hip hop illiterate

In Memoriam

2011-10-17T22:39:00.000-04:00

I cannot believe it has been 10 years since my older brother, Solomon Wesley Belton, passed away in a car accident. It seems I've commemorated his death each year with a reading of this poem I wrote many years ago, a few weeks following his untimely death. Since I do not plan on doing any spontaneous readings (although I'm tempted to sit-in on the Occupy Wall Street protests when I'm back in New York in a few days...so perhaps I will share it then). I miss you big bro. And wish that you were still here to share in all the wonders of life with me.

In Memory of Solomon Wesley

Certain memories wait for their view

shifting, cross glass-encumbered street:

on bench beside bus stop, asleep on southbound 9, a train

crossing midwest, en route to san francisco

hearing click-click, click of roller coaster as it ascends

on ferris-wheel, in parking lot, summertime basement party

hot-dog stand, buying tickets, the alley behind st theresa’s

the familiar tree house

Certain memories wait

beyond the sublet I rent to keep myself from spacing:

scattering out beyond sulphuric spheres that envelop god’s earth

beyond effect & artifice, beyond the park where children are trained

to dangle, beyond the songs sang at grandmother’s burial, & still further

scattering, beyond fenestra’s dressing bedroom, beyond hudson, jersey-skyline

or in descent, beneath gasoline puddle reflecting sun’s light, beneath warm blankets

darkness, crouched, beneath wandering twilight:

I see at night / think better in the pitch / and feel better

About you leaving in my dreams / where we are still

Chasing the ice cream truck / for blocks at a time

To obtain enough penny-candy / to last us until morning

Enough tootsie rolls & blow pops

Enough slushes & ice cream

Sandwiches & sodas & poe-ta-doe chips

Enough oatmeal pies & jellybeans

Certain memories wait for their view

spastic, of me and you strutting through old neighborhoods

telling what it was to hold, hush, brush & make delight for first time, or fifth

after waiting, pushing for it, beneath stairs, passenger seat pushed back, all-night

to a woman, a man, anyone, everyone, we met our first weeks at college

Certain memories are left waiting for a better view of now:

behind women adorned

knotted scarves & colored hats

behind leaves with faces

dimpled flesh beneath the rain

beneath strings of honk & horn & scream

inquiring after accident ahead

beneath muddled-crumplings

soon mush against the pavement

behind wheel & steel & windshield

until you

flew from the scene.

It's Been A Long Time...

2011-08-11T14:47:00.000-04:00

....I shouldn't have left you / without a dope...well, you know how it goes. It's been ages since I've laid any heavy thoughts and theories down on this blog site and, in the paraphrased words of my favorite emcee Nas, "I had time off / was bored with this / I could've written a dissertation / just by close-reading different parts of (Toni) Morrison." Still, Guess Who's Bizack to the blogosphere with a new found fire for entering the public discourse. So much has happened in the interim: my first trip abroad (and to China of all places, check out the blog in the future for more to come about the trip), preparing for my dissertation exams, singing in my friend's wedding, expanding my culinary training, and just trying to survive the rat trap that is graduate school.

Still many apologies for the long delays. With the revamped blog page and renewed interest, I promise to be bringing you dope words to spark the thoughts of your hip hop literacy, or ill-literacy as it were. I'll keep this post relatively short, and add that folks should stay on the look-out for more regular entries as of August 15th 2011. I hope to be entering a weekly column with more of my musings on the intersections between black literature/scholarship and hip hop culture. Please keep your comments coming and enjoy this little diddy:

Could it be I stayed away too long? / Did I leave your mind when I was gone? / It's not my thing trying to get back / But this time let me tell you where I'm at / You don't have to worry cause I'm coming /Back to where I should have always stayed...I wanna be where you are, oh oh / Anywhere you are, oh oh / I wanna be where you are, oh oh / Everywhere you are, oh oh...Please, don't close the door to our future / There's so many things we haven't tried / I could love you better than I used to / And give you all the love I have inside...

Another Look at the "Victimage" of Antoine and Kelly Dodson

2010-08-20T14:21:00.001-04:00

I will admit, when the youtube clips of Antoine Dodson and his sister (who in August of 2010 was the victim of an attempted rape incident in her apartment home in a public housing project in Huntsville, Alabama) were first brought to my attention, I was already on my guard. My previous experience with late night local media news broadcasts involving African Americans and other American ethnic minorities has all too often been shaded by the frequent presentation of individuals who might be said to register with a long history of carefully crafted racial stereotypes. Behind the guise of news reporting, which in the case of ethnic urban areas is almost always restricted to reporting on strange or sensational crimes, I was aware that local media outlets too often frame narratives that sensationalize black lives and constrict the public's perception of the great diversity of their experiences.
So as I clicked to open an e-mail message that had been sent with the simple subject heading of "Fw: you-tube video" and reading my partner's, who is herself a member of an American ethnic minority group, innocuous message: "for laughs! :-D," (in conjunction with her earlier, though limited, telephone description of the video as that of a news report) I prepared myself for what the clip might entail.

What I discovered was the victimization of Antoine and Kelly Dodson, his sister (who as the victim of a horrific attempted rape and assault, through all of the reporting, seems to have been fazed out of the public conversation). The details of the incident are troublesome enough. On the night in question, Ms. Dodson, asleep in her bedroom on the second story of her family's apartment home, was awakened by an assailant's attempted rape. Hearing his sister's screams and cries for help, Antoine Dodson, came to her aid as an assailant was trying, forcibly, to have his way with the young woman. After a brief tussle, the assailant escaped and the police were called in to investigate. There seemed to be nothing left to do but to catch the perpetrator... well, that is, to catch the perpetrator and to report his crime.
What followed was a firestorm of viral coverage in the wake of the local media station's (WAFF) framing of the events of that early morning in Hunstville's public housing project, Lincoln Park, for public consumption. And arising as the "star" (though I would say, the second victim, with Kelly Dodson becoming the absented true victim of the station's broadcast) of the local station's late night news broadcast, was Ms. Dodson's brother, Antoine--a young, angry, black male (or, to appropriate the name of the sensational 1980s rap group, an N.W.A., "Niggah with Attitude")--not unlike others, I'm sure, WAFF has presented in the past for public consumption. In the days and weeks following the original news broadcasting, Antoine's comments have been chopped and screwed, auto-tuned, remixed and remastered, all over the internet. Dodson has become something of an over-night internet celebrity and sensation, but I would argue his 15-minutes of fame have come at a significant cost to the framing and representation of blacks in contemporary news media.

First, it is significant that in WAFF's initial framing of the "official narrative" of the crime, an attempted rape and assault on a young black girl in her Lincoln Park home, Ms. Dodson who had been sleeping in the bed with a young female toddler at the time of the assault (a detail that is overshadowed by the white woman reporter's framing "voice over" at the outset of the original broadcast) becomes a secondary character in representing the crime to the public in favor of her, deservedly upset and angry, brother Antoine. The lead-in male anchor is almost giddy as he relates the details of the attempted rape, details which, one can only imagine, if the race and/or socio-economic class of the victims had been different, the news station might have been more responsible and less sensational in reporting. The lead-in anchor continues by going to great lengths to highlight and build up an anticipation for Antoine's displays of emotion regarding his sister, Kelly's, assault. Displays which, as the white male anchor describes, show his "emotions running high."
Additionally, while watching the video, I took issue at the ways in which Antoine is situated in a tradition of black stereotypical representations by white media and editorial practices. Representations of African Americans throughout this history of the United States have often reflected negatively on the community. Often those responsible for such representations hide behind the supposed objective nature of their presentation and attempt to shift the blame to those individuals they aim to depict. Yet, I would argue, that often the very framing practices and techniques deployed around these ethnic individuals are ones that can be used to reveal the racism and prejudices of those manipulating the representation.
Such framing practices are as old as black expression in America itself. Narratives of
slavery and freedom written in the 18th and 19th centuries, too, included editorial framing techniques that can be seen as reflected in today's media broadcasts. In African American literary scholarship, we refer to some of these methods of framing in terms of the "authenticating documents" and texts in relation to the work of figures like Phillis Wheatley's, whose book of poems, Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral, was historically read as presenting problematic racial stereotypes and stances, and only more recently have come to expose the weight of those framing documents on our interpretation of her text. I would argue that the very same practices are at play in the WAFF editorialized presentation of Antoine Dodson.
All that is to say, it is too easy to make Antoine Dodson solely responsible for his representation through the media's broadcast. As the brother of an attempted rape victim, Antoine has and had every right to be upset and to want to express that frustration. He does not, however, through his juxtaposition with and to the news reporters and police officers on the scene (and, one might argue, even in juxtaposition to his sister, the true victim, Kelly Dodson) deserve to be framed as an overly aggressive, emotional and angry young black man. Yet, such a representation is most clearly the point of the WAFF's sensationalized narrative and comes through in the moments throughout the clip, where Antoine is shown addressing the camera (and ostensibly his sister's assailant, directly), an unconventional style of presentation that can be said to feed the white public's need for infinitely reproducible black stereotypes. The successive moments presented of Dodson's account are more of the same, in terms of Dodson addressing the camera (and viewing audience) directly and in ways that are unfamiliar to the typical evening news broadcast. It's subtle, as these things often are, but if you pay close enough attention you begin to see the ways in which the news broadcasters chose to cast Antoine in a certain light. The cumulative effect of such a presentation should not, however, be left at the feet of Antoine for his deservedly emotional address to his sister's assailant. No, the responsibility for presenting Antoine in such a stereotypical light falls with the WAFF news station and its news staff whose editorial and framing practices, arguably, did not maintain the integrity of responsible reporting in that they chose instead of allowing a victim to speak to sensationalize a victim's speech.

Part II
So here is the WAFF's follow-up broadcast with new interviews with Antoine Dodson:

You'll notice that in the follow-up report, Antoine comes across as much more articulate and expressive than his framed comments in the original report first represent. What I find particularly important though are the moments when they show outtakes from the original interview, as the
white female reporter again utilizes voice over techniques to continue in the framing of the Dodson family story. Notice that Antoine, in those outtakes from the original broadcast presented in the follow-up piece, is more calm and collected and expresses his frustration in a manner that isn't as stereotypical or socially irresponsible as in the first, and also in a manner that seems more appropriate for a late night news broadcast. That is, Antoine is shown responding to prompts from an interviewer's (in this case, presumably, the white female reporter's) questions, not given free reign to rant and rave directly into the camera. Notice the differences in his body language, the volume of his voice, his tone and the nature of his word choice (I know this is difficult given the brevity of these outtakes and the reporter's voiced-over editorial framing).
Notice how, first, directly following the reporter's defense of Antoine Dodson's right to "speak out," the piece cuts to a view of Dodson's responding to an interviewer's questions. As the reporter speaks over Dodson's response, framing the account for the audience, you can make out a reasonably upset young man mouthing, "Yes, we saw his face. We saw his face." As the interview continues, they again show Dodson responding to a question, again expressing frustrations about the perpetrator assault on Kelly Dodson and his "sweeping [his] sister all over her room floor. And," he continues, "I think that's terrible. It's ridiculous. And you're going to get caught." Compare these statements to those originally broadcast, the more shocking and sensationalized, "Well, obviously, we have a rapist in Lincoln Park. He's climbing in your windows, he's snatching your people up, trying to rape them. So ya'll need to hide your kids, hide your wife, and hide your husband, because they raping everybody out here."
Consider that without the context given by the lead-in anchor's brief description of the victim's location, any casual news viewer would see Dodson's statement and not be aware of the "here" to which he is referring. Instead, the public would have the sensational image of a rapist (potentially black) on the loose in the greater Huntsville community.
What I find, in the end, most telling (and disturbing) about the follow-up story are the lengths to which the news station disavows any responsibility or blame for the way in which the Dodson family was originally depicted. The white male lead-in anchor tries to claim that "no one could have anticipated this kind of attention," and yet, the sensational framing and the nature of the editing and airing of Dodson's original comments reveal a very different story. In fact, news stations such as these (that is local news stations and broadcasters) are indeed consistently looking for ratings through sensationalized reporting. It is for this reason, that people criticize the depiction of families like Antoine's and other socially disadvantaged persons through the perpetuation of stereotypes via media interventions through such sensationalized framing practices. Because, in fact, local news broadcasters are often in the business of fear-mongering and playing on social stereotypes. They call it reporting the news, but in truth it's a matter or playing up differences in education (through the juxtaposition and framing of languages; specifically the language of media personalities in relation to those being depicted) and supposed differences in cultural norms. So while almost every night in America news stations run stories depicting crimes perpetuated by and against minority citizens, often in ethnic neighbors, research into what sections of the population are tuning in to these stories would reveal a quite different socio-economic and, often, racial, demographic. Thus, the sensationalized fears, imaginings, and sensibilities of a white, upper-middle class viewing public are consistently brought to bear on (and used to frame) the voices of those socially marginalized and representationally victimized citizens.

While the WAFF news station might not have anticipated fully their success in this endeavor, with regards specifically to the framing of Antoine Dodson's comments, it would be callous for anyone to think they were not seeking this type of sensationalized hype in the first place. Those members of the viewing audience who went through the paces it takes to complain and speak back against the subtly racist media practices at play in both the original and the follow-up broadcast, were not decrying the rights of Antoine and his sister to "tell their story" as the lead-in newscaster tries, slyly, to suggest in the follow-up piece. But instead decry the irresponsible nature through which WAFF went about presenting the story, framing the victims, and editing their voices. And in keeping with their refusal to accept any responsibility or blame for their part in framing the story, the folllow-up broadcast goes to great lengths to depict Dodson as an attention-seeking youth, who the station, supposedly altruistically, helped make famous (via the viral spread of their news broadcast through social media outlets like facebook and youtube). While Dodson is allowed to speak, it is clear from this follow-up newscast that he is not allowed to present his speech in it entirety or, perhaps even, as he sees fit to an outlying audience. That job is reserved for the self-depicted self-righteous and supposed socially responsible white newscasters, who defend Antoine's right to "speak out" as long as it is within the contextualizing and sensationalizing frame they allow.

Emcee Eclectic: Andre 3000 Covers The Beatles

2010-06-10T22:54:00.000-04:00

For any of you hip hop illiterates who are also NBA fans, you might have noticed Nike's new Kobe Bryant Ad featuring the vocal gymnastics and musical production of Andre 3000. Covering The Beatles "Altogether Now," Andre shows that hip hop is always up to the task even when handling classic material by a group as revered as The Beatles. For all you illiterates who are not NBA fans, enjoy the video here and give 3000 some love for yet another studio gem--even if it's only a commercial product.

Getting the Word Out...

2010-06-06T20:53:00.002-04:00

Hello Again Illiterates!

So I spent the weekend at my fifth year college reunion (Class of '05) and had such a wonderful time reconnecting with old friends, colleagues, and familiar faces. I wanted to share with you all the writing of one of those old friends who I discovered has been working as a journalist in New York writing for the Village Voice. Recently, she wrote a wonderful piece that is worth a close reading...great for anyone critically interested in thinking about new domains for feminist intervention and the need for conversations about sexuality and desire to delegitimize the political viability of practices of patriarchy.

Enjoy b-boys and b-girls!

Global Hip Hop Part Deux (Diasporic Hues)

2010-05-26T23:13:00.002-04:00

So part of my thinking about hip hop in its global context involves using the music and lyrics to conceptualize ideas of communal belonging as potentially capable of affiliating along diasporic channels of citizenship. The idea is that culture can be organized and interpolated through hip hop as an expression of counter-hegemonic epistemologies (see some of my earlier musings from previous blogs), and so I wanted to direct you all to the new Nas & Damien Marley album, Distant Relatives (May 2010). Check out the Nas and Damien interview below and keep making global, diasporic, interracial, and international hip hop connections my hip hop illiterates.

The Comic Side to Hip-Hop

2009-07-22T12:19:00.001-04:00

Just thought I would post this quick video of Chris Rock discussing rap music. Obviously, Chris Rock is hilarious, but his commentary is also why I decided that hip-hop needs a more thorough academic analysis. Enjoy!

HARDLY OZ, BUT WE'RE NOT JUST TALKING ABOUT THE BRONX ANYMORE... (Global Hip Hop Part One)

2009-07-02T14:21:00.006-04:00

In the retrospective shadow of the first full decade of the twenty-first century, it seems clear that the culture of hip hop has become a global culture and phenomenon. For most it has become quite easy, and something of a vogue articulation, to declare hip hop suddenly "global," but as renowned black scholar Robin D. G. Kelley affirms, in his 2006 preface to The Vinyl Ain't Final: Hip Hop and the Globalization of Black Popular Culture (2006), from its inception hip hop has been a globalized production. That is, beyond just being the music of those late 1970s' Bronx beboppers and hippopers, those breakers and shakers, urban emcees and diasporic deejays, soul-babies and their disco ladies, those bboys and, well, you get the point, hip hop was also already a global product, as music produced through a convergence between many marginalized cultures, communities, and ethnic practitioners.

As the most technologically innovative, musically excavative, expressively appropriative, music of the postindustrial urban environ, most scholars have located the development of hip hop in the Bronx, New York with incipient turntablist Jamaican deejay, DJ Kool Herc. As a collaborative mixing of Jamaican sound systems and deejay culture, Afro-infused beats and rhythms, techno and disco-infused breaks, hip-hop emerged out of a history of transnational and multicultural connections and connectivities. Yet, the music is no longer the localized product of American youth expression. Hip hop has grown in its reach and its techniques of expression, in its scope and in its influence. An account of just how lucrative (and how influential, by way of its creating and redirecting massive pockets of wealth), the business of hip hop has been around the world can be found in the number of international record sales, global concerts, and global downloads. Influencing the lives of billions around the world, in a global marketplace, the influence of hip hop can no longer even be seen as one-directional. With the recent emergence of producers such as Pharrell, or rappers like Lupe Fiasco (with his Japanese fashion/tech-savy persona, "Japanese sensibilities" as he terms it), it has become harder and harder to discuss hip-hop as moving out from any strict national point of origin.

In my larger work, I am interested in looking at the ways in which hip-hop has expanded its domain. Scholars are just beginning to take notice of much of the creative, intellectual, and philosophical cross-pollination that has been occurring within hip hop over the last thirty-plus years. Reference to figures like Mao-Tse-Tung, Alexander Pushkin, Fidel Castro, Yao Ming, to name but a few, have continued to seep into the singles and LPs of hip-hop artists thousands of miles away--artists who are often separated not only by national shores, but also by the political boundaries of their time.

Of course these references aren't anything new for hip hop fans. For the last quarter-century, hip-hop has pushed beyond national borders and ethnic and racial divisions to develop into what can only be described as an example of a world-culture's most dominant expressive forms. Alongside fashion and film, it seems that no single industry has had as much global say as hip-hop music. As such, it occurs to me that we might want to begin theorizing a "hip hop diaspora." That is, a community of individuals spread out across multiple continents who share a common language, political point of view, practice of expression, history and, perhaps to summarize, culture. Theorizing a diasporic community as centered around hip hop culture calls for an understanding of belong as emergent from an aesthetic that allows for conventionally non-naturalizable modes of connection, linkage, and association between disparate political and cultural, racial, and ethnic communities.

An example of this might be drawn from the connections between the hip hop being produced in the United States and the hip hop being produced in Taiwan currently. Compare the following two videos, one perhaps familiar to the everyday, American hip hop fan, a song entitled "I Can" by Queensbridge-born (New York) Emcee, Nas. The other, a song perhaps a little less familiar to American hip hop audiences called "I Can" (我可以) by Taiwanese rapper 大支 (Dog G). Both show hip hop to be a practice of diaspora or at least as having the potential to be used to form diasporic community. As a set of aesthetic practices, hip hop can serve as a non-spatial site of origin(s), such that each time someone practices its aesthetics, the musical production can act as a figured return to the homeland. Diaspora traditionally has been articulated in terms of forced migrations and racializations, but I would like here to rethink diaspora as a terms that highlights the willful and intentional transnational connections of groups politically dispossessed of certain rights and responsibilities who see themselves as sharing, historically or politically, aspects of common expressive culture. Just some deep thoughts to ponder.

Enjoy the transnational grooves in our sonic interconnectivity and try to imagine the ways in which hip hop's movement across global channels over the next decade will continue to transform the world in which we live.

Keep sending me your feedback, family. And thanks to all my "Zhong Guo Ren" readers...

Signing Off (Zai Jian),

Hip Hop Illiterate

On a Beach with Fidel, Tupac, Biggie, and now, yes, Michael Jackson!

2009-07-01T11:48:00.002-04:00

The morning following Michael Jackson’s death The Washington Post (Online) posted a video of some Washington, D.C. residents reacting to the news of Michael’s death (“Reactions to Michael Jackson Death," Friday June 26th, 2009). The comments of a number of the black men from the community (including barber Joseph Keller, Gregory Looper, Sr. and Akil Wilson) were the Post’s way of providing some local color to their more serious feature-length articles on Jackson’s legacy. Filming in and outside the Edges Barbershop in the U Street Neighborhood of Washington, D.C., the men were asked to reflect on Michael’s passing, often with humorous results.

Scene: Joseph Keller, a black male barber in his mid thirties/early forties stops cutting hair and looks into the camera—a smile across his face, his remarks are directed at once to the white-male interviewer (off-camera), to a regular loitering just opposite the camera-man, and at the most poignant moments directly into the camera itself…

Keller: “I said, I don’t think Michael Jackson is dead.”
Interviewer (interrupting): “Where do you think he is?”
Keller: “Because, the fact that, he done had so many operations—to change his face—who know who we burying, forreal? He could be, you know what I’m saying, got…still got his real face—from his original face—and the guy who dead prolly ain’t even Michael Jackson.”
Interviewer (mockingly): Then where’s the ‘real’ Michael Jackson?”
Keller: “I don’t know. He prolly, um, smoking on Cuban cigars with Tupac and Biggie over in Cuba…”

We all know Cuban cigars are the best (why else would they be banned in the United States?) and if Michael was able, like Tupac and Biggie, to pull off a disappearing act of such ingenuity and scope, then why shouldn’t he celebrate with one of Castro’s cohíbas on a beautiful shore in Cuba? (Quick warning though: Michael, if you’re reading this, keep out of those glittery get-ups, things aren’t in the clear just yet.) The barber’s comments about Jackson's not-real death got me to thinking about what seems a recent trend in our culture—a tendency to relocate black popular figures (especially males, and especially black males who are deemed to have suffered a near-tragic, suspicious and seemingly too early death) to places outside of death in relative isolation and tranquility. This repositioning of tragic black male figures after death can be said to reflect a larger cultural position of “I’ll belief it when I see it” (see ET’s release of the gurney photos) that I find troubling. In this post-Ashton Cusher’s Punk’d world, one would be a fool to belief just anything he hears, sees, reads about, or touches, until it can be proven beyond a shadow of a doubt (those of us in academia call this a postmodern skepticism). Which is probably why after receiving a text from my girlfriend with the news, I replied rather simply, "Nope."

With Tupac passing, for example, there were millions of fans who refused to accept (and many who still deny) the certainty of his death, especially as Tupac had forecast his passing in lyrics and details that seemed too eerily close to the actual circumstances surrounding his homicide. To a lesser degree this relocation beyond death, or trickster’s immortality, has escaped Biggie Smalls if only because there was an actual funeral—a moment that allowed fans to commemorate and cathect—where a casket could be seen and touched for more legitimacy. What arrangements lie in wait for Michael’s remains has yet to be determined, but my feeling is anything short of an open-casket on display for weeks at the Neverland Ranch (with Tom Brokaw poking at the lifeless muscles of an all-too surgically altered face), will result in more speculation regarding the true whereabouts of the King of Pop. As a young man, Akil Wilson (black male in his early 20s), outside of Edges Barbershop put it:

Akil: “I know I’m significantly younger, so I’m thinking to myself like Michael Jackson just seems like the kind of guy, like, he was gon’ live forever.”

The problem for too long, and with too many black men of Michael’s talent, charisma and genius, is that beyond any malformed dreams of immortality, rarely do these men get to live at all. What comedian Chris Rock has often joked about as an unlikely dual pairing of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X with Tupac Shakur and Biggie Smalls (Christopher Wallace) via the formers’s assasignations and the latters’s homicides, may seem a bit more congruous as a list of popular-to-iconic African-American male figures who die all too young when considered in light of Michael Jackson’s recent death. All these men were somewhat cloistered from the rest of us, whether that was due to their own success or their own idiosyncratic natures. And all had lives cut short, or before their primes, and lost to achieving some greater promise and success.

That is, all these men except of course Michael Jackson, who can be said to have reached the height on his powers in the years following the release of his Thriller LP and who was clearly already in decline in the 1990s. Perhaps Michael provides a glimpse of the freakish-grotesqueries that awaited Malcolm, Martin, Tupac and Biggie. As a culture, we like our heroes young and unerring, beyond any shadows or suspicion. Even now the legacy of figures like Dr. King and Malcolm X are being refashioned to reveal a darker, oft-ignored, more flawed human side (See Michael Eric Dyson’s “I May Not Get There with You,” for example) Yet, like Joseph Keller and Akil Wilson, we, as fans, refuse to allow death to render these men obsolete. We seek solace in the idea and possibility that they are still out there, away from the spotlight and controversies, but always out there, waiting to wow-us-all with a return. Perhaps not much is at stake when we challenge their mortality with our imaginative tales of staged-deaths and tricksterism, but I cannot help but consider what questions are raised, worries exaggerated and conditions created when we refuse to let them go peacefully into that good night. As Akil continued:

Akil: “Some people are better as thoughts than as actual physical manifestations. Like the physical Michael Jackson that existed in the last, you know, three years that wasn’t, that wasn’t Mike! It just wasn’t. Nobody, none of our peers, you know, we grew up with 80s Mike…you know, jheri-curls, still kind of black Mike. And then, my parents, you know, know Afro-Mike. Like, this Mike that existed from the 90s on, psst…he just wasn’t a real person. You know, he was kinda like just a caricature…He’ll probably just live on as a legend. Like, he won’t (…) in time, people will kind of like cycle out that latter Michael, because that’s not the greater part of Michael Jackson’s legacy. You know that late-Michael, that’s not really, a lot of people really, just kinda, even as far as musically, he didn’t…”

Akil's words and thoughts trailed off there into a set of nonsensical utterances that reveal that for my generation, the post-Thiller hip-hop generation, Michael's death represents something more and different than it does for our parents' generation... who can't remember a time without his music (but who also remember growing with him, through him). For my generation, Michael's death is an example that not all icons come to favorable ends and that even for the one's, like Tupac or Biggie, who never live to see their primes, maybe such an end as this is far better than some strange and worse alternative. Though the fan in me can't help thinking, maybe not.

To the question: 'Will Michael Jackson live forever?' This generation responds overwhelmingly 'He will"...and does! Perhaps not on a beach somewhere in Cuba smoking cigars with Fidel, Tupac and Biggie, but in the hearts and minds of those of us who don't know when or how to let our icons go.

Hip Hop Illiterate

2009-02-08T13:28:00.001-05:00

What does it mean to be (a) Hip-Hop Illiterate? If literacy is about reading and writing, and hip-hop is an orally produced & aurally received expressive form, then what benefit is there to introducing illiteracy as a problematic of understanding hip-hop music? What positions Hip-Hop uniquely as a mode of self-expression, African-American or otherwise? Is there a place for the study of Hip-Hop within the academy? And if so, how should that scholarship be tailored and who does such a scholarship aim to benefit?

These are just a few of the questions I hope to address in creating this new blog space: 'www.hiphopilliterate.blogspot.com'. I would like this space to serve as a bridge and introduction to ways of thinking about hip-hop theoretically (i.e. from within the academy) and to ways of thinking about academia and through academic discourse via the aesthetic and philosophical practices of hip-hop music. Without getting too bogged down from the beginning, I would like first to begin with a few definitions.

The Oxford English Dictionary (Online) defines the following terms as such:
hip, a.: slang (orig. U.S.)= HEP a. Hence hip-cat = HEP-CAT; hipness,
the condition or quality of being ‘hip’.
hip-hop, n. (and a.): orig. U.S. = a. A youth subculture,
originating amongst the Black and Hispanic populations of
New York City, which comprises elements such as rap music,
graffiti art, and break-dancing, as well as distinctive codes
of dress. b.The music associated with this subculture,
characterized by freq. politically inspired or motivated raps,
delivered above spare, electronic backing, and harsh rhythm
tracks. Also attrib. or as adj. Cf. *RAP
v. intr., to dance to or perform hip-hop; {sm}hip-hopper n., a member
of the hip-hop culture; {sm}hip-hopping ppl. a. and vbl. n.
and finally,
illiterate, a. (n.) = 1. a. Of persons: Ignorant of letters or
literature; without book-learning or education; unlettered,
unlearned; unable to read, i.e. totally illiterate. Also,
more generally, characterized by ignorance or lack of learning
or subtlety (in any sphere of activity). Cf. ILLITERACY.
2. In sense of L. illïtter{amac}tus: Unfurnished with letters,
not written upon; not expressed in words; unwritten;
inarticulate. rare.

Part of my purpose in beginning this blog is to address concerns I have had since beginning my graduate work on African-American literature and cultural theory. There seems to a wealth of scholarship developing and dedicated to the music and culture of hip-hop that sets it apart from the work done on African-American literature and literary theory. And while there is some overlap of hip-hop theory in the fields of black popular culture studies, media & communication studies, and musicology, the absence of an in-depth treatment of hip-hop's lyricism, narrative capabilities, performance and politics have led me to begin my own preliminary assessment. Part of my purpose in creating this blog, then, is to help those within the walls of academia come to ground and grips with the world that hip-hop music made (and is making), to help some remove their hip-hop "illiteracy" and to furnish their world of articles, letters, and publications with a treatment of the unlettered, unwritten illiteracy that hip-hop has to offer (yes, this is a positive offering).
On the flip-side of this coin, there has been a lack of highly critical assessment of hip-hop as a political and philosophical means of expression and human articulation. And as such, part of my purposes in this blog also will be to help bridge the gap between hip-hop as entertainment and hip-hop as highly critical of dominant society and normative culture. At the base of all hip-hop lyricism is an active resistance to social normativities that discriminate, disadvantage, and disenfranchise, even if at times the performances can serve to reproduce society's destructive ideologues. My hope in this blog is to establish a firm relationship between hip-hop's lyricism and cultural performances and a progressive politics of global activism, one that can be found in hip-hop's development into as pervasive a tool for mass intellectual development, literary instruction, and global connection as the world has ever known, but also one that affirms a new foundation for philosophical investigations, in ways that challenge and expand upon the principles, methods, and conclusions of Western thought and Western thinkers insofar as their writings and ideas are made to proliferate throughout the planet.

Let's slow things down for a second with more definitions:
literate, a. and n. = 1. Acquainted with letters or literature; educated, instructed, learned. 2. a. Of or pertaining to letters, literary men, or literature; literary.
AND
ill, a. and n. = 1. Morally evil; wicked, iniquitous, depraved, vicious, immoral, blameworthy, reprehensible. a. Of persons. Of conduct or actions. 2. a. Marked by evil intent, or by want of good feeling; malevolent, hostile, unfriendly, adverse, unkind, harsh, cruel. 3. a. Doing or tending to do harm; hurtful, injurious, pernicious, noxious, mischievous, prejudicial; dangerous. 4. Causing pain, discomfort, or inconvenience: offensive, painful, disagreeable, objectionable. 5. Of conditions, fortune, etc.: Miserable, wretched, unfortunate, unlucky; disastrous, unfavourable, untoward, unpropitious.

The combination of "ill" and "literate" might lead some to wonder how projecting oneself as a "hip-hop illiterate" might be seen as a progressive stance. Yet, for those more familiar with the word 'ill' and its hip-hop usages, it might be easier to recognize a progressivism in this terminology: slang (orig. U.S., in the language of rap and hip-hop)= a. Aggressive, irrational, crazy; unpleasant, bad. b. Excellent, attractive; fashionable.

1979 G. O'BRIEN et al. Rapper's Delight (song, perf. ‘Sugarhill Gang’) in L. A. Stanley Rap: the Lyrics (1992) 325 Now there's a time to laugh, a time to cry A time to live, and a time to die... To act civilized or act real ill. 1982 M. POND Valley Girls' Guide to Life 36 That is so ill. 1985 J. SIMMONS My Adidas (song, perf. ‘Run-DMC’) in L. A. Stanley Rap: the Lyrics (1992) 273 Now me and my Adidas do the illest thing We like to stamp out pimps with diamond rings. 1995 Grand Royal No. 2. 30/2, I threw some elbows and got in the dust but these girls were ill, so I grabbed each one by the back of the neck and shook 'em till they stopped. 1997 Touch May 30/2 If we hadn't come through, things would have kicked off. It could have gotten ill, but we just took control. Often hip-hop transforms meaning in a process of signifying described in scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr.'s book, The Signifying Monkey, in ways that sometimes reassign and even invert meanings. For me, then, being a Hip-Hop ILLiterate involves a process of being both inside and outside any understanding of this discourse. To take on the meanings of "ill" from a hip-hop perspective or lexicon means that I am both exceptionally hip-hop literate or an Ill-literate (one capable of reading, recognizing, and deciphering hip-hop in its internal system of signs and signifiers) and always a hip-hop outsider or illiterate as well. The purpose of this blog is to understand both positionalities and attempt to develop a space for the two to come together in working towards some greater understanding.

Those practitioners of hip-hop might be both ill and literate to its workings as a medium of entertainment, but might be blind to any understanding of its more highly academic, critical, and theoretical implications for literature study, philosophical investigations and overall towards helping expose the ways in which humans exist. On the other hand, those within the academy might benefit from a move away from reason as the ultimate in knowledge-production and truth-seeking and look at the ways that hip-hop as a musical and performative mode of self-expression might help elucidate and fill in the gaps in their more theoretical domains of understanding. As scholars and participants, we are all hip-hop's children - taking on a new intellectual positionality as 'Hip-Hop's Illiterates.'