Tricia Rose on The Hip-Hop Wars, Race, and Culture – Part 2
Another is the motherload of market value is the perpetuation of ignorance and stereotypes. Now, around the world, young people have used hip-hop for the last fifteen years in ways that go completely against what is happening in commercial hip-hop now. They’ve used it to speak to incredibly fascinating and poignant and complex lives in Brazil, in Nigeria, in Ghana, in Haiti, in Puerto Rico, in Japan. Country after country. And they’ve used it in France, the North African population, Moroccans in France, and their frustration with their own ghettoization in France, and in the suburbs of Paris have produced a number of rappers who talk about these things.
Those artists are often challenging the banal, commerical direction that we have, but sometimes they do reflect some of the braggadocio and the misogyny because that has been understood as authenticity. So even though they reflect the roots of what makes hip-hop powerful and dynamic, they sometimes fall prey to hip-hop’s Achilles’ heel. And the reason that they do has everything to do with the power of corporate marketing.
It is not random that hip-hop is a lingua franca for the world.
It’s partly a lingua franca for the world because America’s primary export for in the world is culture. We don’t export damn near anything. Everybody else makes the stuff we consume. What we do export is culture. We export culture in the form of political takeovers –
[Both laugh]
TR: The freedom imperative!
LP: True! Truuuuue!
TR: But we also export culture in terms of products! The music industry, Hollywood, athletics, these are global industries. I mean, the NBA just built something like hundreds of basketball courts all over China. Well, wonder why they chose to do that!
If they build the courts, they can make some basketball players, they can put them in the NBA, create a Chinese NBA, and expand the market of athletic culture. So that’s what we’re in the business of. It is not a two way street. Nigerian rappers don’t make it to the market economy here, right? They get our product.
I was in Mexico, right? And this taxi cab driver was driving me somewhere and I had to ask him a question because he was playing Snoop Dogg! As a CD in his customized car! And I asked him why he liked Snoop Dogg…first of all, he didn’t speak any English, so I didn’t even know he could like Snoop Dogg, like what was it he was listening to?
But he phonetically memorized the words, and you know, he liked the swagger. That’s my translation of what he said. He liked the swagger and he liked the style of it, the machismo of it, and the beat! Well, the reverse doesn’t happen. Mexican rappers aren’t on the radios of white American or non-Mexican taxi cab drivers in New York, you see what I’m saying. A large part of this is about the exportation of markets [rather than what is being built.]
[Latoya's Note - Here is where I asked Tricia a lot of questions about sexism and black women's sexuality. This was the section that made it to Bitch Magazine.]
LP: I noticed that in your book, you do try to put emphasis on rappers who have more of a message, who didn’t give into this kind of corporate distilling of their image into a stereotype. But then, the question becomes how do we define progressive? There are rappers that you name check like Immortal Technique, Jean Grae, people that I enjoy and listen to, but who also seem to have a lot of similar challenges surrounding things like homophobia and use of terms like “faggot” to negatively describe other artists. Immortal Technique also has a lot of issues with sexism and how he views women. so it’s a similar challenge as to what we face with more commercial artists. So, is there really that large of a distinction between what’s put out on the underground and what’s being promoted commercially? How do we stay away from these messages, even from people who are supposed to be more progressive, or who are progressive on some issues –
TR: – and not necessarily in others.
LP: Right. How do we reconcile that?
TR: The first thing we have to do is to reveal this to people. I mean most fans who are not heavily invested in really serious critical reflection hip-hop, they’re not really drawing those distinctions. There are people who do that, but they’re not the bulk of the sales.
Page 2 of 3 | Previous page | Next page