Problem of Maturity in Hip Hop

Problem of Maturity in Hip Hop

Problem of Maturity in Hip Hop

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INTRODUCTION

Conventional wisdom says that hip hop speaks to inner city black and Latino youth and their counterparts in the white suburbs. In the case of the latter, their membership to what is often called ‘‘the hip hop community’’ is a function of their performance of black- ness in the face of their racial and political designations of white membership. The blackness they perform, however, as hip hop cul- ture, is what could easily be recognized by members of black com- munities as black adolescent culture. The same conclusion applies to black and Latino participation in hip hop. Hip hop has, however, become a primary exemplar of authentic black culture. This devel- opment is attested to not only by the multitudes of black adoles- cents and folks in their twenties and thirties (and even older) who are drawn to it in their quest for an authentic black identity, but also globally as even adolescents in Africa and among black indigenous populations in the South Pacific do the same. We could add performances of blackness in Asian and Latin American coun- tries to this roster of loose membership. We may wonder, however,

This article is an expanded version of ‘‘Be Healthy and Seek Wise Ways: The Problem of Maturity in Hip Hop,’’ which appears in Hip Hop and Philosophy, ed. Derrick Darby and Tommine Shelby (Chicago, IL: Open Court, 2005). Thanks to Jane Anna Gordon and Doug Ficek for reading early versions and to Mathieu Gordon for whom hip hop continues to offer so much.

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The Review of Education, Pedagogy, and Cultural Studies, 27:367–389, 2005 Copyright # Taylor & Francis Inc. ISSN: 1071-4413 print=1556-3022 online DOI: 10.1080/10714410500339020

about the consequence of investing so much of a claim to black authenticity into what is in practice and sentiment black adolescent culture. From a philosophical perspective, there is already a fallacy and a form of decadence at work when a part of a community sub- ordinates the whole, when what is in effect a subgroup eliminates the legitimacy of the larger community from which it has sprung.

One effect is that there seems to be more lay-ethnographic inter- est in black teenagers and older black folk who behave like teen- agers as spokespersons of the rest of the black community, or better yet—communities. Where else do we find such an approach to the study of a people that is able to avoid the objections of mis- representation? Even with working-class white youth in 1970s England, from whom the Punk movement was born, there was an effort, on the part of those who studied them, to distinguish their subcultural behavior from the wider category of working-class white people. One understands that part of being young is behav- ing in ways that stretch the limits of culture marked by the weight of responsibility. There is, however, a peculiar absence of such caution in popular and many scholarly treatments of hip hop, where black adolescents seem to have become the wellspring of knowledge and creativity as though tapped into the divine force of the gods—or at least ancestral voices of resistance. And at times, the acknowledgment of such ascriptions translates not into an objection but an affirmation: What’s wrong, in other words, with advancing black adolescent communities as exemplars of black authenticity?

And so our discussion begins.

I

Let me say at the outset that I am not against hip hop as a form of cultural play. Much of hip hop is quite simply fun, and many of the expressions of joy and outrage that manifest activities from rapping over a beat to spray-painting a mural exemplify the Harlem literary critic and philosopher Alain Locke’s (1989) insight that ‘‘Man cannot live in a valueless world.’’ But human beings cannot live in a world in which there is no one minding the children. A world without adults is a world without limits, and the consequence is hardly a world in which children could receive the support mechanisms that enable them to be children in the first place. Yet

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this problem of a children-run world, of Peter Panism, faces more acute problems when the ever-spoiling dynamic of ‘‘race’’ is thrown into the proverbial mix. To spell out what I mean, consider the reflections of Frantz Fanon in his classic 1952 text, Black Skin, White Masks.

Fanon argued that however healthy a black individual might be, he or she would experience the secretion of alienated forces when making contact with the white, antiblack world. That is because that world has waiting for such individuals a sociogenic construc- tion called the black but most often signified by le nègre—ambigu- ously ‘‘negro’’ and ‘‘nigger.’’ This construction is reflected from the eyes of whites, whose points of view are social-politically con- stituted as the point of view on reality, as how black individuals ‘‘appear’’ in the social world. Such an appearance stimulates asym- metrical invisibility: The black individual encounters such a notion of blackness that is not how he or she lives but is how he or she is sup- posed to be. The immediate effect is a doubled reality between the lived and the believed. To appear, then, as what one is not is to encounter the self as always other than the self, which makes the lived-self an invisible reality because of the absence of that self as a source of appearance. The result is, as Fanon observed, a destruc- tion of the self into many fragments—to be torn apart—and thrown out into the world of a journey in search of putting together a dis- membered self. Added to the situation is the ability of this soul torn asunder to see how he or she is seen, to become, in other words, the mirror whose reflection is already a distorted one. In the fifth chap- ter, ‘‘The Lived Experience of the Black,’’1 this search takes Fanon on a course from embracing a neurotic Reason to diving into the depths of rhythmic ecstasy as the waves of Negritude push him ever deeper, and paradoxically ever forward, in a black sea.

To Fanon’s chagrin, his moment of rapture is torn away from him as he finds himself in a moment of dry, sober reflection of its escapist status: negritude, Jean-Paul Sartre (1956) showed, was a negative moment in a dialectical struggle for universal humanity. ‘‘Robbed,’’ as he announced, of his last chance, Fanon began to weep.

The significance of tears, the reintroduction of fluids, of washing, of catharsis, is a familiar aspect of our ongoing struggle with reality. Sometimes, in fact often, reality is difficult to bear. Tears do more than wash our eyes; they wash away, symbolically, psychologically, and existentially, what we have built up as resistance against what we are unwilling to face. Fanon’s autobiographical admission of his

The Problem of Maturity in Hip Hop 369

own efforts at delusion and the tears that washed them away present to us the ironic aspect of any struggle against a suffocating world: Our struggles are double-directional—both without and within.

Fanon’s tears prepared him for facing the problem of psycho- pathology and le nègre. The difficult truth, Fanon argued, is that Western society has no coherent notion of a black adult. Whether it is as the pathetic plight of the assimilation-hungry petit-bourgeois black or the rebellious, illicit economy lumpenproletariat black— whom Richard Wright (1987) portrayed as Bigger Thomas in Native Son—the consequence is of the former not ‘‘really’’ being black and the latter standing as the kind of black to be ‘‘controlled.’’ In short, both poles represent displacement, and because of this, neither can stand for the normal. Yet paradoxically both stand as normal for blacks, which means that black psychology is entrapped in abnormal psychology. Literally, to be black is to be abnormal. The effect, Fanon observed, is that to be black is never to be a man or a woman. It is to be, under this collapse into pathogenic reality, locked in underdevelopment, frozen, in other words, in perpetual childhood.

How, then, can black liberation be possible in a world that denies adulthood to black people? And worse, how could black people hope to achieve liberation through adopting an alien reflection of ourselves that militates against the possibility of maturity?

II

The question of black adulthood raises questions of the context of our query and the legitimacy of its social aims. That we are talking primarily about the question of black, brown, and beige people in the modern world, a world in which they are indigenous, means that the problem of their relationship to Western civilization is ironic and symbiotic. They are an aspect of modern Western humanity. To throw les nègres out of the West is to render them homeless.

When we think of the clothing of hip hop—the sweat suits, the sneakers, the hats, stocking caps, the T-shirts, and even the gold- capped teeth—where but in the contemporary neo-global econom- ies of Western civilization can we find their source? The same applies to the technology of hip hop aesthetic production from

370 L. R. Gordon

vinyl records on which to scratch to the spray paint through which to make thought and name visual.

The Fanonian question poses, however, an additional problem whose roots are in the thought of the German philosopher and phil- ologist Friedrich Nietzsche and whose modern manifestation is in the blues: the question of social health. In The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music, Nietzsche (1968) argued that the ancient Greeks were aware of the suffering that lay at the heart of life itself, and their health was manifested by their response to it, namely, the creation of Attic poetry, drama, and music in tragic plays. For Nietzsche, in other words, health is not a function of the absence of disease and adversity but instead a matter of an organism or community’s ability to deal constructively with such challenges. That the underside of life is suffering and death does not negate the value of life itself. In fact, it makes it more precious. Yet, a healthy attitude to life requires its affirmation without the kinds of seriousness that lead to over-attachment and cowardice. Although the authors of such works died long ago, the underlying messages of their work continue to speak to humanity across the ages.

The underside of modern life was outlined well by Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1987) in his ‘‘Discourse on the Arts and Sciences,’’ where he introduced the problem of the dialectics of enlightenment. Think of the scale of human suffering that accompanies the progress pro- mised by modernity—modern war, conquest, colonization, slavery, racism, genocide; the proliferation of new kinds of disease; and the profound level of alienation of human beings from each other, to name but a few.

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