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Grown Folks’ Business: The Problem of Maturity in Hip Hop

LEWIS R. GORDON

 

 

 

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 in what is often called “the hip-hop community” is a function of their performance of blackness despite their racial and political designations as white. Yet, the blackness they perform, as hip-hop culture, is what members of black communities could easily recognize as black adolescent culture.

The same conclusion applies to blacks and Latinos. Hip hop has, however, become a primary exemplar of authentic black culture. This development is attested to not only by the multitudes of black adolescents 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 countries to this roster of loose membership. We may wonder, however, 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 part of a community subordinates 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 interest in black teenagers (and older black folk who behave like teenagers) as spokespersons for 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 misrepresentation? 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 behaving 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 by the divine force of the gods—or at least ancestral voices of resistance. And at times, the acknowledgment of such ascriptions fails to translate into an objection but an affirmation: What’s wrong with advancing black adolescent communities as exemplars of black authenticity?

So Many Tears: A Fanonian Riff on Hip Hop

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 manifested in activities from rapping over a beat to spray-painting a mural exemplify the Harlem literary critic and philosopher Alain Locke’s insight that “Man cannot live in a valueless world.”¹²⁰ 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 consequences of such a world is hardly one in which children could receive the support mechanisms that enable them to be children in the first place. Yet 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. Consider the reflections of Frantz Fanon in his classic text, Black Skin, White Masks (1952).¹²¹

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 construction called the black but most often signified by le nègre—ambiguously “negro” and “nigger.” This construction is reflected from the eyes of whites, whose points of view are socio-politically constituted as the point of view on reality, as how black individuals “appear” in the social world. Such an appearance stimulates asymmetrical invisibility: The black individual encounters such a notion of blackness that is not how he or she lives but as how he or she is supposed 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 destruction 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 dismembered 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 chapter, “The Lived-Experience of the Black,”¹²² 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 on its escapist status: Negritude, Jean-Paul Sartre 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 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 psychopathology 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 of the lumpenproletariat black—whom Richard Wright 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. To be black is literally 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.

Is black liberation possible in a world that denies adulthood to black people? Can black people hope to achieve liberation through adopting an alien reflection of blackness that militates against the possibility of maturity?

A Nietzschean Perspective on the Black Aesthetic

The question of black adulthood raises questions of the context of our query and the legitimacy of its social aims. 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 economies of Western civilization can we find their source? The same applies to the technology of hip-hop aesthetic production from 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 philologist 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 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.¹²³ 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. This message still speaks to humanity.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau discussed the underside of modern life in his “Discourse on the Sciences and the Arts,” where he introduced the problem of the dialectics of enlightenment.¹²⁴ Think of the scale of human suffering that accompanies the progress promised 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. Modern life has placed a variety of burdens on the aesthetic production of black designated people. On the one hand, there is racist imposition that challenges whether black people have an inner life, which imperils the notion of even a creative life. Black aesthetic production, in this sense, is locked at the level of pure exteriority, of ritual and repetition, the result of which is without diversity and individuation; it is purely unanimistic, locked in sameness of experience and worldviews and devoid of reflection.

Added to problems of individuation are demands of political efficacy. Once black aesthetic productions emerged as aesthetic productions, black artists began to receive criticisms premised upon the view that the black artist had a special calling to serve interests of black liberation. Such arguments undergirded the development of the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s, and they continue to haunt the work of black artists today. We should be reminded, however, that the claim that art should be more than the creative expression of an artist is not limited to black reflections on the subject. Leo Tolstoy, for instance, was concerned about the moral dimension of art. Karl Marx’s thought led to generations of scholars and activists seeking out the revolutionary potential of art. Martin Heidegger worried whether we were losing places in which art can properly “dwell.” And Jean-Paul Sartre appreciated the ways in which art suspended seriousness, although he defended the role of the politically “engaged” artist.

What distinguishes black aesthetic production here is the impact of racism and its baggage full of color questions. Black artists may be drawn toward art because of a sheer love of art, but the context in which that love is expressed is a world wrought with many social contradictions. Just as W.E.B. Du Bois argued that black folk encounter ourselves as problem people in a white dominated world, the black artist constantly encounters black art as problematic art in a white dominated art world. Black art becomes, as Fanon observed with black psychology, abnormal art. It functions as a disruption of the “normal” scheme of things. The result is expectations that, like the black athletes and large numbers of incarcerated black folk, black art must flow from paradoxically naturalistic, causal forces linked to blackness itself—never hard work, individual talent, and reflection—simply pure causal mechanisms infused by experience. The black artist produces work in a context in which there is already a glass ceiling on the potential of his or her work to transcend socially imposed limits. How, then, could black art be politically effective when its aesthetic efficacy has been stratified, and turned the other way, how could the aesthetic quality of black art be defended in a world of black political impotence?

We Need a (Postmodern) Hip-Hop Revolution

Complicating matters is the near hegemonic rise of postmodern discourses in the study and interpretation of culture since the 1970s. The interplay of the impact of the studied on the studier and the language of the latter on the former emerged full form in the popularity of postmodern cultural studies in and outside of the academy. There was, and continues to be, a dimension of postmodern cultural studies of hip hop that is right on target and is, perhaps, the best way to approach the study of hip hop, and that is, ironically, a non-postmodern realization of its accuracy. This requires the distinction between postmodern form and content. To say that hip hop is postmodern is hardly supportable by the content of hip hop, since much of what is often endorsed by hip-hop artists is very modern and often, worse, conventional.

Even the more rebellious hip hop often affirms the more negative side of, say, patriarchy on the one hand (a world of only “bitches” and “ho’s”) or the more stereotyped conceptions of 1960s and early 1970s notions of revolution on the other. For instance, Dead Prez’s depictions of being revolutionary Africans in “I’m A African” (Let’s Get Free) drew much from popular cultural images of black militancy—and beautifully, cleverly, and powerfully so (one of my children’s and my favorite cuts for these reasons)—but it leaves me wondering what is revolutionary about conventional and nostalgic images of black revolutionaries: “Nigga, the red is for the blood in my arm / The black is for the gun in my palm / And the green is for the tram that grows natural / Like locks on Africans.” Wouldn’t a revolutionary development also articulate an image that transcends the present in a forward direction? Yet, the form the music takes is unmistakably revolutionary, and in a powerfully postmodern way with an underlying, unexpressed but felt duality: Hip hop may ultimately affirm one set of values, but it also voices the artists’ shared irritation with the travails of modern life, especially as it has been dished out to people of color.

This shared irritation has taken aesthetic form in hip-hop innovations. The postmodern aspect of hip-hop music and culture is that it is unruly. Hip hop breaks nearly every modern aesthetic convention. The abstract features of such convention appeal to repetition, harmony, resemblance, and similitude, the violations of which are apparent in hip-hop singing.¹²⁵ Consider, for example, that hip-hop music began as “rap.” That it involves music with lyrics enables such work to be listed as “songs,” yet it would be a mistake to call talking, often in rhymes, over a beat the same thing as singing. Moreover, when rappers do sing, they rarely sing on key. In effect, they defy the conventions of singing and the rules of a song. Even at the level of accompaniment, it is often the beat that prevails over chords and instrumental obligato. The human voice echoes and supports the rapper in ways that bring the novice to the fore. It is almost better in hip hop not to sound like a talented singer. Think of the wonderful and not-so-wonderful grunts and squawks that mark performances by such artists as Biz Markie (as in “Just a Friend” on The Biz Never Sleeps) and Ja Rule (“Mesmerize” on The Last Temptation), and even though more polished, Mos Def and Kanye West do, in the end, often sing off key.

By contrast, the impact of rap has been such that talented singers (in the conventional sense) came to hip hop at first as purveyors of the chorus, but eventually as standing up front throughout as we see in music by such artists as Ashanti, D’Angelo, Lauryn Hill, Mary J. Blige, Alicia Keys, and Angie Stone. There may be some debate on whether these artists are properly hip-hop artists, versus, say, soul and R&B, but it is clear that they are highly favored among hip-hop fans. The point, however, is that they challenge the rules governing professional singing. Even when they sing on key, it is not out of necessity. In effect, hip-hop singing has a usually communal dimension; it invites the listener to sing along because however one sings will be fine. The absence of criteria by which a song can be sung better by some versus others locates this aspect of hip-hop performance as postmodern.

Maturity and the Philly Sound

An immediate problem raised by the ascent of hip hop as a representative of authentic black culture is, as we have seen, its valorization of adolescence. But not all of hip hop is this way. There are alternative voices in hip hop, which have always maintained a connection with the blues, staying attuned to its dual reality of flesh and thought fused in a conception of the erotic and the mature that, perhaps, could best be characterized as thoughtful flesh.

For example, consider Me’Shell NdegéOcello’s Plantation Lullabies (1993) and Bitter (1999). There’s nothing childish about her work, as she brings out the contradictions of contemporary life in ways that are attuned to what it means to bear responsibility for one’s actions. She achieves such reflections through exploring themes ranging from listening to music from periods of social resistance on “I’m Diggin You (Like An Old Soul Record)” on Plantation Lullabies—“Listen to the 8-track ... / Remember back in the day / When everyone was black and conscious. And down for the struggle”—to those precious moments of erotic life in which one pays close attention to such features as one’s lover’s hair on “Dred Lock” (Plantation Lullabies)—“Let me run my fingers through your dred locks / Run them all over your body ’til your holler stops”—and on even to theological reflections on race and sexuality, as in “Leviticus: Faggot” (Bitter): “. . . See my dear we’re all dying for something searchin’ and searchin’ / Soon mama found out that god would turn his back on her too.”

Although all music is ultimately a form of play, of suspending the weight of seriousness on life itself, adult play is in truth different from child’s play. Child’s play seeks never to end, which means, at its heart, it is a desire for the impossible. Adult play is always aware of an impending end. In the midst of adult play is the lurking underside of life itself, namely, death. Life is lived, from such a perspective, because of a sober realization of the limits of life.

In addition to NdegéOcello, the hip-hop contributors to the Philly music scene also transcend the New York–California construction of hip hop as a battle between two adolescent sensibilities. Although these Philadelphia artists are technically “east coast” artists, there is a difference between their musical style and musical themes. Many of them are influenced by the black nationalist politics of northern and western Philadelphia, some of which, in fashion and interpretation of history, is influenced by Afrocentrism and the multitude of Black Muslim and Christian, and even Black Jewish congregations in the city. There is, as well, the impact of the musical education offered by some of the public schools for the arts and the Quaker Friends schools, which has resulted in a cadre of excellent musicians. Such artists include D’Angelo, Erykah Badu, Jill Scott, Angie Stone, and, of course, the Roots. The connection between them and the spiritual and urban blues laments of John Coltrane and Nina Simone can easily be heard.

Angie Stone, the most recent to ascend in that group, explores many of life’s themes through the lenses of Northern Philly black liberation politics. For example, her 2001 Mahogany Soul album is reminiscent of the kinds of critique found in the music of Billie Holiday, Dinah Washington, and Abbie Lincoln. Beginning with “Soul Insurance,” in which she invokes the ancestral voice of soul through calling forth the expression, “Hey, sista / soul sista,” as a lyric, she then moves on to “Brotha,” in which she declares her love for brothas reminding her listener: “You got ya wall street brotha, ya blue collar brotha, / Your down for whatever chillin on the corner brother…/ You know that angie loves ya.”

Then in the cut, “Pissed Off,” she alerts the listener that her love isn’t blind as she explores the dynamics of an abusive, insecure relationship: “Lookin’ at life through the glass that you shattered (so pissed off) / Little shit like love doesn’t matter anymore. Baby, whassup? . . . / Brotha can I live, can a sister live?” Later on, over the music to the Philadelphia classic R&B group the O’Jay’s “Back Stabbers” (1972), she explores the dimension of needing to find a way to get over an ended relationship in “Wish I Didn’t Miss you”: “I’m sick for ever believing you / Wish you’d bring back the man I knew / Was good to me, oh Lord . . .” All these songs are done with Stone’s alto voice atop choruses of rich, soulful harmony over hip-hop beats. And the album exemplifies the spirit of the artists with whom she is associated and the themes she writes and sings about bring the tragic and poignant dimensions of life to the fore.

There are, of course, other artists holding down a conception of hip hop that transcends racist expectations of childish, naive banter, such as New York artists Mos Def, Talib Kweli, MC Lyte, and Chicago’s Kanye West. Their lyrics present an image of hip hop that suggests an alliance with intelligence and maturity that is not necessarily a contradiction of terms. Since the focus of hip hop is primarily ultimately entertainment, however, a formulaic route for the mature hip-hop artist seems for the most part to be the avenue of cinema, of which the list of artists here, with the addition of Queen Latifah, Will Smith, and LL Cool J, are clear instances. Their ability to work across many areas of entertainment is a testament to their extraordinary talent, but the serious question is whether such transitions for these artists stand as a form of moving beyond versus affirmation of hip hop. That hip hop works in comedy and violent action films is already evident, but it remains to be seen how it unfolds as drama.¹²⁶

The Hunger for More Than Serious Play

Hip hop is clearly not analytically incapable of taking the drama of life—blues legacies as Angela Y. Davis so aptly put it in her book on female artists—to a level both contemporary and relevant.¹²⁷ But herein is the rub. Just as their predecessors, hip-hop artists face the realities of commodification. Much money is made by a version of hip-hop culture that takes the dollar to near levels of idolatry. Such versions will take their inevitable course in the short-term medium of popularity, decay, and death. The enduring capacity of artistic expression that speaks to our adult sensibilities is marked, simply, by the fact that we all face the winds of change over time and with it, the reflective force of age and aging. That hip hop is not only its music, not only its visual art, not only its witty proliferation of terms and hip syntax, but also an attitude toward life itself raises the question of what it would mean for grayed hair and wrinkled skin to reflect on life in baggy pants, exposed underwear, weaves, and a display of diamonds (the bling!) and gold.¹²⁸ The follies of youth, when collapsed into a resistance against change itself, fall from a leap to the stars to the mire of the ridiculous.

It is easy to exaggerate the role of art in our daily lives. Art does not have to change the world, but it always plays a role in how we live. A human being in a valueless world would suffer a profound sense of loneliness. As the existentialists have shown so well, we bring values to the world.¹²⁹ Wherever and whenever we encounter art, we find an accompanying human spirit. Hip hop speaks to adolescents for the same reason that artistic expressions of joy and resistance have always spoken to adolescents: such a difficult time of life could be crushing if walked alone. But life must eventually be faced, and our ability to live an adult sensibility of not being alone requires a maturation of mundane life—one that is not escapist but at the same time not devoid of play.¹³⁰ We may think of the metaphor behind the dull thump of the bass drum and its repetition, of the message it conveys, in spite of all that is rapped over the beat, in spite of the clever scratches, in spite of the twists and pelvic gyrations that stimulate awe, that life itself marches on toward death in a message always greater than ourselves.

Still, the heart of hip hop—black, brown, and beige inner-city youth—clearly suggests that the blackness of hip hop stands in a different relation to its future than the nonblack world that celebrates it. For how can one have an aesthetic relationship to aesthetic production in a world that offers no alternative to such an attitude toward life? How can play be coherent if its participants are consigned to perpetual childhood? Hip hop, in this sense, suffers from an unfortunate circumstance of serious play. Paradoxically, it needs a possibility beyond adolescence for even mundane adolescence to emerge, since without it hip hop would simply be another manifestation of black, brown, and beige limits. It would be all that can be in a world in which we crave, hungrily, for more.¹³¹