try a
MC Lyte tape in your Benzi box.
What can I say. Hey thanks a lot.
Cause I flip and trip and do all that good shit.
That's why the brothers they can't get off my tip.
They know whose show this is.
Whose show is this?
This is MC Lyte; act like you know.
This passage displays, as many rap songs do, a reversal of the power/knowledge relations that have characterized the history of African-American speech. Knowledge here is not something MC Lyte wants, or wants to use to explain herself; it is fame. She demands that you know her, bases her claims to superiority on how well known she is (Biggie Smalls: "And if you don't know, now you know, you know"). The assertion of fame in rap, repeated over and over, requires that to know, listeners take those rappers on their own terms. Being known as a rapper precisely inverts the relations between agency, power, and knowledge present in, say, case histories of prisoners. This knowledge is not supposed to be extracted from bodies or lives, but rather bubbles up through word of mouth and radio play. Being 'known' in rap terms means having your neighborhood's attention and loyalty, means having fame and fans, means setting the terms of representation through the power to be heard. MC Lyte makes you know what she wants you to know, and in the process takes your twenty bucks. And if you don't know, you better act like you know; if you're ignorant, you're going to be roundly abused.
Likewise, there is a constant cultural aggression in rap, an assertion of the reality or truth of black culture in the face of white domination. This aspect connects rap with the African-American response to oppression that stretches back to the slave narratives. As does Baker and also Henry Lous Gates, Ice T, in his book The Ice Opinion, connects rap to African-American traditions:
The main misinterpretation and misunderstanding of rap is in the dialogue - in the ghetto talk and machismo, even in the basic body language. From the nasty tales of Stagolee in the 1800s to H. Rap Brown in the '60s, most of rap is nothing more than straight-up black bravado. . . . In the ghetto, a black man will say, "I'll take my dick and wrap it around this room three times and fuck yo' mama." Now this man cannot wrap his dick around the room three times and probably doesn't want to fuck your mother, but this is how he's gonna talk to another brother.(4)
Notice that this both confirms and contextualizes the material of stereotype; aggressiveness and sexuality are put in play here in a way that is typical of rap. We have a celebration of black traditions (playing the dozens, e.g.) that is related to an Afrocentric self-construction of the sort that Malcolm put forward and to the African-American aesthetic enunciated and enacted by Hurston. African-American linguistic codes and cultural traditions are centralized and their meanings explained without excuse. But here, it is precisely the elements of African-American culture that are despised and feared by white culture (also by some elements of black culture: the Reverend Calvin Butts springs to mind) which are simultaneously thematized and enacted. That was Hurston's strategy in, for example, Mules and Men and "Characteristics of Negro Expression." Rather than asserting that African-American culture is a "high" culture by European standards, there is here an expression and demonstrations of a power whelming from below.
As expressed in rap, this aesthetic has one criterion of quality: reality. An alternate formulation of the same standard is this: blackness. KRS One (Knowledge Reigns Supreme Over Nearly Everyone), for example, raps "Let me show whose ass is the blackest." To assert that his ass is the blackest is for him to assert precisely that his stuff is real, authentic, hard-core rap. The association of reality with blackness should resonate out of everything I have argued thus far: that whiteness is constructed out of an imaginary ejection of the concrete, the embodied, the real, that white culture is a deathbound culture, a culture aiming toward or making as supreme value out of irreality. "Let me show whose ass is the blackest" turns that construction around on a dime. A "real", hard-core rap is an extremely black rap, and that means bass-heavy, gritty, completely embodied, completely intrinsic in its own enactment.
Here, to take another example, is the introduction to Guru's album Jazzmatazz:
Peace, yo, and welcome to Jazzmatazz, an experimental fusion of hip hop and live jazz. I'm your host the Guru. That stands for gifted, unlimited rhymes universal. . . . Hip hop, rap music, it's real. It's musical, cultural expression based on reality. And at the same time jazz is real, and based on reality. . . . I got Donald Byrd, Roy Ayers, Lonnie Liston Smith, Branford Marsalis, Ronny Jordan, N'Dea Davenport, Courtney Pine, and MC Solaar, all in the house.
The disk then becomes an exploration and celebration of black musical traditions, and an attempt to focus them into a single coherent synthesis that demonstrates their reality and power. It is a use and embodiment of truth as an agent of resistance. And it gives this truth a poetic turn, as on the song "Transit Ride," which uses the recording that blares from subway trains as a figure of urban entrapment: "Watch the closing doors." Thus, much rap is a form of literary "realism," a slice of life and so forth; it is "based on reality." But the typical movement in Guru's introduction shows the distinctiveness of rap as a form (though the same thing is attributed to jazz by the Guru): It is both based on reality and itself real. It is no mere reflection of reality, but also a real thing that takes up the antecedent reality, both the realities of black life and the manufactured realities of stereotype, into its own real enactment. This is not the realism of Dickens or Flaubert, which attempts 'description' while concealing the author. Imagine Dickens interrupting his tales constantly to tell you that Oliver is real, and detail his authority so to tell you (by, say, claiming that he is Oliver, all grown up, with a record contract and an AK). Rap enters and transforms the context it also reflects: It yields no distance between art object and motif. It is the human voice speaking out of the circumstances it sets out, and speaking (at its best) with grit and power and immediacy.
Notice that, in the construction of whiteness, we white folks make of ourselves the truth: We associate knowledge and science and comprehension with ourselves and expel you from them. But notice too that comprehension also falsifies, that in ranging the particular fact under the general category, the jagged edges of that fact, its massed idiosyncracies, must be erased. As we have seen with regard to Du Bois, this abandons by ejection an entire realm of truths to those who are left in the particular (behind the veil). To speak of reality is a powerful way of reasserting these truths; one might say that all that is left out in a Theory of Everything is . . . reality: grit, jaggedness, immediacy, violence. Du Bois moved in some of his writings to a relocation of the site of knowledge. Rappers enact this relocation, claim this site, as an aesthetic and an epistemic strategy for an attack on the initial ejection. If rappers know what they're talking about, then (white) sociologists haven't a clue. If rap is real, white culture has got to be "unreal."
Ice T puts it like this: "I rap about my life, and I rap about it in the hardest, most blatant sense. I consider what I say as real. This is the way the world I come from is. This is the way I talk and live. This is the only way I can be" (Ice Opinion, p. 97). In rap, then, discourse materializes, becomes a hard, solid thing. The discourse of white science, of ejected asceticism, is material as well, but systematically hides that materiality and denies its effects; in rap the materiality of discourse is explicitly thematized. Whereas in Du Bois the description of the particular truth is used as a mode of resistance to the general truth, rap brings the particular truth in a particular embodiment to bear directly on the racial situation. Du Bois recounted the particular truth. Rap enacts it and slaps you with it. The particular truth of rap is put forward by and in a particular voice. The truth is transformed into art, but the reality of the art itself becomes a mode of resistance. The slave narrative made the slave's truth a possession and a weapon; it asserted the ownership of the slave's truth by himself (recall Pennington). Rap, too, is an assertion of ownership of the truth or of the reality; the predominant mode of aesthetic evaluation of rap is not, say, beauty, but precisely reality (blackness) and the authority to present it.
A directly related theme is the rapper's claim to be 'representing,' in both the descriptive and political senses, some constituency. (A Tribe Called Quest: "Lincoln Boulevard represent represent. A Tribe Called Quest represent, represent. ") But whereas the slave narrative authorized black truth by white testimony, and was aimed at white readers, rap refers its authority to represent back to the hood, gang, or crew, and makes an issue of whether the rapper has stayed true to that constituency or turned her back on them. Rap authorizes itself in its own embodiment; its truth can be heard, is inherent in its expression and the power with with the expression is made. But that power is constantly assigned to the rapper's particular history and location and his authorization to represent friends, family, and listeners; that authorization depends on the rapper staying real, and staying connected (and "staying black"). Thus the individual rapper's assertion of authority supports itself through both the rapper's own skills and his connections to a specific background community, which are closely connected in the aesthetics in which the central evaluative categories are reality and blackness. Part of the power of the assertion is also the iteration and reiteration of the rapper's ability to speak about and for his reality, authorized by those who share it, with no reference needed to the epistemic structure of white authorization of the representation. In fact, such authorization immediately casts suspicion on the reality and authority of the representation.
And the mode of dissemination is relevant here as well, because whereas most speech acts (giving a promise, say) are ephemeral, once-and-for-all events, the rap act as it appears on disk or tape is endlessly repeatable and reproducible. It exists as a constant potential assertion or claim; the rap speech act is indefatigable and is produced in a never-ending spiral of recycled and reordered recorded sound. It leaves you with its own evidence, re-asserts itself whenever you press the right button. It can be heard anywhere, everywhere, by anybody. Rap commodifies the racial signifier with absolute precision; it sells, both to blacks and to whites, the preacher, the freedom fighter, the threatening druggie, the earthy black sex bomb, the independent and powerful mama, the black man armed to the teeth and hung like a horse, and so forth. It does this with great directness, but also, I think, often with great irony, and often with a crystalline self-awareness. The assertion of real, particular experience becomes both a commercial strategy (thus it must be accomplished in self-awareness) and an aesthetic and epistemological subversion.
That rap is a commodity, however, does not compromise it as an art; indeed, rap is inconceivable without commodification; as I say, it presupposes the current modes of dissemination and exploits them better than any other art form. Rap's medium is, finally, commodity, and while country music, for example, exists in an uneasy tension with its own commodification, rap revels in it, constantly makes of it an advantage. The play with race in rap, as I hope to show, both intensifies the discourse of race in our culture and violates it. The nastier the rap, the greater the hope. But rap places the nastiness directly into the marketplace; it circulates a racial enactment through the network of commodity exchange; it permeates the white-dominated world of market economics and mass media. It is to some extent co-opted and reduced in power by its location, but its market penetration also signals a significant entrance of black economic power into the economy of commodity.
Rap lends itself extremely smoothly to slumming, which can now be accomplished as suburban white boys watch "Yo, MTV Raps" (we don't even have to go to Harlem). But by the same token and by the same means rap also subverts the structures surrounding commodity and image in contemporary capitalism as the locations of racial construction. The notion of commodity has particular resonance in African-American discourse; these are people who, after all, came here as commodities. And it has a wide resonance, as well, in black American artistic traditions; the white world has appropriated black music through the whole century and used it to make countless fortunes, while the "authentic" black artist was often left destitute. (Though the notion is abroad that this results from conspiracy, and though there certainly have been concerted efforts to buy, say, "folk" songs at the cheapest possible rates, I prefer to give this a different twist. The reason that white performers appropriate black musical styles is because those styles are incredibly compelling aesthetically, but white listeners are often more comfortable hearing them out of white performers: Pat Boone, for example, or Vanilla Ice.) But the only possibility of subversion within consumer capitalism is to seize control of oneself and one's race as a commodity, and that, I propose, is what many rappers accomplish, though they may line white pockets as well. I suspect that rap record labels, for example, make some people nervous the way all-black juries do; they both signal and further the actual status of black persons as full citizens. (Consider the way that Warner Brothers, for example, insulates itself from Death Row Records through a series of embedded companies. On the other hand, Death Row, as I write, has released four disks, each of which has gone at least double platinum.) In our capitalist system, buying power is economic citizenship. For records and movies to be made for black consumption by black people (and the core audience for rap remains black, though it is widely marketed among whites as well) means that their economic citizenship is now beginning to count in real terms, that their tastes and standards will more and more influence the production of public culture. And this cultural shift causes some consternation among white people to the extent that such production is less and less controllable by the filter of white epistemic and economic control. All-black juries get to make legal decisions based on the way they perceive social and political reality; rap musicians get to say how they see the world, including white people, with less and less monitoring by white sensibilities. In rap, all the monitoring that matters--at least as far as the lyrics reproduce it--is from the authorizing community of one's neighborhood or audience constituency. Any other attempt to guide or edit what is said is explicitly rejected as illegitimate.
Consider this lyric, "Burn Hollywood Burn" from Fear of a Black Planet, the classic 1989 album by Public Enemy:
Chuck D:
Burn Hollywood burn I smell a riot
Goin on first they're guilty now they're gone.
Yeah I'll check out a movie,
But it'll take a black one to move me.
Get the hell away from this TV.
All this news and views are beneath me
Cause all I hear about is shots ringin out,
About gangs puttin each others' head out.
So I rather kick some slang out
All right fellas let's go hand out.
Hollywood or would they not
Make us all look bad like I know they had
But some things I'll never forget yeah
So step and fetch this shit.
For all the years we looked like clowns
The joke is over. Smell the smoke from all around.
Burn, Hollywood, burn. . . .
Big Daddy Kane:
As I walk the streets of Hollywood Boulevard
Thinkin how hard it was to those that starred
In the movies portrayin the roles
Of butlers and maids, slaves and hos.
Many intelligent Black men seemed
To look uncivilized when on the screen.
Like I guess I figure you to play some jigaboo
On the plantation, what else can a nigger do?
And black women in this profession
As for playin a lawyer, out of the question.
For what they play Aunt Jemima is the perfect term
Even if now she got a perm.
So let's make our own movies like Spike Lee
Cause the roles being offered don't strike me.
There's nothing that the Black man could use to earn.
Burn Hollywood burn.
This rap both describes the use of black people as stereotypical commodities in media, and presents the simple solution: to "make our own movies."
The thrust recalls Langston Hughes's poem "Note on Commercial Theatre":
You've taken my blues and gone -
You sing 'em on Broadway
...And you fixed 'em
So they don't sound like me.
Yes you done taken my blues and gone.
You also took my spirituals and gone.
... But someday somebody'll
Stand up and talk about me,
And write about me -
Black and Beautiful -
And sing about me,
And put on plays about me!
I reckon it'll be
Me myself!
Yes, it'll be me.(5)
This poem and that rap throw the present project into deep question. And there certainly are attempts by white people to "appropriate" rap; certainly some white fortunes have been made out of it (although mine won't be). Perhaps more thoroughly, and again as this chapter shows, there are white attempts to dominate the discourse about rap.
In the early nineteen eighties I was working as a freelance music critic for several different newspapers and magazines. I was, as I have indicated, interested in black musics, and had written about them, and as rap began to get popular, I started writing about it. I reviewed early records by Run DMC and the Fat Boys, among others, and also concerts by rap stars such as Grandmaster Flash, LL Cool J, and Whodini. Now, first of all, I knew nothing about rap when this started other than that I liked listening to it; for example, I did not know how hip hop was made, and I didn't understand why there was no band at the concerts. I thought they were saving money by rapping over the instrumental tracks from their own records. I am sure I committed a variety of howlers, both in describing the music and in evaluating it. Whatever those howlers were, there was no way for me to be notified of them. Nevertheless, and despite the fact that there were black writers dealing with rap (Greg Tate, for instance, who wrote for some of the same magazines I did), rap's ascension as a widespread pop form coincided with its recognition in the white rock press, especially the Rolling Stone combine (I was working, among others, for Record magazine, published by the RS people). My white voice authorized an appreciation of rap, inserted it into a taxonomy of popular forms, declared and hence defused its subversive potential (again here, recall the authorizing documents appended to slave narratives). There would be two or three white guys in an audience of thousands; it wasn't hard to figure out that we were the critics. I remember sitting at the Laurel Super Music Fest in 1983, in a crowd of ten thousand people, and the only three white guys were in the press box. And if I was any indication, we were probably at that point the people in that audience who knew the least about the music we were evaluating.
But it must be said that the creation and reception of rap has also resisted such means of authorization, much more explicitly and successfully, I suspect, than any other black musical form. More of the people who make rap records, and, at this point, review them, are black than has been the case with the blues, gospel, soul, and so forth. And the criticisms of rap that flow from institutionally accredited locations are taken, frequently with pride, as proofs that the rap or rapper has affronted the white power structure. (Ice T: "You shoulda killed me last year.") What better proof could there be than such criticism that a rapper has said what he isn't supposed to say?
Furthermore, the role of white performers and producers in rap seems to me quite different than their role in previous black musics. Though there has often been successful black/white collaboration in black pop forms (think of Leiber and Stoller's work with the Coasters, or Jerry Wexler's with the Memphis and Muscle Shoals scenes), there has also been a rough division of labor into those who authorize the art and those whose art is authorized to enter public space. But a group like the Beastie Boys, who are a great white rap act, is authorized precisely out of a black discourse of authenticity, just as Vanilla Ice is extruded by it, and finally discredited by it. Still, Vanilla Ice sought recognition in this discourse, and hence made up a blackened autobiography out of whole cloth. One point of a good rap is, again, that it be black, and producers such as Rick Rubin learn what that means and how to make the records come out dark. There is an inversion of authorizing power here that corresponds to the inversion of the stereotype; the reversal of the stereotype or its revaluing, the attack by the stereotyped on the dominant power that uses stereotype itself, has actually reconfigured the distribution of power in the music industry to some extent. Baker points out that "Unlike rock and roll, rap cannot be hastily and prolifically appropriated or "covered" by white artists. For the black urbanity of the form seems to demand not only a style most readily accessible to to black urban youngsters, but also a representational black urban authenticity of performance" (Black Studies, Rap, and the Academy, p. 82). This seems fundamentally right to me, though it must be pointed out that rap has entered much more widely into pop music vocabularies since Baker wrote, and is more and more part of the common language out of which pop songs can be made by anyone. But even in that case, the authorizing function has been reversed, and it is obvious that white performers hope to glean an aura of authenticity through these borrowings, even where the vocabulary now comes very "naturally."
In fact, the Beastie Boys are an interesting case. I said in the last chapter that if white folks made ourselves visible to ourselves as white to the point where we could self-consciously play with and parody our whiteness, race would be ending as a dualistic mode of domination. Our invisibility to ourselves is absolutely essential if the dualism is to be formulated and wielded as a weapon in the precise way it is in American culture. If anyone in our culture has approached this parodic deconstruction of race from the white side, it is the Beastie Boys, and they can only do it from a point within an ongoing black discourse. One of the funniest things about the Beastie Boys is that they sound white even when (as on their early albums) they rap over black beats, and it seems to me that they try to sound extremely white. Vanilla Ice, and even better white rap acts such as House of Pain or Snow try to sound black; the move is appropriative, is slumming. But the Beastie Boys show themselves as white to (among others) black audiences, and parody whiteness. This is an extremely transgressive stance, but they take it up with such light-hearted enthusiasm that it is irresistible.
That such critiques and reversals of the circulation of racial signifiers take place precisely through the media which are criticized doubles their power. Public Enemy's rap does not simply set out a criticism of the construction of stereotype in mass media, it enacts an alternative. It is itself a seizing of the means of representation and the market in images for the purpose of criticizing those means and that market. It embodies what it asserts, is both a program for subversion and an act of revolution.
Consider, for example, Kool Moe Dee's song "Funke Wisdom," which is typical of his output and indeed of a whole style of rap:
The devil sold a dream and you bought it
Without thinkin about it. . . .
With material thoughts from the cradle to the grave,
Slave.
Gotcha livin just to die
For the money, look sweet, slick and sly.
Long as you're ridin and your system's fly
You don't give a damn if your homeboys die.
We gotta find a way to get paid in the system.
With or without money, it's funky wisdom. . . .
Mathematically, it all adds up.
All people are equal, but equal to what? . . .
Twenty four, seven, three sixty five,
Cause nine to five ain't alive
We're in overdrive.
Take the first power, elevate to the third.
Manifest the power of the spoken word. . . .
Knowledge ain't enough, you need funky, funky wisdom.
One might take this simply as a tribute to the power of wisdom, including economic power (if economic power indeed ever accrues to wisdom), and also as an attack on black assumption of the materialist values of the dominant culture. But notice that while Kool Moe extols wisdom, he remains situated in African-American traditions, which he connects here to the power of the spoken word, the same power that Hurston revealed in her folklore and fiction. Rap takes up and pushes forward an oral tradition, and a tradition in which the spoken word is a vehicle of wisdom, as against the European culture of comprehension which (Derrida's bizarre argument notwithstanding) privileges the written text--abstract, enduring, comprehensive, authoritative--above the act of speaking. Further, Kool Moe doesn't just recommend wisdom; he recommends funky, funky wisdom. That is, he recommends wisdom that emerges from and transforms the African-American context, that has funk to it, bass. This is not a recommendation that black people learn Western traditions (though it does not exclude that) but that they locate their own sources of wisdom, among other places, in spoken and musical communication. Socrates had wisdom, perhaps. But Kool Moe Dee has funky, funky wisdom.
This participates in a reversal of stereotype. But, like Hurston, Kool Moe also shows in that very reversal what stands in excess to the stereotype: the fact that there was a real culture there with practices of wisdom that antedated the imposition of dualisms upon it in European colonialism and American slavery. Further, the antecedent culture bears within itself the possibility of a reassertion in and out of stereotyped materials. That wisdom could be "funky" is a delightful notion, and one that is designed to expose the impoverishment both of white constructions of African-Americans (the exclusion of African-Americans from the space of wisdom, of mind, of civilization), and the impoverishment of white constructions of themselves (we don't have a smell, much less a funk; one of the first things I learned about race as a child in D.C. was that black folks smell funny). Wisdom since Plato has been associated with a process of disembodiment that locates the wise man in the realm of pure concepts. If wisdom in that sense were possible, it would be a horror, and the attempt to accomplish the impossible has been horrifying: has turned us toward the world and the ejected body with violence. But funky wisdom is embodied wisdom; Kool Moe does not celebrate ignorance, nor does he celebrate our wisdom; he celebrates his wisdom, the same wisdom that Hurston located in African arts of the diaspora. And in Kool Moe's work, this wisdom is explicitly associated with an African history and an Afrocentric cultural construction.
It is often asserted that rap glorifies violence. That may occasionally be true (though far less frequently, I think, than is commonly supposed) and when it is true one of its functions is, of course, the reassertion of what has been excluded; it is among other things a confrontation of white culture with its ejection of the body. Violence as transgression interrupts the operation of the machinery by which dualisms are enforced. But, as I say, this is occasional, and the bald general assertion that rap glorifies violence makes me wonder what these people have been listening to, if anything. Just a week before the release of Doggystyle, Snoop Doggy Dogg was arrested for murder, apparently because his bodyguard shot someone who had been threatening them with a gun. But check this lyric from "Murder Was the Case":
Hey Jason, isn't that Snoop Dog over there? Roll up on the side of him, man. Man, hand me my motherfuckin Glock, man, give me another clip, cause I'm gonna smoke this fool. Hey man, you Snoop Dog? Nigger! [shots] Jump on that fool! [more shots] Yeah, nigger, what's up? Yeah motherfucker. Youse a dead motherfucker now.
As I look up at the sky
My mind starts trippin, a tear drops my eye.
My body temperature falls.
I'm shakin, they're breakin
Tryin to save the Dog.
Pumpin on my chest and I'm screamin.
I stop breathin.
Man I see demons.
Dear God, I wonder can you save me?
I can't die, my boohoo's bout to have my baby.
It's too late for prayin.
Hold up, a voice spoke to me
And it slowly started sayin:
"Relax your soul; let me take control.
Close your eyes my son." My eyes are closed.
Anyone who thinks that glorifies violence is tripping. It certainly describes violence, and obviously emerges from a situation in which people are armed and in which the threat of death is often present. But Snoop, for one, is whole lot more interested in getting mellow and partying than killing someone, not to speak of being killed. This chilling dream of his own death, which is as vivid as any such description I've ever read or heard, is a reminder of what goes on in the heads of people who live with violence on a daily basis. In fact, there is a whole genre of rap videos that depict gang funerals, or in which the dead or injured are mourned and avenged. But one thing such works do not do is make death an entertaining game; the pain is palpable. Ice Cube raps: "Today I didn't have to use my AK./ I gotta say it was a good day." Biggie Smalls (Notorious B.I.G.) has issued an amazing disk that begins with his birth and ends with his death by suicide ("I hear death calling me," he says, shortly before the shot rings out). He, or rather the character that he constructs, gives us an incredibly detailed description of why he hates himself enough to kill himself.
These lyrics do not glorify violence, unless you take the position that to notice violence linguistically, to admit that it exists, is to glorify it. Rather they tell about violence, mourn it, object to it, and rage against the conditions that make violence a day to day reality. (Raekwon: "I can't believe in heaven cause I'm livin in hell.") This use precisely of narrative in a transgressive interruption of logocentric narrative is particularly vivid in a song by Scarface, "Never Seen a Man Cry":
Imagine life at its full peak
Then imagine lyin dead in the arms of your enemy.
Imagine peace on this earth when there's no grief.
Imagine grief on this earth when there's no peace.
Everybody's got a different way of endin it.
And when your number comes up (?) then they send it.
Now the time has arrived for your final test.
I see the fear in your eyes and hear your final breath.
How much longer will it be till it's all done
Total darkness, at ease, be it all one.
I watch him die and when he dies let us celebrate.
You took his life but his memory you'll never take.
You'll be headed to another place
And the life you used to live will reflect in your mother's face.
I still gotta wonder why
I never seen a man cry till I seen a man die.
This song is about both what it is like to die and what it is like to watch someone you love die. The grief, the darkness, the oneness that death threatens and promises are centralized in experience, but they are themselves the overwhelming of that experience, the sinking of experience into the sea of the incomprehensible, where individuality is destroyed and the story ends. This is the dark side of Hurston's oneness with a changing realm of matter: That oneness is both an expansion and an extinction of the self, a seduction, a grief, and a celebration.
Rap yields narratives, including narratives about violence and death. But narrative is also containment, and hence threat. Narrative has been a weapon of white culture. It has been used, as Derrida puts it, as "white mythology," above all in the scientific explanation of the object which is ejected in the self-constructions that make science possible and which set up the material world, including the human body, as an object for study. Narrative containment is how we explain you to ourselves, and thus us to ourselves, while simultaneously removing ourselves from the scene of description by our "omniscience" and objectivity. Our story about ourselves is that our histories are not stories, but sciences: In someone like Hegel, for instance, our story of progress becomes the entire inner truth of History and Being (significantly, as Kobena Mercer points out, Africa gets left out of history, or rather is on principle excluded(6)). Of course, this is only one possible form of the narrative, even in the West of modernity. There are counter-narratives: not only those that sweep unnarrated materials into the dominant narrative structures, but those that display different forms and possibilities for narrative. For example, there are African models of narration, some of which were employed by Hurston, that admit a plurality of narratives without trying to gather them all into a coherent structure. And rap definitely uses non-Western or not-only-Western modes of narration in constructing a discourse of resistance that is the assertion of the other as other, but is not only the assertion of the other as other.
There is, however, an even more radical excess available here, and available precisely out of the forms and concretions of oppression. For there are experiences that resist being swept into narrative altogether, and some of those experiences are signs or nodes of oppression itself. Thus an excess to narrative in general can be gestured toward precisely in narrative. There is a white mythology that gives the sociological story, for example, of the underclass and its substance abuse and its poverty and its violence and its transgression of "our" values. But notice that these very experiences are constant challenges to narrative in general. There can be narratives of acts of violence. But violence as it is experienced shatters narrative structures; violence might be defined precisely as what exceeds and destroys the coherence of narrative. The "slave narrative," for example, is both narrative and an interruption of narrative; the sheer intensity of the violence depicted cannot be smoothly incorporated in a story; its intensity disturbs the experience of the narrative as story. William Andrews points out that some slave narrators "lamented the inadequacy of language itself to represent the horrors of slavery or the depth of their feelings as they reflected on their sufferings. In some cases black narrators doubted their white readers' ability to translate the words necessary to a full rendering of their experience and feeling."(7)
To narrate one's own death, for example--as do Snoop and Biggie Smalls-- is to make oneself impossible as a narrator. Ice T says this:
Gangs have been able to get away with so much killing it just continues. The capability of violence in these kids is unimaginable. Last year, five of my buddies died. I don't even go to the funerals anymore. It's just so crazy. There are just so many people dying out there. Sometimes I sit up with my friends and think, "There will never be another time on earth where we'll all be together again." . . . You get hard after a while. You get hard. People on the outside say, "These kids are so stone-faced; they don't show any remorse or any emotion." It's because they are . . . conditioned, like soldiers in war, to deal with death. You just don't know what it's like until you've been around it. (Ice Opinion, 31)
Death exceeds story. Living with the constant threat of death and the constant capacity to kill is "unimaginable." It cannot be told; to be understood, it must be lived. And yet rap confronts you with its results, or with the situations in which life in the face of death is the only possible life. The gesture in narrative to those forms of experience is one way that rap connects with its intended audience: It gestures toward forms of experience that are not really describable, but the gestures are understood by those whose lives are punctuated by such experiences. Likewise, to shoot up heroin or to get stone drunk are ways of being sucked into oblivion, an oblivion that interrupts and attacks narrative coherence. Ultimately, in such experiences, one must let go of narrative; to allow oneself to sink into oblivion is to let go of one's story of oneself, and to exceed and escape from other people's stories.
White culture is obsessed with the task of constructing a narrative of black culture, an "explanation." Partly it does this in various attempts at self-absolution, self-abasement, or self-accusation. But in all cases it allocates to itself the right to tell the story of African-American culture, perhaps as a preliminary to "solving its problems" for it. Rap insists (as did Douglass and William Wells Brown) first--and as we saw with regard to "Burn, Hollywood, Burn"--that African-Americans are, and must be, telling their own stories. And here it also offers "explanations," explanations that are comprehensible to white culture as well. Consider this lyric from Fesu's "Goin in Circles":
Can't seem to get my life straight, but I'm strivin.
Fastin every day cause of money, but I'm survivin
I'm havin trouble tryin to concentrate
Cause of this devil, this cold-blooded white man.
Mama, I know that she don't hear me though.
She said: "Pack your shit, nigger, your broke ass gotta go."
And now I'm runnin after lost time,
Tryin to clean up round the house cause I'm a try to keep mine.
They say us youth gone defective, careless and reckless,
They want our ass up out of Texas.
And now I'm feelin somethin missin.
Farrakhan said he cared, so I'm listenin.
Tryin to decide who's right or wrong.
Gotta get myself together cause I know I'm not gonna last long.
Goin round in circles.
A co-dependent age twenty-three.
Blamin the world for my problems but never takin a look at me.
As a kid I used to ride in the backseat.
See the Fruit [of Islam?] in the street.
She wouldn't even buy a paper.
Her little baby wasn't breast-fed.
She stuck a cold-ass bottle in my mouth and lay me in the bed.
Mama, I needed you to bond with,
But you were busy fussin and fightin that fool we were livin with.
Now that I'm grown you say I'm trippin out.
Well I'm trippin to.
You made this monster, gotta feed him, too.
Jackin and bangin, my life's in the war zone.
In the streets, cause you know mama wasn't at home.
And daddy, I can't find him.
I'm ashamed of him, walkin twelve paces behind him.
He beat the shit out of my mommy dear. . . .
Mommy lived in fear.
She asked me why I'm in the game, they can't see.
She said I'm goin in circles, but you don't know me, G.
Now this tells Fesu's own story, but it also tells it through psychological structures developed and deployed by white people; it is "comprehensible." Such concepts as co-dependency and bonding, as well as the general connection to familial disintegration, are characteristic of the white narrative of the black "underclass." They are used here without irony. But the story is no less compelling for that; it shows the rapper striving to make sense of his own life, a life the most conspicuous feature of which is that it refuses to be made sense of: His mother tells him he doesn't know her, or he says she doesn't know him (the lyric is ambiguous).
Even more profoundly, rap often indicates that African-American experience (like all experience, finally) cannot be contained in stories and psychological structures. Another Fesu song, "Fallin Off the Deep End," captures this perfectly:
I don't trust a motherfucker
Or his sister or his brother or his crack-smokin uncle.
I can't stand them white folks.
How can I stress it enough?
I'll put your ass in handcuffs.
You wasn't worried till I started makin money.
But I can't be faded, motherfucker, I'm down with the twenty.
Yeah. And I'm fallin off the deep end.
Substance abuse, violence, sex, death, love, and hatred are ways of falling off the deep end, tumbling into the abyss; they are calls to oblivion and ecstasy. One of the first national rap hits, Grandmaster Flash's "The Message" said "It's like a jungle sometimes it makes me wonder/ How I keep from goin under." Oblivion and ecstasy (and there is hardly a distinction), pull narrative apart by making it particular and then inserting into it a condition that abrogates it. The experience described is a "going under." This is one reason why rap is continually asserted by its practitioners to be "real" or "true": It refuses containment in the fantasy structures of narrative, insists on particularity, and pulls toward a letting-go. Violence in this sense is used, first, as a weapon against white people, but second, as a weapon against white scientific and narrative structures, as an attempt at the deepest level to undermine white art, white sociology, white pathologization of blackness and African-American culture, in short every gesture of containment.
Rap constantly enacts transgression. It flouts the law; it flouts taboos about what words to use and taboos about racial signifiers; it flouts sexual mores and drug prohibitions and polite language. Violence is transgression per se: a sheer violation. No story contains or captures violence; no story expresses the oblivion out of which it emerges or the oblivion it imposes. Violence is the Kantian thing in itself about which we can say nothing positively or wholly true. Even violence that fits into the most recognizable stories of white culture does so uneasily, and there is a penumbra of excess about it. Violence is something into which we are forced, or into which we are seduced; thus violence calls to the self for its oblivion. Often it makes this call precisely through an intensification of self to the point of collapse; shooting someone is an assertion of self, indeed the most pointed and extreme assertion of self, but it pulls at the self by a vertigo into a vortex. Violence is a destroyer of selves, and hence of every attempt to contain or explain the self.
Rap music has been criticized by black leaders for reinforcing racial stereotypes. The widespread use of words such as "bitch," "ho," and "nigger" is taken as an expression of self-hatred now extended (in a terrain we have traversed) into hatred of whatever resembles oneself. And rap has even been criticized for the same reason by some rappers. Sister Souljah, who is both a rapper and a community activist, writes the following in her autobiography No Disrespect:
Racism has turned our communities into war zones where we are dying every day. It is black-on-black hate, created by racism and white supremacy, that is killing us. Black people killing black people. Can African male-female relationships survive in America? Not if black-on-black love is dead. . . . Not if our young men continue to refer to young women as "bitches," or our young women refer to young men as "motherfuckers," or all of us refer to each other as "niggas." It is a sad measure of our profound contempt for each other and of our thoroughgoing self-loathing that we continue to persist in this ugly practice.(8)
Souljah's book is essentially about the difficulties of heterosexual love in a shattered community, a community, for example, where more of the young men are in jail than in college. Some rap takes that issue up in a very "positive" way. Heavy D, for example, says "black coffee, no sugar, no cream: that's the kind of girl I want down with my team." Salt 'n Pepa's "Whatta Man" is a celebration of black male beauty. Coolio's song "Mama I'm in Love With a Gangsta," by a stunning shift of view, portrays the pain of loving a man who is in jail through the eyes of his female lover, with Coolio portraying the incarcerated man. The late Tupac Shakur's "Black Pearl" is a celebration of the strength of black womanhood (though that celebration appeared more than a trifle ironic after Tupac's conviction for sexual abuse).
But the style called "gangsta rap" shows the force of Souljah's charge. Da Brat, for example, refers to herself as a bitch and a ho. It is sometimes said that rap denigrates education, celebrates violence and substance abuse, and confirms white America's image of African-Americans as ignorant, threatening crackheads (or whatever the latest drug of choice happens to be). If this were offered as a general critique of rap, it would be, as we have seen, ridiculously overgeneralized. But it is not without force.
Sherley Anne Williams gives a quite typical argument:
[B]lack people have to ask ourselves why so much [rap] has become so vehemently misogynistic, violent, and sexually explicit, so soaked in black self-hatred? Why, given that we are so ready to jump on Hollywood, the Man, the Media, and black women writers for negative and distorted portrayals of black people, have black academics, critics, and intellectuals been so willing to talk about the brilliant and innovative form of rap? Proclaiming rap's connection to traditional wells of black creativity and thus viewing even its most pornographic levels as "art," intellectuals have been slow to analyze and critique rap's content. We have, by and large, refused to call that content, where appropriate, pathological, anti-social, and anti-community. And by our silence, we have allowed what used to be permissible only in the locker room or at stag parties, among consenting adults, to become the norm among our children.(9)
Now I have quite a hostile response to this passage, which is notable above all for its prissiness, for its unquestioning assumption that what is art cannot be obscene, and for its assumption that describing the realities of some black lives amounts to self-hatred. Williams adds that "the best rap is characterized by . . . innocuous messages and funky beats" (216), which is colossally wrong. But again, it is obvious that the criticism has bite in that it refers to the actual content of many raps.
The charge of misogyny, for example, is hardly misplaced. Here is Claude Brown on the term "bitch":
Johnny was always telling us about bitches. To Johnny, every chick was a bitch. Of course, there were some nice bitches, but they were still bitches. And a man had to be a dog in order to handle a bitch.
Johnny said once, "If a bitch ever tells you she's only got a penny to buy the baby some milk, take it. You take it, 'cause she's gon git some more. Bitches can always git some money." He really knew about bitches.
Cats would say, "I saw your sister today, and she is a fine bitch." Nobody was offended by it. That's just the way things were. It was easy to see all women as bitches.(10)
Here, the use of the term "bitch" is related directly to the predation of women by men, which is a predominant theme of Manchild in the Promised Land. So the last thing I want to do is simply to suggest that such speech is not problematic.
But one question that remains is: problematic to whom? A common bromide of some sorts of feminist discourse is that the animal metaphors used for the genders are differetially inflected: a man is "cock of the walk" or a "dog" for instance, while a woman is a "bitch," a "cow," a "shrew." It is taken as obvious that those words must be valorizing of men and derogatory to women. And certainly in the history of white gender discourse they are derogatory. But it is obvious that such words must always, wherever they are used, mean just that? Or do some listeners assume that the comparison of a woman to a dog must be a derogatory metaphor, even when those using it claim otherwise? I do not want to answer this question definitively here, but just to point out that the assumption that the meaning of words is set by one particular history of meaning encodes a certain cultural assumption of superiority. No matter what you say about what you mean by certain terms, or what those terms mean in your community in practice, cultural commentators are likely to dismiss your claim about meaning in the name of what the words really mean--that is, what they would mean in the white community and what practices they support in the white community. (Recall here Hurston's contextualization of violence between the sexes.) As I explore this, I want it to be understood that I take seriously the fact that black figures such as Sister Souljah, Queen Latifah, and Sherley Anne Williams also attack such forms of words. It is worth mentioning that the term "bitch" is a particularly unstable one in the current scene of changing gender politics. A feminist friend of mine was called a bitch by a male objector to the feminist discourse in which they were speaking. Another, older feminist told her not to worry about it, rather to be proud of it; "bitch," she said, is just what men call women when women don't go along with male preferences and definitions, and thus is a badge of honor. Ice T, in an interview on National Public Radio in which the interviewer sought to confront him with his "misogynistic" use of the word "bitch," tried to show her that it could be used as a term of affection, in a talk that started out "Say you were my bitch," and finished off with "Oh baby, quit trippin. You know I love you. But you're still my bitch." This reduced the interviewer to silence, though I suspect to enraged silence. And of course, had the interviewer been a man, Ice T could not have reduced him to silence in just this way. The question of who gets to say what words mean, however, is central to the possibility of a discourse that resists white hegemony of the sign. And typically, in the white discourse, it is words themselves as abstract objects that are supposed to be holders of power, as if the sheer phonemes in "bitch" or "nigger" carried the same meaning whenever or wherever or by whomever they are uttered, as if to expunge them from the language would actually be concretely to remedy sexist or racist oppression.
I am going to try, however, to give an analysis of the sort Williams demands. Seizing upon and turning around stereotypes is a weapon of subversion. In his memoir Colored People, Henry Louis Gates, Jr. writes:
I used to reserve my special scorn for those Negroes who were always being embarrassed by someone else in the race. Someone too dark, too "loud," someone too "wrong." Someone who dared to wear red in public. Loud and wrong: we used to say that to each other. Nigger is loud and wrong. "Loud" carried a triple meaning: speaking too loudly, dressing too loudly, and just being too loudly.
I do know that, when I was a boy, many Negroes would have been the first to censure other Negroes once they were admitted into all-white neighborhoods or schools or clubs. "An embarrassment to the race"--phrases of that sort were bandied about. Accordingly, many of us in our generation engaged in strange antics to flout those strictures. Like eating watermelon in public, eating it loudly and merrily, and spitting the seeds into the middle of the street, red juice running down the sides of our cheeks, collecting under our chins.(11)
(Recall here the passage from Amiri Baraka quoted in the last chapter, in which he described chowing down on watermelon at Howard. And recall Hurston's "that's just like a nigger.") Where assimilation may be a form of cultural erasure, and where what makes a culture resistant to assimilation is its loudness; where integration means the production of the appearance of whiteness and hence the minting of double consciousness; where the non-assimilated culture is constructed by stereotype; there, the stereotype becomes a weapon of resistance to hegemonic power. Nigger is loud and wrong, hence dangerous and recalcitrant. Gates says that he eventually tried to stop telling people how to be black. But meanwhile being extremely black precisely by the standards of the stereotype is a way of asserting cultural existence and cultural difference.
It is one thing for a white moviemaker to portray black men as dangerous, violent addicts; it is quite another for Spike Lee to present such characters (as he did, for example, in Mo Better Blues and Clockers). Even if the portrayals coincided precisely (and they do not), they have exactly opposite positions in the power structure. One way to try to destroy the power of stereotype is to defy it, to go get a Ph.D., for example. This has its advantages, and of course is not only a strategy for racial empowerment, but for personal development. But as a strategy for racial empowerment, it has its disadvantages as well. For, first of all, stereotypes stand up remarkably well to "exceptions"; stereotypes are not really generalizations, even bad generalizations, but rather templates through which we interpret experience. (That is, as I said in the chapter on Du Bois, the character of the generalization is given in the antecedent taxonomy, and the generalization can break down while the taxonomy remains unquestioned.) It is very easy for me to see a black professor as a racial anomaly; worse, the blackness of the black professor is in danger of disappearing in my eyes; he may walk like me and talk like me, and perhaps I can make of him an honorary white guy. And notice, too, that the Ph.D. may be seen by African-Americans as being purchased at the price of racial identification; it may be seen as a racial betrayal; one may be told to "stay black." I am certain that this is a maddening thing to be told, particularly in a situation such as (say) academia, which is fraught with racial tensions, and in which the color of the professor is not, ultimately, forgettable. It is, I am sure, a maddening thing to be told to stay black when there is really no choice in the matter. Nevertheless, the black professor at Harvard or wherever is operating in the white-dominated world, and may be doing so in part by creating a white surface. This compromises stereotypes, but only locally, and it also raises the threat of cultural annihilation by assimilation (an issue that is also vividly present in the Jewish community, wher it focuses aroung intermarriage).
Academia is one perfect node of white self-construction; we professor types are pure minds, and we are notoriously physically inept and badly dressed because we have forgotten our bodies. To be a professor is to be very, very white, though there are also transgresive ways of taking up this or any other role. This is one reason that academia resists integration, and one reason why the forms of integration practiced in academia are particularly insistent in demanding a white surface from those by whom it is integrated. Yet the integration of this space is particularly needful and particularly fecund; as figures such as Cornel West and bell hooks and Gates and Baker and Patricia Williams strive to make a black authorship in the academic culture, they strive to operate within that culture while simultaneously throwing into question its most basic underpinnings in race. If we could be confronted with the minds of our pure bodies, we might watch a collapse of our own self-image. It goes without saying, however, that we white academics take extraordinary measures, unconscious to ourselves, to avoid that confrontation.
But another strategy is to use the stereotype in profound acts of self-empowerment: "If you think this is what I am, I'll give it to you (so to speak) in spades." And notice the potential of the stereotype, particularly of the black man, as a weapon against the power that creates it: Black guys are, according to the stereotype, animalistic, armed, violent, out of control. Rap's reply: Hell yes we are, so get the fuck out of the way. (Consider MC Eiht's song "Niggaz That Kill," which ends up being more or less a simple list of niggaz that kill; it says: there's a whole bunch of us out here, and we're coming.) Ice T says:
Crime is an equal-opportunity employer. It never discriminates. Anybody can enter the field. You don't need a college education. You don't need a G.E.D. You don't have to be any special color. You don't need white people to like you. You're self-employed. As a result, criminals are very independent people. They don't like to take orders. That's why they get into this business. There are no applications to fill out, no special dress codes. In crime you need only one thing: heart. (Ice Opinion, 53)
This is something of an explanation. But it is also a demonstration of the power of transgression, a demonstration of how transgression becomes a form of economic and characterological resistance. It confirms the stereotype, but with a self- and other-awareness that are incompatible with the supposed neutrality of the values that make and enforce the stereotype, and with a skill and self-consciousness that are incompatible with the stereotype itself. It says: this is what you have made by stereotype. People are trapped in a situation of violence, and the claustrophobia that accompanies the description of violence in rap is palpable.
Furthermore, it leads to a heightened romanticism of black culture by whites; every confirmation that black people are earthy, ignorant, violent, criminal, sexy, drunk calls out both a greater fear and a greater yearning toward that culture on the part of people whose lives have been designed to omit or simply fail to acknowledge these things. So white parents find their children listening to and dressing like Snoop (and maybe sipping on gin and juice or smoking chronic), and face a racial situation that has been to some extent transformed. One runs across a similar strategy in certain strands of feminism ("eco-feminism" for instance), where the image of woman as intuitive or instinctive mammalian nurturer is not derided as a stereotype but is intensified into a mode of subversion. "Bitch" animalizes the person to whom it is applied. "Ho" sexualizes, or equates person with sexual body. "Nigger" carries with it the weight of the entire white cultural construction of black people as savages. There's no doubt that such terms are "degrading," and so forth. But there is, equally, no doubt of the capacity of reversal and subversion that lies in those terms when they are appropriated by black people and shoved at or sold to white people.
In the marketing of rap to white folks, we see something very like the erotics of interracial sex that I have described in bits in the earlier chapters. And let me make clear my own positioning with regard to that erotics, as I did briefly with regard to Malcolm X. I identify with figures such as Ice T or Snoop: they're my "ego ideal." These guys are my heroes. Of course, in yearning to be them I am yearning to be what I am not, or yearning to be what has been excluded from my self; I am yearning to become my other. And yet, somewhere at the point where Ice T is on the lecture circuit and I'm at the rap show, our lives are actually running together in certain ways precisely out the strength of our mutual exclusions and the concomitant desires. I not only want what I'm not supposed to want (black women), I want to be what I'm not supposed to be (a black man). Now this is not to say that if I actually woke up tomorrow in a black body I could remain happy about that for very long; I'd then have to deal with all the shit that goes along with that position. And yet when I'm watching a rap video, I'm identifying more intensely with the star than when I'm watching a Woody Allen or Clint Eastwood movie (to take two poles of white masculinity). This erotics of identification is of course intensified precisely by its transgressiveness, and by the fact that the black man is, for us white guys, very close to a pure sign of transgression. I yearn to be a pure body, a pure violence; but what I yearn for most of all is to use that status strategically, intelligently in an attack on white culture, the way Ice T does. This book (you may have noticed) is just such an attack on Western culture, but I would like it if this attack took the form of a rebellion against those who oppressed me, and hence of a pride in myself and my culture, rather than the form of self-loathing.
In rap music, by a magical reversal, the instrument of oppression, the stereotype, becomes in the hands of those against whom it used an instrument of resistance. My criticism of white culture is not the same as Ice T's; it would not be the same criticism even if we used the same words. The words are not the same when different voices speak them to do different things. Critics who read rap as a manifestation of self-hatred are supposing that the words and images must mean what they would mean if they proceeded from white mouths, under the auspices of white authority. But the shift in voice and authority fundamentally changes the speech act. It is not too much to say that rap, by a sort of alchemy, converts oppression itself into resistance. Like a martial art, it turns the attacker's energy against him and threatens him with his own violence.
This is appropriate to the particular mode of oppression in which we white folks are now engaged. For, as I have argued, we have become invisible as oppressors; we have learned not to say the wrong words. Our oppression has been continually subtilized until it is maddeningly elusive; as the oppressed turn their thoughts to resistance, they find it difficult to finger any particular individual as directly responsible. (There are, of course, exceptions to this, such as the LAPD.) Racism has been subtilized to the point that no persons seem responsible for it; it seems to be a matter of fudged vocabularies and implicit standards, a sort of linguistic log-jam of domination assignable to no body's act or control. But rap has invented a manner of resistance that employs the submerged energy of oppression that still flows palpably in the direction of African-Americans; rap hijacks the language of oppression itself and both attacks and uses the constructions of its imaginary locations. Tupac Shakur said "I'm not a gangster; I'm a thug." He had "Thug Life" tattooed on his stomach. Then the oppressor feels threatened even if he is not aware that he is an oppressor.
The stereotype is, in the first place and as we have seen, a mode of ejection: It is an attempt to insulate the culture from aspects of its own humanity that it perceives as threatening or bizarre. The stereotype in this sense is conceptual segregation. It functions the same way in individuals: Bigotry is an attempt to eject from oneself aspects of oneself one finds intolerable. For such reasons, bigotry has been at its most explicit in segments of white culture that are in fact closest to black culture: in poor southern whites, for example. Here the conceptual exclusion of the other is at its most tenuous, and so extreme methods of insulation must be developed. With regard to rap, this ejection has been quite explicit and quite extreme; rap is continually censored. Many artists make one version of their songs for CD and another for radio and television: Words such as `nigger', `bitch,' and `ho' are omitted, bleeped, or replaced. This has its ironies, since Queen Latifah cannot say, on the radio, that you shouldn't call women bitches. This is the problem of equality of language re-appearing: Even the oppressed cannot use the words to say, don't call me that. It is as though words had meanings outside purposes for which and contexts in which they are spoken. This is an important strategy for declaiming responsibility, and for repressing speech mechanically. The fact that you can't say "nigger" in polite white society does squat to combat racism; it intensifies racism because it renders it invisible. (Unbelievably, during the O.J. Simpson trial, "nigger" was referred to by the white-dominated press as "the 'N' word. People, please: let's get real.) But it is supposed to follow from that prohibition that black folks shouldn't say "nigger" either.
Tupac, who before his death in the second hail of bullets directed at his body had been consistently censored, as well as legally hounded (perhaps for good reasons), samples Dan Quayle on "Pac's Theme." Quayle says, over and over: "It has no place in society," a perfect call to cultural ejection. Tupac's equally perfect reply: "I'm a product of this society." Ice T, who was forced to remove the song "Cop Killer" from one of his CDs when prosecutors in a murder trial claimed (wrongly) that the song had motivated a young Texas man to kill a policeman, writes that "I realized a long time ago that censorship is as American a tradition as apple pie." And he adds:
We made the album Rhyme Pays, and then Warner Brothers came to me at the label and said they wanted to put a sticker on the record. I asked why. They explained it was to inform the public some material on the album might offend listeners.
I said, "Fine, that's cool." Then they explained to me the organization behind the stickering was called the Parent's Music Resource Center--the PMRC. I thought, "What a nice organization, what a nice name." Little did I know that it was founded and headed by this crazed bitch named Tipper Gore, who made it her job to put down nearly every artist in the music industry for saying what's on their minds. Gore and the PMRC are wholeheartedly against information exchange. Tipper Gore is the only woman I ever directly called a bitch on any of my records, and I meant that in the most negative sense of the word. (Ice Opinion, 98)
The modes of ejection and marginalization that white culture practices against black culture could not be clearer than they in the case of rap. The operations of the PMRC echo the censorship of Quuen Latifah's feminist anthem. Since white people don't need the word 'nigger' anymore to keep the machinery of racism humming, it now becomes forbidden for anyone to say the word, even those to whom the use of the word is essential in describing the history of their oppression. "Nigger" reminds white people too uncomfortably of their very recent past, and suggests (unthinkably!) that the situation is not so very different now just because the word is out of style.
White identity could not be more perfectly visible than in these cases of ejection and marginalization. As Tipper defends our children, she does so in the blandest, most boring way; she appears in her pure whiteness. She becomes a pale spokeslady for pale "family values," the neutral ethical centerpoint on which we are all supposed to be agreed. She even claims a kind of nice appreciation for sixties black music, nice party dance music: We normal matrons aren't racist. We like black music, as long as it stays apolitical and doesn't offend us and corrupt our children. Whereas the people she attacks are relentlessly particularized, she, in her matronly outfit, is relentlessly generalized into a defender of "our" values, "our" children, "our" culture from the bizarre forces of obscenity, transgression, violation. She is protecting us from those who say the wrong words and thus compromise our culture as a white culture. And that white culture, in the person of Tipper Gore, can consume and enjoy black cultural production as long as it stays in its place.
What must be rejected or expunged are, to repeat, the parts of oneself one finds intolerable (above all, violence and desire, the violence of desire, the desire for violence). The content of the stereotype, thus, is per se what threatens the self-image of the bigot and, more widely, what threatens the image that white culture makes of itself. So the stereotype can be utilized as an absolutely precise weapon against the dominant culture: What we've tried to make of you is precisely what compromises us most deeply. The oversexed and overdrugged black gangster is the perfect "shadow" self of white culture, its absolutely intolerable negative image. Thus, the stereotype is invested with a preternatural power to threaten white culture and white personality; it can be used as a weapon.
An ascetic is constantly threatened with the re-eruption of his desires into his consciousness, and the subsequent threat of their enactment in his life. That is why the logical conclusion of asceticism is suicide: Death expunges desire once for all. "The philosopher studies to die," says Socrates. White culture, understood as that which ejects its body--its violence, its sex, its addiction, the rhythm of its pulse--into the other, into the African-American, is continually threatened by the re-eruption of what has been ejected, which also constitutes its deepest desire. Rap peddles these desires to white culture as commodity, but that in itself constitutes an act of resistance; it is an artful destruction of white culture that is also the self-destruction of white culture.
We are now confronted with the other in ourselves; our children purchase it and desire it (that is, desire to desire) even as "concerned parents" such as Tipper Gore try to reinstitute the construction of ascetic culture and its slumming containments of the enjoyments of the body, cleaned up and made decent. We want to lose ourselves in desire; this loss is our death, but, more profoundly, the extrusion of the other is itself an act of suicide. What could the ejection of the body possibly signal except death, except the demented turning toward death of a body in pain? Thus, as I have said, white culture is a culture of death in a certain sense, though it views itself as a culture of immortality, of life purged of particularity, of life liberated from the material. Is it any wonder that this extrusion comes to be the site of desire, that in turning back toward life in its chaotic particularity we are pulled obsessively to what our constructions of ourselves as already dead sought to shunt away? Thus, the site of extrusion is the site of cathexis; it is where our desire is made and its objects determined; our desire to desire, to allow ourselves to desire, can only turn toward life by turning toward the other, and hence toward our own death as pure white selves. The historical irony is that the figure of the black violent thug threatens white people and white culture as the result of our own conceptual elaborations and the oppressions we have used them to impose. Our fear of the figure that Tupac Shakur explicitly invoked is the product in part of our shaping of that figure and applying it to people who look like Tupac. It is a position we manufactured, a composite of our ejections and oppressions, and it is beginning to speak in its own voice, and use the very power we have ascribed to it.
The amazingly shrill white response to rap is a desperate clinging to life lived in ascetic terms, but of course that desperate clinging is itself desire: desire turned against desire, the desire not to desire, and hence itself an inscription of suicide. That is why rap is invested with a preternatural power as art, as culture, as cultural critique, as the confirmation of stereotype. In it, we really do watch the threat of violence to ourselves as white people. But what we do not understand is that this violence is our own violence, returning to us from the ghetto into which we sought to confine it. Our lack of self-knowledge makes this threat incredibly intense, gives it the air of something surreal; in making ourselves what we are, we have made this violence, returned upon us, incomprehensible to ourselves. And since our self-construction is precisely a comprehension, we are threatened at our core by a violence we cannot understand or contain. It is for precisely that reason that rap is censored. Bizarrely, for example, MTV blanks out all guns from rap videos, and bleeps out words that refer to guns. But of course guns are ubiquitous on television in general; the policy applies only to black popular music. Violence and its signifiers are permissible in the "right" hands, and those hands belong to Sylvester Stallone, not to Doctor Dre.
Ice Cube's "What Can I Do?" turns the stereotype around on a dime. Let me say that there are snatches of this rap that are indistinct or which I do not understand. In fact, that is itself a feature of rap that gets used strategically; rap is designed to be partially incomprehensible to crackers like me. It makes me feel my exclusion, and hence intensifies my discomfort. Thus, it helps create an epistemic community among those who do understand it. It is a zone of concealment in which cultural reconstruction becomes possible. (We have seen the making of such zones since the slave narratives.) At any rate, I omit bits and in other spots my transcription is tentative. The song starts with a narrator out of PBS saying this:
In any country, prison is where society sends its failures. But in this country society itself is failing.
Cube then proceeds:
How ya like me now, I'm in the mix.
It's 1986 and I got the fix with a chicken and a quota
Got the bakin soda.
Let the water boil [to make crack]
Workers are loyal.
Dropped out the twelfth cause my wealth is shorter
Than a midget on his knees.
Now I sling peas and fess (?) my hood with crack
Cause I'm a mack
Takes a nation of millions to hold me back. [quote from Public Enemy]
Too big for my britches,
Now I got bitches
I'm hittin switches, niggers want my riches. . . .
89's the number, another summer.
Police ain't gettin no dumber.
Street's dried up, used to think it would last
But being a kingpin is a thing of the past.
Tried to harass me for sellin a boulder.
Now I got my ass in Minnesota.
Got my own crew, it's all brand new.
Damn what can I do today?
What the fuck can I do today?
Already done stacked me half a meal ticket.
Bought a house next to Prince so now I can kick it. . . .
Waving to my friends, rolling in my Benz,
Going to see the Twins play at the Dome.
Police are tapping my mobile phone.
I'm almost home
Gettin excited, indicted.
Spent the year tryin to fight it.
Lawyer got paid. Plea: no contest.
And everything I own got repossessed.
I'm happy cause I only got 36 months.
Never picked up a book.
But my arms are 16 inches, niggers look.
Can't wait for 92 so I can get with my crew
And see what can I do today.
Fucked up in the pen, now it's 94. . .
Back in LA and I'm chillin in the door (?)
Everybody know I gotta start from scratch.
So where the work at, and niggers smirk at. . . .
Even though I got muscle
That ain't my hustle
Takin niggers' shit in a tussle.
No skills to pay the bills.
Talkin about education to battle inflation.
No college degree, just a dumb-ass G.
Why me?
I got a baby on the way, damn it's a mess.
"Have you ever been convicted of a felony?" Yes.
Took some advice from my Uncle Fester
All dressed up in polyester.
Welcome to McDonald's may I please help you?
Shit, what can I do?
The white man's broke every law known to man to establish America. But he'll put you in the state penitentiary, he'll put in the federal penitentiary, for breaking these same laws. Now we're gonna look and see if this motherfucker's guilty for the laws he'll put you in jail for. Drug using, drug selling, armed robbery, strong arm robbery, grand larceny, rape, racketeering, conspiracy to commit murder, extortion, aggravated assault, mayhem, sodomy of a black man, trespassing, embezzlement, perjury, kidnapping, smuggling, grand theft, brandishing a firearm, carrying a concealed weapon, breaking and entering, and pre-meditated, cold-blooded murder.
Guilty on every charge.
This amazing work is typical of the African-American tradition in many ways. First, it makes philosophy out of personal experience. Despite its realism, however, this can hardly be straight autobiography, since during the years in question, Cube wasn't doing time, but rather making great records. Second, in the tradition of Douglass, the charge is hypocrisy, the cure truth.
The meaning runs deeper, however. First, note that the person whose story Cube tells in his own voice is a stereotype, though the picture may be precisely true of someone. The rich black drug dealer with his bitches and mobile phone could be straight out of a police profile. In prison, he opts for bodybuilding over books, a choice with economic consequences that raises the specter of a black man with sixteen inch arms and an axe to grind. But the profound move is this: White folks have tried to eject their criminality into the "black underclass"; black disrespect for order is supposed to be mirrored by our effortless respect for it. Again, we are confronted with the content of whiteness, now rendered contingent. White self-constructions congratulate themselves on abiding by an order that white culture has made. Law, whether conceptual, scientific, or governmental, is at the center of our self-constructions; we are the people who order ourselves and one another, who comprehend and by comprehension command bodies. The making of that order, the one we follow and you proverbially break, has also been the history of oppression, of the breaking of bodies and the subjugation of peoples. But here Cube shows that this transcendental condition of white mythology is purely imaginary, is merely a mythology. The fact that we have imaginatively excluded criminality, transgression from ourselves allows us (in a point that ought to be familiar by now) to ignore the most obvious facts about ourselves. It allows us, in fact, to practice criminality on a huge, generalized, world-wide scale while seeming to ourselves to be law-abiding citizens. As KRS-One puts in "Sound of Da Police": "Your laws are minimal/ Cause you won't even think about looking at the real criminal." This is a particularly sharp formulation because it makes the matter turn on visibility: What we seek to make visible in black folks by an amazingly elaborate and publicly conducted process of enforcement is precisely what we seek to make invisible in ourselves; to see the real criminal, we'd have to look in the mirror. In fact, Cube's conviction of "the white man" is exactly right, because though relatively few of us are criminals as defined by the legal system, we all together constitute a criminal capable of robbing the world and practicing modes of exclusion that verge on annihilation.
Patricia Williams, in The Alchemy of Race and Rights, makes precisely the same point. Discussing a case she remembers from her youth, Williams writes:
A black man working for some civil rights cause was killed by a white man for racially motivated reasons; the man was stabbed thirty-nine times, which prompted a radio commentator to observe that the point was not just murder but something beyond. I wondered what sort of thing would not die with the body but lived on in the mind of the murderer. Perhaps, as psychologists have argued, what the murderer was trying to kill was a part of his own mind's image, a part of himself and not the real other. After all, generally, statistically, and corporeally, blacks as a group are poor, powerless, and a minority. It is in the minds of whites that blacks become large, threatening, powerful, ubiquitous, and supernatural.(12)
Thus, the violence that the white murderer does to the black victim is, imaginatively, the murderer's violence toward himself; the violence with which the black gangsta threatens white culture takes on a supernatural significance as a return of the excluded portions of white culture. Black bodies are not by nature supernaturally powerful or magical; we invest them with that potential to threaten us by using their bodies in our semiotics of self-construction, and then hate and fear them in proportion to our constructions. Think for a moment about why black Tupac scared white people more than black Bob Marley. The racial constructions of American selfhood are not generalizable, and Jamaican culture and persons have not been the locus of white American ejection and oppression in the same way that American blacks have. We do not shiver with supernatural fear at Marley's assertions of black centrality and identity, or even at his descriptions of burning and looting.
A couple of pages later, Williams continues like this, with regard to Bernhard Goetz's shooting of four black teenagers in the New York subway:
What struck me, further, was that the general white population seems, in the process of devaluing its image of black people, to have blinded itself to the horrors inflicted by white people. One of the clearest examples of this socialized blindness is the degree to which Goetz's victims were relentlessly bestialized by the public and by the media in New York: images of the urban jungle, with young black men filling the role of "wild animals," were favorite journalistic constructions; young white urban professionals were mythologized, usually wrapped in the linguistic apparel of lambs or sheep, as the tender, toothsome prey. . . . Locked into such a reification, the meaning of any act by the sheep against the wolves can never be seen as violent in its own right. . . . Thus, when prosecutor Gregory Waples cast Goetz as a "hunter" in his final summation, juror Michael Axelrod said that Waples "was insulting my intelligence. There was nothing to justify that sort of summation. Goetz wasn't a hunter." (74-75)
Thus, the violence done by white people is rendered utterly invisible to white people; in the bizarre imaginary that dominated the Goetz trial, it was very hard to remember who did the shooting. When it was necessary to address the fact that Goetz did shoot, the attempt was made to cast him as the defender of the sheep. In contemporary American culture, violence by white people against black people is rendered invisible, while violence by black people against white people is conceived to be continual and ubiquitous. If white violence against blacks is so obvious that it must be noticed in some way, it is legitimized by the invocation of the specter of massive, threatening, chaotic black violence, a specter that arises from our ejections and is then naturalized by us as if violence were an essential feature of blackness rather than a projection on our part and, relatedly, a result of our own violence. This erases not only the contemporary situation of massive dehumanization, exploitation, and cultural destruction, but also the history of appropriation and assault that marks white treatment of black bodies in America. Williams writes: "Whites must take into account how much this history has projected onto blacks all criminality and all of society's ills. It has become the means for keeping white criminality invisible" (61).
The moral talk of white America focuses on personal responsibility. Whenever the criminality of the "black underclass" is discussed in white America there are two modes of explanation: first, absolving individual members of the underclass of responsibility because of their membership in that class, or second, insisting on their personal responsibility, and perhaps blaming those who would absolve them for the very criminality in question. But in a case where the stereotype demands particularization and violence, the question of responsibility arises all too easily for the "black underclass." Both responses seem unable to conceptualize responsibility except by either excusing or indicting the black person: whether there's responsibility or not, it seems, it's you that have it or lack it. In the case of white collective criminality, the discourse of responsibility has no place. This is a conceptual effort to imaginatively free the criminal exercise of power into a realm where it is nobody's doing at all. Thus, our ethics has obvious applications to the excluded, but it breaks down completely when it comes to ourselves. An ethics of personal responsibility (typical of capitalism, for example), one might say, is designed to focus on certain sorts of criminal acts with vicious intensity, while it is completely incapable of detecting others, and those of the grandest scale. And the fact that "our" ethics detects "their" acts and leaves us blind to our own is hardly an odd coincidence.
To treat persons as irredeemably particular, passionate, violent, instinctive, is to make them over into persons who harbor within themselves the constant potential for criminality by the standards of the ethics of stereotype. Thus the black population of the United States is always a threat, a reservoir of transgression, a never-drained capacity for destruction. We practice exclusion while preaching inclusion, practice annihilation while preaching uplift. But we have a tremendous appetite for that which we have excluded or attempted to destroy. For one thing, what is excluded has the potential, as "What Can I Do?" demonstrates, to show us to ourselves. That is dangerous, but it can be desirable, especially once our self-image as reasonable white folks has begun to disintegrate. Thus we buy back the excluded zones of ourselves (our criminality, for instance) as commodity. This purchase is dangerous to white culture in certain ways, but the commodity is containable, saleable, ignoreable in time of crisis.
Nevertheless, it is the only possible way, in the current situation, that we could receive ourselves. When Khalid Mohammed, the former spokesman for Nation of Islam, speaks of the crimes of the white man, he can be dismissed as a demagogue, or simply fail to find an audience among whites. (Ice Cube, in fact, samples one of Khalid's speeches on Lethal Injection.) But rap, as I could pause to argue but won't, is art: art often of very high quality, art that immediately rivets the attention. (Hurston's aesthetics can teach us how and why it does this.) Rap transmutes violence into art, transmutes stereotype into art, transmutes degradation into art. This is in itself an amazing accomplishment, and typical of African-American culture, as we have seen in the discussion of Hurston. It also transmutes solutions to violence into art, the rejection of stereotypes into art, and uplift into art. (Latifah: "Who you callin a bitch?") Now perhaps Khalid is also an artist in his own way, but rap is an art of almost perfect accessibility; it sets its themes to beats and rivets you with them. In some ways, this insulates white folks from its message even as they listen; it's possible to dig the beats and ignore the words, or even enjoy the words and forget them when it becomes too dangerous to listen. But it leaves the words as present in white consciousness as a sort of dystopian trace of the aesthetic experience, leaves the words of the excluded inhabiting the culture as a whole in virtue of market penetration, with explosive capacities.
Hear this by Souljah, who enjoyed a briefly huge celebrity when she suggested (more or less facetiously, I imagine) that black people take a day off from killing each other and kill white folks instead. This became a campaign issue for Bill Clinton in the 1992 election. But on "360 Degrees of Power" she is up to something else:
Being both feminine and strong represents no conflict.
African women have always been powerful, decisive and strong.
And, in a state of war, we must be even stronger!
I'm coming up from the bottom and I'm damn sure rising.
You tried to stop me so I guess I'm surprising.
I'll never keep quiet, so don't even try it.
Sit in the back row, I won't buy it.
Necessary but secondary, that's your insecurity.
You fear my essence, my soul, my mind, and Black man you fear
my purity.
My brain is blazing strong and uprising.
My mind is thinking faster than my eyes be blinking.
Check out this science of me, my chemistry.
Aesthetic, altruistic, thoughts flow endlessly.
Flowing and growing, showing and proving.
Pulled by gravity but I keep moving with
360 degrees, 360 degrees, 360 degrees.
Ancestors blessed me with the power of spirits.
Dominate my thoughts, I'm not tryin'a hear it.
I'm stronger than that, too bold deep and black.
On a feminine curve with nerve.
You thought I was a noun but no way I'm a verb
An action word.
A secret for centuries but now the cat's out the bag.
Strong black woman you should be glad.
You have 360 degrees of power girl, you bad!
No adjective can describe my objective.
Original cradle rocker, positive conquers negative.
You started me braggin cause you played with my esteem.
Now you're mad cause I'm rising like steam.
Reduce me to a curve, a swivel, or a twist.
Cause my hips bring you pleasure and eternal bliss.
Don't mean to intimidate, relax while I insulate
Your children and your entire nation.
No buck wilding, no misbehaving.
Powerful but won't misuse it, take advantage or abuse it.
Keep in mind before you go, it's what you need if you're
gonna grow.
This lyric turns stereotypes around with incredible power and precision. First of all, it glories in the "strong black woman" of popular belief, and it glories in womanhood in general: in the image of the circle and the curve, both associated with femaleness (and particularly black femaleness). And the primary image is of fertility, of black women as a source out of which people and cultural transformation can arise ("I'm a verb, an action word": recall Hurston's aesthetics). There is art in the beat, and in the poetry. But there is, always present within that art, a fertility, a possibility for ramification into the culture as a whole. And Souljah does address the culture as a whole. On the same disk, Souljah says: "We have the power to tell the truth, to say whatever is necessary, to do what needs to be done, whatever it is and no matter who it may hurt. Well if the truth hurts you'll be in pain. And if the truth drives you crazy, then you'll die insane."
Ice T, star of disk, book, screen, and lecture circuit, has had particular success in transforming his life into art. (He says of the lecturing: "I'm going to Harvard or someplace to teach these people how to be real. Isn't that stupid?" Well, no. The people at Harvard need to be taught how to be real very badly.) Here is "Straight Up Nigga," which plumbs, like the Souljah rap, all of the themes I have been discussing.
Yo check this out. A lot of people be gettin mad cause I use the word nigger, know what I'm sayin? . . . They say I'm a black man. I tell them I'm a nigger; they don't understand that. I'm gonna say what I wanna say. I call myself what I want to call myself. Know what I'm sayin? They need to stay off my dick, you know?
Damn right I'm a nigger and I don't care what you are
Cause I'm a capital N I-G-G-E-R.
Black people get mad cause they don't see
That they're looked upon as nigger just like me.
I'm a nigger, not a colored man or a black
Or a Negro or an Afro-American, I'm all that.
Yes I was born in America, true.
Does South Central look like America to you?
I'm a nigger, a stand-up nigger from a hard school.
Whatever you are I don't care; that's you, fool.
I'm loud and proud, well-endowed with a big beef.
Out on the corner I hang out like a horse thief.
So you can call me dumb or crazy,
Ignorant, inferior, stupid, or lazy,
Silly and foolish but I'm bad and I'm bigger.
But most of all I'm a straight-up nigger.
I'm a nigger in America that much I flaunt,
Cause when I see what I like I take what I want.
I'm not the only one that's why I'm not bitter,
Cause everybody is nigger to a nigger.
America was stolen from the Indian, show and prove.
What was that? A straight up nigger move. . . .
What's a nigger supposed to do?
Wait around for a handout from a nigger like you?
That's why a low-down nigger gets hyped.
But I'm not a nigger of that type.
I'm a steak and lobster-eating billionaire.
Meat and cash money-makin, movin, shakin,
Jet-glidin, limousine ridin
Writin hits, filthy rich, straight-up nigger.
Now I'll write this song but the radio won't play it.
But I got freedom of speech so I'm a say it.
She wanna be les he wanna be gay,
Well that's your business; I'm straight so nigger have it your way.
Those who hate me, I got something for ya.
I'm a nigger with cash, a nigger with a lawyer.
No watermelon, chitlin-eatin nigger down south,
But a nigger that'll slap the taste from your mouth.
A contemplatin, best-champagne drinkin,
Ten-inch-givin, extra large livin,
Mercedes Benz drivin, thrivin, survivin,
All the way live and kickin, high-fivin,
Strokin, rappin, happenin, deal doin,
Fly in from Cali to chill with the crewin,
Grindin, groovin, fly-girl grabbin,
Horny, gun-shootin, long-hair-havin
Nigger, straight up nigger.
Nigger, that's right fool look at me,
The kind of nigger you'd like to hang from a tree.
But all you KKK-type gravediggers
Ease back fool, cause I'm a trigger nigger. . .
Shipped us over here in locks and chains
Put us up, twisted up the niggers' brains.
Now you keep me in a constant sweat.
But I'm a nigger that you'll never forget.
A black, bad, ironclad, always-mad
Fly nigger takin off from a helipad.
Rolex stylin, buck wildin, cash pilin,
Sportin chain links and medallions,
Intellectual, high-tech,
Cashin seven-figure checks and still breakin necks.
The ultimate male supreme, white woman's dream,
Big dick straight up nigger.
As I have said, to seek to evade the stereotype may often be to intensify double-consciousness by producing a "white" surface. Ice T says: "If some square Tom politician is not a nigger, then I am a nigger, you understand? I am not what you want me to be" (Ice Opinion, 105). For this reason, the upwelling of black culture into the mass media and swirl of commodity exchange takes the form of a reinforcement of stereotype. In fact, and typically, though with particular gusto and sheer verbal agility, Ice T goes beyond confirming stereotypes to revelling in them and deploying them with perfect strategy.
This song intensifies the stereotype and makes it even more threatening than it is on its own. The black guy hanging on the corner like a horse thief, armed and every white woman's dream, is bad enough. But when that black guy has a lawyer and is cashing seven-figure checks--in short when he has the resources to burst out of the ghetto and into your face--that's a threat. This figure of the rapper as simultaneously hoodlum, poet, and successful entrepreneur is unprecedented in American history and is deeply subversive. This black man is, first, operating within white America's capitalist structures with complete success, in part by selling his product to white consumers. He's rich, and it's obvious that he's smart, and so forth. But he's also got ten inches for the bitches; he's also hooked into the gang structure in LA; he's also potentially violent. And it must be pointed out that he's supremely conscious of what he's doing: He's utterly at play in the racial signifier. He plays, but he's serious as well, and he knows exactly what he's doing as he lobs those words and images. Even as he insists that he can call himself whatever he wants, that he won't be named by white culture or even by black culture, he brings forward the history of the white man as nigger.
1. For a treatment of the various direct and indirect connections of rap to Malcolm X, see Michael Eric Dyson, Making Malcolm: The Myth and Meaning of Malcolm X (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), chapter 3.
2. Michele Wallace, "Afterword: 'Why Are There No Great Black Artists?': The Problem of Visuality in African-American Culture," in Black Popular Culture, a project by Michele Wallace, edited by Gina Dent (Seattle: Bay Press, 1992), p. 345.
3. Houston Baker, Black Studies, Rap, and the Academy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), p. 89. This book is, for my money, the best, and it is certainly the most readable, "academic" discussion of rap.
4. 4 Ice T as told to Heidi Siegmund, The Ice Opinion: Who Gives a Fuck? (New York: St. Martin's, 1994), p. 94.
5. 5 Quoted in Maya Angelou's foreword to Zora Neale Hurston's Dust Tracks on a Road, pp. vii-viii.
6. Kobena Mercer, Welcome to the Jungle, p. 109.
7. To Tell a Free Story, p. 9.
8. 8 Sister Souljah, No Disrespect (New York: Random House, 1994), p. 350.
9. 9 Sherley Anne Williams, "Two Words on Music: Black Community," in Black Popular Culture, ed. Gina Dent (Seattle: Dia/Bay Press, 1992), pp. 167-68.
10. 10 Claude Brown, Manchild in the Promised Land (New York: Macmillan, 1965), p. 109.
11. 11 Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Colored People (New York: Knopf, 1994), pp. xiii-xiv.
12. 12 Patricia Williams, The Alchemy of Race and Rights: Diary of a Law Professor, p. 72.
