• Young kid from the hood trying to make good? Check.
• Prerequisite positive rap song that feels like it was pulled from Ghostwriter? Check.
• Street pressures that are easily overcome? Check.
• Mandatory plot for women, involving sexing up your image to get signed to the majors? Check.

But hey, I had just gone through three really depressing movies about the fall out of the drug war. I needed something to lift my spirits, and I will shamelessly admit that I enjoyed Brown Sugar. On the real, Filly Brown could have been a Lifetime produced version of the Somaya Reece story, and I still would have watched it!

Luckily, I was wrong.

Okay, on second thought, I wasn’t that wrong. Two and a half of the four I listed above were in the movie. But the team behind Filly Brown managed to add enough new elements to make the standard tropes feel fresh.

Maria Jose “Majo” Tonorio (Gina Rodriguez) is about her business. We meet her in the an LA studio, hungry and ready to get on the mic. Her moniker is “Filly Brown” and her onstage persona is aggressive. Her clothes are made for maximum comfort and street style, and she wasn’t taking any kind of mess. She meets a clownish (yet popular) rapper before one of her sets, and when he grabs her ass, she punches him in the face. (This film is not for pacifists–Majo is quick with her hands, and there is a lot of violence.) Raw and ready, she catches the attention of DJ Santa (Braxton Millz) who unites with her to create a new kind of sound. He believes in her talent, but Majo is under a lot of pressure. Not only is she helping to raise her boy-crazy younger sister and looking after her overworked father, her mother is in jail on drug charges. After being absent for a few years, her mother Maria (Jenn Rivera) reaches out to pressure Majo to finding the money to retry the case.

Her father and uncle will not help her with the money, wary of Maria’s past history, so Majo takes matters into her own hands, leaving the comfort of her close-knit circle and doing whatever it takes to get to the top.

The film flows in two directions–the first, more predictable track is Majo’s journey through hip-hop stardom. The second plot, however, is a bit more compelling. Majo is actually a generation removed from the streets–her father Jose (Lou Diamond Phillips) and her uncle used to live fast and hard, but gave up that life as they grew older. Now as a adults, they’ve struggled to carve out a legal existence. Her father owns a landscaping company with two of his friends from the streets, but they risk losing work when his largest contract believes that the burly, tattooed workers present an undesirable image to her clients. In addition to financial pressures, Jose doesn’t want to tell Majo the extent of her mother’s drug abuse, leading the family lawyer (Edward James Olmos) to threaten to reveal all the family secrets.

The scenes between Majo and her mother at the prison are beautifully acted and heartbreaking–as Majo begins to piece together the web of lies her mother told to further her habit in prison, she becomes angry and resentful. However, her final freestyle to her mother trapped behind the prison glass wrung tears from most of the audience.

Overall, Filly Brown was a hip hop movie with tons of heart and style. It passes the Bechdel test with flying colors, and while it may feel a bit predictable in some parts, Majo is a character worth cheering for.

The catchphrase, what that was all about, “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised,” that was about the fact that the first change that takes place is in your mind. You have to change your mind before you change the way you live and the way you move. So when we said that “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised,” we were saying that the thing that’s gonna change people is something that no one will ever be able to capture on film. It will just be something that you see, and all of a sudden you realize I’m on the wrong page, or I’m on the right page but I’m on the wrong note, and I’ve got to get in sync with everyone else to understand what’s happening in this country.

But I think that the Black Americans have been the only die-hard Americans here, because we’re the only ones who carried the process through the process that everyone else has to sort of skip stages. We’re the ones who march, we’re the ones who carry the Bible, we’re the ones who carry the flag, we’re the ones who have to go through the courts, and being born American didn’t seem to matter, because we were born American, but we still had to fight for what we were looking for, and we still had to go through those channels and those processes.
- Mediaburn, 1991

If you only focus on the political aspects of our work, you change us. We’ve done 20 albums and not all of the songs on them are political. We acknowledged politics, just like we acknowledged the existence of condoms, guns, family, neighborhood issues. We were songwriters who tried to represent all the different aspects of the community.
- Chicago Tribune, 1988

It’s no fun being in jail. No fun. There’s some people that you believe shouldn’t be there, and then there’s some people that you believe should alwaysbe there. But my whole situation was that I needed to go on tour, and I got band members, people that hired us … I said what I had to say, now I gotta go where I gotta go.
- The Village Voice, 2001

Ideas sometimes move slower than everything else. Only a fool expects to do it overnight. It’s not an overnight thing. The world didn’t get this way overnight, so we’re not going to be able to fix it overnight. The more people I meet who want to see it fixed, the better I feel.
- VentnorBlog, 2010

I’m saying that everybody pushed the envelope a little bit further, because we started in chains. So you took the steps you could to help move your people forward. Like it wasn’t no sense in you running all the way down the block claiming you were leading somebody if you weren’t with them any more.

You could only lead people who follow you, and they could only follow you at a certain pace. So you modify your pace in order to encourage them to stay with you and see where you are going.
- San Francisco Bayview, 2009

You will not be able to stay home, brother.
You will not be able to plug in, turn on and cop out.
You will not be able to lose yourself on skag and skip,
Skip out for beer during commercials,
Because the revolution will not be televised.

The revolution will not be televised.
The revolution will not be brought to you by Xerox
In 4 parts without commercial interruptions.
The revolution will not show you pictures of Nixon
blowing a bugle and leading a charge by John
Mitchell, General Abrams and Spiro Agnew to eat
hog maws confiscated from a Harlem sanctuary.
The revolution will not be televised.

The revolution will not be brought to you by the
Schaefer Award Theatre and will not star Natalie
Woods and Steve McQueen or Bullwinkle and Julia.
The revolution will not give your mouth sex appeal.
The revolution will not get rid of the nubs.
The revolution will not make you look five pounds
thinner, because the revolution will not be televised, Brother.

There will be no pictures of you and Willie May
pushing that shopping cart down the block on the dead run,
or trying to slide that color television into a stolen ambulance.
NBC will not be able predict the winner at 8:32
or report from 29 districts.
The revolution will not be televised.

There will be no pictures of pigs shooting down
brothers in the instant replay.
There will be no pictures of pigs shooting down
brothers in the instant replay.
There will be no pictures of Whitney Young being
run out of Harlem on a rail with a brand new process.
There will be no slow motion or still life of Roy
Wilkens strolling through Watts in a Red, Black and
Green liberation jumpsuit that he had been saving
For just the proper occasion.

Green Acres, The Beverly Hillbillies, and Hooterville
Junction will no longer be so damned relevant, and
women will not care if Dick finally gets down with
Jane on Search for Tomorrow because Black people
will be in the street looking for a brighter day.
The revolution will not be televised.

There will be no highlights on the eleven o’clock
news and no pictures of hairy armed women
liberationists and Jackie Onassis blowing her nose.
The theme song will not be written by Jim Webb,
Francis Scott Key, nor sung by Glen Campbell, Tom
Jones, Johnny Cash, Englebert Humperdink, or the Rare Earth.
The revolution will not be televised.

The revolution will not be right back after a message
bbout a white tornado, white lightning, or white people.
You will not have to worry about a dove in your
bedroom, a tiger in your tank, or the giant in your toilet bowl.
The revolution will not go better with Coke.
The revolution will not fight the germs that may cause bad breath.
The revolution will put you in the driver’s seat.

The revolution will not be televised, will not be televised,
will not be televised, will not be televised.
The revolution will be no re-run brothers;
The revolution will be live.
- “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised,” 1971

Aside from the fact that Ashley Judd has no clue about Hip-Hop as an art form and a culture, her comment shows an underlying prejudice towards black men. She says that Snoop and Diddy’s participation in YouthAIDS raised a red flag for her. If she knew anything about Hip-Hop or maybe even had a conversation with either one of these men, she’d know that neither condone rape or create violent music (at least not in the last decade), both are intelligent and savvy media moguls, and both are fathers (each has a least one daughter). So why wouldn’t they use their star power and influence to spread the message to young people, and especially the Hip-Hop community, about the importance of HIV/AIDS prevention? Shouldn’t they be lauded? If their music is so sexually irresponsible, isn’t it a good thing that they are talking about safe sex considering that HIV/AIDS transmission rates are so much higher among African-Americans?

I have looked closely at the feedback I have received about those two paragraphs, and absolutely see your points, and I fully capitulate to your rightness, and again humbly offer my heartfelt amends for not having been able to see the fault in my writing, and not having anticipated it would be painful for so many. Crucial words are missing that could have made a giant difference. It should have read: “Some hip-hop, and some rap, is abusive. Some of it is part of the contemporary soundtrack misogyny (which, of course, is multi-sonic). Some of it promotes the rape culture so pervasive in our world…..” Also, I, ideally, would have anticipated that some folks would see only representations of those two paragraphs, and not be familiar with the whole book, my work, and my message. I should have been clear in them that I include hip-hop and rap as part of a much larger problem. It is beyond unfortunate that I am talking about some, for example, of Snoop Dogs’ lyrics, an assumption has been spread I was talking about every single artist in both genres. That is false and distorted. Here, I am again aware that it would be impossible for me to get this “exactly right.” Some will find fault, no matter how careful I am, no matter what my intentions.

“Why don’t we [help] end rape culture instead of getting mad that we’re getting called out on it?”

On March 30 hip-hop producer Calvin “Mr.Cee” Lebrun—he of Notorious B.I.G.’s Ready to Die fame–was busted by New York City police allegedly receiving oral sex from a sex worker. Reports said Lebrun supposedly received the sexual favors from “a man” .  This got some people feeling some kind of homophobic way, complete with saying that “we all should have seen this coming” because of his alleged “golden showers” kink.  As Sister Toldja wrote earlier this week :

To be totally fair, this isn’t the average gay rumor; not only was the other person in the case allegedly paid for the act, the writer who dropped this gossip also claimed that Mister Cee has a thing for urinating on female strippers. So while much of the chatter is about Mister Cee being (allegedly) infected with The Gay, folks are aghast by this pee thing, too. Considering our attitudes about sexuality, that’s no surprise.

With homophobia and anti-kink sentiments roiling—and Lebrun and his supporters doing the NYPD Hip-Hop Conspiracy Step —hip-hop artist and critic dream hampton provided some level-headed analysis about the situation:

While highly regarded in the hip hop industry and in New York, Mister Cee is not necessarily famous. Still, his arrest gave opportunity to talk about the persistent poking around hip hop’s “closet,” where speculation about sexual orientation is practically a sport. Charlamagne actually elevated the conversation by asking why a married 44-year-old man was seeking sexual favors from a 20-year-old, professional or otherwise, and if that, then why in a parked car? I argue that none of this would be a discussion, viral or anywhere else, had Cee been arrested with a 20-year-old woman, be she prostitute or not. I also don’t believe, 2011 or not, that hip hop is a safe space for anything other than aggressively heterosexual public behavior or affirmation. While obviously lesbian women MCs and personalities remain silent if not closeted about their sexuality, there is even less space for men to appear bisexual or homosexual.

I believe that Mister Cee’s sexuality is a personal matter, one he must reckon with himself and his wife. But Charlamagne’s co-host Angela Yee took the position widely held by heterosexual women—that closeted bisexual men are a health hazard, exposing trusting women to AIDS and more. While I’m not dismissive of those concerns, particularly in a marriage, where condom use is expected to be abandoned, I do know that we heterosexual Black women don’t exactly offer safe spaces for bisexual men to express their desires.

I’m also far more concerned that the transgendered 20-year-old who allegedly serviced him be safe, particularly if he is a sex worker. I wished aloud on my own Twitter feed that the discussion about Mister Cee would be one about decriminalizing sex work and focusing on harm reduction rather than speculating if Mister Cee is closeted.

Hampton is right in this respect.

The sex worker who is said to have provided the service, it turns out, is–based on the clues and cues I have picked up on from the media as well as personal education around trans issues and media literacy–a trans woman named Brooke-Lynn Pinklady not a “transvestite” that the first link’s source and other news and gossip sites—both cisgay and presumably cisstraight–thought to misgender as “a man.” (Even hampton refers to her as a “transgendered male.”) There’s a difference—a big difference—between a cis man, a “transvestite,” and a trans woman. (And, for the 50-11th time, the word is not “transgendered.” As several trans activists have point out, no one says “gayed” or “heteroed.” It’s “transgender” or “trans.” And I’m not going to go there about the word “trannie.” Suffice to say: don’t. It’s a slur. Don’t.)

To make the whole matter much worse, several outlets—and even the NYPD, never known at the bastion of tolerance, let alone acceptance and advocacy of trans people–refer to Brooke-Lynn by her government name instead of, like this post, honoring her as how she presents gender-wise.  Since too few people accorded her any sort of respect around her gender identity, we’re getting transphobia–specifically transmisogyny–twisted in the homophobia. Because of the constant misgendering of Brooke-Lynn as a “he,” out comes the assumption that Mr. Cee supposedly had sex with a “man.” No, Mr. Cee had sex with a woman, full stop—regardless of how he sexually identitfies. As Monica Roberts at TransGriot writes:

Many of us still have ID’s with mismatched name and gender code info or are in states that despite us having legal name changes, refuse to change gender codes until the person undergoes GRS.

…

SRS is not the end all and be all to determining gender identity or when a person transitions to the other gender.

As far as I’m concerned, the second you swallow you first hormone or take your first shot of testosterone, begin living in the opposite gender and make moves to harmonize your body with that gender role that may or may not include surgical options, you ARE that gender.

Many transpeople who would like to have it either aren’t able to afford genital surgery or have health issues that prevent it. There are many transpeople successfully living in our new gender roles despite possessing neoclits in our panties.

To break this point down for you: gender is between your ears, not your legs.

With that said, let’s bring this back to hampton’s concern.

According to a landmark report from the National Center for Transgender Equality and the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force , sixteen percent of trans people of color (TPoCs) who responded to the organizations’ survey have turned to selling sex and drugs in order to survive. Furthermore, the report states:

• Respondents who were currently unemployed experienced debilitating negative outcomes, including nearly double the rate of working in the underground economy (such as doing sex work or selling drugs), twice the homelessness, 85% more incarceration, and more negative health outcomes, such as more than double the HIV infection rate and nearly double the rate of current drinking or drug misuse to cope with mistreatment, compared to those who were employed.
• Respondents who had lost a job due to bias also experienced ruinous consequences such as four times the rate of homelessness, 70% more current drinking or misuse of drugs to cope with mistreatment, 85% more incarceration, more than double the rate working in the underground economy, and more than double the HIV infection rate, compared to those who did not lose a job due to bias.

I agree the cruel parlor game of Suspecting Teh Gayz, especially on spurious reasons like being down with kink, needs to cease within some Black communities as well as a conversation around decriminalizing sex work needs to open up.  I also think what happened with Mr. Cee is a perfect opportunity to talk about transphobia, gender identity, and gender policing, too—which, as an ex-friend pointed out to me, tend to be the “what’s really going on” when some want to go homophobic because they want to judge what a “real man” or a “real woman” is supposed to look like and act like.

We’re wrecking too, too many lives with this basic disrespect.

Photo Credit: thesmokinggun.com

By Guest Contributor Rob Fields, cross-posted from Black As Love

It was close to a year ago when I started research that would begin to answer the question, “so, who exactly is the audience for black rock?”  Of course, the unspoken part of that question was the assumption that this was and continues to be, something fringe.  But we know that’s hardly the case.  In fact, the audience for black rock and black alternative music is growing, and that growth is powered by an ongoing cultural shift.

I won’t bore you with the demographic recap of those who took the survey (50/50 male/female split; 76% African American), as you can read it in the executive summary below.  What’s most interesting to me is the psychographic—or attitudinal stuff—that the research uncovered.  After all, attitudes drive actions.

These attitudes are important to note for another reason: It speaks to the need/opportunity for broader institutional and, yes, corporate, support for black rock and black alternative music.  There’s still the belief out there that

1. Black folks are monolithic and;
2. We can all be reached by using hip hop.

The first supposition has never been true.  As for the second, hip hop, particularly in its commercial form, is easily a shadow of what it could have been.  Moreover, by virtue of its inclination for entertainment over substance, it has abdicated any right to say that it’s representative of black folks.

Anyway, here are 6  key attitudes–culled from 316 fully completed surveys–that put you in the headspace of those who are into black rock and black alt music & culture:

• Highly individual. 63% indicate that expressing your individuality takes precedence over allegiance to group identity.
• No need for commercial radio. 78% say the time you spend listening to commercial radio has decreased over the past two years.

• You seek artists who break the mold. Nearly 90% of you say that you at least often seek out black artists who defy convention.  Over half of you do on a consistent basis.

• Music buying.  Contrary to conventional wisdom that people are mostly buying singles, over 60% tend to purchase whole albums. Nearly 40% of you spend between $11-$30 each month on music.

• Feelings about hip hop. Nearly 74% of the overall respondents and 77% who identified yourselves as African American say that your feelings about hip hop have become indifferent or more negative.

• What you’re listening to. The chart below speaks for itself, but here are the key points: 73% say that the amount of hip hop you’re listening to has decreased over the past two years. 52% say the same about R&B. There’s an increase in black rock and world music (70% and 46%, respectively).

Finally, some context before you jump into the executive summary: I wrote it with an audience of marketing professionals in mind, especially those who are already using music to build their brands.  I’m currently developing a few Boldaslove.us initiatives for 2011, and those need corporate support.  The bottom line: Supporting the further growth of this community makes good business sense for any number of companies.

You can view, print or download the entire executive summary here: Black Rock Music and the Emerging Urban Mindset

A couple of weeks back I had the pleasure of attending a Rap Sessions panel that discussed the question of women and their role in Hip Hop. One particular response by Dr. Raquel Rivera really stuck with me: “we are too fast to demonize the raunch. Don’t demonize the Raunch!” Joan Morgan (yes, THE Joan Morgan) followed up with an astute observation that American society does not have a discourse available for the erotic. My first response? “Ha! I love that!” The second response? “Yeah, that makes sense.”

What is our fascination with sexuality? Particularly, what is our fascination with the erotic and its impact on our understanding of blackness? (Hyper)sexuality often frames our understanding of men and women of color since our implementation into western culture. It is a gendered and oppressive space, often maintaining rigid boundaries and unilateral interpretation. For centuries, the black body existed primarily within the confinements of sexual expression. And, unfortunately, that space has not completely evolved. The Americanized erotic is transfixed within the slave discourse and white privilege that dominated the antebellum United States. Although I do not deny that women have been objectified via the infamous “male gaze,” a “one-up” that white women have over black women is the fact that at least their “honor” and “purity” granted them access to the coveted cult of true womanhood. Their bodies and sexuality are considered worthy of preserving and being respected. Black women, however, have inherited membership in the cult of the freaknasty. Breeders, freak (a leek)s, Jezebels, and, as Abbey Lincoln suggests, “sexual outhouses of white men,” African American women have not been able to remove themselves from the perspective of a sexual lens.

This referential point has sustained itself in both white and black American communities. Because black sexuality is such a taboo topic, the push to avoid it sensationalizes this discourse and the imagery that accompanies it. One possible reason for the lack of erotic discourse available is the desire of black America to remove the stigma of sexuality from its identity. This silence bears an excruciating consequence: the continuation of a vicious cycle of misrepresentative sexual stereotypes and outside influence on the inner African American community’s understanding of identity.

Returning back to the idea of slave discourse and sexuality, there often extremities associated with categorization of the black body. For black men, the buck, brute, or Uncle Tom archetype covers the range of hypersexual to asexual. In similar fashion, African American women were categorized by the Jezebel, Sapphire, or Mammy. These representations have far from disappeared from American public culture. In fact, these proto-erotic images have transcended to reflect and evolve with (popular) black culture. Because we are now part of the Hip Hop Era, there is a Hip Hop Erotic, a gendered and emotionally charged space that all of its affiliated parties are forced to navigate.

“Don’t Demonize the Raunch!:” The Hip Hop Erotic
Hip Hop Culture has an intriguing way of presenting and reaffirming notions of black sexuality. The video vixen takes after the Jezebel while the thug is the hybrid descendant of the brute and buck. Even more fascinating is how the erotic is constructed: women’s sexuality is often encompassed in a bitter and angry space while men, also angry, present their sexual identity via a dominant and hyperviolent space (i.e. rape discourse). There are frequencies or reserved spaces that allow levels of visible blackness. These frequencies are especially noticeable for women in Hip Hop. It is obvious that the video vixen reflects the highest frequency of womanhood within Hip Hop culture. Their presentation reaffirms the suspected correlation between black women and hypersexuality. For female emcees, it is hypersexuality or obscenity. The Little Kims, Foxy Browns, Trinas, and Nicki Minajes fight to get more (radio) play. The Jean Graes and Mysteriouses (from Making the Bad Season Two) fight to be taken seriously without using their sexuality to validate their lyricism and authenticity. This lack of fluidity forces women to navigate through stringent spaces of extreme identity.

Because those lines don’t blur, it is problematic for our understanding and placement of women who try and straddle the fence (no pun intended). For example, how would we place Missy Elliot, a “femcee” who started off not being able to stand the rain in a big ass trash bag talking about YoYos ( I caught the double meaning)? She evolved into a femme fatal emcee, warning listeners about her distaste for minute men and tricks she could do with magic sticks and cho chas. In a way, Missy was a Hip Hop Mammy, often looking out for other artists (like Aaliyah, Da Brat, and the “mama” of 550 Music Group) and suppressing any trace of sexual identity. Missy, while multitalented, often had her sexuality and authenticity questioned after the transformation of her lyrical content because she aligned her music with the sexy. While not asexual, Da Brat followed similar suit (“So Funkdafied” to “Ladies Night” and “What Do You Like”). In order to maintain relevance and visibility, these talented emcees were forced to submit and learn to function within a recognizable space of hypersexuality.

Why is the erotic so enticing and prevalent? It is a sensationalized space that is often molded and shaped to fit the experiences and expectations of its beholder. The erotic space is a struggle between conservative thought (traditionalism?) and open sexual reflection (liberalism?). Sexuality is a fluid form of expression that is only a facet of the black American experience. Once this is accepted as a normative state of gender discourse perhaps we can transcend from viewing sexuality as a stigma of the black body to utilizing it as a tool for conversing about and complicating our understanding of blackness in America.

On a fluke a few of weeks ago, I picked up a dvd about the Black Panthers and the student and employee strike at SF State that created the first Black Studies department in the country.

It was in watching this video that realized that both crack and hip hop politically underdeveloped young people. Much of this statement comes out of my reading two or three books a week along with five or six articles last month, while simultaneously watching the fall out from Sasha Frere Jones’s post about the end of hip hop and a post about rap critics. Blog posts, long blog posts take a lot of work. At least coherent ones do.

Reading and writing is labor and I am thinking about to which ends, those of us who are in our twenties and thirties, are reading and writing.

While watching the responses percolate, I wondered what would happen if we invested the same time in rap blogs in making politics to address our lives?

What is our investment in a music that has made it clear that it doesn’t give a fuck out us in a time where we live in an unsustainable world?

For the folks who say that hip hop is related to a political project, I would say, place a link in the comment section. By political I mean a group of people organizing to serve a communally determined group agenda. This doesn’t mean that it hasn’t served as a conscious raising tool, in the past, but Post Chronic or even Post Blueprint, the music has ceased being for itself and currently exists for Black respect and White dollars.

Given that this is the case, what does this mean for Black people and what does it mean for Black music?

To the extent that this applies globally, remains to be seen.

Chuck D has argued extensively that young people globally have used rap music as tool to make sense of their position is society. Based a couple of documentaries that I have seen about hip hop in Cuba and North Africa, to a certain extent this is true. Given the impact of AIDS mass incarceration and the systemic undereducation of Black, White and Latino students, what are the ways in which that the music, at least since The Chronic, has helped us make sense of our world?

I come from the Leroi Jones school of Black music, which looks at Black music both as it relates to our history in this country, and as being representative of a particular point in time in this country.

Three months ago, Rafi said that rap music used to be the street talking to the street. In commenting on the ways in which Nike used Cube’s “Today is a Good Day” for a skateboarding commercial he writes,

It’s just another example of hip-hop’s transformation to lifestyle marketing tool and its astonishing disconnect from the reality it used to represent….Three years ago I saw a big hip-hop show in New York City just days after Sean Bell’s murder. The city was buzzing with rage and confusion everywhere except inside the show where the incident wasn’t even mentioned. I said back then that there was “a time when rap was supposed to speak to and speak for the streets”. But shows like that Rock the Bells performance and ads like this one from Nike show how far we’ve come from that.
The acts and songs of that era are being used to market to aging hip-hop fans like myself but it is all sound and no fury.

Rhythm & Blues affirms Black humanity, modern rap music affirms our subhumanity.

This doesn’t mean that Rhythm and Blues was all warm and fuzzy as Black humanity encompasses both the aspects that we are proud of and our collective darkside as well.

Birkhold thinks that this is really crude statement, and criticizes me for saying so. Yes it is crude. But I stand by it, because Black music has changed from a being for itself to being for others. Rafi’s comment
is an illustration of this.

This isn’t a conscious vs. thug dichotomy. My argument is a little more nuanced than that. Cube, Dre, Too Short, were dudes, street or not, talking to the street. Peep the VH1 NWA documentary, “The World’s Most Dangerous Group”. Popular gangster rappers wanted to make some money but they weren’t trying to become corporations themselves. That wasn’t an option, so it wasn’t a goal.

I mentioned the content of this piece to Birkhold shortly after I wrote it and he disagreed with my statement that rap use to exist for itself, and is now existing for others (thuggin’ for cash).

His issue was with the fact that rap has always been, for the most part, about Black men performing Black male, machismo, fantasy. Being for others. Cold Crush brothers, Funky Four Plus One, Africa Bambaata were either on some party shit, some machismo steez, or some super Black masculinity. He tried to say that Cube was from the suburbs, but he’s from South Central, according to Wikipedia. However he did attend Phoenix Institute of Technology in the fall of 1987, and studied Architectural Drafting. Chuck D, Russell and I believe, Run DMC were middle class cats from Long Island and Queens respectively. In rap, Black men have always been performing some other ‘ish and I agree with that.

However, I responded that, while it very well may be true that early rappers were performing a macho, fantasy, partying, Black masculinity, the scale, risk and harm in the1970s and 80s isn’t analogous to
1990s and 2000s.

The fact that Byron Hurt made a movie, Barack and Curtis, about Black masculinity comparing 50 to President Obama is indicative of this.

Currently, rap music is conflated with Blackness. As a result some Black children who are not from the ‘hood feel compelled to perform thuggery in order to be accepted. After all the sacrifices their parents have made, pursuing higher education, moving to the suburbs, working the corporate gig, the children want to be exactly what their parents have been sheltering them from, a thug. The pervasiveness of rap music in 1990s and 2000s plays a big role in making this possible.

The notion of acceptance and assimilation is an important one. In fact, much of the homophobia that we observe in both American culture and in Black culture stems from the resentment that a gay man or lesbian woman has the audacity and courage to walk around being who they want to be, not who others expect them to be. We have been socialized to resent the courage to be queer. We are angry because they refuse to fit into the box that society has created for them, and we are uncertain of how to get ourselves out if it.

Back to Huey. Watching the documentary on The Panthers, the irony of fact that Huey Newton was murdered in a dope deal gone bad on the streets of West Oakland isn’t lost on me.

In listening to Eldridge speak in the documentary, it became to clear that while I was familiar with his open and aggressive misogyny, as he famously
stated that he practiced raping Black women, as preparation for raping white women. He was also charismatic, extremely handsome and in some ways the clip of his speech reminded me of many of the rappers that I grew up listening to.

All these cats accomplished a lot in their twenties and their thirties.

What are we doing?

How can our generation build a movement when we can’t even be honest with ourselves about where we are?

There has been very little analysis about the ways in which Black communities have been impacted by 20 years of the war on drugs. There has also been very little analysis of the ways in which crack wiped out the last vestiges of 60s and 70s era Black resistance.

What does it mean that 30 years later our young people and many older people are more concerned with whether the music is dead than with whether neighborhoods that birthed the music will survive over the next ten years given the impact of globalized gentrification of ‘hoods in the US and around the world?

Have you been to Biggie’s old block lately?

How was the FBI able to eliminate the Black Panthers but unable to contain The Crips and The Bloods?

If Black people’s contribution to this country has been music and free labor, what does it mean when our music is a lifestyle marketing device, and that Black men are systemically under and unemployed?

Thank you for reading this. Clearly, I am trying to work some thangs out.

In proofreading this piece it has become clear how Sociology of the Self is teaching me how to look at the person and society simultaneously. WOOT.

Today, I got three text messages in rapid succession from my friend Hae.

“Check out the new MV from 2ne1 called Fire!”

“Song is addicting!”

“Street version is better than space version!”

I knew YouTube wouldn’t let me down, so I headed over there to see if someone posted an English translation:

2NE1 is just one group in a long line of Korean hip-hop (or hip-pop, according to some, but more on that later*) artists that I have enjoyed thanks to JYP Entertainment and YG Entertainment. While YG is credited with popularizing the hip-hop sound in Korea, both companies have received major success with their artists.

There’s the Wonder Girls:

And Big Bang:

Back when I first discovered Korean hip-hop, I was quite fond of showing my friends this video by 1TYM, called “Do You Know Me?”:

After watching the video, my friends had a range of reactions everything from “Who knew Koreans rolled hard?” to amazement to laughter. But some people weren’t quite as accepting, posing the question “Why do they have to take our stuff?”

Is there a such thing as “our stuff?” I grappled with this question in the specific context of a global hip-hop culture. Six years ago, I was looking up scholarly articles on hip-hop for a research paper when I stumbled across an obscure article in a random journal about the spread of hip-hop in Japan. The article posited hip-hop’s growth was fueled by young Zainichi who keenly felt their second-class status and could relate to the lyrics and culture of American hip-hop.

Ever since then, I’ve looked to see where hip-hop flourishes around the globe in hopes of understanding its appeal. Before hip-hop was recognized as a major influence on youth culture , I found articles, documentaries, and mixtapes from places like Palestine, Thailand, Cuba, South Africa, and Haiti. Seeing what I felt to be “my culture” reflected back at me in so many ways was a jarring experience – everything, good and bad had been replicated and remixed and each hip-hop scene emerges with a style all its own.

While preparing this series on Cultural Appropriation, I realized that the dialogue around cultural appropriation and global hip-hop culture follow similar lines of argument. What constitutes appropriation and what is an homage? When are we borrowing versus flat out stealing? What are the power dynamics involved in this conversation?

The idea of cultural appropriation is one fraught with misunderstandings, minefields of misinterpretation, and other issues. I’ve been struggling with how to launch this series for a while now – exactly, what can one say? The Angry Black Woman opened up a conversation back in January, asking her readers to define cultural appropriation. After 103 comments, there were still more questions than answers.

So, in launching this series, I hope to provide points for discussion, but not necessarily firm solutions. The idea is not to provide a go to guide on appropriation, but to illuminate some of the issues in these types of conversations.

—-
*I’m not talking about the different views on what’s “real” hip-hop in this post. Later, when I started taking a serious look at the trends and representations of hip-hop abroad, I found out that the same battles that happen here occur elsewhere. While reading some back information on Jinusean, I saw the message boards filled with those who claimed that Jinusean was hip-pop and the real hip hop in Korea was represented by groups like Drunken Tiger and the whole Movement crew.

Here’s one of Drunken Tiger’s videos, called “Do You Know Hip Hop”:

It’s also worth noting that Drunken Tiger had a mega-hit in Korea from their song “Sweet Talk,” which uses the same melody as Camp Lo’s “Black Connection.”

—-

“Fire” actually isn’t 2ne1′s debut song – their first one was with the boys of Big Bang, called “Lollipop.” I have no idea why this video makes me so happy. Maybe it’s all the colors. Maybe it’s because one of the girls is obviously getting her Snork on. Or maybe it’s because the whole video is 80s-a-licious. Either way, I love it so here it is:

I am officially a hip hop curmudgeon. After a weekend spent in Houston listening to “Da Stanky Leg” and “the Halle Berry” on local radio, I am officially declaring myself one of those annoying ass old heads who is always waxing about the good old days. Notice here, I’m not talking about the “back when hip-hop was political” nostalgia – oh, no no. Party-hop, politics, whatever – I miss lyrics and lyricism. When a song had multiple verses and a chorus for me to memorize, not just some hollerin’ and foolishness. After listening to my homegirl V-sheezy explain why Lil’ Wayne may very well be the best rapper currently in the game (and she made a compelling case after explaining the current crop of voices on the mainstream airwaves), I retired to the Verve Remixed 4 and decided that I needed to embrace the fact that while I love hip-hop culture, I’m over rap. Just give me the production and let people who can really sing do their thing.

So it kind of goes with out saying that I had negative interest in listening to the latest flash in the pan, Asher Roth. Someone young, white, and privileged, rapping about being young, white, and privileged? Man, I could go watch that Smirnoff Tea Partay ad for that. At least that was intended to be comedy.

But apparently, Asher Roth has been busy.

In addition to inadvertently exposing some of the more interesting racial dynamics in hip-hop, he’s also been running his mouth about a few other things – like what African rappers need to be doing while he’s talking about how much he loves college or how he’s hanging with “Nappy Headed Hoes”. Here are some of the best bits from the Asher-pocalypse:

M. Dot, Model Minority – Asher Roth x Don Imus x Nappy Headed Ho’s

Apparently, Asher Roth was recently on the Rutgers campus and tweeted that he was hanging out with some “Nappy Headed Hoe’s.” He then tried to clean it up and recant by saying that “he was trying to make fun of Don Imus.” He apologized as well.

Recently my post, “Michael Baisden is a Misogynist Pig“, ran on Racialicious. The post is about the fact that Michael Baisden stated on his radio show that a wife “should just lay there and take it”, if her husband want’s to have sex and she doesn’t. One of the commenters, “Nina” who was open, honest and thoughtful in several her comments, said that she felt that Baisden was being hyperbolic. She writes,

Perhaps because I think of him as being like Chris Rock, someone who exaggerates but often has a bit of wisdom at the core of the shit talking, what I hear is the kind of thing many men say when alone. And there is the risk that he goes to far OR that listeners will take it as gospel and not hear it as hyperbole. I hear it as hyperbole, my brother and friends hear it as hyperbole but that doesnt mean everyone does.

I responded saying,

Let me ask you this, do you think Don Imus was being Hyperbolic when he called the Rutgers women’s team Nappy Headed Ho’s?

If he wasn’t being hyperbolic and was being racist, why should Imus not be tolerated but Baisdens comments are hyperbolic?
Often times, I have found that people hide behind the defense of laughter when in reality it constitutes hate speech.

Can’t sprinkle sugar on shit and call it ice cream.

Having just wrote these comments on Wednesday, you can imagine my surprise at seeing Asher Roth say the same thing,
on Twitter, on Thursday.

Why should Asher Roth be singled out when Black men call us hoes all the time?

I am not saying that Asher should not be criticized for what he has done but we need to keep it even and acknowledge that many Black rappers and Black men, and for that matter Black women, refer to Black women, reflexively, as “hoes.”

Harry Allen, Media Assassin – Fight the White Rap History Rewrite

[F]rom a certain angle, there’s just a shade of difference between white people rapping and white people telling nigger jokes. (I know that this framework, though immediately clear to a certain number of Black people, if only on a gut level, isn’t obvious to others, and is completely offensive to many white people. I elaborate on it, more, in two other works: (1) “White People and Hip-Hop,” which I recorded with both Racialicious‘ Carmen Van Kerckhove and writer Jason Tanz (Other People’s Property) for Van Kerckhove’s “Addicted to Race” podcast, and (2) “The Unbearable Whiteness of Emceeing: What The Eminence of Eminem Says About Race,” which I wrote for The Source. [As well, I also spoke about this during an episode of Oprah I taped with Michael Eric Dyson, Sister Souljah, Sister 2 Sister's Jamie Brown, and others in the fall of 1997, though Harpo never aired the piece.]) Both behaviors form a set of inadequate, insufficient white responses to the system of white supremacy, formatted, here, as “entertainment,” or “fun.” Of course, any fun, carried out over a long enough period, starts to look like making fun of to the one not in on the fun, as does any insufficient response, carried far enough, in the midst of a dire situation.

In spite of, or maybe because of, the generally unsatisfactory artistic role white rap has often played when considered this way, I’ve gotten far more out of it by studying the social networks around it; i.e., how it makes white people act. (To a great extent, this is what “The Unbearable Whiteness of Emceeing” is about.). Toward this end, a few choice details jump out of the Asher Roth New York Times piece and land in my lap:

1) It never fails to amaze me how much better white people’s jobs are than Black people’s jobs. In the piece, Asher Roth’s father, whose name is David, is described as “the executive director of a design firm.”

It just sticks out. First of all, so many rappers grow up without fathers at all that to hear of an artist with one is unusual. But, here, there is a father, in the home, and he executive directs a design firm.

2) That a rapper is white is often enough to get them major media coverage. One sees this over and over in the coverage of white rappers, from at least the Beastie Boys to the present. Take away Asher Roth’s whiteness, and is there a story here? Even more, is there a career here? Roth’s now famous XXL cover, as one of ten “freshmen” rappers expected to do great work in 2009, is often mentioned, but Wale and Charles Hamilton sure aren’t.

Which reminds me:

3) White rappers frequently appear as though being handed off from one set of white hands to another. Here, narratively, Roth is handed from his parents, first, to his manager, Scooter Braun, who discovered him, to Steve Rifkind, his label owner, to the Times author, Jon Caramanica, to the fans.

And, most of all:

4) History is often rewritten in the interest of prizing white people, of which white rappers are, of course, a subset. In the piece, Caramanica, who, as a former editor at VIBE and a long-time writer covering hip-hop, should know better, says this: “Whether they talk about it or not, plenty of rappers are from the suburbs, but not one has created an aesthetic around it until Mr. Roth.”

Really? What did De La Soul do, then? What did the Dungeon Family do? Heck: What did Public Enemy do? (I wrote about P.E.’s suburban roots and worldview at length for The Village Voice in a 1988 piece, “Strangers in Paradise.”)

Jeremy R. Levine, Social Science Lite – Asher Roth is the Anti -”White Guilt”

Interestingly and quite arrogantly, Roth is harnessing a shtick of white privilege as he claims the authenticity of the…erm…suburbs. You know, because suburban kids can’t relate to hip-hop in its contemporary form. Why? Well, that’s a little unclear. Roth’s basic claim is that white kids in the suburbs have been consuming hip-hop for years, but have never had some one they can relate to, some one to represent them and their voices. You know, because white folks can’t relate to black folks. And, of course, because only white folks live in the suburbs. Comparing Eminem to Roth, the blog No Trivia wrote it better than I could have: “But Eminem’s use of his whiteness came from a desire to prove himself in spite of the unfortunate reputation of white rappers that came before him, not some strange sense of privilege because he’s the person actually buying rap CDs.”

In the most blatant example of white supremacy in hip-hop, Roth is absolutely obsessed with his whiteness. He doesn’t problematize his whiteness, like when Em forced us to re-think what it means to be white in his deeply personal discussions of growing up poor. No, instead Roth wants us to realize that we should like him because, well, he’s white and privileged just like us! His most recent song leak (which you can download here) details the trials and tribulations of being the next great white rapper and the subsequent comparisons to Eminem. Simultaneously, Roth reminds us that while he is no Eminem (he is from privilege and proud of it), he is unabashedly white (and therefore more relatable than those black rappers we thought we liked). Quoted in a recent New York Times piece, Roth explains the difference: “Culturally, Em was almost a black guy. My background is more stereotypically white.” That’s just great, Asher. How astute. It’s one thing to be aware of your racial identity; it’s an entirely different thing to embrace a privileged identity as your claim to superiority in a culture dominated by minority artists.

In an article from 2005, Brother Ali poignantly discussed white fans’ relationship to underground white rappers. “One of the hardest things we’re dealing with now is the underlying feeling of white supremacy among fans who feel they are a part of hip-hop, but are listening to and prefer mostly white MCs,” says Brother Ali. “They believe that Aesop Rock is better than independent artists who are Black and mainstream artists like Ludacris. These MCs are doing a lot with hip-hop artistically that they have learned from Black people, but [their fans] don’t want to hear from the old-school originators because they believe it’s the white MCs who created the styles they like. This isn’t an underground-versus-mainstream thing—it’s a racist thing.” My emphasis.

Brandon Soderberg, No Trivia – Asher Roth is a Problem

It’s never explicitly said—because if it was, he wouldn’t even be afforded the minor fame he has right now—but Roth’s rapping is not an alternative to mainstream hip-hop or capitalistic corpo-rap, but an alternative to blackness. It’s not entirely clear if Roth even realizes this (probably because he’s not thinking as hard as he thinks he is), but his contempt for most rappers mixed with statements about how he’s the kind of guy buying the music—again, and therefore not black people—sound contemptuous.

When I twittered about writing something on Asher Roth, NattheDem came back with a link I had missed. In an interview with the AP, Roth is quoted:

Roth addresses poverty and greed on the song “Sour Patch Kids.” And at his fans’ behest, Roth uploaded to his MySpace page “A Millie Remix,” a freestyle rhyme over Lil Wayne’s “A Milli” beat, criticizing rappers who boast about having millions of dollars but “don’t share, don’t donate to charity.”

“When I dropped that … (I thought) ‘You guys are always going off about how much money you have. Do you realize what’s going on in this world right now?’ All these black rappers — African rappers — talking about how much money they have. ‘Do you realize what’s going on in Africa right now?’” Roth says.

“It’s just like, ‘You guys are disgusting. Talking about billions and billions of dollars you have. And spending it frivolously, when you know, the Motherland is suffering beyond belief right now.’”

Sounds awfully familiar, doesn’t it? A lot of things came to mind when I read that quote, but none of them are printable.

Last month, Marisol LeBron sent me a video of Asher Roth covering D’Angelo’s How Does It Feel:

At the time, I had not heard of Roth, but the video twisted my stomach. Everything that was so right about the video had been perverted into all kinds of wrong.

Now, after doing a bit of reading and seeing how Roth is being championed as someone who is just expressing himself, I understand my reaction a little better.

—

And simply because it amuses the hell out of me – The Green Tea Partay, Smirnoff’s fake rap beef sequel:

A variety of clubs cater to queer women of color in the San Francisco Bay area. Some are wall-to-wall women of color – Black, Latina, Asian and most play hip-hop music non-stop. In each club, there are all different kinds of women. For instance, there might be women over forty with long ‘locks, Hawaiian shirts, shorts, and Teva sandals in one corner of the room and younger, Butch, women wearing crisp, indigo-colored Levi’s with thick black belts, large belt buckles and perfectly gelled hair in another. There are also femme women in tight jeans or skirts, heels, and short T-shirts, some cut around the collar so that they slide down their shoulders. In every club I that I’ve been to, there is always a clearly designated dance floor, which is usually packed tight with sweaty bodies. Some clubs have elevated dance floors or stages with one or two go-go dancers dressed in hot pants and knee-high boots. Below them are women lined up with dollars. In the background, hip-hop music fills the room with beats and voices, sometimes the only male presence in the room. What type of male, and ultimately what type of masculinity depends on the club.

On Gay Pride weekend this year, I went out to several of these clubs. Two in particular stuck out in my mind because of their similarities and differences in relationship to queer sexuality and black masculinity. For instance, at one of the clubs I went to, the deejay played songs that characterize more of the nigga, or thug image in hip-hop- 2Pac, Biggie Smalls, the Game, and 50 Cent. At the second club, the music had much more of a playa or sexualized tone – the Ying Yang twins, David Banner, and Khia. While there are two different types of masculinity being played at each club, in a room full of women of color, the lyrics fall to the background as the performances take center stage. For instance, nigga masculinity in the first club is reflected in a particular style, stance, or code. It is more about an individual identity, one that each person can take on. Women throw up hand gestures as they dance, make eye contact with one another and mouth the words to the lyrics. Some women even had on T-shirts with the ultimate “nigga 4 life,” 2Pac. The tone set at this club is also about community. The mood isn’t so much about sex or domination sexually, but rather, a stance about who someone is or declares herself to be: being down, being able to take what comes in life, being loyal to this group, this identity, and this community.

In the second club, the playa image was much more prevalent. If you wanted someone to help you get your groove on, this was the place to be. Women would grind their bodies into one another, and move one another’s bodies around to the direction of the lyrics. Queer sexuality was much more on display, as a woman, you wanted to be looked at, have somebody notice you, and maybe take you home. For instance, at one point, I noticed two women on the stage, dancing with one another. One of the women, in baggy jeans and a baseball jersey picked up the wman she was dancing with who was wearing a short, silver skirt and tank top. She then lifted her up onto the bars surrounding the stage and then put her face into the woman’s skirt under the musical direction of “work that clit, cum girl.” I had to sit down.

Even though I was a little uncomfortable with this display, I didn’t leave the bar, which is probably what I would have done had I been in a straight club. In a mixed setting, the lyrics and sexual display denote a different power struggle for me: with women more clearly marked as objects and men as subjects. That expression of sexual desire is one that all women see in music videos, movies, and hear it played out in the music we listen to. Similar to Laura Mulvey’s definition of the male gaze in popular culture in which the female is the fetishized object and the men are the spectators, mixed clubs are assumed to be spaces where women are expected to take on the passive quality of “to-be-looked-at-ness.” Over a hip-hop beat, men then possess the ability to look, taking pleasure in looking at and dominating women. I am not suggesting that straight women have no power in these settings. Mulvey has been rightly critiqued for her failure to go beyond men as spectators and women as passive objects. She, and other feminists, forget that every once in a while, a woman might like to “pile [he]r phat ass into [he]r fave micromini [and] slip [he]r freshly manicured toes into four inch fuck me sandals” for her pleasure as well as his when she goes out to a club. However, I do suggest these are the expected and most displayed roles in hip-hop music. What I am interested in is what women do with these roles.

Moreover, the expression of sexual desire between two queer women of color is rare, if at all existent, in popular culture. In these all female, queer club spaces, the decoding of black male masculinity is exciting, normalized, and even “safe.” First, these displays can demonstrate what queer women do and whom we do it with. Second, there isn’t the fear of violence or being overpowered that may be associated with mixed, straight clubs. Popular discourse often warns women, gay or straight, about the dangers of going to clubs alone. We are all too familiar with the Dateline specials on GHB or “roofies” which capitalize on horrible stories of women who go to bars sober and end up being sexually assaulted. While these stories are used to make women fear and regulate our sexuality, I have never once been worried about these “dangers” when I have walked into queer clubs alone, freshly made up in tight jeans and revealing blouse.

All queer women of color spaces have been one of the most liberating places for me as a Black queer woman, and consequently, as a feminist. I feel validated as a woman of color living in the current context of the L-Word, Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, and Queer as Folk where a majority of queer people are men and most of the lesbians are white. Scrambling to see images of myself and make connections with other women of color is an ongoing struggle in the twenty-first century. And it is always more than pleasurable to tell your homegirls that you like to throw lips to the shit and have them know the queer context I am speaking of. In these moments we engage in what Stuart Hall calls and oppositional reading of rap lyrics and hip-hop music. Queer women of color construct new meanings of the text and become active consumers who change the context of sexuality and masculinity.

In her research on drag kings of color, Halberstam points to this type of reading in her conclusion that “when a drag king lip synchs to rap, she takes sampling to another level and restages the sexual politics of the song and the active components of black masculinity by channeling them through the drag act for a female audience and through the queer space of a lesbian club. ” I argue that the same is true or lesbians and queer women in the clubs I have been to. For instance, some of the women in the clubs look and dress as hard as the men in rap videos. In these moments, black masculinity is changed in that these women are exploring their masculinity in relationship to the women they love and have sex with.

In this sense, there is a clear link between a Black queer or lesbian identity and the nigga identity. To clarify an earlier question, perhaps this is why Black queer women identify, at times, with the masculinity in hip-hop. In particular, the sense of outsider status in identities like the nigga. As Todd Boy suggests in Am I Black Enough for You, “the nigga is not interested in anything having to do with the mainstream, though his cultural products are clearly an integral part of mainstream popular culture. The nigga rejects the mainstream even though he has already been absorbed by it.” Here, Black male masculinity occupies a space both in and outside of heteronormativity through the rejection and absorption of it. Similarly, Black queer women reject heteronormativity in both their identity and desire at the same time that we embrace mainstream cultures like hip-hop. This happens not only in relationship to sex and sexuality, but with racial and ethnic identity as well. For instance, even though Gwen Stefani has colonized the culture, language, fashion, and stance of women of color from her use of Bindis, to dark eyeliner around her lips, her ska musical style (collaborations with Eve and Ladysaw) and, recently her “entourage” of Japanese girls, queer women of color run to the dance floor when her songs come on, singing louder than the music, perhaps reclaiming the identities that she has appropriated from us cause “ooh, this my shit.” The decoding of masculinity and race that happens in queer women’s spaces indicates that each identity is indeed performative. And what I find important in these performances of masculinity on the dance floor is the sense of legitimacy and dare I say “pride” that comes from watching Black women gyrate with one another to a hip-hop beat, one wanting the other to know she’s a hustler, baby. There is a celebration and declaration of same sex sex and sexuality in these moments that Black women and other women of color continue to be denied in popular discourse.

Queer women of color flipping the script in dance clubs does not eliminate the rigid representations of Black masculinity and femininity in popular culture or how we internalize these images as Black men and women. As I have demonstrated through the actions and spaces I have described, queer engagement with hip-hop masculinity is mad full of complexity and contradiction. These complexities have a long history in the lesbian community long before girls told other girls they’d take you to the candy shop and let you lick the lollipop. By examining this queer space, I am in now way suggesting that the objectification of women is thrown out completely. Bending your girl over to the front and telling her to touch her toes and having her do so in high heels and a thong may not be the path to liberation. I also make no claims that queer women don’t engage in harmful acts upon one another. I was once at a party and heard a woman telling someone else that she and her friends pulled a train on “this bitch” that she picked up at a club one night. And, to my horror, one of her friends standing next to her asked her “why she didn’t invite her to that party.” The same objectification and violence towards women can happen regardless of the gender of the protagonist. And queer communities are similar to the hip-hop community in that they reflect popular culture and discourse. This is not to exclude these actions, but to point out what this ideology, which some of us have internalized, suggests about the value of Black female bodies in this culture. What does it mean to be in an all female loving space and question the sexist lyrics.

The contradictions in queer women’s spaces are similar to the complexities that Mark Anthony Neal aces as a Black feminist man who enjoys songs that are derogatory against women. As he states, “My affection for Mos Def’s ‘Ms. Fat Booty’ frames one of the contradictions in thinking oneself a black male feminist. For example, how does black male feminism deal with the reality of heterosexual desire?” I must end this essay with a similar question; how do black queer feminists who love hip hop deal with the reality that same sex desire and practice is sometimes played out over a sexist hip hop beat? How do we recognize and value ourselves as part of the hip-hop generation, many of whom gay or straight don’t identify as feminist?

— From Andreana Clay’s essay “I used to be scared of the dick”: Queer women of color and hip hop masculinity, originally published in Home Girls Make Some Noise: Hip Hop Feminism Anthology.

I think I have fallen in love with Camus (a dead white Algerian philosopher who argues that the death penalty is premeditated murder) and Anthony Hamilton simultaneously.

What does this have to do with being an artist? Everything, simply because over the last few days I have been apart of a few conversations on the tension between art and commerce.

Two days ago, on Twitter, Indieplanet and I were having a discussion about art, commerce, Joe Budden/Vlad flap up.

indieplanet @mdotwrites Its a bigger issue of basic ethics.
Too many blogs/video sites decide at some point to exchange
ethics for page views. 10:06 AM Jan 11th from web in reply to
mdotwrites

indieplanet @mdotwrites Re: Budden/Vlad – What are your
thoughts on the whole situation. I think its a bigger picture that
video sites should consider. 11:51 PM Jan 10th from web
in reply to mdotwrites

indieplanet @mdotwrites Shouldnt it be possible to make a
contribution AND get paid?? It is possible (not common)
to change the game & have morals 12:17 PM Jan 11th from web
in reply to mdotwrites

@indieplanet Its like running with the Dope man. Sooner or
later, someone is going to test you, and you are going to have
to choose. 12:23 PM Jan 11th from web in reply to indieplanet

Yesterday, Dart Adam’s sent me a link to an essay of his which outlined, amongst many things, how the The Telecommunication’s Act spearheaded mergers and acquisitions in radio and how these changes impacted hip hop.

To cap it off, yesterday, Brooklyn Bodega posted a Facebook note asking “Does Money Ruin it All?” He wrote,

the other day one of our family posted a comment that he was no fan of ‘Notorious’ because too many people had profited from its production. He cited Memebrs of Junior Mafia, Puff and I assume he also had a problem with Ms. Wallace as she looks to have been in charge and arguably received the largest check.

So the question is does the presence of money make it impossible to produce a work of pure artistic integrity?

The responses ranged from, “as long as the Wallace family is compensated then it is all good” to “making money is practical for everyone including artists”, and finally “this is a less of an issue of the evils of capitalism and rather a question of authenticity.”

Many of the comments reflect a fundamental lack of understanding of capitalism and both how it has historically impacted art and how it impacts hip hop and Black artists specifically. Because capital is productive property, there will always be a move to exploit the the property to obtain the most returns.

This is why we have 5 CSI’s, 6 Indiana Jones’s and Hannah Montana dish towels.

Quality be damned.

Think about it, art is referred to as intellectual property for a reason.

And here is where the tension arises. If our music, our precious Hip Hop music began as a voice for the under represented, what does it mean for us to be so silent about its current state of affairs? And, if we are silent, do we deserve better than what we receive? Why are we so reluctant to admit the way in which the market has impacted our art?

I have watched both Saul Williams and KRS rationalize getting money with Fortune 500′s. And I thought to myself why be coy, why not just say, “Ya’ll, I got bills to pay.”

Lets be clear, I do not claim to be on a pedestal. If Coke/Sony/Steve Madden/ came calling and wanted to work with me and I chose to do so, I wouldn’t turn around and say to you “Well the executives at Coke/Sony/ like me, so this is a great partnership.” I would understand that they want to rock with me because they feel that I may be able to enhance their shareholder value. Simple as that.

So if you see my face and big {teeth} smile on the back of a Brooklyn Erotica anthology at the end of the year, lets be clear, I had to pay some bills and I am okay with that.

I guess, I am really perturbed at the fact that we all clearly understand the nasty bottom line of the Dope game, but when it comes to analyzing the ways in which the nasty bottom line of Capitalism affects our art we get shook.

Statement was very similar to another statement that I read by Camus (pronounced Cam-moo, like shampoo.) In the essay
The Wager of our Generation, Camus writes,

The aim of art, the aim of life, can only be to increase the sum of freedom and responsibility to be found in everyman and the world. It cannot, under any circumstances be used to reduce or suppress that freedom, even temporarily….

No great work of art has been based on hatred or contempt. There is not a single true work of art of art that has not in the end addressed the inner freedom of each person that has known and loved it.

In an interview on Verbalisms, ran by the phenomenal and formidable (wink) Raquel Wilson, Dan Tres OMi interviews Wise Intelligent of PRT on the role that art and music plays in our culture. He writes,

There are quite a few people who feel that music that is created to raise the consciousness of a particular community is irrelevant in the age of what William C. Bansfield calls the post-album age wherein the music created is commercially driven and marketed to a specific segment of society. Wise Intelligent, the front man for the influential hip-hop group Poor Righteous Teacher, always felt and continues to feel that he was galvanized by the spirit of the people to take up the mic to educate the masses. It is a tragedy that Wise Intelligent, who penned one of the best odes to Black women with “Shakyla,” is forgotten when it comes to bringing knowledge of self beat up and compressed into hip-hop form.

Where does Anthony Hamilton fit in? His album is the first one in a very long time, that both instrumentation wise and lyrically, has helped me make sense of my life. He has helped me be okay with my new found freedom. The irony is that it isn’t Hip Hop, and because I am notoriously boom bap oriented and it feels weird. I will add that Q-Tip’s The Renaissance has been in rotation as well.

Anthony Hamilton also comes into play because the title of his album connects to an essential question asked by Camus, which is what is the point of life? While I do not have an answer to that, I have been thinking about the role that music plays in affirming who we are.

In 1992, I had Death Certificate to make sense of what was going on in LA, in the Streets of Oakland and in my family life. What music do the young bucks of today have to help them make sense of their lives?

What music do they have to help them make sense of the rage that they feel about the murder of Oscar Grant?

Whether you describe it as the dawning of a post-racial age or just the end of white America, we’re approaching a profound demographic tipping point. According to an August 2008 report by the U.S. Census Bureau, those groups currently categorized as racial minorities—blacks and Hispanics, East Asians and South Asians—will account for a majority of the U.S. population by the year 2042. Among Americans under the age of 18, this shift is projected to take place in 2023, which means that every child born in the United States from here on out will belong to the first post-white generation.

“I think white people feel like they’re under siege right now—like it’s not okay to be white right now, especially if you’re a white male,” laughs Bill Imada, of the IW Group…“There’s a lot of fear and a lot of resentment,” Newman-Carrasco observes, describing the flak she caught after writing an article for a trade publication on the need for more-diverse hiring practices. “I got a response from a friend—he’s, like, a 60-something white male, and he’s been involved with multicultural recruiting,” she recalls. “And he said, ‘I really feel like the hunted. It’s a hard time to be a white man in America right now, because I feel like I’m being lumped in with all white males in America, and I’ve tried to do stuff, but it’s a tough time.’”

“I always tell the white men in the room, ‘We need you,’” Imada says. “We cannot talk about diversity and inclusion and engagement without you at the table. It’s okay to be white!”

“But people are stressed out about it. ‘We used to be in control! We’re losing control!’”

So this roundtable has been a long time coming. In mid-January the team started to take a look at Hua Hsu’s Atlantic Monthly article “The End of White America?” And we had a lot of pissed off things to say. And yes it did take us more than a few weeks to corral all our righteous indignation together. But we hope you’ll think it was worth the wait.

On the Cover

Andrea: This is the impression I got from the cover and the article: screamingly alarmist. The half-face of Obama juxtaposed with heavy-block sans serif capital letters that can be seen half a long Barnes & Noble check-out line away. As if to say this single man–a bi-racial man who self-identifies as Black–is single-handedly ruining white people, whiteness, and, most importantly, white privilege. It seems to play off the fear-mongering miscegenation fantasies of yore: the “receding” of the “white” phenotype, that “beiging” of America that Hsu refers to in the piece. Then, before anyone gets any ideas about the writer’s race, in smaller red letters, is the scribe’s name. Sorta like, “Ha! You can’t accuse The Atlantic of being racist ’cause the name can’t be ‘read’ as white.” Doesn’t matter, IMO. The zero-sum game that is US racism is visually in full effect.

Actually, The Atlantic cover reminds me of another cover from a magazine about twenty years ago, when “coloredness”–coded as “identity politics” and “political correctness” back then–was also “threatening to tear the country apart.” From Time magazine, April 9, 1990:

Just some visual perspective on these kinds of articles.

On Alarmism

What happens once this is no longer the case—when the fears of Lothrop Stoddard and Tom Buchanan are realized, and white people actually become an American minority?…Today, the arrival of what Buchanan derided as “Third World America” is all but inevitable. What will the new mainstream of America look like, and what ideas or values might it rally around? What will it mean to be white after “whiteness” no longer defines the mainstream? Will anyone mourn the end of white America? Will anyone try to preserve it?

Thea: Hsu argues that mainstream culture has turned against white people and the way he talks, it’s as if the colored hordes of P Diddy fans and ethnically ambiguous Latin@s who’re snapping up all the commercial parts have somehow sneakily gotten hold of “culture” and orchestrated this shift. First, we’ll make fun of you for not being able to dance! Then, WE’LL EAT YOUR CHILDREN!!!”

Andrea: This alarmist angle covers what really bugs me about the piece–it’s offers no analysis of structures and execution of racism itself in the US. What Hsu seems to ostensibly and sloppily attempts to get at is once whiteness–and those white people and PoCs who adhere to it–fall back, racism itself will disappear. Hsu says:

There will be dislocations and resentments along the way, but the demographic shifts of the next 40 years are likely to reduce the power of racial hierarchies over everyone’s lives, producing a culture that’s more likely than any before to treat its inhabitants as individuals, rather than members of a caste or identity group.

And there is Hsu’s “we gonna be post-racial, y’all–if we’re not already” statement–which can also be a another read on this article.

But.

This article makes me go back to Tim Wise and Vijay Prashad, who I think would have made better touchstones/springboards for Hsu’s piece because they both have more nuanced understandings of the mechanics of racism in the US. Tim Wise said about whiteness, from his book, White Like Me:

…from the mid-1600s to the early 1700s a series of laws were promulgated in Virginia and elsewhere, which elevated all persons of European descent, no matter how lowly in economic terms, above all persons of African descent. The purpose of such measures was to provide poor Europeans (increasing called whites) with a stake in the system, even though they were hardly benefiting in material terms from it. In other words, whiteness was a trick, and it worked marvelously, dampening down the push for rebellion by poor whites on the basis of class interest, and encouraging them to cast their lot with the elite, if only in aspirational terms. White skin became, for them, an alternative form of property to which they could cleave, in the absence of more tangible possessions.

And from Vijay Prashad, from his book, Everybody Was Kung-Fu Fighting: Afro-Asian Connections and the Myth of Racial Purity (which gets to Thea’s point about whites as immigrants and the internecine racial conflicts among some PoCs):

Since blackness is reviled in the United States, why would an immigrant, of whatever skin color, want to associate with those who are racially oppressed, particularly when the transit to the United States promises the dream of gold and glory? The immigrant seeks a form of veritcal assimilation, to climb from the lowest darkest echelon on the stepladder of tyranny into the bright whiteness. In U.S. history the Irish, Italians, Jews, and –in small steps with some hesitation ont he part of white America–Aisans and Latinos have all tried to barter their varied cultural worlds for the privileges of whiteness….

Yet all people who enter the United States do not strive to be accepted by the terms set by white supremacy. Some actively disregard them, finding them impossible to meet. Instead, they seek recognition, solidarity, and safety by embracing others also oppressed by white supremacy in something of a horizontal assimilation…

When people actively or tacitly refuse the terms of vertical integration they are derisively dismissed as either unassimilable or exclusionary. We hear, ‘Why do the black kids sit together in the cafeteria’ instead of ‘Why do our institutions routinely uphold the privilieges of whiteness?’ There is little space in popular discourse for an examination of what goes on outside the realm of white America among people of color.

Hsu certainly didn’t expand this space. He’s just screaming, “Fire!” in a crowded theater of racial anxiety.

Fatemeh: Hsu’s “The End of White America?” (cue scary music) essentially aims to hash out the following: “Hey, white people are freaked out that people of color are becoming the majority in the U.S. Why’s that? Don’t worry, guys. It’s cool.” But instead of just sticking to this outline, it feels like Hsu tries to condense several books on hip-hop culture, racial history of the U.S., market trends, and race theory into one article. Because all of these subjects need extensive background, he fails in his attempt to mash them together.

Hsu hints at a “white panic” caused by the racial demographic shift, but doesn’t explore it, question it, or even attempt to assuage it (except for a few paragraphs in the last section). He quotes Bill Imada, who states that whites are worried about “losing control,” which is the reason for all this “white panic” over shifting ethnic demography. But instead of analyzing this point (“What do they mean by ‘losing control’? What do they think this means for them?”), it serves as a transition at the end of a section, and is quickly glossed over in a comparison of different “types” of whites (the seemingly conservative and liberal camps) that still doesn’t tell us what white people are afraid of.

Fear can’t be assuaged or overcome without an assessment of what it is you’re afraid of, which Hsu hints at in the next section but never actually plainly states: “The coming white minority does not mean that the racial hierarchy of American culture will suddenly become inverted…” As if people of color will suddenly disenfranchise whites, confiscate their assets, and force them into slavery.

Arturo: It’s hard to read this article without laughing at first, and then getting angry. Hsu’s piece, much like Diddy’s White parties he talks about, is high in concept but crass in execution.

Ask me about “the end” of whiteness when I don’t have to read “reassurances”in the New York Post that minorities are advancing on television because there are more black supporting characters. Ask me about it when Bruce Springsteen isn’t playing the Super Bowl halftime show because white people are scared of Prince’s guitar and Janet Jackson’s cleavage.

On Hsu’s Use of Language

Obviously, steadily ascending rates of interracial marriage complicate this picture, pointing toward what Michael Lind has described as the “beiging” of America. And it’s possible that “beige Americans” will self-identify as “white” in sufficient numbers to push the tipping point further into the future than the Census Bureau projects. But even if they do, whiteness will be a label adopted out of convenience and even indifference, rather than aspiration and necessity.

Fatemeh: Hsu presents terms that he doesn’t define, like “whiteness,” “racial transcendence,” and “beiging.” He also makes several terms synonymous that aren’t so:

…the dawning of a post-racial age or just the end of white America…

and

…we can call this the triumph of multiculturalism, or post-racialism.

These conflations are even more problematic because of Hsu’s undefined terms; it’s up to the reader to guess what he means by terms such as “post-white” or “post-racial”. Undefined terms like this are unclear and often alarmist; I can just imagine a reader trying to figure out what “post-white” means: “Does that mean there won’t be any more white people?!”

Hsu not only presents the “white panic” without a full explanation of what it is, but often feeds it with alarmist rhetorical questions like, “Will anyone mourn the end of white America?” and sympathetic constructions of white people who can’t get jobs in advertisements because all the advertisers want “beige” people.

Andrea: Yeah, the word “beiging” is wrong on at least 30 different levels. Here are 4: Inaccurate, creepy, twee-rude (nasty with pinkie in the air), and asinine.

Thea: Let me just say that as a mixed race person of colour I OBJECT to the word “beiging.” Pullease. I am not beige! More of an off-yellow, really.

This is a long-ass article, but Hsu never finds space to define some key, and rather obvious terms. Like “white.” Or “post-white.” Or “multicultural.”

Hsu talks about how white people feel “culturally bereft” and want to distance themselves from “whiteness.” And that seems an accurate representation to me – the word “white” has become a bad word. In some circles if you point out that Gary is white, everyone will act like you called Gary’s mom a ho.

But what drives me mad about that is that it was the white colonisers who came up with the term “white” in the first place, to distinguish themselves from everyone else as more pure and biologically superior. Says Dr Gregory Jay of the University of Wisconsin in his article “Who Invented White People?”:

It was white people who invented the idea of race in the first place, and it is white people who have become obsessed and consumed by it…[Whiteness] emerged as what we now call a “pan-ethnic” cateogry; as a way of merging a variety of European ethnic populations into a single “race,” especially so as to distinguish them from people with whom they had very particular legal and political relations–Africans, Asians, American Indians–that were not equal to their relations with one another as whites.”

So it’s hard to have sympathy for “white folks on the run” or white folks who get their backs up when you point out that they are white, when it was the forebears of said white folks who set up racial categories in the first place.

Perhaps one of the most infuriating things about this article is Hsu’s expectation that we will have pity for these white folks who no longer know how to define themselves in a demographically shifting America. Because in order to have pity we’d
1) have to agree that this demographic shift was equivalent to a power shift, which as far as I can tell it is not, first African American president notwithstanding,
2) have to feel bad that white folks are feeling the pinch of a segregation that they have benefitted from for 100s of years – the segregation they started, and the segregation that many white folks only begin to notice and fuss about when it is perceived to threaten their power and identity.

Not to be all puerile and get into who started it, but uh, they started it. And to loop back to 1), I don’t really care if you’re being segregated. When you do a) become a minority race b) become politically marginalised as a minority race, then I’ll come and talk to you.

And anyways. What really has changed? Sure, I know lots of angry young people of colour who do see the word “white” as a bad word and use it that way. But I don’t think they’re the ones who are greenlighting films, owning the companies that can make or break a recording artist (like Sony or Virgin), or making the final decision on H&M’s Spring Collection.

On Hip Hop

Andrea: I think Hsu uses hip-hop as a played-out shorthand for (and two of its proprietors, Russell Simmons and P. Diddy, examples of) “authentic Negritude,” which is the image of Black folks struggling in the hard-scrabble, poverty-stricken, school-system-and-city-government-failed, inner-city streets. I’m not saying that this isn’t *a* reality for some Black folks (and other PoCs as well as some white people here and abroad) but it also became the mythic standard of what being an African American in the late 20th century and into the 21st century – and a commodified mythic standard at that. Hsu, then, uses hip-hop to insinuate, “See, *those* uncouth, can’t-quite-assimilate-to-”our”-middle-class-mores Negroes are taking over! Hide your (white) women and innocent (white) children!” ::horror-film scream::

But What Is This Article Really About?

Thea: The fact of the matter is that this is an article that is not simply afraid that white people will be a demographic minority, but that they’ll lose control. To me, that’s kind of a repugnant fear. Would a little more balanced distribution of power across race lines really be that bad?

Fatemeh: Hsu doesn’t ever address why there is such “white panic” by Buchanan et al. It feels like this panic is really a fear that white people will have to be treated the way they treated people of color for years. Is this what Hsu means by racial transcendence? Why doesn’t anyone just say this? I feel like that’s what is meant a lot of times, but wrapped up in the secret language and given the code “power.”

Are some white folks afraid they’ll be forced into the white slave trade? Maybe. But I think most people are afraid of “losing control”, which really means losing advantages over others because of skin color, losing skin privilege when it comes to housing or loans or job openings. People will have to actively work and participate in a community rather than assuming one exists based on race.

Andrea: Even if white folks became a numerical minority, I don’t think that’ll cause racism, especially white-centered racism, itself to cease. Unless my memory is getting rusty, a group doesn’t necessarily need sheer numbers to have a system that works favorably for them–just the silver tongue and the ammo. (Apartheid in South Africa, anyone?) So, “white America” supposedly fading away in numbers and in “culture/cultural relevance” (both demeaningly ridiculous assumptions) will not make us “post-racial” any more than PoCs shutting up about Teh Racizim that “we” seem to be “foisting” on the “innocent” white people, esp. in the Obama Age, as Thea rightly states.

Jessica: I mean, what’s with the “What does it mean to be American?” question every time White people feel like they are losing power in these perceived “race wars”. It was even in the title paragraph of this damn piece! Isn’t it really, “What does it mean to be colonized, over and over and over again?” I think that’s how one might fit in a little more with the truth of it all.

Like many people, I hate the quintessential pictorial of what a perfect, hegemonized America would look like if we all just forgot our histories and pretended like we’re getting along in perfect racial symbiosis. Diversity/equity work 101 myth dispelled for ya: Hiring people from racialized communities DOES NOT always lead to the appropriate programs and policies for people of colour. So take a chill pill about Barack, okay? (but keep on hoping for that change!)

Back to what people were actually saying for this article:

Bill Imada:

White people feel like they’re under siege now.

Christian Lander:

As a white person, you’re just desperate to find something else to grab onto.

Matt Wray:

You’re forced as a white person into a sense of ironic detachment…..We’re going through a period where whites are really trying to figure out: Who are we?

I suppose I appreciate the frankness of the opinions shared, although I’d be remiss if I didn’t in my unpolite non-Western norm discourse state that besides having had it with the same old, same old defensiveness that happens when racialized communities start reclaiming and re-asserting themselves, I’m at a loss for seeing how these various forms of wanted cultural appropriation, guilt-tripping, and blame-shifting the issues are in any way beneficial for improving race relations here.

Hsu also seems to suggest that with our increasing numbers, “armies” are going to form and White people had better watch out. Umm, yeah it’s kind of exciting that we’re populating the country as people of colour, even in Canada Aboriginal people are the fastest growing population with 50% of us under the age of 25. But are we planning to mass organize and take over the country the same way you fucked us over?

No. Because culturally speaking, we wouldn’t be Aboriginal anymore. Thanks.

And is it Still the End of White America if a (yet to be seen) White Minority Still Hold the Institutional Power?

Thea: The article is peppered with quotes and anecdotes that echo this vision of white men on the run, of white men (well, really white people, but Hsu focuses on the men) being ostracised for being “culturally bereft” and lacking in colour. But strangely enough, in a 9-page article on power and race in America, Hsu never once talks about the real marker of power in America: money. Who are the poorest people in America? According to Wikipedia:

The US Census declared that in 2007 – 12.5% of all people, [34]including
- 10.5% white people [35]
- 24.5% black people [36]
- 21.5% all Hispanic people of any race, [37] lived in poverty.

Stats on Asians and Native Americans are missing, but at a glance it is clear that while the US now has a person of colour as a president, socio-economic conditions didn’t miraculous change overnight for communities of colour the moment Obama won the election. Obviously!

Hsu says:

[Christian] Lander’s “white people” are products of a very specific historical moment, raised by well-meaning Baby Boomers to reject the old ideal of white American gentility and to embrace diversity and fluidity instead…But his lighthearted anthropology suggests that the multicultural harmony they were raised to worship has bred a kind of self-denial.

It is almost ridiculous to me that Hsu buys into the idea that Americans (and North Americans as far as I can tell) embrace multiculturalism and diversity in a real way when so much of the basic stats that measure well-being and race – the real measures of power – show that he is wrong. Here’s some more stats: rates of incarceration by race in the U.S.; and a Canadian article that states that

Although [Aboriginal people] comprised only 2% of the general adult population, they accounted for 17% of the prison population. They were younger on average than non-Aboriginal inmates, had less education and were more likely to have been unemployed.

Hsu never defines “multicultural harmony.” And because some of his examples that pronounce the dominance of non-white cultures include white kids growing dreadlocks and suburban white kids wanting to be black (i.e. wiggers), by the end of the article I started to think that maybe Hsu believes that things like the use of models of colour in American Apparel ads and last year’s popularity of the fashion keffiyeh are examples of diversity’s strength in American mainstream culture. For crying out loud. That’s not power sharing. That’s cultural appropriation. To go back to the first thing I said, I don’t think it’s people of colour who’ve directed the cultural shift that that’s got us suddenly slobbering over everything “non-white.” I think it’s white folks who are into cultural appropriation (i.e. not anti-racism or equity) have made this so.

The fact is that the popularity of Eastern Religions, sushi, Sufism, faux-Chinese tattoos, Kanye West, backpacking across Vietnam and Bob Marley has not coincided with the fair distribution of socio-economic power across the globe, or across ethnic groups in America. So call me a cynic but to me the popularity of those things – which more often than not rise to prominence as sanitised and white-washed versions of their original selves – is more of an insult than a sign of multicultural harmony.

And also, That Whole White People Are Cultural Bereft Thing is a Racist Fallacy

Arturo: Life at the Atlantic has to be tough – how does one write this stuff with their pinky so high in the air?

Hsu’s sources and examples are undermined just as easily as his argument. Really, we’re supposed to be surprised that the guy behind Stuff White People Like would attest to a sense of white self-loathing? Did Professor Wray not refer his culturally envious students to Temple’s genealogy department? Did he not teach them the meaning of the word genealogy? I’ve got news for these guys – some of the White People I know cared enough to learn about how their families emigrated to this country from Scotland, or from Ireland, or from Germany, or from Russia.

Let me repeat: they cared enough to learn. Only a narcissist (or worse, an avaricious hipster preying on the insecurities of people in skinny jeans) would dismiss culture as nothing more than a pigment; a shared history, the traditions, the customs and courtesies and the stories we learn from our loved ones help forge our respective cultures, not because they’re “cool and oppositional,” but because they come from inside us.

Hsu’s “Flight To Whiteness” section, which could have examined the paths and reasons behind the remaining vestiges of generational racism, instead seems to buy into the self-stylings of the Cable Guys and Sarah Palins of the world as a would-be Rebellion against the Evil Multicultural Empire. Instead of focusing on Smokey and the Bandit and Falling Down, he might have been better served asking how and why Michael Steele and Bobby Jindal could rise up the ranks of the Republican party to which so many of these “besieged” white people pledge fealty.

And Finally

Arturo: Instead of asking the questions he should’ve, Hsu blithely dismisses race as “a fiction that often does more harm than good” and hides behind advertising reps eager to re-code and re-demo the young people they’re probably eager to pitch cigarettes and nose jobs to before closing his note with hopeful visions of the upcoming social shifts — the same ones he and his editors had been so alarmed about. The “end of white America”? I’ll just be glad to see the end of articles like these.

Fatemeh: This article was too tangential and incredibly disappointing. Hsu didn’t need to dance around the definition of whiteness. He didn’t need to use “whiteness studies” to dissect whites into different cultural groups (this should have been an entirely different and separately interesting article). He didn’t need to compare P. Diddy to The Great Gatsby. All he needed to do was examine the white panic, deconstruct it, and let the anxiety around it float away after a clear, rational repudiation. Instead, he tried to come at it from too many angles, which just ups white America’s anxiety level and feeds the fires of fear.

Thea: This article is a bizarre and sprawling mess that suggests that just because Russell Simmons is massively successful, America has not only achieved racial harmony, but is now threatening to submerge white folks into a sea of “beigeness.” But it never answers a very basic question: what do any of the things that Hsu mentions – like Smirnoff ads, 50 Cent, Dora the Explorer or Stuff White People Like – have to do with actual rates of racial equity?

Not much.

I thought the insanity would end after the election. But oh-no! I was wrong!

”There was underlying concerns we had become too regionalized and the party needed to reach beyond our comfort” zones, he said, citing defeats in such states as Virginia and North Carolina. “We need messengers to really capture that region – young, Hispanic, black, a cross section … We want to convey that the modern-day GOP looks like the conservative party that stands on principles. But we want to apply them to urban-surburban hip-hop settings.”

But, he elaborated with a laugh, “we need to uptick our image with everyone, including one-armed midgets.”

This is a direct quote, people.

“I am not afraid of being held accountable for my leadership,” [Steele] said. “The idea I am somehow going to handicap myself before I begin is nuts. I am not going to buy into this mind-set among a few people who probably have never run anything but their mouths.”

Under Mr. Steele’s helm, the “old” may seem inappropriate in the Grand Old Party’s affectionate nickname. He said he is putting a new public relations team into place to update the party’s image.

“It will be avant garde, technically,” he said. “It will come to table with things that will surprise everyone – off the hook.”

Does that mean cutting-edge?

“I don’t do ‘cutting-edge,’ “ he said. “That’s what Democrats are doing. We’re going beyond cutting-edge.”

Oh shit, I’m going to have to start reading the Washington Times now. This is comedy gold!

Actual comments from the Times site:

#
By: Jay666

I used to like this guy and even voted for him but he is an idiot. The race war doesn’t need anymore help getting started. When the upcoming generation who is getting royally shafted by this bogus “stimulus package” wakes up and realizes that the blacks have sold them into debtor’s prison to elect one of their own. People like Steele, Obama and the rest of the black politcians will be treated as the pariahs they are and their lives won’t be worth a dime. Obama and his tribe of sissies didn’t win the election, the white supremacists did. They predicted this debacle and the uprising that will ensue.
February 19, 2009 at 2:57 p.m. | Mark as Offensive

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By: Cullen

I wish Mr. Steele the best in his attempt to bring the Conservative philosophy to the masses.

Maybe he should include a call to responsibility specifically to blacks and women: This is your country, too, guys. If you keep voting for the worst possible candidates you will end up with the worst possible place to live.

It’s one thing to bad-mouth Republicans, it’s another thing to go vote for a class of people (Democrats) who are 10 times worse.

If you can’t vote for somebody who is white or male, then you should grow up and get over your own racism/sexism.

If our country continues it’s downward path you will have nobody to blame but yourself…
February 19, 2009 at 12:52 p.m. | Mark as Offensive

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By: NRAMBR89

Illegal immigrants are the problem. And that doing the jobs Americans don’t want to do is BS!!!!!!! I work Construction and my wages are held down by Illegal Immigrants because they will work for 20 bucks a day.
February 19, 2009 at 12:53 p.m. | Mark as Offensive

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By: doug12342

Cullen wow are we a little racist maybe its you who has it all wrong ever consider that. I am sure talking down to the as you said “blacks and women” is going to make them vote republican. You neocons make me laugh your i am better than everyone else attitude is a big part of why your party is dieing.
February 19, 2009 at 12:57 p.m. | Mark as Offensive

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By: Cullen

doug12342, When 97% of a particular race vote against a candidate because he is white it speaks for itself: racism. Do you deny this?

This is not a football game, this is our future.

Look at the following website. Check out the video at the bottom of the page. Note the people going to vote who couldn’t name key facts that everybody should know before walking in the booth.

http://www.howobamagotelected.com/

When certain groups of people are drawn to vote for the worst candidates it says more about those groups of people than it does the candidates.

It’s time for those groups of people to get in the game – it’s your country, too.
February 19, 2009 at 1:04 p.m. | Mark as Offensive

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By: NRAMBR89

Stupid liberals need to stop analyzing the GOP. The problem with the GOP is it is just like the Democrats. It is not Conservative. Conservatism dose not need to be ‘Hip-hop’ It needs to be conservative. And you ignorant libs need to grow up and stop stereotyping conservatives. You don’t hear me saying all libs are over educated pampered sissies who don’t know what a hammer is do you?
February 19, 2009 at 12:17 p.m. | Mark as Offensive

Hat tip to the Rachel Maddow show. I was half asleep when I heard this. I thought I was dreaming. But no! Dead at Melissa Harris-Lacewell, who was on the show and said the GOP thought voters had “a Pavlovian response” to hip-hop music forcing us to salivate to the ballot box.

And I now dedicate the following to Michael Steele – best of luck to you!

(Lyrics to “Can I Get A…“)

(Photo Credit: The Washington Times)

(Continued from Part 1)

LP: [We should] think some more about this formula, because it seems to me that with every year that passes, the formula gets whittled down into the need to find the next hit. Catchy hooks, lyrics, whatever – they just want a hit. And it appears that some of these [truths about life and culture] are becoming diluted. So before, the hits came because in some ways, we can relate to this pain, and relate to this anguish. But the people who are in charge of these [networks] are making decisions about what gets played but they don’t hear those things. Instead, the only hear violence, they only hear anger, they only hear rage and they decide to promote that. Is that a pattern you saw in your research?

TR: Yes. It shares the history of transition into the “mainstream” market. Just as the dances and dance steps and styles of singing that minstrelsy was based on was something quite different than what minstrelsy turned into, right? So there were origins of minstrelsy [rooted] in black cultural expression, but minstrelsy became a grotesque exaggeration that was basically seen through dominant eyes. So black women, in hip-hop, become, you know, big booty bitches and hos, gold diggers, divas, sex kittens, whatever else you want them to be because dominate society perceives black women that way. They’re baby mammas, they’re basically male appendages who are also hypersexual and sexually irresponsible. These are all part of dominant stereotypes! Now does that mean that sexually explicit material is bad? No! But it means that sexually explicit material that is destructive and self destroying is problematic! So this is directly related to the process underway. And also our normalization, our comfort with it. The fact that their isn’t much public critique inside the community for this kind of problem.

If you study the blues, or if you study any other black music, this is one of the things that happens. These forces are at play every single time. So this idea that music should be a revenue stream is fundamentally destructive.

Until we change the racial structures and gendered structures of society, then the larger dominant fantasies are going to rule the dominant marketplace. And that’s going to be problematic. It will be profitable, but it will be really problematic.

LP: I recently attended an exhibit put on by the National Portrait Gallery here in Washington D.C. called “Recognize,” and you know, it’s kind of a history of hip-hop through portraiture and other forms of artistic expression. One of the things they mentioned in the introduction to the exhibit is that hip-hop has become part of the dominant youth culture around the globe. In almost every other country in the world, their youth scene involves a heavy element of hip-hop culture, and each country has put their own unique spin on the genre.

So I know, a lot of times in the United States – and in particular in your book – you focus on how things are seen through a black and white lens. That’s how our country started and it has been the defining conflict for us here. But did you think about hip-hop as a global culture when writing? How did it spread so much and why does it resonate with so many different types of people around the globe?

TR: Yeah. Whoo, that’s a big question!

LP: Yeah, I know.

TR: First of all, the reason I reestablished the black/white binary, which I’m not happy about having to do, but I feel that for the purposes of what I’m trying to deal with in this book I had to. For all the incredible range, uses, and creative participation that people all over the world of every possible background have contributed to hip-hop, the genre in the US, as a commercial formation, relies on incredible, homogenous, fictional models of black masculinity and femininity. It relies on precisely the binary of blackness and whiteness, or blackness and something else, that has really dominated racialized representation in the US.

For example, while we have many Chicano rappers, while we have Asian-American rappers, while we have hordes and hordes of white rappers, we almost never see them on TV. You might catch Eminem and Bubba Sparxx, but you wouldn’t know there’s a whole underground scene full of white rappers. Let alone all the other people of color there as well! So the question is, why are they written out of the conversation?

That’s one piece of it.

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.

So the first thing is to help people see what the sam heck is going on, right? Like, let’s look at the territory. The second thing is to hold artists to the kind of standards we hold people around us. Now the problem is that some of us aren’t terribly progressive! You’ve got homophobic youth, sexist youth, because we’re trained to be homophobic and sexist. This isn’t like, “you’re personally responsible.” This is how America raises its youth for the most part. So what we have to do is develop a political consciousness…then we hold Immortal Technique to that standard!

You know, I’ve thought about sending this book to a group of progressive artists, many of the ones I’ve mentioned! And say, you know, look – there are some places I think you fall down here, and instead of getting all excited about what you’re good at, you might want to think about places you need to fix.

I mention some of those flaws in one of the chapters [in the book], but I think [the key] is the idea that what we consume should broadly line up with our overall principles. It doesn’t have to be perfect. Sure, there’s violence. Sure, there’s exploitation. Sure, there’s manipulative characters we could draw – they’re fascinating. But if the overall scope of what we’re doing doesn’t line up with our principles, then we need to start asking some fundamental questions. We should ask them of the underground, we should ask them of the commercial mainstream, we should ask them of everything.

So, [an artist like] Lupe Fiasco may get big in a commercial way. Well, he still wouldn’t fit commercial rap if he did that! And people like Andre 3000 from Outkast, and what not – he avoids a lot of stupidity. That doesn’t mean he hasn’t been successful. So when I say commercial rap, I don’t just mean what’s sold, what is commercially viable, because it’s all commercial. But it’s about what has dominated mainstream iconography. So people can move around, people can change, people can be challenged into greater growth.

LP: Last question. So after all your research and writing, we see at the very end of the book that we are looking toward reframing the conversation. What’s the key to reframing the hip-hop wars into a productive and beneficial conversation?

TR: The daunting task that I hopefully, vaguely achieved was to get people to recognize that we’re trapped. Because, to be quite honest, a lot of people don’t think we’re trapped. They think this is just a fun entertaining thing, and there’s nothing at stake, and as long as you get paid it’s cool. So the first thing is to really lay out the problem. The second thing…the idea of the six guiding principles is to say look, I’m not going to tell you what you should believe, which artists to like, because these things can shift. Somebody could put out a record tomorrow that breaks with their entire tradition and history of record producing. This is not about [individuals.]

This is about, you know, progressive ideas and community sustaining culture and music…that tries to enable, not disable. That is the general goal. Within that goal, a lot of incredible genius, creativity, funk, sexuality, and even violence can be articulated. So the struggle is to keep those fundamental ideas alive. One, we know that yes, you’re going to need to make music for sale because we’re in a market economy.

But don’t let the value of that market economy govern who you are as an artist, or as a fan. Once you start separatingthat out, you can make some better decisions about why and what you’re doing. And it’s not just about what’s going to make me the most money, because then you’re really no different than a drug dealer.

LP: True.

TR: It doesn’t really matter what you’re selling, right? It’s just about how much money you make.

[END]

In the Noir Issue of Bitch Magazine, I interviewed Tricia Rose about her new book The Hip Hop Wars: What We Talk About When We Talk About Hip-Hop.

My interview assignment was 2,000 words. The transcribed interview came back as 6,000.

This is the overflow.
—

Latoya Peterson: You’ve had other works published, including Black Noise, which was a very influential book discussing music and culture and how that plays out in the black community. So why do you choose to work with music to explore both black culture and youth culture?

Tricia Rose: The category of youth culture to me tends to be racialized youth culture. From my vantage point, when you’re looking at African-American history and cultural expression, music is of extraordinary importance to that history. It is disproportionately rich and complex and dynamic and influential and innovative. And I say “disproportionately” to say that not everyone has such a rich, modern musical legacy. Some ethnic and racial and religious and national groups have literary or dance or film legacies, but when it comes to music in the modern world, people of African descent in the Diaspora in particular have an enormous contribution….if you are thinking twentieth century alone there are not too many American musics that have not been directly influenced or are in fact constituted as an African American tradition. Jazz, blues, rhythm and blues, gospel, hip-hop, even dance music – techno and the like.

It’s just an incredibly rich tradition. It also has a profound connection to a history of culture in oral traditions of social commentary. [...] In African American music and culture, you find not just good music, but music that plays a role in commenting on and creating critical consciousness about one’s social world.

LP: In your book, you write, “gangsta rap music is a post-industrial black culture industry with job openings and a chance for upward mobility. This is a fascinating way to frame the discussion because so much of hip-hop has become about the business side of it. Some have argued that it has come to step in for the industrial [labor market] void we have. So, instead of having progressive job growth in inner cities, other industries have come and filled in that gap of losing jobs to off-shorting, like the hip-hop industry or underground industries like the drug game. Can you comment more on the idea of rap music being an industry and providing people with upward mobility?

TR: Beginning in the twentieth century, when industrialization begins to flourish, you develop industrialized music cultures, in that you develop products, right? Music became something you could buy and sell. And once that happens, the record industry begins to take hold, and then [music] begins to be an industry for artists that was not the case before. [...] For post-industrial, isolated, urban black youth, rap music, and to a lesser extent athletics, have become an alternative form of upward mobility, a way to get of the hood. What makes rap music problematic in this way is that it is not just an industry that creates opportunity, but a form of opportunity creation that is also a trap.

It creates a trap for it’s followers because of the icons it celebrates. So rap as a “way out” has become attached to the tail of a street economy, that “gangster” rap has been defined by. So it’s not just rap music and the industry that’s a problem, but the fact that what we are selling is profitable. And what is profitable, what makes it an industry, is its constant sale of pimps, hos, gangsters, hustlers, drug dealers, criminals. It’s a grab bag of what we would call in the old days the red light district – it’s that underground economy.

Then you’re talking about a set of icons that celebrates a lifestyle that ultimately either reflects or celebrates a lifestyle that is extraordinarily self-destructive, and more importantly – to my mind – destructive to the entire community. It makes the sustenance and the maintenance of healthy, strong, progressive, stable communities more difficult. I mean, the already existing joblessness, the criminalization, the just appallingly bad schools, the hunger, the poverty, all of these circumstances are horrible. But [these ills] are not helped by a sort of market based churning out of constantly sexy, exciting, and interesting images of black people as street hustlers, hoes, and pimps. So it creates an avenue of revenue that is [intrinsically] destructive. And that’s a very different thing than to just say rap music is a product.

LP: Let’s focus a little more on what you talk about when you say “destructive to the community.” Now, that’s also a complaint that comes from people who are anti-hip-hop, who feel as though it represents the worst of black youth culture and there is an assumption that [hip-hop] feeds dysfunctional tendancies. I noticed that you argued against that idea in the book, but at the same time favor that diagnosis by talking about how you can embrace certain sides of something, but not have it corrupted by the will of the market. Can you talk a bit more about the community aspect and how that plays into the idea of the “authentic voice?”

TR: I am treading a fine line here, and the problem is that people hear critiques of hip-hop in such a simple lens, partly because that’s what’s been offered, that it looks like I’m saying hip-hop is community destructive. What I am saying is the constant narrowing and over-representation of gun toting stereotypes about young black youth is destructive.

LP: I agree!

TR: I didn’t say hip-hop was destructive, I said the constant over-emphasis of what are community-destructive icons. Since when is a street-based or even regionally based drug dealer not destructive for a community? Increasing the number of consumers, for him, is destroying the community. The more drug addicted people you have, the less stable and the more problematic community you have! Nobody’s for drug addiction!

You know, when we’re talking about crack, when we’re talking about heroin, when we’re – I mean, we aren’t talking about a little weed on the side! We’re talking about a major drug industry that is partly available and interesting because it’s one of the only industries that a long of young people feel that have access to and it actually pays well. But it also destroys the community! It destroys human relationships, family relationships, and people’s lives.

And prostitution!

First of all, it should be legal so it can be regulated so that women can reap the primary reward. But for the most part, it is attached to an exploitative dynamic where men control and often physically or verbally dominate women. So to me, the problem is that hip-hop identifies with these icons so profoundly that a lot of fans in hip-hop have been really encouraged by the marketplace to celebrate and develop attachments to these figures to such a degree that they think when you critique that [behavior] you’re critiquing hip-hop.

Now to say that “hey, I’m from a tough neighborhood and these things have happened to me,” that’s one thing. But to have a constant sense of “I’m a hustler, I’m a hustler for life, I sold drugs so that I could then sell you this rap music that only raps about me selling drugs” is a very circular, problematic tendency. And more important than anything else is the lack of honest admission among many of what I call hip-hop hyper defenders.

I mean, this is not true of all fans.

But those who hyper defend everything and anything hip-hop, like one of the things that’s really troubling is that they don’t even acknowledge the degree to which this gets into a legacy of the ways black young people have been represented across the last hundred and fifty years. That the very stereotypes that drive the profit for hip-hop -among mostly white consumers I might add – are the same stereotypes that have driven consumption of images of black people for the last 150 years. So you know, this isn’t about black authenticity.

The second thing is that the right wing and conservative forces have chosen to turn extraordinary forms of neglect and active destruction of black communities [into a talking point.] To deny all these [truths] and instead pretend these are cultural traits, that being a pimp, being a ho, being a hustler are some how black in origin. I spend a lot of time talking about the absurdity of this because it’s ridiculous! It’s like, I slap you in the face, you get a swollen eye, and then I write a book that says, oh, black people have one big swollen eye, it must be from Africa.

Can we get some common sense around here? And some honest reflection?

So, we’re trapped. We’re trapped between the “swollen eyes from Africa” constituency and the “I’m a hustla for life and that makes me real, and I’m authentically black because I sell drugs to my neighbors and shoot down other young black men in the street and slap bitches and hos.”

LP: Unfortunately, you’re right. Let’s talk a bit about the marketing of this kind of hyper aggressive masculinity. I’ve seen it called destructive masculinity as well. I notice in the intro to your book, you did make a large distinction between commercial hip-hop and other kinds of hip-hop. For the purposes of the book, you’re focusing more on mainstream radio airplay, is that correct?

TR: Right.

LP: I’ve found – just from being a hip-hop listener and consumer of hip-hop culture – that it seems like there was a very clear trend from the time when hip-hop was beginning to become a strong cultural force. So this was post ’83, post the avant garde era, the experimental era where there were multiple genres within hip-hop. And it appears that the more popular hip-hop got, the narrower and narrower the representations [of hip-hop] on radio got.

So whereas before, you had someone like the Notorious B.I.G. and he’s rapped about dealing drugs, and he has that line at the beginning of “Juicy,” where he talks about the people who “called the police on him when he was just trying to feed his daughter.” But those kinds of rhymes did go through his thought process and his pain at doing these things as well. He had another track called “Suicidal Thoughts” or “Everyday Struggle” where he talked about killing himself for the deeds he had done, and not feeling as though he could make it, and having that level of introspection.

And it seems like, over time, this formula that they sell for hip-hop has been distilled down into a smaller and smaller equation. So whereas there was once reflection over these deeds – not just telling the story and recounting it, but reflection, remorse, loss, and things like that in the original gangster rappers like N.W.A., Tupac, Biggie to what we have now. The people on the airwaves now barely bother to reflect if they do so at all. [They] show no remorse, glorify this lifestyle, and at the same time not have the same lyrical depth that their forebears had. Do you feel like that’s a kind of a function of the market as well as just changing pace? Some people would say this is just where we are right now, it’s just a change in pace…

TR: The problem with that is that we’re not here just on some random state of affairs. What happened in the period that you’ve described is a dramatic transformation in the consolidation and control of musical outlets. So one of the things that drops out of all these discussions is somehow, we like what we like, and it doesn’t matter that its played 150 times a week on Power somebody or WKYS somebody else. It does matter!

Now, that doesn’t mean that there wouldn’t be some taste involved, we make choices. But if there were a wider range of things were constantly played, then we would make a wider range of choices. And what happened in 1996 was the Telecommunications Act, is that autonomous, black-owned, local radio is nearly killed. What takes place is a massive consolidation of large conglomerate ownership of nationwide outlets for different types of genres/slices of the radio listening audience.

And so hip-hop, there’s an appendix in the book that lays out who owns what [...] but right now, there’s been a direct consolidation. They have a vested interest in consolidating their playlists because that allows them to cut staff, to repeat certain promotional devices across the whole country. I mean if they’re playing a lot of Jay-Z and they get a promotion for Jay-Z on the radio in New York, well it’s easy! You can use that in LA and in Memphis and in Detroit. But then that means Detroit rappers aren’t getting as much airplay, right?

Now, that’s one form of impact.

The second thing is that gangster rappers themselves begin to talk less about suffering, sorrow, and the complexities of a problematic choice, like being a drug dealer or a hustler, and they feel less and less ambivalent about that. I mean Biggie and Tupac were both really important for their expression of that pain and ambiguousness. And conflictedness. But that begins to fall away, and the simultaneous rise of their success as a genre speaks to not just people’s willingness to celebrate these icons, but white desire for this kind of unproblematic consumption. You have to really ask some fundamental questions about white fan consumption of hip-hop. It just rarely gets asked! What is it about this that’s so exciting? You can sort of make some excuses for black young people liking it, but what is it about this that makes it so exciting and interesting?

It’s not only that this piece of the puzzle — the gangster street hustling piece — has gotten bigger and almost eaten every other sub-genre but it’s also that the content of that subgenre has been narrowed, contained, and lost a level of critical self-reflection. As I said in the intro, I think if Tupac showed up today and tried to get a record deal, he’d be labeled a conscious rapper! He probably wouldn’t even be on the radio! So this is not just about human taste. Taste is cultivated. Partly by– especially when you’re talking about a genre that’s dominated by major global organizations.

I know, I know. If you’re looking for socially conscious rap or hip hop, you don’t go to Busta Rhymes. But this still surprises me:

Maytha from KABOBfest has highlighted Rhyme’s song “Arab Money,” which has some disgustingly racist lyrics. Maytha brings up some great points about this video, namely, that it is a blatant example of the acceptability of anti-Arab racism.

Let me highlight some of Busta’s rhymes:

Women walkin around while security on camelback

Club on fire now — dunno how to act

Sittin in casino’s while im gamblin with Arafat

Money so long watch me purchase pieces of the Almanac

Ya already know i got the streets bust

While i make ya bow down makes salaat like a muslim

Camelback?! Gambling with a dead PLO leader?! Elsewhere, there are references to growing beards and Prince Al-Walid bin Talal bin Abdul Aziz Al Saud, a member of Saudi Arabia’s royal family known for his success in business (his…uh…bread).

Busta Rhymes’ song (and its fakey Arabic chorus–shudder) is just one more instance of hip hop’s cultural appropriation of Middle Eastern music (producer Timbaland has been “sampling” Arabic songs for years: remember Jay Z’s “Big Pimpin”? That is Egyptian artist Hossam Ramzy’s “Khusara Khusara” that you hear).

Rhyme’s references to Yasser Arafat and Saudi princes create the illusion of ownership: not only are we expected to think that he and Browz understand/speak Arabic and understand Middle Eastern politics and geography, but we’re also supposed to think that he rolls with said Arabs.

When I first heard the song, I didn’t know whether to be angrier about the sexism (Rhymes makes reference to “Middle East women and Middle East bread”—things), the racism, or the casual name dropping in what Maytha calls “baseless stereotypes masquerading as knowledge.”

Not to mention the insensitivity of the lyric “See now I take trips to Baghdad,” as if it’s a vacation destination and not a war zone full of people whose lives have been ripped apart. It’s almost as if Rhymes thinks all Arab countries are as rich as Saudi Arabia and as glitzy as the Emirates.

And if you want to know how much Ron Browz knows about Arabs, listen to this interview:

One point I have to disagree with Maytha on is her assertion that “Elite Khaleeji Arabs need to get off their consumptive high horses and stop making us look bad because of their wanton bougie-ness and hideously hedonistic materialism.”

I disagree with this mostly because blame for the stereotype of the unimaginably wealthy Arab who spends his money unwisely can’t completely be leveled at rich Arabs. Rich white guys spend money on stupid crap all the time, but it doesn’t reflect badly on their race. I think it also does a bit of a disservice to wealthy Arabs who have poured their money into their communities through infrastructural development and investments. But I digress.

The major problem with Rhyme’s song is that it uses cultural appropriation to perpetuate stereotypes, which are not only absorbed by non-Arab audiences, but can be internalized by Arabs. Case in point: Maytha shows us Arab American hip hop artist/producer Noose’s reworking of “Arab money” into an equally stereotype-ridden video. Perhaps it was missing the icing, however: there wasn’t a belly dancer.

So now it’s an Arab man producing this stuff, adding the hookah and the keffiyeh and the (presumably) Arab woman as a video vixen. Noose is obviously aware of the stereotypes that Arabs and other Middle Eastern people face, evidenced from his own lyrics:

Along with the Feds thinkin’ I’m bin Laden

C’mon people, I’m not gonna blow up Manhattan

And yet, he’s just as quick to roll them right out:

Arab money serious

I might buy a pyramid

Maytha’s analysis of the song and its producer is a great one: she says that she “cannot see this as more than a cheap appropriation of hip hop gangsta posturing with a superficial ‘Arab’ twist.” I’d have to agree yet again.

Another thought that crosses my mind is that “Arab” is used not as an ethnicity but as an adjective for money. Which begs the question, what kind of money is “Arab” money? From Busta Rhymes’ and Noose’s songs, I gather it has something to do with an obscene amount of wealth, which is in itself a stereotype. But this is especially dangerous in that colloquialisms are easily twisted (please reference the history of the terms “gay” and “queer” for further examples), and “Arab” could (and in some cases has) become a pejorative term, used in negative ways just like “African”, “native” and “Jew” have been.

This is the problem with cultural appropriation: initially, things are appropriated for a reason (wearing a keffiyah to show solidarity with Palestinians, for example). But quickly, this same appropriation turns into empty name-dropping, outright stealing (here’s looking at you, Timbaland), and/or derogatory usage against the original “owner” of whatever was appropriated.

I can’t help but wonder whether Busta Rhymes will get any Arab money for this album.

If Maytha has anything to say about it, I’m guessing not.

In this month’s issue of Vibe, Barack Obama receives a formal endorsement from the magazine. Danyel Smith’s Editor’s Letter is an impassioned plea to get involved and help push Barack all the way into the White House. She writes:

We value freedom and aspire to be better than we are, and to live in a country that will be better than it is. We must vote for Senator Obama and for Senator Joe Biden. We must make sure our friends get to the ballot box. We must reach deep for every bit of idealism we had at the beginning of rap music. We must not be cool. We must not again make manifest the “apathy” label that has been thrust upon us. This is not a moment to be reviewed or dissected, or gazed upon from an ironic distance. This moment in history is ours. Our country will not be okay if Obama loses.

The issue goes on to provide three key pieces of political commentary: Obama’s own letter to Vibe readers, Jeff Chang’s “The Tipping Point,” a piece that explores the shifting nature of our political landscape, and a compilation of 99 hip-hoppers positions on politics.

Obama’s letter cuts straight to the heart of the apathy Danyel Smith describes in her intro piece:

Now, I’ve heard people say, “My vote doesn’t matter,” “My vote won’t count,” or “I’m just one person, what possible difference can I make?” And I understand this cynicism. As a young man attempting to find my own way in the world, I faced many of the same choices and challenges facing many of you today. I sometimes doubted that my thoughts and actions really mattered in the larger scheme of things.

But I made a choice. I chose to check in, to get involved, and to try and make a difference in people’s lives. It’s what led me to my work as a community organizer in Chicago, where I worked with churches to rebuild struggling communities on the South Side. It’s what led me to teach and run for public office. And even today, I hear the skepticism. Too often, our leaders let us down, They don’t seem to do much to make our lives better. So I understand the temptation to sit elections out.

But this year, when the stakes are this high, and the outcome will be so close, I need you to choose to vote.

Jeff Chang pens “The Tipping Point,” which provides a glimpse into each convention as well as a look towards the shifting demographics of America. I was particularly interested in his description of the Republican National Convention:

John McCain has outflanked the Democrats, and the next night, he was in a taunting mood. “Let me offer an advance warning to the old big-spending, do nothing, me-first, country-second Washington crowd,” he said in his speech. “Change is coming.”

But the Xcel Center’s pale masses belied his message. Only 36 of the 2,380 Republican delegates were African-American, the lowest tally since 1968. Even after adding Hispanics and Asian-Americans, the Republican National Convention was a 90-percent white gathering, whiter even than Minnesota.

It’s a tough time to be a black Republican. The young ones complain that they’re still seen as Carlton Banks stereotypes – which they most definitely are not. Not Sean Conner, 24, the tall Republican National Committee staffer from East Oakland who favors freshly caught fish and piping hot sneakers; or Lenny McAllister, 36, the pinstriped political commentator from Charlotte, N.C., who multitasks interviews with radio, TV, and print outlets; or Claudio Simpkins, 23, the slim Black/Puerto Rican/Cuban Brooklynite, who is finishing Harvard Law School and aspires to become the conservative Obama.

They call themselves hip hop Republicans.

“We are the trailblazers,” McAllister said, comparing themselves to rap’s pioneers. “We’re trying to bring about political diversity.”

They all grew up with the struggles of average inner city kids and joined the party that ended slavery because their views on community and service had led them there. “Don’t let Sarah Palin know this, but I used to be a community activist,” said McAllister, who, through the Hill House Association in Pittsburgh, Pa., organized young fathers around the issues of parenting and social responsibility.

They were frustrated that their party didn’t seem to care for them. “You don’t get much of a policy platform discussion about providing adequate housing, about gentrification, about funding adequate jobs, about reforming our public education system,” said Simpkins, who worries that the party is focused on “God, gays, guns, taxes, and terrorism.”

With Obama’s nomination and the rise of anti-immigration demagogues in the party, they figure tougher times are ahead. “I personally love Barack Obama. I see him as a role model for myself,” said Simpkins. “[But] I look at the policies and values that were instilled in me through my church and my family and I think it lines up more with what McCain talks about.”

He added, with a sigh, “Like it or not, I’m kinda stuck with this party.”

Chang’s piece also briefly touches on the Green Party, non voters, the DNC, and how Will.I.Am decided to make the iconic “Yes We Can” video.

Vibe also obtained 99 quotes on the politics in the age of Obama.

Here are a few of my favorites:

I was with a girl the other night. She’s like “I just don’t vote.” Finally, I said, “Just do it for me. You like me, right? You like me enough to have sex, could you just like me enough to go vote? Do it ’cause you love me.

—Murs, rapper

Athletes should step into politics only if they know what they are talking about. I am personally handing out voter registration forms to the ‘hood, to enlighten them on what it takes to help change the United States.

—Amare Stoudemire, Forward/center, Phoenix Suns

Obama is not perfect – his ideology, what he’d like to do versus what he’s able to do are two different things. It’s not like Great, we got a black president and it’s all good. We need to hold Obama to a higher standard than most.

—Bun B, Rapper

We can’t make records calling Hillary Clinton a bitch. Every rapper should just back away until November. And then we can make any remix we want.

—Fatman Scoop, Radio personality

I hope there’s a radical shift in the image of America in the world. And the image of black Americans in the eyes of the world.

—India.Arie, Singer

I’m not a voter at all. But this year I gotta vote for Barack. And I’ll probably never vote again. For me this is one-time only. I think all these guys are the Illuminati – straight up. I’m gonna cast my vote for this member of the Illuminati.

—KRS-One, Rapper/author

I voted in 2000. Felt like it didn’t count – and I was sour to the whole process. But the past eight years have been terrible. When he gets elected, I just want Obama’s platform to come to fruition. I feel like education is the key…the fact that we have to pay so much to get degrees…living in a democratic society and being capitalists, you get to see the fruits of your work rewarded. But people should take a look around and see educational system outside of America and how they work. We need to borrow from other people’s philosophies.

—Q-Tip, Rapper/producer/actor/DJ

This election won’t be the end of anything. It may be the most important election in history. But it won’t change things by itself. It’s just the beginning.

—David Banner, Rapper/activist

Two major things happened in Black television in the last week or so.

Rap City was canceled, TRL was canceled and VH1 presented the 100 best songs in Hip Hop.

All of these are interesting because they relate to hip hop. I remember when I first learned that 106 and Park audience surpassed TRL’s about 7 years ago, and I thought to myself, hmm thats interesting. In fact, I think Carson Daly had just left the show for Hollywood.

Recently, I read a quote in S. Craig Watkin’s book which said that black teenagers in general and boys specifically occupy a very interesting place in the American culture. On one level their presence is reviled, their bodies are policed (laws on sagging pants) and they are systematically undereducated (only 35% of Black men starting 9th grade in NYC graduate) yet their “cultural products” are in demand from Madison Avenue to Japan.

In watching the segment on NWA, I was reminded of how far from mainstream hip hop was in the early days. I was particularly tickled when Kurt Lorder of MTV asked Ice Cube a question about the educational system and he responded “We ain’t activist, we give social commentary, we like the news”. I find that this sentiment squares nicely with my my post last week, titled, “Hip Hop Isn’t Political”. What was particularly interesting as well was how none of them were making money except Eazy E and Jerry Heller.

Here NWA was, making their social commentary and not getting paid. I am almost willing, let me repeat, almost, willing to go out on an ledge and say that there was something pure about their music, at that time.

They had no radio play, they sold millions of albums, the free speech folks rallied behind them, and they were not motivated by the money because they (the majority of them) were not making any money.

The marginalization of early hip hop and its subsequent popularity reminds me of how easy it is to go from being shunned by capitalism to being used by it. In many ways Black men are like Detroit, when capitalism no longer needs you, you will be left to figure out what to do with yourself.

It happened to The Chinese, The Japanese, Black folks and it will probably happen to Mexican folks in the next 30 years. [Ed Note - It's already happening. But we will discuss that in another post. - LDP] Cheap labor is America’s best friend.

Back to Rap music. The fact that Rap City was canceled reminded me of all the programming that was once on BET that is no longer shown such as Rap City, Teen Summit, Midnight Love and BET Nightly News. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t look to television for social justice or spiritual up lift, but there is something especially gully about willingly canceling all programming that may have some social value beyond promoting consumption.

Black people stay loving/supporting those who don’t love them back.

It wasn’t always like this. From 1998 to 2003, female rappers such as Lauryn Hill, Eve, and Missy Elliott were among the genre’s most bankable artists. But nearly all of their successors — including Lil Mama, Kid Sister, Ms Dynamite, and Jean Grae — have struggled to connect with listeners. And it’s harder than ever to launch new talent. ”Hair and makeup is killing female hip-hop,” says a source. ”The grooming cost to break a female rapper versus a male rapper is 10 times as much per appearance. That tends to have an adverse effect on a record company’s willingness to even entertain a female rapper.”

—- From “BET and VH1 Present…Awards Shows Without Women,” Entertainment Weekly

(Thanks Carmen!)