“This introduction is a bad document identifying the fugitive as a citizen.”
You don’t see him.
He often doubts if he really exists.
His is not the radio phonograph.
His is capable of five live sounds,
of feeling their vibration,
of being the embodiment of those sounds.
But he’s not five Louis Armstrongs
playing and singing
“What Did I Do To Be So Black And Blue,”
yet he’s made poetry out of his being invisible
and it’s probably because he’s unaware that he is invisible.
I understand his invisibility, though, I think.
He has that slightly different sense of time,
and I can, at least, tell when he’s not quite on the beat—
sometimes ahead and sometimes behind.
But nevermind me;
this isn’t about me.
He listens, in that newly discovered
analytical way of listening to music.
I hear each melodic line existing of itself,
standing out clearly from all the rest,
saying its piece,
waiting patiently for the other voices to speak.
He listens in time and space,
entering and descending into its depths
like the invisible men before us,
like Dante,
knowing now that few
really listen to this—
the invisible music of his isolation—
he asks
not what did he do to be so blue,
but “what do we do
with the Black?”
Bear with us.
Some of the words above, which I use to introduce Owning My Masters, are borrowed from the narrator of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man. He discovers “a new analytical way of listening to music” while “under the spell of…reefer” (8). He’s on dope. I imagine his being “self-critical” is a result of his being what Hortense Spillers describes as “discomfited, unoriented.” She suggests that this is what “the work of the intellectual [should] make her reader/hearer” (83). Avital Ronell might call this a conjuring.¹ She writes, “Intoxication names a method of mental labor that is responsible for making phantoms appear. It was a manner of treating the phantom, either by making it emerge—or vanish” (Ronell 5).
Regardless, this is the work of dope.
An emcee steps into a cipher with stories to tell. For his work to work it must be dope. He must be dope. Here dopeness could be a response to the question Ronell asks in Crack Wars: Literature Addiction Mania: “What if “drugs” named a special mode of addiction, however, or the structure that it philosophically and metaphysically at the basis of our culture?” (13) It is a special mode of addiction, the structure that is philosophically and metaphysically at the basis of our culture. Ronell prefaces her question by stating, “Our ‘drugs’ uncover an implicit structure that was thought to be one technological extension among others, one legal struggle, or one form of cultural aberration. Classifiable in the plural (drugs: a singular plural) they were nonetheless expected to take place within a restricted economy” (13).
Owning My Masters: The Rhetorics of Rhymes & Revolutions responds to Ronell’s text, which describes the ways in which cultures need drugs.² En route to describing the implications of this assertion, Ronell illustrates how drugs are not, as we love to imagine, part of some subculture, but necessary components of culture itself. Ronell uses the literary lives of Baudelaire, Freud, and Flaubert to support her claim. I add Ralph Ellison’s narrator in Invisible Man to this list, as he is under the influence of reefer “some jokers gave” him when he “discovered” the “new analytical way of listening to music” described in the novel’s prologue (which is remixed into the introduction of Owning My Masters: The Rhetorics of Rhymes & Revolutions).³ I make the same assertion, take it a step further, utilizing hip hop. Where Ronell describes being(s) on drugs, hip hop matches, and then one-ups her. hip hop’s aspirants aim to be the drug. More specifically, the artist desires to be dope.
Owning My Masters: The Rhetorics of Rhymes & Revolutions attempts an answer to the question Alexander Weheliye asks in Phonograpies: Grooves in Sonic Afro-Modernity: “what happens once the black voice becomes disembodied, severed from its source, (re)contextualized, and (re)embodied and appropriated, or even before this point?” (37).
It attempts to perform what Tricia Rose calls “techno-black cultural syncretism” in Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America by combining Black oral traditions with the sampling of Black voices by utilizing recording technologies to enter into conversations with those voices.
Additionally, the project engages African American rhetorical traditions and contemporary practice, and “Black Study,” as outlined by Stefano Harney and Fred Moten in The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study (2013). I call the digital liner notes for the project a “bad document,” referencing Harney and Moten’s perspectives of how one might engage the university and fugitivity. This idea of fugitivity relates to my desire to complicate the simple “town” and “academy” binary I was thinking in my previous work (COLD is set in Decatur, IL as well—in the town and at the university).
It was an artificial binary that fails to hold up to close scrutiny, as it changes as the contexts for the work change. When the work is music, where it is being created, and how it is disseminated matters to me, perhaps more than it does to many listeners. For audiences outside the academy, the setting, the stories, the characters, the symbols, seemingly matter less than it being engaging or appealing (intellectually, aesthetically, or otherwise) enough on its face. If it’s dope, it’s dope. Academic audiences seem to want to know how it fits into larger conversations “in the field,” whatever field.
Many Hip Hop Studies texts that have been invaluable to the burgeoning field of study have also been incredibly valuable to my understandings of the genre and culture.⁴ While engaged in these texts, and the music I was listening to and making, and also living in South Carolina – on a former plantation, no less – I felt compelled to introduce some additional figures into the historiography – my own cipher – that would ground my project and help me get at the questions I raised.
¹ In 2018, Avital Ronell was found responsible for sexually harassing a graduate student. I wrote Owning My Masters: The Rhetorics of Rhymes & Revolutions between 2013 and 2017. After careful consideration and conversing with editors about this project, I decided that it would be disingenuous to remove or reduce the citation of Ronell’s work, which I read and responded to as a graduate student before the allegations against her were made public in 2017. Similarly, this project contains a reference to James B. Peterson, who left his job at Lehigh University in 2018 amidst an investigation into allegations of sexual misconduct. Current or future scholars may choose to exclude thinkers, including those listed above, regardless of their intellectual contributions, because of the damaging effects of their harassing misconduct. Along with describing the evolution of my dissertation project into this current publication, Owning My Masters highlights my experiences of some pervasive systemic and interpersonal violence and exceptional harm as a graduate student. I share this note in solidarity with victims of any of the multitude of abuses of power occurring daily at universities and people struggling to thrive in academia’s many hierarchies with unequal vulnerabilities.
² Ronell, Avital. Crack Wars: Literature Addiction Mania. University of Illinois Press, 2004.
Reference to Ronell connecting pathologies associated with drugs and race in Crack Wars: Literature Addiction Mania, writing:
“Crack Wars. In an altogether uncanny manner, the polemics surrounding drugs historically became a War only when crack emerged. At this moment, drugs acquired the character of political question. Routinely associated with subversion, drugs, by means of crack, were escalated to the threat of revolution and a technological articulation of racial difference. Security was upped; civil liberties went down. Crack lost its specificity as merely one drug among others. As synecdoche of all drugs, crack illuminates an internal dimension of polemos—opening the apocalyptic horizon of the politics of drugs.
“Prior to the emergence of what we call crack, drugs posed questions of control, legalization, and containment. Their usage seemed to belong to the socio-juridical precincts of civil disobedience. Ever since its inception as legal category, this all-American crime has earned its dose of moral defensibility from a link to anti-war activities. But crack, when it brought the War to drugs, brought war unto the law. Civil disobedience split away from constitutionally sanctioned habits: this war, unlike others, permits no dissent. Destructuring a civil constitution based on difference, crack introduces narcopolemics as total war.” (19)
³ Ellison, 8
⁴ A Hip Hop Studies historiography might include (among others) titles like Tricia Rose’s Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America (1994) and Hip Hop Wars: What We Talk About When We Talk About Hip Hop—and Why It Matters (2008), Adam Krims’s Rap Music and the Poetics of Identity (2000), Imani Perry’s Prophets of the Hood: Politics and Poetics in Hip Hop (2004), Murray Forman and Mark Anthony Neal’s That’s the Joint! The Hip-Hop Studies Reader (2004), Joseph G. Schloss’s Making Beats: The Art of Sample-Based Hip-Hop (2004), Kyra Gaunt’s The Games Black Girls Play: Learning the Ropes from Double-Dutch to Hip-Hop (2006), and Adam Bradley’s Book of Rhymes: The Poetics of Hip Hop (2009).