BEING DOPE IN LANGUAGE

Though it has existed in and around academia for decades, the performance of some of hip hop’s cultural products simultaneously tend to exist on the margins of what is considered “proper” scholarly engagement in many academic disciplines. Additionally, this “academic” study of some hip hop cultural products seems to reproduce certain forms of – and assumptions about – knowledge production regarding hip hop. Furthermore, some conventions in the discipline and certain types of scholarly performances of hip hop scholarship render Blackness pathological – even in the service of attempting to combat what might be understood to be anti-Blackness, by virtue of attempts to confront the notion that hip hop culture is, in fact, deviant or bad or unworthy of study – and are complicit in the denial of what P. Khalil Saucier and Tryon Woods describe as “Black sentient humanity and the complex interplay between culture and historical context”5 in the field (276). Owning My Masters: The Rhetorics of Rhymes & Revolutions is what I offer as one of many possible explorations and analyses of this broader problem.

 

Owning My Masters: The Rhetorics of Rhymes & Revolutions is a digital archive of original rap music and spoken word poetry, accompanied by a primary music playlist, a YouTube video channel, an annotated timeline, photo galleries, and a digital liner notes book. Rather than theorizing about hip hop, the project “does” this work through the genre of hip hop. The project privileges rap and spoken word poetry as its primary means of engagement, and its content calls for attentiveness to historical and contemporary social justice issues.

 

The project is framed around the conjecture that the study of hip hop has assisted in pushing through some of the boundaries imposed by many academic conventions and as a transdisciplinary practice, it has connected many seemingly different academic disciplines.  

 

With it I ask five questions:

 

  1. What are the roles of hip hop performance in knowledge production and what types of ideological work is being done by scholarly engagements with hip hop performance?
  2. How can hip hop performance resist (push beyond) the limits set upon it by academic convention?
  3. How does one more effectively approach hip hop academically in a manner that speaks through (one of) its form(s) and does not reinscribe the “oppression” the form seeks to subvert?
  4. How can we responsibly deal with the issue(s) of access (to “academic spaces”) for producers of cultural products like Rap music/lyrics?
  5. How should the academic institutions where the lives and works of artists like Nas and Jay-Z are studied consider the “formal” education status of aspiring hip hop artists or those who are not well-known? Both Nas and Jay-Z dropped out of high school before their professional rap careers began and would therefore likely not qualify to study or teach at those institutions.

 

I am persistent in my commitment to hip hop as transdisciplinary practice that emphasizes the process of making more than the product that gets made, but a way to situate Owning My Masters: The Rhetorics of Rhymes & Revolutions is to bring into the noted hip hop historiography, and this particular conversation, a few interesting dichotomies that might be explored.

 

The first is what I see as “Critical Black Studies,” from which I contend with Alexander Weheliye’s distinction between the embodied and disembodied Black voice. He argues that sound technologies like the phonograph removed from view the body that might be present in a live performance. He writes, “its materiality was displaced onto the recording apparatus itself and the practices surrounding it and, as a result, rematerialized the sonic force” (20). He builds much of his work in both Phonograpies: Grooves in Sonic Afro-Modernity (2005) and Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human (2014) on the work of Hortense Spillers and Sylvia Wynter, whose works also inform my project.

 

Weheliye arrives at his Critical Black Studies distinction between the embodied and disembodied Black voice by “crossfading” Fred Moten with Jacques Derrida, who poses a Philosophical distinction (the second in this list)—between phonocentrism and logocentrism, which Weheliye describes in simpler terms as speech vs. writing (and in other places singing vs. signing).6

 

It’s helpful to know that these fields are also in conversation with my interests in what might be called Rhetorics of Rap and African American literary traditions to inform what could be called a “Critical Hip Hop Study” in the form of the archive that that comprises Owning My Masters: The Rhetorics of Rhymes & Revolutions. It’s also important to note that the distinctions highlighted here are not the only ways my project can or should be engaged. An essay of this type necessitates the limiting of the project by putting them into “academic” conversations to make them legible (and visible) to “academic” audiences. These are included in the reasons I consider the essay a “bad document.” Still, this essay attempts to demonstrate these dichotomies in the service of highlighting what might be lost in privileging the disembodied over the embodied voice, the logocentric over the phonocentric. Owning My Masters: The Rhetorics of Rhymes & Revolutions opens up a theoretical and aesthetic critical space to move away from the ‘either/or’ implied in these rigid dichotomies.

 

The third distinction comes from Musicology. Carolyn Abbate wrestles with Vladimir Jankélévitch’s distinction between the “Drastic” and the “Gnostic” in her important 2004 essay, “Music: Drastic or Gnostic?” She notes the differences between the experience of a performance of music and the composition of music to be performed. She makes these differences clearer by questioning what is gained or lost in the experience of the former as opposed to the latter, stating she wants “to test the conviction that what counts is not a work…in the abstract, but a material, present event” (506).

 

Abbate clarifies that the distinction

“involves more than a conventional opposition between music in practice and music in theory because drastic connotes physicality, but also desperation and peril, involving a category of knowledge that flows from drastic actions or experiences and not from verbally mediated reasoning. Gnostic as its antithesis implies not just knowledge per se but making the opaque transparent, knowledge based on semiosis and disclosed secrets, reserved for the elite and hidden from others” (509-10).

 

Some of the broader issues explored by Owning My Masters: The Rhetorics of Rhymes & Revolutions, like the idea that some conventions in Hip Hop Studies and certain types of scholarly performances of hip hop scholarship render Blackness pathological, are articulated in the scholarly debate between “afro-pessimism,” as expressed by Frank B. Wilderson, III, and “black optimism,” argued by Fred Moten, as they pertain to [the object and subject of] Black Studies. Wilderson’s case is made primarily in Red, White and Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms7 and Moten’s in a series of articles, “The Case of Blackness,”8 “Black Ops,”9 and “Knowledge of Freedom,”10 both as extensions of Orlando Patterson’s conception of Slavery and Social Death.11

 

Leaning more toward Jared Sexton’s 2011 synthesis, “Ante-Anti-Blackness: Afterthoughts,” Owning My Masters is a project created with the understanding that:

“The logical and ontological priority of the unorthodox self-predicating activity of Blackness, the “improvisatory exteriority” or “improvisational immanence” that Blackness is, renders the law dependent upon what it polices. This is not the noble agency of resistance. It is a reticence or reluctance that we might not know if it were not pushing back, so long as we know that this pushing back is really a pushing forward. So, in this perverse sense, black social death is black social life. The object of black studies is the aim of black studies. The most radical negation of the anti-Black world is the most radical affirmation of a Blackened world. Afro-pessimism is “not but nothing other than” Black optimism.” (Web)12

 

Karl Shapiro wrote of Melvin Tolson’s 1965 poetry collection, Harlem Gallery, that, “Tolson writes in Negro” (12).13 The celebratory words by Shapiro, included in the introduction to Tolson’s book, guided my thinking when composing the 2011 hybrid hip hop/poetry/prose novel COLD.14 Under the auspices of the “scholarly” validation of critical interpretation, the aim was to “write in Hip Hop” (199).

 

5 Saucier, P. Khalil and Tryon Woods. “Hip Hop Studies in Black.” Journal of Popular Music Studies, Volume 26, Issue 2-3, 2014. pp. 268-294.

6 This philosophical distinction, while clarified by Weheliye’s treatment, was introduced to me while studying at the European Graduate School, where I took the “Music Philosophy & Sound” course taught by Michael Schmidt and DJ Spooky, which was important to my development as a scholar doing music as scholarship, particularly hip hop.

7 Duke University Press, 2010.

8 Criticism 50:2, 2009.

9 PMLA, 123:5, 2008.

10 The New Centennial Review, 4:2, 2005.

11Slavery and Social Death. Harvard University Press, 1982.

12 Sexton, Jared. “Ante-Anti-Blackness: Afterthoughts.” Lateral, 2011. Web. http://lateral.culturalstudiesassociation.org/issue1/content/sexton.html

13 Quoted in COLD, p. 199

14 Carson, A.D. COLD. Mahomet, IL: Mayhaven Publishing, Inc., 2011.