FOREWORD

“Teach the Bourgeois and Rock the Boulevard”: Michael Eric Dyson as Celebrity Gramscian

Reputation spreads, and eventually opportunities present themselves to cross over from the left intellectual ghetto to the status of Black Voice for the mainstream. . . . This is the path blazed so far by Gates and West, and Dyson, as usual, is bringing his best Pigmeat-Markham-MeetsBaudrillard act along behind.

—ADOLPH REED

Of course Adolph Reed meant the above epigraph as a “dis.” It was just a small chunk of the flesh that Reed took from his more celebrated public intellectual contemporaries, in what may be the most widely circulated and cited diatribe against the so-called black public intellectual. What Reed didn’t understand then (and apparently has no interest in understanding now) is that the “Pigmeat-Markham-MeetsBaudrillard act” was the whole reason a bunch of us were digging Michael Eric Dyson in the first place. When Dyson’s Reflecting Black: African-American Cultural Criticism dropped in 1993, a whole new world was opened up for black cultural studies in the United States. I was one of those brighteyed and hungry poststructuralist shorties who found his calling after reading Reflecting Black: African-American Cultural Criticism, and later sucking the bone marrow from Robin D.G. Kelley’s Race Rebels: Culture, Politics, and the Black Working Class and Tricia Rose’s Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America, as these texts, and the thinkers behind them, provided a generation of black graduate students in the humanities and the social sciences the license to bring the diverse and competing realities of black life into conversation with contemporary cultural and critical theory. As Dyson himself admits, “I do want to make the life of the mind sexy for young people in the academy and beyond its reach. I want to have a mode of criticism that allows me to be mobile, to move from the academy to the streets to the world” (p. 127).

By the time Dyson’s Race Rules (his fourth book in four years) was published in 1996, Dyson was regularly mentioned alongside Cornel West, Henry Louis Gates Jr., and bell hooks as a member of a generation of black public intellectuals who were worthy of intense praise (Robert Boynton and Michael Berube) and scrutiny (Reed and Leon Wieseltier). A few years before the hype hit the fan, Cornel West tried to make some sense of the functions of these yet to be ordained black public intellectuals, as he argued for an “insurgency model” of black intellectual activity. This model was in part inspired by the work of Antonio Gramsci, who posited the emergence of a class of “organic” intellectuals. According to West, the “central task of postmodern Black intellectuals is to stimulate, hasten, and enable alternative perceptions and practices by dislodging prevailing discourse and power. . . . Instead of the solitary hero, embattled exile, and isolated genius—the intellectual as star, celebrity, commodity—this model privileges collective intellectual work that contributes to communal resistance” (Breaking Bread, 144). These were the words of a man who had not yet become the very thing he critiqued after the publication of his bestseller Race Matters in 1993.

West’s conflation of the postmodernist public intellectual, as well as the Gramscian organic intellectual, is really indebted to the Cultural Studies movement that emerged in Britain in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Speaking about that first generation of cultural theorists who worked out of Birmingham University’s Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, Stuart Hall—generally regarded as the forefather of contemporary Black Cultural Studies—asserts that “we had to be at the very forefront of intellectual theoretical work because, as Gramsci says, it is the job of the organic intellectual to know more than the traditional intellectuals do” but adds that it was just as crucial that the “organic intellectual cannot absolve himself or herself from the responsibility of transmitting those ideas, that knowledge, through the intellectual function, to those who do not belong, professionally, in the intellectual class” (Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies, 268). Not surprisingly, many of the so-called black public intellectuals of the 1990s emerged within the institutional rubric of American Cultural Studies, despite their very specific training in the fields of philosophy, theology, and literature.

If the point was to “speak truth to power” on behalf of the folks in the hood, or as Chuck D put it, to “Teach the bourgeois and rock the boulevard” (“Don’t Believe the Hype”), then no doubt black public intellectuals were the hot hype that preceded them. Nightline, The Today Show, Charlie Rose, TalkBack Live, BET Tonight, “came arunnin’” looking for those fly, bespectacled, dressed-up spokespersons of the race who could put a “literate” spin (“Why they’re so articulate”) on issues such as the O.J. Simpson trial, the Dream Team (both the Michael Jordan–led Olympic team and Simpson’s legal advisers), the deaths of Tupac Shakur and Biggie Smalls, and the Million Man March. Dyson himself became one of the brightest lights among black public intellectuals in the aftermath of the O.J. Simpson trial, providing commentary during the trial (and immediately after the jury decision) for NPR and appearing as the “color commentator” on BET, when Ed Gordon sat down with Simpson after his acquittal. Adolph Reed may be a “hater supreme,” but he ain’t crazy, so there’s some legitimacy to his claims that the high visibility of black public intellectuals does not naturally correlate with the concerns and ambitions of the black masses these intellectuals ostensibly “speak” for. No amount of Apple computer ads with elite black intellectuals are getting black farmers the duckets that the federal government has thus far fronted on. Even Dyson admits “true dat,” but in describing the political components of his own teaching, he submits, “we don’t have to subscribe to such a literal view of the work of politics. Creating discursive spaces in hegemonic academic culture is a specific kind of work that should be valued, even if it is rightly not confused, better yet, conflated, with traditional politics. Such activity has an empirical effect on the concrete political interests of folk outside the academy” (p. 66).

The current generation of black public intellectuals has been thoughtfully, though mistakenly, aligned to the New York intellectuals of the 1950s. Stuart Hall, Raymond Williams, and the cadre of “Birmingham School” cultural theorists are more tangible influences, though truth be told, the very tradition of black public intellectuals can be traced back to figures like David Walker and Alexander Crummell (whom DuBois eulogized in The Souls of Black Folk) in the nineteenth century, and Hubert Harrison and Zora Neale Hurston in the early twentieth century. No doubt, David Walker’s Appeal was a gangsterish takeover of the dominant media of the day, making him a prototype for Harlem Renaissance era figures like Wallace Thurman, Bruce Nugent, and a bunch of the other folks who were behind the “insurgent” periodical Fire! or early hip-hop purveyors like Kool Herc and Grand Wizard Theodore. But what if Walker would have had access to twenty-fourhour cable stations or had mounted a fifty-city book tour? As Nas said, “imagine that.” I make this point only to suggest that Dyson, West, Gates, and all the usual suspects (can’t name them all, though I must acknowledge the work of the late June Jordan) have really transcended the tradition of black public intellectuals, at least in the context that this tradition has flourished during the last century. Perhaps more apropos is the title “black celebrity intellectuals”—media stars, commodities in Ivy League battles to capture the “bigga nigga,” and the postmodern “niggeratti” (as Hurston so poignantly called it seventy-five years ago), who floss alongside the anointed black political spokespersons, hiphop moguls, Dream Team lawyers, and black Hollywood icons, with little distinction made among them, since they are all examples of “black star power.” Dyson admits “celebrity is a temptation among scholars and especially among black intellectuals, given the relatively small numbers of us who are able to survive and thrive in the academy. . . we have to constantly resist that temptation by making relentless forays into those base communities for which we claim to speak” (p. 68–69).

It is in the guise of his celebrity that Michael Eric Dyson has distinguished himself among the cadre of black celebrities who happen to live a life of the mind. Sure, we can talk about his flow (a real black intellectual hip-hop CD would have Dyson and fellow Detroiter Todd Boyd flowin’ lovely like a Biggie and ‘Pac collabo), and how the “brotha” has found a comfort zone equally at home with the highbrow, starched collar of Brian Lamb’s Booknotes or in “poppin’ that collar” with Tavis Smiley on Smiley’s NPR program. Although we all secretly harbor some desires to be the “head nigga in charge,” Dyson’s never been about becoming a black entrepreneurial intellectual, or the black “moral conscience of the nation” intellectual, and that’s what made him “real” for us “thug nigga intellectuals” who actually hold it down in the academy, and the fo’ real “thug niggas” surviving the triple Ps: penitentiaries, projects, and poverty.

But it goes a little deeper than what are essentially surface and stylistic distinctions among black intellectuals. Stuart Hall notes that Gramsci’s concept of “organic” intellectuals “appears to align intellectuals with an emerging historical movement and we [Birmingham Cultural Theorists] couldn’t tell then, and can hardly tell now, where that emerging historical movement was to be found. We were organic intellectuals without any organic point of reference” (Stuart Hall, 267). Though the current reparations movement will likely produce its own insurgent intellectual tradition, the emergence of black public intellectuals in the 1990s occurred outside of the kind of social movement (unless of course we consider the hypercommodification of black popular culture as such) that Hall, per Gramsci, suggests is necessary for the full realization of an organic intellectual tradition. Ironically, the one phenomenon that could be considered a legitimate social movement in the last two decades is the basis for what is arguably the most commodified form of black expression on the earth.

Despite intense commodification, hip-hop culture has produced its own tradition of insurgent and organic intellectuals, who have used the ghetto pulpit—now firmly situated in the mainstream—as a means to speak the essence of a “postworld” (postmodern, postsoul, post–civil rights, postindustrial, take your pick). There is little question that figures like Chuck D, Rakim Allah, Melle Mel, Sista Souljah, Mos Def, M–1 and Stic.man of Dead Prez, Talib Kweli, Sarah Jones, S. Craig Watkins, Ursula Rucker, Ice Cube, Bahamadia, Common, the late Lisa Sullivan, Kevin Powell, Raquel Cepeda, Paris, Davey D, Yvonne Bynoe, Bakari Kitwana, Gwendolyn Pough, Danny Hoch, William Upski Wimsatt, and the often bombastic KRS-One (to name a few) are a formidable cadre of thinkers and artists who rightfully represent the organic intellectual voices of their generation. But as hip-hop has circulated around the globe, so have the images—more so than the deeds—of these hip-hop Gramscians. Mos Def appears in a Pulitzer Prize–winning Broadway play, while his music (“Umi Says”) serves as the soundtrack for a Nike commercial. Sarah Jones, in battle with the FCC over the lyrics of her song “Your Revolution,” has become the poster child for the ACLU and the left liberal press, recently appearing on the cover of Utne Reader. The fabulous “white boyz” Hoch and Wimsatt have become the celebrated icons of the “back packer” set. In every way, shape, and form, these figures are all celebrities. In many regards, these “celebrity Gramscians” are the progeny of the late Nigerian musician and activist Fela Kuti, who wedded his celebrity, proclivity for hedonistic practices, and hatred for corrupt Nigerian leaders, including the late Sunni Abacha, into the global musical movement known as Afro-beat. This was the proverbial “party and bullshit,” with a trenchant and critical political message.

Less the sellouts that they would have been defined as a generation ago, this generation of what can only be called celebrity Gramscians, speaks to the ironies of hip-hop itself—an art form that seeks to neither delegitimize nor undermine the logics of late-stage capitalism, but rather to reorient those logics to serve the interests of its constituents. It’s not a perfect science—I’m not at all suggesting that a CD, or book, or spoken word program broadcast on an AOL-Time Warner network replace the real work in the trenches. But hip-hop, in concert with advances in technology such as the Internet, mp3s, CD burners, and so on, has facilitated a unique moment in which “cultures of resistance” can circulate quickly and widely in ways unknown to previous generations. It is these celebrity Gramscians who are the talking heads—MTV’s TRL and BET’s 106th and Park notwithstanding—of this moment.

For more than a decade, Michael Eric Dyson has been referred to as the “hip-hop intellectual.” Speaking of his earlier years as a teen father and welfare recipient, Dyson notes “to many onlookers, I suppose I looked like a loser, a typical, pathological, self-defeating young black male. That may help explain why I empathize with such youth in the hip-hop generation; because I was one of those brothers that many social scientists and cultural critics easily dismiss and effortlessly, perhaps, literally, write off” (p. 10). Dyson has more than “empathized” with the hip-hop generation; he has represented for them, in the academy, in the pulpit, on the tube, within the lily-whiteness of mainstream America, arguably, more effectively than any of his peers within the higher echelons of “black public intellectual–dom.” While many of his peers have been well positioned to talk about and interpret hip-hop culture for the lily-white masses, dating back to a well-known case involving a bunch of “booty-ass” rappers known as the 2 Live Crew, Dyson has been “organically” connected to hip-hop in ways that many of his peers neither understood nor desired. Dyson has been fond of remarking during his public talks that if he had to choose between high-falutin’ Ivy League Negroes or the “niggas,” he was “representin’ fo’ the niggas.”

The best testament of Dyson’s importance in this regard is the runaway success of his book, Holler If You Hear Me: Searching for Tupac Shakur, which had its roots in Dyson’s previous book, I May Not Get There with You: The True Martin Luther King Jr. Many critics have taken Dyson to task for suggesting that King had much in common with the likes of the late Tupac Shakur or Christopher Wallace, also known as Notorious B.I.G. Dyson responds, “We do not have to deny the huge differences between King and many contemporary black youth, but both have good and bad things in common: how they view women, how they borrow and piece together intellectual sources, how they view sex, and how they confront the evils of racism and ghetto oppression.” Even if Dyson’s claims are not legitimate (I for one think that they are), what is the harm in attempting to build some kind of intellectual or ideological bridge between the civil rights generation and “generation hip-hop”? The possibilities of the bridge were realized with the publication of Holler If You Hear Me, as Dyson understood, better than most, that Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, Louis Farrakhan, Hugh Price, and the contingent of initialized, acronymed organizations (NAACP, SCLC, CBC, etc.) cannot compete with a “dead” Tupac Shakur for the attention and devotion of the hip-hop generation. By tapping into the myth and symbol of Tupac Shakur—this generation’s most fetishized Gramscian intellectual—Dyson has been the most influential of his generation of black public intellectuals among the hip-hop and post–hip-hop generations.

America has never really taken seriously the intellectual capacity of the folks of African descent spread out across its terrain. Despite their successes and their visibility, black thinkers and artists are rarely allowed a “public complexity,” but are reduced to the smallest possible “racial box” in order to sell them and their ideas to a mainstream audience, black and nonblack, who have never thought of “blackness” as being complex at all. Among mainstream audiences who have very little familiarity with the black intellectual tradition and its complexity, a book like John McWhorter’s largely anecdotal Losing the Race: Self-Sabotage in Black America, for example, is hailed as a “brave intellectual achievement,” instead of just a collection of uncritical and often misinformed perceptions about black life. Though Skip Gates and Cornel West have produced groundbreaking scholarship in literary theory and religious philosophy (Gates’s Signifying Monkey is the most accomplished piece of scholarship of his generation), the two are likely more well known, respectively, for narrating a PBS series, Africa, and the “pithy little book” that made West a media star. Though these are folks who are now clearly writing for general, nonscholarly audiences, the mode of authority that they derive in these spaces often anchors them to work that, by definition, is not meant to overly challenge its readers. The small space allowed black public intellectuals was made painfully clear recently when Dyson appeared on C-SPAN’s Booknotes with Brian Lamb to promote Holler If You Hear Me. Admittedly, Lamb’s audience is not the type that would be familiar with Shakur, or Dyson for that matter. But rather than let Dyson do his thing, Lamb reduced him to answering inane questions like, “What’s a homie? . . . Okay, then what’s a ho (whore)? Then what’s a bitch?” These questions reflect a general disregard for the complexity of black life and culture, as well as the intellectual acumen of those who survey and scrutinize it for a living.

Since the publication of his third book, Between God and Gangsta Rap, Dyson has primarily written for general audiences. It is in the context of writing for such audiences that Dyson has been able to have the widest impact on American culture, though he has been subject to often mean-spirited critiques suggesting that intellectually he was “soft.” In the pages of Open Mike: Reflections on Philosophy, Race, Sex, Culture, and Religion, Dyson admits that it is “unavoidable that an academic surrenders depth for breadth in making many public forays into television, radio, or the popular press. But that doesn’t automatically overrule the usefulness of such pursuits. . . . in a word we have to respect the genre” (p. 63). Indeed, some of the missives aimed at Dyson from, say, the likes of Adolph Reed, are informed by “hostility” toward the folks who are able to “take the knowledge, to take the profound rigor that is often suggested in such exercises, and make them available to a broader audience” (p. 63). But Dyson does not need to be defended here. Open Mike stands on its own as a response to all those who suggest that Dyson isn’t erudite enough to represent at the big table. In the discourse of one of the many rhetorical communities in which Dyson flows, Open Mike is a “critical beat-down.”

Scholars who do work in cultural studies are often dismissed by some who believe that “everyday life” is not worthy of scholarly inquiry. But they are also attacked because of old-school, conservative notions about “interdisciplinary scholarship.” Dyson argues that at its core, “prisonindustrial threatens academics who construe their interests narrowly and seek to preserve their intellectual bailiwick” (p. 66). Like so many of us in the field of cultural studies, Dyson was likely born an “interdisciplinarian.” Describing the early development of his intellectual project, Dyson asserts that “there are tensions, and, in fact, these multiple tensions define my intellectual projects and existential identities: tensions between sacred and secular, tensions between the intellectual and the religious, tensions between radical politics and mainstream institutions, tensions between preaching and teaching” (p. 12).

Open Mike speaks to the legitimacy of Dyson’s project, as the book is structured to represent the distinct spheres of Dyson’s intellectual engagement. The opening section features Dyson in the mode of the critical race theorist, while the following sections find Dyson in his well-known guises of cultural critic and religious philosopher. Open Mike is Michael Eric Dyson “unplugged.” In the chapter entitled “Is It Something I Said? Dissident Speech, Plantation Negro Syndrome, and the Politics of Self-Respect,” Dyson announces, “I am an unadulterated black man, ain’t got no shame about it, I’m gon’ represent the African American interests while being critical of them. I’m going to speak to the larger, universal themes of black American culture while being critical of the ways that we fail to live up to our obligation to defend our own people—AND—I’m going to hit themes that the larger American culture can resonate with, because black folk are not orangutans living outside the arch of human experience” (p. 135).

In the words of the pure playas, “Respect the Game.”

Mark Anthony Neal
Assistant Professor, English
State University of New York at Albany