“Y’all Niggaz Better Recognize”: Hip Hop’s Dialectical Struggle for Recognition

You’s a flea, and I’m the big Dogg
I’ll scratch you off my balls with my muthafuckin’ paws
Y’all niggaz better recognize
And see where I’m comin’ from, it’s still East Side till I die
Why ask why? As the world keeps spinning to the D-O-Double-G-Y

Do y’all remember Roxanne? Of course you do: the fictional object of the Kangol Kid’s affections in UTFO’s 1984 hit “Roxanne, Roxanne” will long be remembered as triggering one of the first and most extended “battles” in the history of rap. When Marley Marl and the girl (Lolita Gooden) who came to be known as Roxanne Shanté came out with “Roxanne’s Revenge” the following year, the floodgates opened. Around the country, rappers scrambled to get into the action; more than fifty “response records” came out by the time the whole thing was all over. This incident established once and for all the importance of “battles” to the hip-hop industry.⁴⁷

But are battles just a gimmick, a marketing strategy? Or are they an essential part of what hip hop is all about? What, if anything, do battles signify in hip-hop culture? Let’s break it down, starting from the top. A bit later on, we’ll get some help from the great nineteenth-century German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel.

“I Ain’t No Joke”: Rapping and Battling

One of the central forms of hip-hop culture is rapping—rhyming over beats—and one of the most pervasive motifs is a rapper’s claim to be superior as a rapper to all others on the scene. This form of rap-sodic competitiveness involves explicit challenges to would-be antagonists and insulting comparisons and put-downs of competing rappers. The imagined context of much rhyming is that of an all-out, every-man-for-himself war for supremacy or mastery. Rhymes of this kind involve boasting or bragging swagger, a combination of self-advertisement, harsh disses of other rappers, and accusations that other MC’s try to steal or copy one’s style. As Rakim puts it in “I Ain’t No Joke,” addressing an anonymous MC:

I wake you up and as I stare in your face you seem stunned
Remember me? The one you got your idea from
But soon you start to suffer, the tune’ll get rougher
When you start to stutter, that’s when you had enough of biting
It’ll make you choke, you can’t provoke
You can’t cope, you shoulda broke, because I ain’t no joke.⁴⁸

The battle is a dramatic showdown between two rappers who challenge one another with lyrics such as these and vie to outdo one another in the construction and performance of their raps. Two rappers square off, each claiming to be the best. They can only establish which of their competing claims is valid through a struggle: each is dueling with the other for the status of acknowledged superiority. The winner takes away the glory and the rewards, while the loser loses credibility, since his claim to be the “baddest muthafucka on the mic” has been defeated. A classic example of a battle is that staged between Jay-Z and Nas. Here the lyrics are hard-hitting and take on a fully martial imagery. As Jay-Z raps in “Takeover,” addressing Nas:

The takeover, the break’s over nigga
God MC, me, JayHova
Hey lil’ soldier you ain’t ready for war
R.O.C. too strong for y’all
It’s like bringin’ a knife to a gunfight, pen to a test
Your chest in the line of fire witcha thinass vest
You bringin’ them Boyz II Men, HOW them boys gon’ win?

Later on in the same rap he presents the fantasized result—for his opponent—of their life-and-death struggle: “Get zipped up in plastic when it happens that’s it . . . / They’ll have to hold a mass, put your body in a hole.”⁴⁹

With “Ether” Nas responds in kind, opening the track with the sound of automatic gunfire and several background invocations of “Fuck Jay-Z!” The track is dripping with venom and anger toward Jigga for having dissed “God’s son”:

You a fan, a phony, a fake, a pussy, a Stan
I still whip your ass, you thirty-six in a karate class?
You Taebo ho, tryin’a’ work it out, you tryin’a’ get brolic?
Ask me if I’m tryin’a’ kick knowledge
Nah, I’m tryin’a’ kick the shit you need to learn, though
That ether, that shit that make your soul burn slow.⁵⁰

This example vividly illustrates the vehemence, the emotional charge, and the violence of expression that battles often produce. But all that still leaves open the questions—are these guys for real, or are they only fronting? What do battles have to do with the heart, the spirit of hip hop? To help answer these questions, let’s turn to a philosophical treatment of human struggles formulated during the revolutionary storm that swept Europe some two hundred years ago.

“You’re a Sucker MC”: The Struggle for Recognition

One of the great themes of the “western” philosophical tradition —some would say an essential item in philosophy’s tool-box of concepts—is dialectic, a pattern of progressive development through opposition and struggle. The O.G. of modern dialectic was George Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, whose first and greatest work is The Phenomenology of Spirit (1807). A key chapter is entitled “Independence and Dependence of Self-Consciousness: Master and Slave.” This chapter has two closely connected topics: first, it relates a crucial moment in the growth of human self-consciousness—that is, of human freedom—and second, it is an account of the most basic form of domination—the relation of master and slave.

Self-consciousness is, for Hegel, a primary stage in human development. Self-consciousness is, most simply, consciousness of self, that is, the awareness of oneself as aware, or, in other words, reflective self-awareness. This is, indeed, for Hegel and many others, what distinguishes humans from other conscious beings, such as other animals. This idea is explicitly affirmed by Talib Kweli, when he raps in “K.O.S. (Determination)”:

I feel the rage of a million niggaz locked inside a cage
At exactly which point do you start to realize
That life without knowledge is death in disguise?
That’s why Knowledge Of Self is like life after death
Apply it to your life, let destiny manifest.⁵¹

Hegel claims that self-consciousness becomes certain of itself only through a process he called the “struggle for recognition.” There is only one way that any—say my—self-consciousness can prove itself, can show itself that it is true, accurate awareness of myself rather than deluded. That can happen only if my self-consciousness is verified by the acknowledgment of another self-consciousness—if I am recognized for what I claim to be by someone else. So the impulse toward self-consciousness gives rise to the demand for recognition. And that demand is made by both parties: my demand that you recognize me is met by your demand that I recognize you. Each party to the struggle puts forward a demand for recognition—a demand for respect from an acknowledged equal. Thus, the demand for recognition gives rise to a struggle between two self-consciousnesses. Hegel says, “[T]he relation of the two self-conscious individuals is such that they prove themselves and each other through a life-and-death struggle. They must engage in this struggle, for they must raise their certainty of being for themselves to truth.”⁵²

But why do the demands give rise to a struggle—why can’t they both simply accept one another’s demands? That’s because of the very essence of self-consciousness. For Hegel, self-consciousness is necessarily self-determining, that is, autonomous or free. Why? Well, think of it this way: consciousness is always consciousness of something—an object—on the part of the one who is conscious—a subject. If I’m conscious of my phone ringing the hook from “Hey, Ya!”, I am the subject—the one who is conscious—and the phone ringing is the object—the thing outside of me that I am conscious of. The content of my consciousness in this sort of case is determined by something outside of me—whatever the object of consciousness is. But in the case of self-consciousness, the object of consciousness isn’t outside myself, it is myself. The subject of consciousness and its object are one and the same thing—myself. My self-consciousness ought, therefore, to be determined solely by myself, or, as Hegel puts it, for itself.

Maybe you’re thinking: this all sounds okay, but what does it have to do with hip hop? Well, consider this classic example from Run-D.M.C.:

You try to bite lines, but rhymes are mine
You’s a sucker MC in a pair of Calvin Kleins
Comin’ from the wackest part of town
Tryin’ to rap up but you can’t get down
You don’t even know your English, your verb or noun
You’re just a sucker MC, you sad face clown.⁵³

D.J. Run’s rap is a series of put-downs, addressing various features of his presumed antagonist’s self—not just his style, but his lack of originality, bad taste in clothes, his “wack” neighborhood, his ignorance of English, and his inauthenticity (“you can’t get down”). The rap has the effect of raising Run himself to a level of dominance in relation to his antagonist in virtually every respect. Indeed, this superiority is recognized: the “sucker M.C.” shows himself to be fan by the fact that he bites Run’s lines. In short, though this is not a battle rap, and certainly not a “struggle to the death,” the pose is unmistakable: “I’m ready to dominate you totally, suckas!” While it’s true that a rap battle is not literally a life-and-death struggle, it is the closest thing to a cultural—musical—form of a life-and-death struggle, and the stakes of a rap battle have a similar all-or-nothing character to them. Both parties to a hip-hop battle claim the same prize, and only one can walk away with it. And crucially the prize is a matter of recognition, the acknowledgement of technical superiority, and the respect that goes with it.

But why does the struggle for recognition have to be a life-and-death struggle? Since my demand for recognition is that you recognize me as a self-consciousness, it must be a demand that I am seen, and recognized, as purely self-determining. Nothing, and no one, can dictate to me. For that to be true, I must be able to eliminate, or dominate, anyone or anything that threatens my self-determination, my control over my situation. In relation to you, from whom I demand recognition, I can only become self-determining if I can impose my terms on you, gain domination over you. For if you are in a position to determine the conditions of my existence, then I will not be fully self-determining in the way I need to be. But my demand for recognition is matched by an identical demand on your part. And so the struggle is joined, and it is a struggle for domination. What Hegel’s account requires, then, is that self-consciousness must involve a struggle for recognition, and that struggle for recognition must become a struggle for domination and, ultimately, a life-and-death struggle. “It is only through staking one’s life that freedom is won.”⁵⁴

Now a life-and-death struggle ends only when one of the contenders is decisively defeated, and even put to death. In the struggle for recognition, however, the death of one of the parties would represent a loss for the victor: If his antagonist is actually killed, then the crucial goal of the victor—recognition—escapes him. His opponent is no longer able to provide recog-nition since he no longer exists.⁵⁵ So the only satisfactory resolution of the struggle is the complete domination, but not the destruction, of the vanquished by the victor. That’s why Hegel thinks the struggle for recognition must lead to the relation of master and slave. And this situation—that of achieved mastery and enforced subordination—is earnestly depicted in the lyrics of innumerable battle raps.

But this situation, though resolving one phase of struggle, inaugurates a new one. Though it appears to guarantee a kind of freedom and self-determination to the victor at the expense of the vanquished, this, it turns out, is an illusion. The new situation, which at first appears to be a resolution of the original opposition, is in fact only a new stage in the working out of that opposition.

You may have noticed earlier something about the situation of self-consciousness: the demand that I be completely self-determining is already compromised by the very condition that I am demanding that another self-consciousness recognize me as such. The demand for recognition is, on the face of it, an admission of a kind of dependence on the other! The entire situation or problem of recognition is one that, in this sense, is unstable or subversive of its own conditions of existence.

In the master-slave dynamic neither party is truly free. The master is not free because he is dependent on the slave for recognition of his mastery,⁵⁶ and sometimes for his very existence as well—for the slave typically produces the means of subsistence for her master and is the foundation of his wealth. The slave is not free because he is not recognized as such by the master. And so the very situation of mastery comes to seem a kind of slavery all its own. Here is another example of dialectical “reversal”—of one thing turning into its opposite. As Andre from OutKast puts it on “Liberation”: “Can’t worry ’bout what a nigga think, now see / That’s Liberation and baby I want it / Can’t worry ’bout what anotha nigga think / Now that’s Liberation and baby I want it.”⁵⁷

Unfortunately, liberation cannot come from simply refusing the struggle for recognition. Refusing to seek recognition from those who present themselves as one’s peers can easily become a self-defeating attitude that rejects the world altogether. Sometimes this attitude is presented as reciprocating the world’s rejection—“fuck ya’ll too, then.” Here the individual self-consciousness becomes painfully aware of the opposition between its demands for freedom and fulfillment and the resistant surrounding world. This attitude is exemplified by Tupac Shakur in “Me Against the World”:

The question is will I live? No one in the world loves me
I’m headed for danger, don’t trust strangers
Put one in the chamber whenever I’m feelin’ this anger
Don’t wanna make excuses, cause this is how it is
What’s the use unless we’re shootin’ no one notices the youth
It’s just me against the world baby.⁵⁸

The attempt to opt out of the struggle for recognition becomes, ultimately, suicidal....

Gangsta and Rap’s Struggle for Recognition

The importance of the theme of freedom in hip hop might also suggest part of an explanation for the rise and prominence of gangsta rap. Gangsta was, for a crucial period, the emblematic cutting-edge style of rap, with which the whole of hip-hop culture was sometimes identified. One way of understanding the sub-genre of gangsta rap is as an extreme, exaggerated metaphoric form of the struggle for recognition. Gangsta is an extended metaphor that highlights a violent, no-holds-barred, sudden-death form of the “battle” in stylized, dramatic narratives. Thus, “gangsta” makes sense as a metaphor for the core impulse of the music and the culture—the struggle for recognition and the theme of freedom. As N.W.A puts it in “Gangsta Gangsta”:

Since I was a youth, I smoked weed out
Now I’m the muthafucka that ya read about
Takin’ a life or two that’s what the hell I do,
You don’t like how I’m livin’? Well fuck you!
This is a gang, and I’m in it
My man Dre’ll fuck you up in a minute
With a right left, right left you’re toothless
And then you say ‘goddamn they ruthless!’⁵⁹

The ruthlessness of the gang is the proof and guarantee of the freedom—in the sense of independence, self-determination—of the rapper who is a member of it. Here the struggle for recognition takes a form that openly acknowledges that the individual’s freedom involves dependence on the group—in this case the gang. The recognition of an individual rapper’s reality turns out to involve the recognition of the objective—that is, real-world—conditions of his or her life. These are, first of all, that the rapper’s life takes place within the gang; but also, secondly, that the gang’s life is part of the life of society. This new demand is for a socially and historically grounded understanding of one’s social existence. And this social context gangsta rap points toward, in its own way, as exemplified in Ice Cube’s backhanded tribute to the suburbs: “Cock the hammer then crackle, smile / Take me to your house, pal / Got to the house, my pockets got fat, see / Crack the safe, got the money and the jewelry.”⁶⁰

Ice Cube’s planned trip to the suburbs represents another kind of demand for recognition. This is no longer solely the individual rapper’s struggle for recognition as an individual possessed of talent, imagination, and the skills capable of projecting a compelling, distinctive vision. Here that demand is coupled with the demand that those in “the suburbs” recognize the undeniable connection between their mode of life and that imposed upon those in “the cities.” Hip hop’s struggle for recognition becomes a demand, and sometimes a plea, that America open its eyes to the realities under its noses. It’s that reality that gives the harshness to hard-core lyrics:

Lights turned off and it’s the third month the rent is late
Thoughts of being homeless, crying ‘til you hyperventilate
Despair permeates the air then sets in your ear
The kids play with that one toy they learned how to share
Coming home don’t never seem to be a celebration
Bills they piled up on the coffee table like they’re decorations.⁶¹

This second level of the cultural struggle for recognition that defines hip hop is the struggle for recognition of the legacies and cultural traditions from which hip hop has sprung. First and foremost this means the legacy of the urban black and latino/a youth who gave birth to this form of cultural creativity. That legacy is one of affirmative creative achievement and remarkable survival in conditions of special oppression and often of desperation. But this struggle for the recognition of the historical experience of the makers of hip hop is a more protracted and difficult struggle for recognition than that of any individual artist. The stakes are higher, and the struggle is a collective or group struggle, not an individual one.

Hip Hop and “This Makin’ Dollars Shit”

But which group identity is most relevant to hip hop’s struggle for recognition? The two stories most often given both stem, indirectly, from Hegel. Hegel’s philosophy of history is based on the idea of a succession of (world-historic) peoples, or more specifically, nations. Nations wage, among themselves, a sort of life-and-death struggle for recognition; in each era one nation plays a dominant part in the progress of civilization. According to Hegel’s account, the pinnacle of world historical development is achieved by—you guessed it—the Prussian state. Here his account of history concludes. Hegel doesn’t hesitate to celebrate the achievements of European peoples at the expense of the people and nations of Asia, who he puts on the lowest rung of historical development, and those of Africa, who he regards as having no role whatsoever to play in the development of history.⁶²

Other philosophers, influenced by Hegel, have provided conceptions of history that bear more directly on the project of accounting for hip hop’s social conditions of existence. Near the beginning of his development as twentieth-century theorist of black liberation, W.E.B. Du Bois put forward a version of the Hegelian conception of history according to which “the history of the world is the history, not of individuals, but of groups, not of nations, but of races, and he who ignores or seeks to override the race idea in human history ignores and overrides the central thought of all history.”⁶³ Accordingly, Du Bois identified races as the main parties to the struggle for recognition on a historical scale. The racial conception has its share of adherents among rap’s most well-known practitioners, as evidenced by these lyrics from Public Enemy:

I’m like Garvey
So you can see B
It’s like that, I’m like Nat
Leave me the hell alone
If you don’t think I’m a brother
Then check the chromosomes.⁶⁴

Another, in some ways more drastic, revision of Hegel’s account of history was made by Karl Marx. He argued, famously, that in analyzing everything in terms of self-consciousness and spirit, Hegel was missing a most basic truth about human social life, which is organized around doing, and specifically making, rather than thinking. Real human activity is, according to Marx, first of all the production of the means of survival—of food, shelter, clothing, the essentials needed to satisfy the most basic human needs. Humans must eat before they can think. Marx developed a “materialist” conception of history, reshaping the Hegelian dialectic of nations and peoples into a class-based conception of human history. As he and Frederick Engels famously put it in their Communist Manifesto, “The history of all hitherto existing societies is the history of class struggles.” ⁶⁵ Even though the goods that societies depend on for survival are produced collectively by virtually the entire population, that production process is controlled by a small powerful elite who therefore control the product—the wealth—as well. And so history is the process of the struggle of opposing classes—the haves and the have-nots, the capitalists and the workers.

Putting hip hop into the context of this history, this struggle, is not much of a stretch. As Ice Cube’s fantasized trip to the suburbs indicates, the struggle for recognition often involves the struggle for a “piece of the action,” since the demand for recognition is the demand for a kind of freedom, and freedom in a capitalist society is closely related to the ownership of wealth. Since, as Wu-Tang famously put it, “Cash Rules Everything Around Me” in a capitalist society, he who has the cash is in a position to rule others. But then the demand for recognition of a group as oppressed generates a related demand for redistribution of wealth. But the kind of “redistribution” of wealth advocated—if that’s the right word—in AmeriKKKa’s Most Wanted is meaningful at most on an individual level, and doesn’t serve to overcome the basic condition most individuals in an “acquisitive society” confront. Indeed, that acquisitiveness is itself identified as a part of the problem when Talib Kweli says:

Supply and the demand it’s all capitalism
Niggaz don’t sell crack cause they like to see blacks smoke
Niggaz sell crack cause they broke
My battle lyrics get conscious minds provoked and ghetto passes
revoked
’Cause we surrounded by the evil, you know that the people’s minds is feeble
They believe in it, even if it don’t make sense, this makin’ dollars shit
Don’t take a scholar to see what’s goin’ on around you.⁶⁶

Indeed, this “makin’ dollars shit” comes to rule everything in a developed capitalist society, where everything becomes a matter of buying and selling. So, in the development of hip hop, the practice of battling, originating, back in the day, in the schoolyard cipher—informal competitive “rap sessions” with rappers taking turns exhibiting their skillz, turns into the institutionalized form of the “beef” once the rule of cash takes over. When that happens, the cipher show-down becomes the beef driven by corporate profit imperatives and exploitative business deals as much as the petty jealousies that are their pretext. As Mos Def puts it in “The Rape Over,” explicitly challenging the claims of Jay-Z’s “Takeover”:

Old white men is runnin’ this rap shit,
Corporate bosses is runnin’ this rap shit . . .
We poke out our asses for a chance to cash in.⁶⁷

And so we return to the problem, initially posed in a Hegelian framework, of “conscious minds,” of how minds become conscious, and how this contributes to passing beyond “the evil” of “this makin’ dollars shit.” This is where the dialectic has brought us, and where the struggle for freedom, in its full, and fullest sense, now stands.⁶⁸