Why hip hop continues to thrive

What Kilson fails to grasp is that the hip hop community has become a dominant African American institution. Where young black Americans once turned primarily to the church—and to the civil rights leaders that the church produced—to articulate their hopes, frustrations, and daily tribulations, it is fast becoming men like Jay-Z and Nas, and women like Missy Elliot and Lauryn Hill, who best vocalize the struggle of growing up black and poor in this country.

Nevertheless, Kilson captures what many black folks believe about hip hop, and those scholars associated with its defense. Many agree with Kilson that “there’s nothing whatever that’s seriously radical or progressive about hip hop ideas and values.” Many support Kilson’s view that hip hop is little more “than an updated face on the old-hat, crude, anti-humanistic values of hedonism and materialism.”

Hip hop’s critics make a valid point that the genre is full of problematic expressions. It reeks of materialism; it feeds on stereotypes and offensive language; it spoils with retrogressive views; it is rife with hedonism; and it surely doesn’t always side with humanistic values. But the arguments of many of hip hop’s critics demand little engagement with hip hop. Their views don’t require much beyond attending to surface symptoms of a culture that offers far more depth and color when it’s taken seriously and criticized thoughtfully. It is odd that so many gifted intellectuals should so resolutely stick to superfluous observation. Such critics seem afraid of the intellectual credibility or complex truths they might find were they to surrender their sideline seat and take an analytical plunge into the culture on which they comment.

It would be outlandish for critics to comment on, say, metaphysical poetry without interacting critically with its most inspired poets. At least read Donne. And if one were to make hay over the virtues or deficits of nineteenth-century British poetry or twentieth-century Irish poetry, then one should encounter the full range of Tennyson’s or Yeats’s work before jumping, or slouching, to conclusions. I’m afraid that many critics, including Kilson, haven’t done their homework. That’s characteristic of the sniping posture of many defensive elders who haven’t put their gifts to good use in the guise of cultural critic. Like Kilson, many critics end up wearing their feelings on their peeves.

The dead giveaway is that many critics like Kilson take on articles—op-eds to be exact—and not the books of the scholars I noted above. It is intellectually lazy of Kilson in particular to take such a tack, since he’s re­nowned for his erudition. What better way to make a straw argument than by parsing words in a less-than-thousand-word article while refusing to engage a text that actually takes on these issues in far more sophisticated and demanding fashion—perhaps too demanding for one out to make book on thin premises. The major points in my New York Times op-ed on the brouhaha over Barbershop, stirred largely by civil rights leaders, were that films are not scholarly monographs; that folk have the right to express themselves, and if we don’t like it, we can criticize them or make our own films; that one film can’t possibly represent the entire black experience; that recent scholarship focused on mass movements in the civil rights era veered toward group dynamics being just as important as charismatic leadership; that civil rights organizations at their worst shut down free speech; that at its best an informal community gathering place like a barbershop offers politically incorrect black speech as a bonus with sheared hair; and that art is supposed to get in our faces and not simply soothe or reassure us.

What Kilson failed to mention is that I’ve written a book on rapper Tupac Shakur and one on Dr. King. But Kilson couldn’t acknowledge that since it would ruin his argument, much as the critics of hip hop don’t want to spoil their biases through concrete engagements with the culture they despise. I don’t despise civil rights; I take it so seriously that I engage it at fair length, concluding that, despite his faults, King is the greatest American produced on our native soil. The goals and ideals of the civil rights movement are so important to me that I work feverishly to bring those concepts to bear on the debates happening in this country today. Rather than relegate our past leaders to the celebratory pages of history, I want to engage them and see what their teachings and their examples can tell us about our current condition. It is not meant as blasphemy to consult Dr. King when discussing Tupac; rather, it is an admission that King’s message still resonates and has consequence though times are different and the culture has evolved. The study of hip hop is not a repudiation of the civil rights movement. It is an effort to bridge the gap between then and now, and to offer the insight of past icons to the younger generation while engaging young folks’ criticisms of their elders.

Hip hop needs to be called out for its lesser qualities, for its abysmal failures. But hip hop’s critics ignore how some of the sharpest criticism comes from within hip hop’s borders. The first line of Jay-Z’s inspiring comeback album, Kingdom Come, laments the sorry state of current hip hop: “The game’s f***** up / Niggas beats is banging / Nigga ya hooks did it / Ya lyrics didn’t / Ya gangsta look did it.” And Nas’s stirring Hip Hop Is Dead is an album-length autopsy of hip hop’s rapper mortis: “Everybody sound the same, commercialize the game / Reminiscin’ when it wasn’t all business / They forgot where it started / So we all gather here for the dearly departed.” The difference between such criticisms, and those made by critics who fail to engage hip hop as a complex and immensely varied art form, is the balance and the historical memory at work in the best musical and literary commentary on the culture. Outside of the criticism offered on hip hop albums, rigorous engagement and sustained critique occur in the books that Kilson and other critics must wrestle with beyond tackling newspaper articles.

Kilson’s shameless anti-intellectualism on this score is shared by other writers like Hugh Pearson, a Brown University graduate who is appalled by the fact that Ivy League schools like Harvard and Penn would dare offer hip hop courses. Writing in Newsday, Pearson condemns Harvard’s Du Bois Institute for housing a hip hop archive because its scholars deem the art form and culture on which it rests to be worthy of study. Pearson’s condescension is barely concealed; he rails at rappers with “a tendency to compose ungrammatical lyrics flowing from the ungrammatical speech patterns that are standard for too many African-Americans.” Unlike earlier funk musicians, who “in those days no one considered . . . worthy of ‘study’ at a serious university,” Pearson is galled that the Ivy League “will now treat hip hop as respectable.”

Pearson has no sense of irony when he pinches a phrase from a man of manifest mediocrity, George W. Bush, who in accepting the Republican nomination for the presidency at its 2000 convention spoke of the “soft bigotry of low expectations.” It was an unintended autobiography in précis for the future president. Pearson samples the line to suggest that’s what studying hip hop in the academy amounts to. He argues that the study of hip hop, instead of “[raising] cultural standards . . . prefers to make chicken salad out of chicken necks.”

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