After . . . Word!

The Philosophy of the Hip-Hop Battle

MARCYLIENA MORGAN

 

 

 

As the essays in this volume demonstrate, hip hop not only invokes many ideas and arguments from the Western philosophical tradition, it is rooted in its own classic battles of philosophy. Although hip-hop philosophy developed from many influences, I first became aware of its importance in the 1980s. It did not come to me in the form of lyrical competition, displays of unfathomable skills, or demonstrations of devotion to the power of The Word. Instead, it came to me in the form of kung-fu movies. On Saturdays from 12:00 p.m. to 6:00 p.m., the local television station presented a series of Hong Kong films they aptly named Kung Fu Saturday. I was treated to six hours of uninterrupted battles of will, martial arts skills, betrayal, revenge, and lessons of honor and integrity! I learned about styles of fighting and that some styles, though lethal, have subtlety and wit, while others are simply brutal, blunt, and deadly. Battle or fighting styles were associated with different houses or crews. Each house was guided by sets of philosophical principles that had to do with the individual, the inner self, the mind, the body, desire and much more.

I watched warriors involved in endless philosophical teachings and contests coupled with practice sessions, with crouching, kicking, swooshing sounds and arms waving and momentary breaks when the “master” would query the novice about the philosophical lesson of the day. Those working under different philosophical schools/houses/crews and masters practiced against imaginary foes and battled for the future of humanity. Often warriors from honorable houses used their bodies and embodied stereotypes to subvert and confront power with a style that recognized the opponents every move. I was not prepared for the power shown by women in these films. They often first appeared demure and “traditional”—serving men and accepting their indifference and abuse. But when trouble developed in the form of intruders, they would channel Audre Lorde’s “power of the erotic” and throw their (always) long hair back, or put in a bun, jump over any object in their way, and kick some serious butt!²⁵⁵

In the midst of my education, I attended a Kung Fu movie festival in Chinatown. The line to the movie theater was a block long. It was composed of a variety of teenage males representing virtually every ethnicity; and many wore clothing representing the latest hip-hop style. As they waited to enter, they practiced rhymes and dance moves and gathered in circles/ciphers, incorporating style/house/crew battle and philosophy within their own sense of place, representation, identity, and culture. Their assessments and critiques of skills were ruthless and righteous. While everybody was kung fu fighting, they channeled the words of Wu-Tang: “Take in my energy, breath and know the rest. ’Cause the good die young and the hard die best.”²⁵⁶ They prepared for battles that were not simply about winning, but based on principles and philosophies about contestations: what these battles mean, what causes them, when it is time to engage in them, why one loses, why one wins, and how one wins.

In the late 1970s, when the elements of hip hop—MC rhyming, b-boying, graffiti art, and deejaying—congealed in the South Bronx, youth brought back home something bigger than hip hop. Youth of color in urban communities suddenly enjoyed a renaissance of ideas and exchanges about their lives, their communities, their neighborhoods and about those who wanted to control them and held them in disdain. Much more than CNN, hip hop brought back the search for reality and truth within a modern, highly advanced world of ideas, technology and modes of communication. For many youth, hip hop conducts its real business in the counterpublic where it is actualized through a central edict that is constantly repeated and reframed: represent, recognize, and come correct.

Hip hop did not begin in the Bronx, but in the ritual expression of a particular generation at a particular time reflecting the same state of crisis emerging from their neighborhoods. The development of hip-hop culture is an instance of what Victor Turner considers a passage through a threshold state into a ritual world that embodies crisis. The threshold state is a power ritual where there is structure and anti-structure—official positions and local positions.²⁵⁷ In retrospect, the South Bronx was the perfect location for the birth of a hip-hop nation, for in popular and dominant culture it was considered a wasteland and described as full of death rather than life, despair rather than hope, hate rather than love.²⁵⁸ In fact, the youth of the South Bronx were determined to salvage themselves from their crisis state. From its threshold beginnings, hip hop was an artistic and cultural phenomenon that wrote the most rejected and despised youth back into public and popular culture with an unforeseen script. Hip hop not only had something to say, it did it in such a way that it achieved the Brechtian ideal of art as politics as it thrived on the tension between the mirror and description of society and the events and the dynamic depiction of its contradictions and injustices.²⁵⁹ Without formal training, urban youth created a new visual, poetic, and dance aesthetic, raised philosophical questions, introduced new technologies and remolded old ones into a powerful ‘workforce’ of art.

Though the refrain represent, recognize, come correct may suggest essentialist notions of cultural membership and proof of citizenship, it is seldom the case because identity and unity in hip hop are the result of what is referred to as ‘flow’. In their introduction to this volume, Tommie Shelby and Derrick Darby emphasize the importance of flow through their riff on the Raekwon quote “That shit ain’t easy.” Flow in hip hop refers to consciously moving within a chaotic context of fragmentation, dislocation, disruption, and contradiction to create balance, unity, and collective identity. One enters the chaos, battle, cipher in order to represent, recognize, and come correct. A collaborative relationship is created where the artist serves as the audience’s envoy, representing its intentions, consciousness, and pleasure. In this respect, the artist embodies the signifier sign and the signified one, the form and the concept. Yet, as artists work to identify, define, and refine their conception of truth and the real, they do so through often highly politicized contestations and confrontations about how to talk about and represent reality and the truth.²⁶⁰ Once the “real” and socially critical context is established, artists may enter what Csikszentmihalyi calls flow state as they reach contentment and are fully absorbed in the activity.²⁶¹ It’s in this sense that hip hop’s ritual of respect and collaboration undermines and mines the status quo by not only exposing hegemony, but recklessly teasing it as well. On the surface, artists appear to stalk, boast, and deride. In reality, they are arguing for inclusion on their terms. Hip hop, and its often-epic quest for what is real, is part of Foucault’s technology of power and a battlefield where symbols, histories, politics, art, life, and all aspects of the social system are contested. It is not an endless Nietzschean search for truth, but a determination to expose it and creatively represent all of its manifestations.

As the philosophers in this volume have shown, to represent in hip hop is not simply to identify with a city, neighborhood, school, and so on. It is also a discursive turn—it is the symbols, memory, participants, objects, and details that together produce art of the space and time. Hip hop not only disrupts many classical disciplines and approaches to knowledge, but challenges theories of modernity by publicly holding them in contempt. This level of representation is accomplished through a fantastical and complex system of indexicality—literally pointing to and shouting out places, people and events when an interaction is framed around important referential symbols and contexts. In this case, shout outs index and remind us of contextual layers that then invoke related contexts and ideologies. In the end, only those who know the reference can manage to understand what is being said in the present and in the refurbished framework of the hip-hop world.²⁶² Through this system of representation, hip hop endorses its cultural insiders and the particular set of interpretative beliefs and practices that are in play.

To recognize what is hip hop challenges the participants to both contribute their skills and analyses within this value system. It is also to acknowledge that there is a dominant method of evaluation that is hostile to and suspicious of hip hop’s system of fair play as well. Similarly, to come correct requires constant artistic and personal development, study, analysis, and evaluation. The motives are subversive, the purpose is to reset the world for possibilities and openness.²⁶³

The survival of hip hop depends on a counterpublic sphere and counterlanguage that, to paraphrase the political scientist Michael Dawson, is a product of both the historically imposed separation of the working class, women, blacks, and other minorities from whites throughout most of American history and the embracing of the autonomy of each group as both an institutional principle and an ideological orientation.²⁶⁴ Hip-hop, artistic expression is not to be valued according to the level of appreciation exhibited by those outside of the cultural framework but within hip hop itself. In that respect, the art is not outside of day-to-day experience. Consequently, the critic, scholar, and especially the academic philosopher are always under suspicion.

However, the enduring emphasis on “keeping it real” is not necessarily evidence of a modernist sensibility. In fact, hip hop identities are not fractured or always intended as resistant—though they may be interpreted as such. Indeed, adolescent identities are often impulsive and not readily identifiable in relation to personal, social, cultural and political motivation. That is, youth identities are framed within a consistent set of core characteristics and standards that are simultaneously sensitive to the complexities of place, time, and generation.²⁶⁵ These characteristics include socialization into hip-hop values, beliefs, and attitudes; knowledge of local, personal, and foundational hip-hop history; a common language, mode of interaction, and discourse style; and shared beliefs about representation and evaluation of ability. It’s in this sense that hip-hop culture aggressively confronts what Cornel West calls the “ignoble paradox of modernity [that] has yielded deep black allegiance to the promises of American democracy.”²⁶⁶ Hip hop calls into being—through words, sounds, and style of discourse—a matrix of tropes that connect and reframe cultural, historical, social, and political contexts that reintroduce not only events, but narratives about activities and attitudes that existed as part of the past event. Artists express agency, constantly undergo change, and inevitably express the right of all youth who participate in hip-hop culture to assert identities that incorporate race, gender, social class, location, and philosophy. So instead of being fixed, hip hop identities are resolute. Instead of being fluid, they flow.

The introduction of hip hop brought to light the visceral sense of pleasure and power experienced by listeners and fans when artists perform at the highest level of artistic skill. In turn, each hip-hop era is marked by philosophical battles over the nature of representing and identity, the notion of recognizing and truth and sense and reference, and the notion of comin’ correct and intentionality and power. Similarly, the hip-hop mantra “keepin’ it real” represents the quest for the coalescence and interface of ever-shifting art, politics, representation, performance and individual accountability that reflects all aspects of youth experience.

Hip-hop youth battle through the theoretical houses of Michel Foucault, Mikhail Bakhtin, Judith Butler, Antonio Gramsci, Jürgen Habermas, and more, “shouting out,” testing, and challenging theories and philosophies, trying to bring it back to their young bodies in motion, trying to keep theory real. Instead of Descartes’s split, they spit rhymes as they reason about their existence. They channel classic old school questions like those presented by Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell as they explain “Ain’t Nothing Like the Real Thing” and by Nick Ashford and Valerie Simpson as they check their flow and demand, “Is it Still Good to You?” Hip hop is a battle. It is a philosophical fight exploding with overwhelming expectation, opportunity, and challenges that affect real lives. In this battle, there is no such thing as a dead philosopher—just one that has not been resurrected yet to make sure they pay their dues to the flow of hip hop.