Pragmatism, Rap, and Art

One of the most wonderful and deeply revolutionary aspects of hip hop is the challenging of this dualism. Many of the more thoughtful MCs claim not only to be creative artists but also philosophers; and they see their artistic expression of truth as part and parcel of a political struggle to achieve greater economic, social, political, and cultural power for the core hip-hop constituency of African-American society. This undermining of traditional divisions between artistic culture, science, and politics is part of what I regard as rap’s deep “philosophy of the mix” which is expressed, of course, also in its aesthetic techniques of sampling and its references to so many aspects of popular and political culture.

The notion that reality is fundamentally mixed and multiple rather than pure and uniform provides a contrast to Plato’s view of true reality as pure, ideal, permanent, and changeless Forms. If rap has an underlying metaphysics, it is that reality is a field of change and flow rather than static permanence. This emphasis on the changing and malleable nature of the real (which is highlighted in rap’s frequent time tags and its popular idiom of “knowing what time it is”) and on the mixed pluralism of reality rap shares with the philosophy of American pragmatism, first made famous by William James and John Dewey, and later embraced in different ways by the great African-American philosophers W.E.B. Du Bois and Alain Locke. Pragmatism also shares with rap the rejection of the rigid divisions of art and reality, body and soul, culture and politics.⁶⁹

Pragmatism and rap understand art not as an ethereal product of supernatural imagination, but as an embodied activity emerging from natural needs and desires, from organic rhythms and satisfactions, and also from the social functions that naturally emerge from and reciprocally influence the biological. From this pragmatic point of view, art is desired and desirable because it enhances life, by making life more meaningful, more pleasurable, more worth living. Art intensifies experience by engaging reality and by giving expression to the most powerful human drives. One of these basic drives that art seeks to satisfy is the quest for meaningful form. But another is the drive to achieve and express power. This second drive clearly relates to the phenomenon of violence, which is undeniably not only a feature of reality but also a particularly prominent and problematic feature in the specific reality and image of hip hop. This track will offer a brief analysis of the concept of violence in terms of its relation to art in general and rap in particular.

Violence and the Art of Keeping It Real

The most basic “dictionary definition” of violence is simply “swift and intense force or power.” By this definition most good works of art commit violence. The sculptor who chisels, the ballet dancer who leaps, the shrieking soprano playing the Queen of the Night in Mozart’s Magic Flute, all exhibit physical violence, just as do hip-hop artists, whether they are tagging graffiti, whirling and popping in breakdancing, frantically scratching vinyl as DJs, or busting rhymes and moves as MCs. Great art further works through violence not simply by representing it as in Oedipus, King Lear, Crime and Punishment, or The Stranger, but by effecting it in the flow of our experience: through the swift, enthralling power of aesthetic experience, which even when not pleasant is relished for its explosive intensity. So much of our routine experience of life is humdrum and boring that we relish art for sweeping us away by the power of its intense experiences.

Violence has of course another meaning, that of harm or injury resulting from its force. Art’s basic logic in the economy of human life is to gratify the needs and pleasures of violence in the first sense while reducing the damages of the second. Aristotle’s theory of catharsis, though focused on pity and fear, presents the standard aesthetic solution: art is valuable because it allows dangerous, yet gratifying emotions to be enjoyed but then exorcised by expressing them in a safe, because fictional world of mimesis, a realm clearly distinguished from the real. Aristotle, though defending art, thus joins Socrates and Plato and the main tradition of aesthetics that opposes art to real life and seeks to keep it in a realm apart.

Pragmatist and rap aesthetics cannot accept this solution, since we insist on art’s deep connection to life, its use as a tool for structuring one’s ethics and lifestyle, a means of political engagement to raise consciousness and promote greater freedom. Art is a mere distraction if it is separated from life. But if art is deeply violent, if its power cannot be confined to the quarantined white cube of gallery space or the soft padded dungeons of movie theatres, then its violence should emerge in real life—and it does. The problem is when that violence becomes more destructive than life-enhancing.

Street Violence and Dead Bodies

No contemporary genre demonstrates this danger more than rap music, with which my version of pragmatist aesthetics has been closely linked, for better and for worse.⁷⁰ For more than the last fifteen years, rap has become America’s prime cultural symbol of violence, demonized in the menacing figure of unruly young black men from the ghetto, targeted by the media, the police, and even a long list of premier politicians including our recent presidents. The media history of rap is a history defined by violence, stretching from rap’s media discovery with the “wildin” of the 1988 Central Park rape, to the 1992 L.A. riots, to the Snoop Doggy Dogg indictment for murder in late 1993, and more recently to the seemingly related drive-by killings of two young rap superstars Tupac Shakur and the Notorious B.I.G., who were famous not only for their music but for the violent feud between them that heightened rap’s longstanding East Coast-West Coast rivalry.

First shot in a 1994 New York City incident for which he blamed the Notorious B.I.G., Tupac was murdered on September 7th, 1996, in Las Vegas, while in the car with his manager from Death Row Records. The Notorious B.I.G. (born in Brooklyn as Christopher Wallace) was gunned down only six months later, March 9th, 1997, after a rap party in L.A., where his presence had provoked disapproval. Only twenty-four, he was buried several days later in New York, and even his funeral erupted into street violence in which the police were involved and made several arrests. All this made an eerie introduction to his new double-album long ago planned for release on what turned out to be the very next week after his funeral and uncannily titled Life After Death. Its sales were stunningly lively. Snoop Doggy Dogg’s murder indictment enabled his debut album to be sold out before it was even issued. In August 2004, while serving a prison sentence for assault, criminal possession of a weapon, and firing shots into a crowd, the rapper Shyne released a new LP Godfather Buried Alive, and it proved the highest selling new entry on the week it debuted. For Shyne, it was clear that his criminal “street cred” contributed to sales of his music: “It brings a bit more reality and a bit more truth to it.”⁷¹ Corporate wisdom has long known that violence sells; but this, of course, is not simply a “rap thing,” just think of action movies or the arms trade.

Aesthetic Violence and Consciousness Raising

Long linked to destructive street violence, rap also displays aesthetic violence. The swift, intense force of its beat, its very methods of sampling and scratching records, its aggressively loud, confrontational style give rap the aesthetic vigor that raises the energy and consciousness of its listeners. Rap’s early motto of “Bring the Noise” was an auditory declaration of violent protest. Violence of some kind was recognized as necessary for breaking the conspiracy of silence and complacency about economic oppression, police violence, and other social ills of the black inner city. Aesthetic violence was needed to take bad records apart so that their tracks could be made into something better.

Ever aware of its violent heritage, rap has also developed a strong tradition devoted to the theme of “overcoming violence.” Already in 1987, the rap community launched a “Stop the Violence” movement under the leadership of KRS-One whose hit by that title was inspired by the killing of his rap mentor and partner Scott LaRock, shot while trying to stop a street fight. KRS-One is still actively continuing this tradition today, having been joined by some other East Coast knowledge rappers like Guru, Jeru the Damaja, and Dead Prez. Unsurprisingly, this tradition gets far less attention from the media, since destructive violence makes more sensationalist news, pandering to conditioned consumer interests and expectations.

But the “Stop the Violence” movement in rap is worth our close attention. Not only because it will help us avoid the philosophical habit of speaking in abstract generalities rather than reporting on concrete realities, but also because rap culture knows a lot about violence; and it makes, in its own vernacular way, some very complex and astute points.⁷²

Since its very aesthetic is based on the positive violence of swift, intense energy, rap’s quest to overcome violence must reject the standard, one-sided solution that violence should be altogether abandoned and simply replaced by an ethos of pure sweetness and tender love. Knowledge rap shows that the problem of violence cannot be so simple. Violence cannot simply be viewed and eradicated as an absolute, unnecessary evil; it is deeply entrenched in our evolutionary make-up as a necessary tool for survival and still has its positive expressions and uses. The problem of overcoming violence is not, then, a question of exterminating it altogether but of channeling and managing it, of separating the good violence that improves realities from the violence that does more harm than good; of using good violence to overcome bad violence.

Stop the (Bad) Violence!

Let me now get down to particulars by citing some lines from KRS-One and other rappers to illustrate these issues. The first point made in the original “Stop the Violence” (By All Means Necessary) anthem was that rap violence must be seen in a context of much wider, politically institutionalized, violence in Reagan’s “Star Wars” America: “They create missiles, while families eat gristle.”

The second point the song makes is that the destructive killing connected with the rap milieu neither expresses true power nor strengthens rap but only weakens it. This violence, KRS-One argues, does not even frighten the white police force who are happy to see black brothers killing each other and thus discrediting their culture instead of directing their rage on their true enemies: establishment society and the rap community’s own bad habits:

We gotta . . . stop the violence,
When you’re in a club you come to chill out,
Not watch someone’s blood just spill out.
That’s just what these other people want to see
Some wish to destroy the scene called hip hop
Hip hop will surely decay.
If we as a people don’t stand up and say
“Stop the Violence!” “Stop the Violence!”

This title phrase is shouted out here (and elsewhere as the song’s refrain) with great vocal power to underline its importance through violent intensity, but also to symbolically outshout rappers who tend to glorify black crime. The auditory message is that one has to be violent to overcome violence, at least in a culture where violence is so deeply entrenched—as perhaps it is in all human cultures but certainly in America and its urban ghettoes.

As its lyrics constantly insist, rap is an art that gets its appeal by “keeping it real.” This theme of making art true to life is very familiar; what distinguishes rap, making it both attractive and risky, is its implication of the converse idea: that one makes life true to art. This is most attractive to young people looking for an aesthetic model to give style to their lives. Hip hop, as I argue in Practicing Philosophy, captures its fans not simply as music, but as a whole philosophy of life, an ethos that involves clothes, a style of talk and walk, a political attitude, and often a philosophical posture of asking hard questions and critically challenging established views and values. For so-called knowledge rappers like KRS-One, this philosophical life includes metaphysics, political protest, vegetarianism, monogamy, and strict self-discipline. For the gangster style—powerfully established by West Coast rapper Ice-T with his 1991 album OG, i.e., Original Gangster and linked with rap’s street reality as signified in his Return of the Real—the rap reality of both art and life instead demands pimping, drug-dealing, high-living, and mobster-like killings. By blurring the boundaries of art and life, rap’s stakes are high. The violence cannot be confined to a purely fictional aesthetic realm, quarantined from life. How then is violence to be handled and its dangerous forms overcome?

KRS-One’s efforts to resolve this question start with the Darwinian premise that violent struggle is so deep in our human social nature that it cannot be simply uprooted or suppressed; nor can it be confined to the ghetto neighborhoods. Violence can however be channeled into symbolic, artistic forms that are more productive than destructive in their hardcore power, as KRS-One insists, highlighting the forceful reality of his message: “So when I kick the rhyme I represent how I feel / The sacred street art of keeping it real.”⁷³

Underlying the power of this art is the basic struggle for survival and for social recognition and prestige, converted from brute murderous cannibalism to victories of symbolic glory through artistic prowess:

With all this technology above and under,
Humanity still hunts down one another.
Rappers display artistic cannibalism through lyricism.
We fight each other over rhythm.
Through basic animal instincts we think,
So the battle for mental territory is glory.

KRS-One’s premise here is that despite technological advancement and ideologies of peace, humanity retains an instinctual heritage of violence that was (and perhaps still is) necessary for survival. The key is to express this violence in hardcore poetic expression, in symbolic, lyrical, and rhythmic combat which will not destroy bodies but sharpen the mind, animate the spirit, and create a glorious artistic tradition that can help raise the cultural pride, social profile, and economic potential of African Americans. Guru advocates the same strategy of channeling violent impulses into cultural production in his song “Lookin’ Through the Darkness” (Jazzmatazz, Vol. 2: The New Reality)

I try to channel my rage,
As I travel through the city regularly,
Turning the anger and frustration straight into energy.
I rock from East New York to the suburbs.
The light keeper, knowledge seeker.
I switch the stress that’s on my mind
Into the voice that rocks your speaker.

Such solutions channel violence onto an aesthetic medium in a field of artistic production and rivalry: kicking rhymes, rocking beats, busting moves, and dueling with other rappers over the quest for truth and artistic excellence. Rappers know that their struggle for success in life will inevitably involve them in violence of some sort: the only room for choice (as a Guru song-title from Jazzmatazz, Volume 2 puts it) is the “Choice of Weapons”—a mic or a gun.

(Positive) Violence of Self-Discipline

There is also another strategy offered by knowledge rappers like KRS-One and Guru for overcoming destructive violence through rap’s positive violence: the violence of strict self-discipline and self-knowledge, a violence on oneself that strengthens the self without hurting others. Repeating the Darwinian message that “everythin’ in nature rules by kickin’ ass,” KRS-One’s song “Health, Wealth, Self” (KRS-ONE) advocates self-realization through hard-core self-control. His track “Breath Control” (Edutainment) relates the theme of self-control to the vocal demands of the very art of rapping; while his more recent “Squash All Beef” (KRS-ONE) connects his disciplined vegetarianism to the general theme of stopping violence, urging his listeners to be at least “mental vegetarians” by directing one’s energy not at attacking others but at forceful self-control and the quest for knowledge: “Violence in society would be minimal / ‘Cause the education here would be metaphysical. / Not livin’ by laws but livin’ by principles.” Jeru the Damaja (in “Ain’t the Devil Happy?” from his The Sun Rises in the East) is even clearer about how the quest for the power of self-knowledge and self-control requires a violent attack on one’s destructive desires: “You must discover power of self / Know thyself / Find thyself / Hate in thyself / Kill in thyself.”

Here violence is directed not outwards toward harming others nor even to a separate artistic medium distinct from oneself, but instead directed inwards, with demanding asceticism, on the material of the self—to strengthen its will and kill the destructive violence of hate. By such logic, true peace and love often require a violent strictness rather than soft indulgence. Consider BDP’s “Love’s Gonna Get’cha” (Edutainment) and “Why Is That?” (Ghetto Music: The Blueprint of Hip Hop), where KRS-One urges: “The stereotype must be lost / that love and peace and knowledge is soft / for love, peace must attack And attack real strong, Stronger than war!”

Rap’s strategies for handling violence do not try to erase it altogether, but only to overcome it by a more benign, constructive form of violence. Is this limitation of strategy due to rap’s particular depravity or is it due to the more general problem of the inescapable role of violence in our human condition? It may seem easier to blame only rap, but greater progress will be made in overcoming the many evil varieties of violence, if we recognized its deep pervasiveness and even its useful positivities.