The Michael Eric Dyson Reader (76 page)

It may not be altogether unfitting that hip-hop is partially cut off from the roots of even its own history. After all, with its impulse to create sonic collages, its sampling of existing music, its disregard for musical conventions, and its irreverent pairing of the culturally sacred and profane, hip-hop is thought to be a striking instance of postmodernism. And according to critic Fredric Jameson, the lack of a sense of history rests squarely at the center, if it can be said to have one, of the postmodern moment. While it’s easy to see why hip-hop is deemed a postmodern art form—quotation, pastiche, contingency, fragmentation, and the like help define its presence—it may be that its homegrown nostalgia and hunger for purity and authenticity betray modernist obsessions.

In other words, the postmodernism of hip-hop may show that we’re trying to get rid of, or, at least, get over modernism too quickly. Postmodernism may turn out to be modernism in drag. At its heart, modernism looks back to move forward. Modernism is obsessed with critically reexamining the ground of its origin—which, in its advocates’ minds, turns out to be our culture’s origins—so that its foundations are secured. Modernist discussions are caught up in the rapture of renewal, recovery, return, and renaissance, all in the name of progress, of moving forward. The new is valuable precisely because it is formed out of reappropriating the original. The great paradox of modernism, for some critics, is that, in order to outdo it, one must hold that whatever will succeed modernism, say postmodernism, is rooted in a ground of thought that is more original than the modernist ground it criticizes. Ironically, that’s a modernist move. As a result, one ends up replacing the content of modernism, but not the form of modernism itself. That’s why critic Theodor Adorno said that there was no overcoming modernity.

The question of whether hip-hop is really postmodernist or modernist is, at some levels, a strictly academic affair. In other ways, the debate may help us understand the conflicts, and the hidden ties, between hip-hop and forms of black music that have modernist elements. It may shed light on the uses black folk make of their past, and the difference those uses make in how we view black youth.

If black nostalgia has distorted the relation of postmodern black youth culture to a complex black past, this is nowhere more powerfully glimpsed than in comparing hip-hop with a high point of black modernism: jazz music and culture. Critics like Stanley Crouch and musicians like Wynton Marsalis have relentlessly attacked hip-hop culture for its deficits when compared to jazz. In conversations—in truth, they were Herculean arguments between us that raged for hours at a time—neither of these gifted gentlemen has had anything good to say about hip-hop culture.

Crouch maintains that hip-hop is, in a memorable phrase comparing rap to the infamous, racist 1915 D.W Griffith film, “
Birth of a Nation
with a backbeat.” Marsalis thinks rap reflects a fascism that mars humane art. Plus, rap is rooted in
a banal, mindless repetition of beat, signaling a lack of musical imagination and invention. Inspired by the likes of Ralph Ellison, but especially by Albert Murray, Crouch and Marsalis argue that the artistic possibilities of jazz—its heart pumping with the blood of improvisation, its gut churning with the blues—embody the edifying quest for romantic self-expression and democratic collaboration that capture Negro music and American democracy at their best. For Crouch and Marsalis, hip-hop negates everything jazz affirms.

Many fans of black music, including stalwarts of soul and R&B, most certainly agree. They simply add their music of preference, and perhaps their own string of modifiers, to Crouch and Marsalis’s list. (That’s because Aretha ain’t about democracy. She’s about the imperious demands of gospel genius as it baptizes and is transformed by secular sentiments. I’m not so sure that Crouch and Marsalis stand ready, however, to reciprocate. Whether Aretha, Sam Cooke, Otis Redding, Marvin Gaye, Donny Hathaway, or Al Green count in their reckoning as much as, say, early Miles or middle Coltrane, Sarah Vaughan or Ella Fitzgerald, or Ellington or Armstrong, is highly doubtful.) Despite the issues that separate black musical purists of any sort, their shared disdain for hip-hop culture’s claims to art unite them as citizens of the Republic of Nostalgia.

The only problem is that, like hip-hop, jazz has a history of cultural attack. That history has been buried under an avalanche of nostalgia that hides jazz’s grittier roots. For instance, during the Jazz Age and the Harlem Renaissance, the response to jazz by a large segment of the black bourgeoisie, black intellectuals, and black artists anticipated the attack on rap. Such responses reflected, and were partly driven by, the negative response to jazz of large segments of white society. Jazz was viewed as a cultural and artistic form that compromised decency and morality. It was linked to licentious behavior and lewd artistic gestures. With its jungle rhythms, its blues base, its double entendre lyrics, and its sexually aggressive dancing, jazz, like hip-hop today, was the most widely reviled music of the ’20s and ’30s. Headlines in respectable publications asked questions like: “Did Jazz Put the Sin in Syncopation?” According to the
Ladies’ Home Journal
, jazz was responsible for a “holocaust” of illegitimate births. A Cincinnati-based Catholic newspaper railed against the “sensuous” music of jazz. It said that “the embracing of partners—the female only half dressed—is absolutely indecent.” Blues pioneer W.C. Handy’s daughter, Lucille, was sternly admonished by the Colored Girls’ Circle of an elite school for “making a fool” of herself by singing and dancing her father’s blues and jazz. “It [continuing to sing and dance] will be under the peril of death and great danger to yourself,” the letter concluded.

Many Harlem Renaissance intellectuals detested “gin, jazz, and sex.” The publications of black organizations, from the NAACP’s magazine,
Crisis
, edited by W.E.B. Du Bois, to the Socialist Party–supported magazine,
Messenger
, edited by A. Philip Randolph and Chandler Owens (with assistance from George Schuyler), expressed opposition to jazz as well. For many Harlem Renaissance intellectuals, jazz was not viewed as a serious artistic achievement on par with European classical music. The
great irony of blacks worshiping European music is that European composers such as Richard Strauss were, at the same time, expressing profound admiration for jazz.

In 1926, one of the most important debates about the relation of black intellectuals to black mass culture took place in the pages of the
Nation
, between George Schuyler and Langston Hughes. In his essay, “The Negro Art Hokum,” Schuyler argued that there was no such thing as a distinct Negro art apart from American art. Schuyler said that Negro art occurred in Africa, but to “suggest the possibility of any such development among the ten million colored people in this republic is self-evident foolishness.” Schuyler argued that “slave songs based on Protestant hymns and biblical texts” and “secular songs of sorrow and tough luck known as the blues” were “contributions of a caste” in certain sections of America that were “foreign to Northern Negroes, West Indian Negroes, and African Negroes.” For Schuyler, defining art in racial terms was “hokum.”

Hughes’s response, which ran a week later, became one of his signature essays. Entitled “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain,” Hughes’s essay lamented the veiled desire of some black artists to be white. Such artists feared their own racial identity. Hughes argued that the black middle class was denying a crucial part of its heritage by denying the “beauty of [its] own people” and that Negroes should stop imitating “Nordic manners, Nordic faces, Nordic air, Nordic art.” In their stead, he urged Negroes to embrace “the low-down folks, the so-called common element, and they are the majority—may the Lord be praised.” Hughes argued that the “common people will give to the world its truly great Negro artist, the one who is not afraid to be himself.” For Hughes, the racial mountain was the inability of the black bourgeoisie to accept Negro art from the masses. Hughes exhorted his fellow Negroes to let “the blare of Negro jazz bands and the bellowing voice of Bessie Smith singing blues penetrate the closed ears of the colored near intellectuals until they listen and perhaps understand.” Hughes’s words are still relevant.

By rehearsing this bit of jazz history—one that is conveniently overlooked by Crouch and Marsalis as they attack rap and proclaim jazz as America’s classical music—I am not arguing that we should romanticize black folk culture. Neither am I equating black folk art and pop culture. The big business of how black culture is packaged as a commodity to be bought and sold in the marketplace with billions of dollars at stake prevents such an easy equation. I’m simply arguing that all forms of black music have been attacked both within and beyond black culture. Blues and jazz, rhythm and blues, and soul have all been viewed as indecent, immoral, and corrupting of black youth. To be nostalgic for a time when black music offered a purer aesthetic or a higher moral vision is to hunger for a time in history that simply doesn’t exist. (Of course, another way of stating this is to say that all black music has an aesthetic appeal, and a moral vision, that will at first be assailed, but whose loss will one day be mourned and compared favorably with the next form of hated black music to come along.) Now as Marsalis, Crouch, and other critics perched aloft the wall of high black culture throw stones at hip-hop, they forget that such stones were once thrown at their
music of preference. Bebop was once hip-hop. Ragtime was once rap. Bluesmen were once b-boys. What is now noble was once notorious.

I’m not suggesting that there are no artistic differences between generations and styles of black music. Queen of Hip-Hop Soul Mary J. Blige is no Queen of Soul Aretha Franklin. (With Aretha’s gifts, very few have measured up. Those who do—such figures as Vanessa Bell Armstrong, Ann Nesby, and the late Marion Williams—flourish in the gospel realm.) And neither should she be. She couldn’t be even if she wanted to. Aretha’s art, in large part, draws from her sheer genius. The outsized technical ambitions encouraged in her by the gospel tradition of the black church. Her apprenticeship in sanctified emotion under gospel great Clara Ward and her famous preacher father, C.L. Franklin. And a voice whose only teachers were unrelenting pathos and undaunted passion. But Aretha’s greatest art has to do with a budding black feminist consciousness in the ’60s and ’70s. The demand for respect. The warning to men to think about their emotional intents with women. The prescription of feel-good therapies for sexual intimacy. And reckoning with the endless chain of fools produced by the quest for faithful love. In short, Aretha Franklin’s greatness is a product of its times.

Mary J. Blige’s art is similarly a product of its times. True enough, hip-hop soul borrows the grooves, and the rhetorical gravity, of black soul culture. But hip-hop soul’s themes and rhythms occupy a distinct spiritual orbit. Blige says much of what Aretha said in the ’60s and ’70s, but she says it in the grittier, more explicit voice of hip-hop culture. Blige’s hip-hop soul feminism seeks real love. But it remakes edifying love confessions into gut-wrenching pleas of faithfuless. It makes self-love the basis of loving others. And it bitterly, defiantly refuses to accept sexual infidelity (though Aretha hinted as much when she said if men wanted do-right women they’d have to be do-right men). Blige is full of self-enclosed hip-hop angst. She also possesses, or at least she seeks to possess, a strong degree of hip-hop self-reliance. And she has a dark, stormy, rap-inflected (or is that infected?) artistic temperament.

Blige’s art reshapes the blues at the bottom of Aretha’s soul feminism into a brooding female voice of resistance in an Age of Misogyny. Aretha’s generation certainly faced the same forces. But ’60s and ’70s sexism was cloaked beneath a chivalry and condescension that even black male versions of patriarchy could express. (Let’s not forget that there were plenty of brutal examples of black men mistreating black women at Aretha’s artistic peak. Lyrically speaking, male rappers talk a good game of ho-smacking and bitch-beating, but the likes of James Brown, Bill Withers, David Ruffin, Marvin Gaye, and a host of other artists allegedly abused wives, girlfriends, or lovers while singing sweet, rapturous praises to the fairer sex on wax.) Aretha Franklin’s and Mary J. Blige’s aesthetic values reflect, in part, the cultural and musical environments that shape their art. What they respond to—norms, practices, behaviors, expectations, ideas—has as great an effect on the character of their art as their particular musical gifts. While soul and hip-hop cultures embody virtues to which each musical style responds, the cultures contain vices to which each style reacts. (Franklin and Blige, of course, embody both the good and the bad of their respective traditions in their art.) The explicitness of hip-hoppers makes their limitations more obvious. But the subtlety of soul artists doesn’t make their limitations any less lethal.

The problem with nostalgic blacks is that they place more artistic stock in the aesthetic form they are familiar with. (They often have what may be termed Hegel’s problem, named after the philosopher who believed that of all periods in history, the Zeitgeist, the world spirit, was best embodied in his own Prussian state during his life. For our nostalgic true believers, it translates into the notion that the best in black music happened to coincide with their own youth.) At the same time, they associate vice, or limitation, or smallness of artistic vision, with the aesthetic form most alien to them. While blues, jazz, soul, and R&B may share crucial assumptions, say, about women, the differences in their outward aesthetic forms makes us believe that one is more harmful or more foreign to black culture than the other. Thus, hip-hop’s misogyny is more jolting than the antipathy toward women that came through in some R&B. But within both hip-hop and what’s called urban contemporary music, there are artists who are appalled at the malevolence hurled at black women. And one need not look beyond these genres to find rich expressions of the seductive art of subtlety—as opposed to the “do me” explicitness common among current acts—practiced by artists of previous generations. Chante Moore and Tony Terry, Maxwell and Babyface, Prince Markie Dee and Heavy D are just a few.