The Politics of Rap Music

Is rap a legitimate medium of political expression?

Content Standards!

• 11.8.8 Discuss forms of popular culture, with emphasis on their origins and geographic diffusion (e.g., jazz and other forms of popular music, professional sports, architectural and artistic styles).

• 11.11 Students analyze the major social problems and domestic policy issues in contemporary American society.

• 11.11.6 Analyze the persistence of poverty and how different analyses of this issue influence welfare reform, health insurance reform, and other social policies.

• 11.11.7 Explain how the federal, state, and local governments have responded to demographic and social changes such as population shifts to the suburbs and racial concentrations in the cities.

Cultural History

• Cultural history combines the approaches of anthropology and history to look at popular cultural traditions and cultural interpretations of historical experience. It examines the records and narrative descriptions of past knowledge, customs, and arts of a group of people.

The Bronx in the 1970s

The Post Industrial Context

• Industrial --> Service Economy

• Suburbanization: white flight, reduced tax base for cities, red-lining

• Urban Renewal

• Poverty, Violence, Crime

• Hip-hop culture

Hip-Hop Stylistics

• Rap Music: flow, layering, rupture; DJ and MC

• Graffiti: long, winding, sweeping letters, interrupted, italics and shadowing suggesting motion

• B-boying (break-dancing): flowing and complex movements interrupted by abrupt starts and stops

The Theory

• Continuity and Circularity• Layering• Highlighting of “threats” through break or

rupture• Management of threat (continuing the flow)• Use of public space (originally, at least)• = BLUEPRINT FOR RESISTANCE

Wild Style, a 1982 movie by Charlie Ahearn, connects early hip-hop genres: art (graffiti,) breaking, and rap.

Black Oral Traditions: Toasting

• A toast is a lengthy, recited narrative or poem describing a series of exploits by a central character, focusing on the main character's heroic acts and exercises of wit.

• Characters announce their intentions to survive in style, which can mean "heroic masculinity" or conspicuous consumption.

Black Oral Traditions: Signifying

• According to Black literary scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr., the practice derived from the Trickster archetype found in much African mythology, folklore, and religion: a god, goddess, spirit, man, woman, or anthropomorphic animal who plays tricks or otherwise disobeys normal rules and norms of behavior.

Signifying

• The expression itself derives from the numerous tales about the Signifying Monkey, a folk trickster figure said to have originated during slavery in the United States. In most of these narratives, the Monkey manages to dupe the powerful Lion by signifying. Signifyin(g) directs attention to the connotative, context-bound significance of words, which is accessible only to those who share the unique cultural values of a given speech community.

Black Oral Traditions: “Playing the Dozens”

• The dozens is an example of the African American oral tradition in which two competitors, usually males, go head-to-head in an improvised competition of often good-natured, ribald trash talk (think Yo Mama.)

• It’s an element of an African-American custom of verbal sparring, of woofin' and signifyin', intended to defuse conflict nonviolently, descended from an oral tradition rooted in traditional West African cultures.

So…

• How does this add complexity to understanding of rap music?

• How do these traditions contribute to an interpretation of rap as “political” or “resistant?”

• Why was gangsta rap a particular target for critics of rap?

Political/Cultural Rap: Public Enemy

NOI Rap: Brand Nubian

Gangsta Rap: NWA

Straight Outta Compton NWA (Niggaz with Attitude)

Guerrillas in tha Mist Da Lench Mob

Questions

• Why was gangsta rap so much more heavily critiqued and policed than other forms of rap?

• Why was gangsta rap a MUCH bigger crossover genre of rap at the time?

• And the big cultural history question…was gansta rap as much REFLECTIVE as RESISTANT? CONTEXT has multiple and multifaceted implications.

Gangsta Rap Made Me Do ItIce Cube