Why hip hop continues to thrive

In fact, that’s even more reason to clarify what an art form does well, and what it does poorly. Such balance is woefully lacking in many criticisms of hip hop. For instance, some critics protest that, stripped of politics, history, and racial conscience, hip hop is little more than sonic pathology and all it does is blast away the achievements of the civil rights struggle. But hip hop music is important precisely because it sheds light on contemporary politics, history, and race. At its best, hip hop gives voice to marginal black youth we are not used to hearing from on such topics. Sadly, the enlightened aspects of hip hop are overlooked by critics who are out to satisfy a grudge against black youth culture and are too angry or self-righteous to listen and learn.

Sensational headlines trumpet the moral transgressions or violent deaths of hip hoppers like Tupac Shakur and Jam Master Jay. John McWhorter, a social critic and widely read black conservative author, has made a career of twisting perceived black misbehavior into a provocative, if flawed, analysis of contemporary race. For instance, he lambastes black folk for our victimology and anti-intellectualism in his book Losing the Race. Mc­Whorter eloquently weighs in on hip hop culture with lopsided moralizing in New York’s City Journal. “By re­inforcing the stereotypes that long hindered blacks,” McWhorter argues, “and by teaching young blacks that a thuggish adversarial stance is the properly ‘authentic’ response to a presumptively racist society, rap retards black success.” The fate of black success is a heavy burden for black youth to carry. That’s especially true for the black youth who make a cameo in the anecdote about eight unruly teens who had to be kicked out of a fast food restaurant that fronts McWhorter’s essay. For Mc­Whorter, these youth embody the “antisocial behavior” encouraged by hardcore rap that preaches “bone-deep dislike of authority.”

Many critics, including McWhorter, don’t account for the complex ways that some artists in hip hop play with stereotypes to either subvert or reverse them. Amid the pimp mythologies and metaphors that gut contemporary hip hop, rappers like Common—and Xzibit in his wildly popular MTV series Pimp My Ride, devoted to upgrading broken-down automobiles—seize on pimpology’s prominence to poke fun at its pervasiveness. But its critics ­often fail to acknowledge that hip hop is neither sociological commentary nor political criticism, though it may certainly function in these modes through its artists’ lyrics. Hip hop is still fundamentally an art form that traffics in hyperbole, parody, kitsch, dramatic license, double entendres, signification, and other literary and artistic conventions to get its point across.

By denying its musical and artistic merit, hip hop’s critics get to have it both ways: they can deny the legitimate artistic standing of rap while seizing on its pervasive influence as an art form to prove what a terrible effect it has on youth. There are few parallels to this heavy-handed and wrongheaded approach to the criticism of other art forms like films, plays, or visual art, especially when they are authored by nonblacks. These cultural products are often conceded as art—bad art, useless art, banal art, but art nonetheless. There is far greater consensus about hip hop’s essential artlessness. Such cultural bias and unapologetic ignorance reinforce the racial gulfs that fuel rap’s resentment of the status quo.

Not all the barbs aimed at hip hop are meant exclusively for its artists. Some are directed at “members of the post–civil rights era generation of Black academics” who matured as writers and intellectuals during the rise of hip hop culture. This group includes scholars like Tricia Rose (author of Black Noise), Todd Boyd (Am I Black Enough for You?), Mark Anthony Neal (What the Music Said), Juan Flores (From Bomba to Hip Hop), Murray Forman (The Hood Comes First), Cheryl Keyes (Rap Music and Street Consciousness), Imani Perry (Prophets of the Hood), S. Craig Watkins (Hip Hop Matters), Gwendolyn Pough (Check It While I Wreck It), Felicia Miyakawa (Five Percenter Rap), Kyra Gaunt (The Games Black Girls Play), William Jelani Cobb (To the Break of Dawn), T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting (Pimps Up, Ho’s Down), and younger scholars such as James Peterson, Meta DuEwa Jones, Dionne Bennett, Dawn-Elissa Fischer, Kyle Dargan, H. Samy Alim, Rachel Raimist, Scott Heath, Marc Hill, Angie Colette Beatty, and Sohail Daulatzai.

Outside of the academy, there are intellectuals and activists of hip hop and spoken word like Davey D, Rosa Clemente, Byron Hurt (writer/director of the documentary Hip Hop: Beyond Beats and Rhymes), Nelson George (Hip Hop America), Joan Morgan (When Chickenheads Come Home to Roost), Jessica Care Moore (The Words Don’t Fit in My Mouth), Bakari Kitwana (The Hip Hop Generation), Yvonne Bynoe (Stand and Deliver), and Jeff Chang (Can’t Stop Won’t Stop). Revered intellectuals and writers like Crouch, Marsalis, McWhorter, and Martin Kilson, the first African American professor to receive tenure at Harvard, cringe when they think intellectuals who engage hip hop don’t embrace the values and styles of earlier arts communities or the civil rights movement.

Kilson accuses the post–civil rights black intelligentsia of “tossing poisoned darts at African Americans’ mainline civil rights tradition and its courageous leadership figures.” Since he singles me out as a major culprit among “these civil rights tradition–offending” thinkers, I’ll presumptuously respond on behalf of an admittedly big and complex group of scholars who, while holding some beliefs in common, also entertain varying, even contradictory views about hip hop culture.

Kilson says that in a September 2002 op-ed for the New York Times about the controversial movie Barbershop, I claim to belong “to a new generation of Black intellectuals who consider leadership personalities like Martin Luther King Jr. and Rosa Parks fair game for anyone’s comedic dishonoring.” (I don’t make any such claim.) Kilson says I engaged in this practice by defending the “Black people–offending MGM film, Barbershop.” Kilson argues that I support “the mindless hip-hop style irreverence toward African-American civil rights leadership,” and that I consider it “some kind of new freedom for Black actors and entertainers to verbally dishonor Dr. King, Rosa Parks, and others.” Further, he says I approach the “analytically bizarre” when in my op-ed I claim that “the barbershop . . . may be one of the last bastions of unregulated speech in black America,” and that, at their worst, civil rights organizations are “antidemocratic institutions headed by gifted but authoritarian leaders.”

Kilson goes on to say that my “outright falsehoods” are “analytically wrong and serve as anti-Black ammunition for conservative opponents of African-Americans’ civil rights agenda.” He says that millions of black folk find voice through their leaders in civil rights organizations. Further, open speech was the point of “Negro spirituals, gospel music, the ‘dozens,’ dinner table-talk, street talk, [and] meetings of all kinds of African-American organizations.” Kilson concludes that I might do “well to revisit the folk essence of African-American institutions” before I again contemplate “an affront to Black people’s honor.”

MORE FROM TODAY BOOKS: HISTORY POLITICS

‘A History of Ghosts’ explores paranormal past

‘A History of Ghosts’ explores paranormal past David Alan Grier: Is beige the new black? Is price gouging in wake of a hurricane wrong? New book places blame for Pat Tillman’s death Blagojevich tells his side of story in ‘Governor’ Geraldo on Hispanics’ new era of prosperity Ousted Ill. governor explains self in new book Michelle Malkin: Obama’s team is corrupt Book: Obama turning slump into socialism Book traces rise of 44th U.S. president   Add Today Books: History Politics headlines to your news reader: