It was Saturday morning and I was at school, coffee in hand, listening to Dr. Clevis Headley kick off the Hip Hop Symposium which he has organized. The chairs in PA 101 were cleverly bolted to the ground on a swinging McDonald’s-style mechanism, maintaining a certain degree of discomfort in order to deter anyone with bolt cutters from stealing them.
What were the fifty-some-odd attendees doing there? More to the point: what the hell was I doing there?
Despite my early love of rap as a child, when I hear most new rap songs on the radio or on TV, my first reaction is usually to change the channel. I had the same reaction to the first speaker, FAU Professor Michael Zager, head of the Commercial Music Program. Zager delivered a disturbingly familiar synopsis of the history and appreciation of rock ‘n’ roll. Nothing new there: country music ironically owes an awful lot to African musical roots; the Beatles, like 9/11, “changed everything.” The only unexpected twist was Zager’s admission that his support of hip-hop is, at least in part, due to the fact that artists like Jay-Z and Missy Elliot have sampled songs that he produced being one of the fathers of disco.
Dr. Richard Shusterman, after inserting an apologetic disclaimer about being a philosopher, began the more abstract portion of the symposium. Did you know that, as early as Socrates, philosophers were hating on other philosophers? In Shusterman’s words, they “denounced the competition as whack.” According to Shusterrman, rappers like KRS1, who is an inheritor of the philosophic tradition, argue in their lyrics that the violence in rap is merely a symptom of a culture of violence. In fact, rap does a better job than almost any other medium of capturing and expressing the kinds of social problems that the same people who ignore rap would also like to ignore. Wait. That’s me.
At this point it was time for more coffee – even though our coffee break had been stolen.
By the time I snuck back in Professor Pero Dagbovie of Michigan State University was passionately pleading for an entire history of the black people to be put to a beat. “Why doesn’t Jay-Z do that?” he challenged. I heard mmmhmm’s sneaking out of the mouths around me then I heard one coming from my own.
“What’s the problem with hip-hop?” you may be asking by now.As Professor Dagbovie sees it, the problem with hip-hop is that it has squandered its resistance for a pocketful of mumbles. Propelled by the powerful springboard of the national media spotlight, important members of the hip-hop community have often let down the larger African American community by failing to meet the challenge of their greatest potential. Bling bling, misogyny, the thug mentality without the expression of a desire to affect change aren’t really very thuggish.
It was Professor Minkah Makalani that first actually mentioned the phrase “the problem with hip-hop.” I was anxious to find out what this problem was, because I was beginning to think I was the one with the problem. I felt I’d be much more comfortable pinning it on something or someone else.
So what’s the problem with hip hop? The same thing that’s wrong with everything else in the mainstream: the privatization of culture. Suddenly, it was all clear. Of course I don’t listen to new rap on the radio. I don’t listen to any new music on the radio. I can’t stand any of it. Am I just a crotchety, old man already at the age of 23? Nope. The rap that is distributed through mass media comes to listeners through only one of a handful of record labels and then through only one of a handful of broadcasting companies. I’d been looking at hip-hop culture through the world’s largest corporate media filter. And what was on the table next to my notebook? Why, it was a flyer marked “Commercial Music,” and then the stench of irony wafted over to me.
FAU Professor Derrick White spoke about the mixed relationship between hip-hop and electoral politics. For many years, rappers have rhymed on the subject of voting, and the message has generally been politically transgressive, rather than progressive. Rappers made the argument that, without real access to political power, there was no point in African Americans voting. Neither the Republicans nor the Democrats took them seriously, in their eyes. However, not only did OutKast tell everyone to vote, they got a shout out at the Republican National Convention when the Bush twins alleged that their parents had been known to “shake it like a Polaroid picture.” Without explaining why that is really funny, I’ll let you guess why this past November was Outkast member Andre 3000’s first time voting, and why 2004 was the year hip-hop entered the ring of national electoral politics through P. Diddy’s “Vote or Die” campaign.
FAU Student Jimmel Michel then performed a rap song he had written, calling on people to take charge of the message. Suddenly there was this thing called “knowledge rap” and Professor Sujatha Fernandes from Princeton was blowing the place up with samples of Latin hip-hop, taking us from Afro-Cuban life under the Castro Revolution to the new hip-hop socialist government under President Lula in Brazil.
“If Brazil can have a Minister of Culture, why doesn’t the U.S. have a cabinet-level position dedicated to the promotion of our culture?” I wondered.
I posed this question to Dr. Headley, who had organized the event, and according to the final tally in my notes, mentioned on the microphone on four separate occasions that there were pastries in the hall. Headley responded, “In many other countries, there is always at least one intellectual position in the cabinet, or one intellectual who has influence. The United States government does nothing to promote culture. Some things can’t just be left to be regulated by the dictates of the free market.”
Many of the speakers noted that they felt awkward, or thought it was strange that they were discussing hip-hop in such an academic environment. That is the same awkwardness that comes at the beginning of anything worthwhile, including the symposium itself. The important thing is that the conversation has already begun.