Naked Punch: Hip Hop Dossier

naked punch presents

HIP HOP DOSSIER edited by Zoe Sutherland

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To purchase past and present issues of Naked Punch or to download this dossier online go to our website www.nakedpunch.com COMPLIMENTARY DOSSIER HIP HOP - JAN 2009 Contents A Civic Rap ..................................... 3

By Josh Karant ‘Fakin’ the Funk?: Negotiating Racial Authenticity in Hip-Hop ............................................... 7

By Michael Barnes Authenticating Sincerity in Hip Hop ..................................... 3

By Freeden Ouer Topographies of Sound: The Presentation of Place in German Rap ..................................................... 11

By Ela Gezen The Expressive Potentialities of Freestyle ............................ 4

By Zoe Sutherland Back to the Old School ..................................... 3

By Jay Santil Hip Hop Supplement Editor Zoe Sutherland

Issue 11 on Sale Now

Design and front cover Qalandar Bux Memon Naked Punch Review © 2008, All Rights Reserved Distribution Central Books ISSN 1745-4344

Contents of Naked Punch Issue 11 FRAGMENTS OF A PROLOGUE

ESSAY

ART SECTION

Oscar Guardiola Neo-humanitarian and Rights today: On Human Security and the Ideology of Human Rights

Arundiati Roy Listening to Grasshoppers: Genocide, denial and celebration

Interview: Juliana Cerqueira Leite with Chiharu Shiota 塩田千春さんとのインタビュー

Qalandar Bux Memon Walking with Cristina on Burnt Oak High Street Amiri Baraka Notes From a Doomed Civilisation

DOSSIER: GLOBAL ECONOMIC IMAGIINARIES, part 2 Edited by Amin Thomas Samman Daniel Hjorth + Daniel Steyaert The Entrepreneur Ronen Palan The Offshore Economy 2

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INTERVIEW Jacques Rancière In coversation with Nicolas Vieillescazes DOSSIER: POETIC AND ARTISTIC ONTOLOGY Simon Critchley Surfaciality: Some Poems by Fernando Pessoa and a Brief Sketch of a Poetic Ontology Hilary Lawson The Poetic Strategy: What is the Poetic strategy capable of delivering?

Conversation: Jose Maparreño & Cesar Paternosto Edited by Francesco Cincotta Photography: Boyar Char, The Coastline of Bangladesh Saiful Huq

POETRY SECTION Poetry by Suheir Hammad Edited by Francesco Cincotta

Naked Punch Issue 11 is available for purchase on bookstores in London: Foyles Bookstore (Charing Cross) Foyles Royal Festival Hall Claire de Rouen Books London Review Bookshop ICA (Institute of Contemporary Art) Books Etc Waterstone’s (WC2A 2AB) Waterstone’s (WC1E 6EQ) Hayward Gallery Bookshop Calder Bookshop at SE1 Ottakar’s (SW11 1PT) Ottakar’s (SE10 9BL) Books Etc (O2 Centre NW3) Camden Arts Centre Housman’s Bookshop (N1 9DX) Serpentine Gallery Bookshop (Hyde Park) Whitechapel Gallery Bookshop ArtWords Bookshop (EC2A 3QQ) Nog gallery Flowers East Gallery

A Civic Rap by

Joshua Karant

The paradise offered by the culture industry is the same old drudgery. Both escape and elopement are pre-designed to lead back to the starting point. Pleasure promotes the resignation which it ought help to forget.

—Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment Tired of trials and tribulations It seems like life is Hell Dreams the only way of escapin’ to worlds that’s beyond imagination I know a place, I could take you there, through elevation —Inspectah Deck, “Elevation” (from the album Uncontrolled Substance)

Some mysteries are better left unsolved: Germany’s love of David Hasselhoff, for example.

Or Poland’s primetime Smurfs reruns, Paris Hilton’s cover shoot for Paris Match, Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Japanese energy drink ads, and the globe’s billion dollar appetite for Pirates (of the Caribbean). Alone, these phenomena make little sense; yet taken as a whole they underscore the obvious: American popular culture has never been quite so popular. And yet, this fact often raises brows and curls lips. Why all the fuss?

An aversion to pop culture (American or not) is nothing new. Critics with such vastly different temperaments as Nietzsche, Arendt, Adorno and Horkheimer saw popular art’s evolution as one of decline, a spiral which ends much like history did for Rousseau: in abject inauthenticity. Contemporary critics have intensified this charge against pop music specifically, dismissing top-40 bands as puppets of a predatory recording industry which packages radical, disenfranchised, countercultural and idealistic visions to receptive consumers. Under this formula, the more lurid, the more abrasive, the more expressive the product, the better; consumers eagerly purchase sonic snippets of

“Popular culture can, and has, satisfied this high standard; it just rarely does in contemporary practice” defiance and rebellion without so much as lifting a finger (save to move a mouse or change the channel).

In “The Tenth Muse,” Jacques Barzun levies a broader charge: “Clearly, in the modern demotic society there is no art of and by the people.” Even music so aggressively (and apparently) “authentic” as rap comes in a slick, highly predictable parcel of easy mass consumption. As such, the powerful, raw emotions characteristic of the music “might qualify as popular culture if [its artists] sounded more spontaneous, less like standardized products modified only to compete within an industry.”

Barzun’s critique is substantive rather than 3

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categorical. His models of erstwhile success— Greek theater, Medieval epic poetry, Renaissance ballads, Shakespeare—testify to the accomplishment of art that truly expresses “the people as a whole.” Popular culture can, and has, satisfied this high standard; it just rarely does in contemporary practice.

Fair enough. Barzun’s prose is polemical, but his effort is earnest. He conveys a genuine faith in democratic expression, and takes seriously the political value of art. Still, his is a reproachful, frustrated work: he combines strict qualifying standards with a looseness to condemn. Contemporary hits may well lack the gravitas of ancient Nordic sagas, but does this mean that current culture is entirely ersatz?

Probably not. Popular art is anything if not fluid, yet one thing is certain: it often goes misdiagnosed in the moment. This is particularly true of hip-hop, a culture that, throughout its young history, has been (alternately) dismissed as puerile nonsense or praised as the second coming of the civil rights movement.

Hip-hop is neither. It has certainly given a voice and visibility to the marginalized and oppressed, providing a compelling model of perseverance no matter the odds. Yet it is also a culture awash in violence and misogyny, lawlessness and conspicuous consumption. And these conflicting, cacophonous parts make the sum rather difficult to assess. What to make of an art form that is both ignorant and enlightening, banal and engaging, crass and sophisticated, divisive and unifying, self-destructive and progressive?

As I will argue, these overt contradictions actually allude to hip-hop’s greatest strength: its vibrant, unabashed diversity. This is a culture powerful precisely because it incorporates such a wide spectrum of practitioners, from street thugs and corporate hustlers to sensitive lovers and esoteric artistes. It is both truly popular (expressive of the hearts, minds and spirits of a wide range of people), and inclusive (offering modes of expression to anyone regardless of race, creed, gender, socioeconomic status, worldview or formal training).

Hip-hop’s political and pedagogical value therefore lies in its powers of engagement. It teaches values compatible with John Dewey’s vision of strong citizenship: active engagement, anti-essentialism, innovation and self-

scrutiny. And it engenders a sense of irrepressibility sharpened by institutional exclusion and a heightened awareness of inequality.

As independent legend Bobbito Garcia describes, hip-hop also cultivates critics, fans and practitioners who examine their art with passion and attentiveness. Hip-hop heads are fickle. Never-ending debates dissect beats, rhymes and albums, the letters in graffiti pieces or a b-boy’s breaks. Artists who produce classic works quickly fall from favor with a subpar reprise. This intense scrutiny and pressure to excel is reflected in a rich vocabulary of dissatisfaction. “Biting” (mimicry) is a cardinal sin; to “fake the funk” is to perpetrate inauthenticy; to “fall off” or “slip” is to release a “wack” effort, to disserve both the artist’s potential and the audience’s expectations.

Furthermore, active feedback and heavy expectation cultivate reciprocity between practitioners and fans. A symbiotic relationship forms where art is presented to a partici-

“Hip-hop was spawned in 1970s South Bronx, an urban jungle famous for its setbacks”

patory audience whose reactions in turn guide the artist’s growth. What keeps hip-hop fresh is the necessary involvement of both parties.

Spectators rally around art which satisfies their clearly defined, albeit constantly evolving, standards. Works must in turn fulfill the terms outlined by the community to which they are presented. It is the call-and-response experience writ large, a dialectic, deliberative process driven by feedback and accountability. In this phenomenon, art is both foundational and catalytic: it provides standards upon which value is judged, and restlessly asks for more.

Hip-hop is also deeply connected to the communities which give it life. This has been true wherever it spreads: from the South Bronx to Southern California, Houston to Ohio, and all points overseas. And despite traveling the globe, adopting new slang and absorb-

ing new concerns, hip-hop has maintained a deep connection to its roots. In so doing the culture remains both mutable and grounded, providing a refreshing counter-narrative to the hegemonic uniformity of globalization, while offering a normative means of bridging racial gaps and connecting otherwise disparate peoples.

This success indicates a relatively recent phenomenon, what Richard Shusterman describes as the “renewed appreciation of belonging to a complex multicultural planet, where we need to reach beyond our local geographical and cultural boundaries so as to nourish this richness and to enrich our lives through it.” To wit, local music, dance and art scenes thrive in Japan, Europe, England, South America and Africa. ITF and DMC DJ competitions reflect this international flavor: turntablists from Canada to Copenhagen battle for “world supremacy” in a common musical language. B-boying incorporates elements as diverse as Capoeira (the Brazilian martial-arts dance) and Chinese Kung-Fu film moves, and major crews have global chapters. Graffiti colors cities from Paris to Prague, Amsterdam to Atlanta. Of the four elements, only emceeing is limited by regional dialects. Yet rappers such as Metaphor and Thirstin Howl III blur linguistic barriers with bilingual flows, while many producers (like Wu Tang Clan’s RZA) feature global artists rapping over their beats.

All of which hints at a new type of cultural glue, a strain of collective identity centered around four broadly inclusive modes of expression. Under this analysis, hip-hop acts as a nexus for civic communion because it affords individuals the means of creative selfexpression within the coherent structure of a commonly-shared ethos, a set artistic form, and a storied tradition. * * * * * Hip-hop was spawned in 1970s South Bronx, an urban jungle famous for its setbacks: Robert Moses’ Cross Bronx Expressway, which leveled seven miles and displaced 60,000 residents; the loss of over 600,000 jobs; 30,000 fires set in the mid-1970s alone; and the influx of drugs, guns and gangs. Although the disco era was in full swing downtown, a new uptown movement was developing, one better suited to the Bronx: sharp, proud, defiant, in your face.

Soon, kids not admitted to the chic swingers clubs began throwing their own parties.

People had certainly been break dancing, graffiti writing and music-making for years.

But no one labeled these isolated activities “hip-hop” until the DJ came along – Kool Herc specifically, a Jamaican immigrant schooled in the ways of the soundsystem – to throw a party welcoming everyone: writers and b-boys, music fiends and knuckleheads. Four so-called “elements” (graffiti, dance, music and emceeing) coalesced, and the sum proved much greater than the individual parts alone.

Most significantly, a community was born.

In describing this nascent scene, pioneering deejay and Universal Zulu Nation founder Afrika Bambaataa sounds like a borderline hippie. As he tells it, hip-hop started spontaneously and somewhat amorphously as “a celebration of life gradually developing each of its elements to form a cultural movement…

When we made hip-hop, we made it hoping it would be about peace, love, unity and having fun so that people could get away from the negativity that was plaguing our streets (gang violence, drug abuse, self hate, violence among those of African and Latino descent).”

Hard times notwithstanding, hip-hop quite literally began with a party.

Crazy Legs, the world-famous Rocksteady Crew

founder who took up dancing in lieu of Little League Baseball (his mom could not afford the fees), echoes this sentiment. “Summing it up, basically, going to a jam back then was watching people drink, dance, compare graffiti art in their black book.” Impromptu festivals of art, b-boying, exhibitionism, and a bit of debauchery were set to soundscapes provided by the party’s host, the deejay, who would tap any available electrical source (such as sidewalk lampposts) to power their turntables and speakers.

That said, it wasn’t all peace and love. From the start, these gatherings contained a combative element. Fights broke out amongst competing crews; writers defaced rivals’ murals or tags; and dancers battled for the crowd’s support. Local security (often provided by the Zulu Nation) kept parties reasonably well-policed, but certain songs (most famously Baby Huey’s “Listen To Me”) still triggered gunshots and muggings. Which is to say, violence was an issue from the start.

This ever-present sense of conflict has led authors such as Tricia Rose argue that hip-hop above all “remains a never-ending battle for status, prestige, and group adoration always in formation, always contested, and never fully achieved.” Yet the gravity of her conclusion obscures an equally essential element of early hip-hop culture: fun. The object may have been to best your rival, but it was also to catch a buzz, dance and debauch, to have a good time (urban blight be damned) and (as Rakim put it) move the crowd.

This amalgam of entertainment and fierce competition is wonderfully illustrated in a scene from Charlie Ahearn’s 1982 film Wild Style, in which two antagonistic squads (Cold Crush and the Fantastic Five) battle in rhyme, and on the basketball court, while onlookers cheer both sides. The game begins with three women discussing the heated rivalry. Each member walks to the middle of the court, lining up to trade confrontational verses. During the match, competitive raps are highlighted with close-ups and pauses in the game’s action. By contrast, we never see clear shots of individuals scoring baskets. The match itself ends on an amusing note with an unidentified emcee boasting: “I’m so very glad that you thought you said something, that’s why we’re winning eighteen-to-nothing!”

Although Ahearn never actually reveals the winning team, he showcases each player’s lyrical skill. In this example, the experience of competing against worthy opponents (rather than decisive victory) fuels both crews. It is West Side Story with a sense of humor, an entertaining spectacle punctuated by strong pride and playful wit. Furthermore, knives are never drawn: competition is limited to artistic expression. If rivalry and dispute are central to hip-hop, battles were traditionally settled through rhyming and mixing, uprocking and mural-painting, rather than gunplay and fisticuffs. * * * * * As we have already seen, demotic art is often dismissed as formulaic and contrived, a product whose value is limited to consumer sales.

The charge of inauthenticity (or not “keeping it real”) is commonly applied to rappers and graffiti artists as well. Yet often, an opposite concern seems to hold even more weight: that the culture is too deeply connected to life; that it challenges, and often crosses, safe or proprietous boundaries; that it engenders and encourages violence and illegality. A brief examination of hip-hop’s history underscores 4

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this point.

Take, for example, graffiti. By the late 1970s, New York City had become an urban canvas of sorts, a cityscape in which artists (many without formal training or materials) covering trains, buildings and bridges with pieces and burners. Lauded in films like Style Wars (1983) yet condemned by critics as juvenile and desecrating, writing eventually provoked the wrath of New York City’s Metropolitan Transit Authority who, in the early 1980s, spent upwards of 24 million dollars on chemical washes, wire fences and guard dogs to “discourage” artists from “bombing” the system.

This institutional condemnation proved lucrative. Graffiti became the counter-cultural darling of the SoHo chic art set, and landmark shows featured the works of Bronx writers alongside Andy Warhol and Keith Haring.

Today, long after the art galleries’ initial interest (and the city’s initial hostility) has waned, artists have indoors: into fashion, advertising and commissioned works.

Dancing also found a marketable niche following periods of popularity, censure and overexposure. In the early 1980s, b-boy circles could be found everywhere from barbecues to concert floors to cardboard sheets on city sidewalks. Police started inhibiting unlicensed exhibitions just as movies and mainstream media brought the athletic dance to national audiences. “Breaking Out,” one 1984 Newsweek cover story declared; and even Republicans took notice, hiring the New York City Breakers to perform at Ronald Reagan’s 1985 inaugural ball. To this day, “urban dance” lessons thrive throughout suburban America, and b-boy circles still grace underground shows. Yet most significantly, the style (if not the spirit) has seeped into advertising and mainstream pop videos, both of which appropriate hip-hop dance moves for choreographed sales pitches or stage shows.

The culture’s most well-traveled ambassadors, however, are its deejays. Initially, deejaying was a competitive sport marked by innovation and creativity. Kool DJ Herc, “the godfather of hip-hop,” introduced the massive sound system uptown; Afrika Bambaataa, also a “godfather,” was renowned for his musical erudition (he tore labels from his vinyl to prevent other deejays from mimicking his obscure selections); and Grandmaster Flash brought a new level of acrobatics to the art of mixing and blending. Originality ruled, and took the art to unexpected directions. Turntablism, a term coined by west coast DJ Babu in 1995, transformed the practice into a complex art requiring dexterity, syncopation and quick wits to complete innovative moves like crabs, flares, chirps and orbits. And even as turntables became this generation’s guitar, the dawn of the digital music age has ushered in yet another innovation: digital MP3 “turntables” developed specifically for scratching, mixing, and beat matching.

Emceeing, the most prominent of hip-hop’s elements, was also the last to emerge. Rooted in Jamaican dub performances, the AfricanAmerican call-and-response tradition, and musical predecessors such as the Last Poets, rapping was originally all about rock, shocking the house. Recent years have seen a retreat from the stage to the studio, yet lyrics are still as varied as their speakers. From “flossy” rap about jewelry, furs and fine champagne, to “thugged out” tales of ghetto violence, drugs, sex and gunplay, to humorous narratives on life and love, to more nuanced lyrics about politics or self-knowledge, rhymes display an array of styles and concerns.

Diversity notwithstanding, emceeing grew infamous in the early 1990s as “gangsta” groups like the Geto Boys and NWA both offended and entranced mainstream American audiences. Politicians, academics, and even the FBI, rose to either decry or defend these brutally ribald inner-city narratives. Henry Louis Gates defended rap group 2 Live Crew in The New York Times editorial section, arguing that the “sexual carnivalesque” of songs like “Me So Horny” used “heavy-handed parody, turning the stereotypes of black and white American culture on their heads.” By contrast, C. Delores Tucker, chair of the National Political Congress of Black Women, teamed with former education secretary and drug czar William Bennett in a crusade against rap which, according to Bennett, “celebrates violent and anti-social behavior” and hastens “the wreckage of civilization.” History has judged neither vision too kindly. 2 Live Crew’s penchant for juvenilia— not subversion—was affirmed by their work in pornographic film and websites, while global terrorism has supplanted gangsta rap as a far more imminent threat.

Common to each hip-hop element is a history of innovation, condemnation, fetishization, and ultimate endurance. Alternately loved and loathed, the culture has progressed musically, lyrically, creatively and financially from its highly localized origins. Many authors have connected this resilience to roots in postcolonial and marginalized communities, where reinvention was a response necessitated by institutional oppression. And considering the culture’s most organic demand –to be fresh – we might conclude that reinvention is indeed central to its aesthetic.

As one Rocksteady member observed of old-school fashion, “it wasn’t about what you wore, it was about how you rocked it.” “Rocking it”—sporting everything from clothing to names with charismatic flair—is a proud exercise in self-promotion, but also an expression of individuality. Combining adjectives and nouns with evocative results, descriptive aliases emphasize this point: Kool DJ Red Alert, Jazzy Jay, Smooth B, Greg Nice, Large Professor, Intelligent Hoodlum, Lord Finesse, Fat Joe. Some monikers are acronyms, like GURU (Gifted, Unlimited Rhymes Universal) and KMD (positive Kause in a Much Damaged society).

Others are name-based: Nas is the rapper Nasir Jones, O.C. is Omar Credle, and E-Double of EPMD fame began his solo career as Erick Sermon. Some are simply silly: Trugoy of De La Soul is “yogurt” spelled backwards.

Fashion styles also span the spectrum of weight to whimsy. X-Clan rapped Afro-centric rhymes from a Pink Cadillac, adorned in elaborate African robes, nose rings, beads and leather pendants. The cover of Boogie Down Production’s second album, By All Means Necessary, pictures KRS-One holding an Uzi behind a curtained window, in homage to the famous portrait of Malcolm X. Flavor Flav of Public Enemy made over-sized alarm clocks the most popular neck ornament of the late 1980s. Slick Rick wore a trademark eye-patch to cover his lazy eye, and bragged of his crisp Kangol hats and sharp Bally shoes. Capone and Noreaga are depicted in camouflage military suits on their first album’s cover, while Thirstin Howl III is outspoken in his appreciation of Polo gear.

Alas, the exuberance and uniqueness characteristic of hip-hop from its birth until the mid-1990s has been overshadowed by the dull homogeneity of a marketable mainstream formula. Dwindling are the days of innovative, self-conscious reinvention, supplanted by a more ubiquitous embrace of a bourgeois gangster image, a champagne-swilling Casanova who packs heat just in case the jealous

seek his or her fame, and iced-out platinum jewelry.

With such a meteoric rise in rap’s conspicuous consumption, it is no wonder paranoia flourishes. Yet these dubious fruits were born of hip-hop’s very success. Its phenomenal popularity captured the interest of major labels, who in turn pressured artists to present more widely marketable images. This led to an emphasis on form above substance, smooth-sipping commercialism over dissonance and originality. The current model of rap superstardom follows a pattern marketable to teenaged-consumers. Airwaves and videos flood images of absurd, juvenile fantasies: halfnaked models getting sprayed with booze to a heavy bass line and synthesized keyboards, swayed by lyrics professing an intimate connection with an Hobbesian vision of urban life.

Amidst the madness—the overt contradictions, the apparent conformity and infantilization—commercial rap seems to have strayed far from its South Bronx roots. But we must bear in mind three things. First, “golden era” artists also rhymed about women and wine, guns and fun, fashion and folly; in terms of lyrical content, this is nothing new. Second, hip-hop artists have always rapped about what they know; as the culture has proven financially lucrative, it only stands to reason that we will hear loud and clear from those reaping financial rewards. And finally, many songs with “superficial” lyrical content are stylistically quite innovative. Lil Jon’s patented groans, the Dirty South’s raucous energy and Houston’s syrupy flows may speak mostly about hoes and flows, cars and grills, but their delivery is unique, compelling and wildly popular.

And while one can (along with traditionalists, purists, and New York rappers who see their spotlight fading) easily decry the current state of rap, it is misleading to say that hip-hop is dead. The culture has always reflected its environment, and always shown a restless yearning for the new. If the South is hot right now, so be it; the only thing hip-hop history proves is that this trend too will come to pass. * * * * * Despite its perceived monotony, hip-hop now culls practitioners from around the world.

It has become an immense melting pot of enthusiasts, influences and expressions alike, a catalyst for dialogue enriched by the expansive diversity of its members. In the late 1980s, Public Enemy’s Chuck D labeled hip-hop “the black CNN” because it broadcast the AfricanAmerican experience for all to hear. If hip-hop transmits globally, what makes it so compelling to international ears?

Lyrical and aesthetic diversity notwithstanding, songs often paint vivid, uncompromising pictures of ghetto life. In Showbiz and A.G.’s classic “Runaway Slave,” A.G. raps: Livin’ in the slums with the bums, the rats and the stray cats Dogs with the rabies, little babies are having babies Juveniles act wild Every footstep you take, on every corner there’s a crack vial Pushers, dealers, crack-heads are buying Now the dealer’s in jail, all the crack-heads are dying My man got AIDS, he was hit hard To get laid, he paid a crack-head for a five dollar quick job In the ghettoes this stuff you have to find A beer will relax my mind but I still pack my nine Cause I’m aware of all evil and devilishment Because I’m living in a rat-like settlement Sometimes it’s hard to manage I grab a forty take a sip and let the mental do

the damage Yeah I’m woozy and my eyes are red But it’s better than a Uzi and a brotherman is dead See nine out of ten are black on black crimes Four out of nine were killed before their prime The other five wanted vengeance So now five out of five are doin’ a jail sentence Ask the Giant I’ve been through it So when I reach to the top, I say the ghetto made me do it And I know how to strive, huh Born and raised in the ghetto so you know I can survive The rhyme begins with dense description: a slum littered with stray animals and pregnant teens, drug dealers and aggressive youth, crack and AIDS. It quickly shifts to alcohol and marijuana as coping mechanisms which, while disorienting and self-destructive, are preferable to the violent alternatives posed by street life. The stanza concludes with a grim urban pedagogy (statistics on “black on black” violence) and a testament of firsthand knowledge (“I’ve been through it”). Identifying a resourcefulness and pride both immune to and strengthened by these experiences, the final line strikes a self-assured note: “Born and raised in the ghetto so you know I can survive.”

More recently, the group Cannibal Ox released a song entitled “Iron Galaxy.” In the final stanza, Vast Aire Kramer describes the life of someone born to a drug-addicted mother and murdered father: You were a still born baby Mother didn’t want you, but you were still born Boy meets world, of course his pops is gone What you figga That chalky outline on the ground is a father figure?

So he steps to the next stencil, that’s a hustler Infested with money and diamond cluster Lets talk in laymen terms Rotten apples and big worms Early birds and poachers New York is evil at it’s core, so those who have more than them Prepare to be victims Ate up by vultures, the politicians In a dog eat dog culture, that’ll sic ‘em Before the verse begins, a sampled voice asks: “Do you know that you’re one of the few predator species that preys even on itself?”

Couched in the cinematic imagery of an infant born to this cannibalistic future, the story unfolds. A child without familial bonds turns to a hustler for guidance. Raised by the streets and the streetwise, the nameless youth confronts the “rotten” city in which he grows. The terms of survival are uncompromising: in a “dog eat dog” culture, in an environment riddled with predators and poachers, the hunted must hunt to survive. The final warning is unflinching. The city that breeds such tragic lives must face the haunting consequences of its neglect: “those who have more than them” must “prepare to be victims.”

Although Cannibal Ox sound a desolate, menacing note, they find solace and strength in music. Asked “How you do it” (survive) on “Straight off the D.I.C.,” they respond “we stay moving/Through the jungle, ghetto surviving, spittin’ lines.” Hip-hop is not merely vocational in this image; it is the very engine of survival, a therapeutic response to a predatory environment. Mixing metaphor and harsh description, rhyming offers the group a means of expressing, exploring and overcoming otherwise unmanageable obstacles.

Both A.G. and Cannibal Ox present different takes on a sympathetic theme. Urban life demands nothing less than confrontation and survival: confronting and revealing 5

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the difficulties posed by violence, poverty and estrangement, and maintaining a will to persevere. If the songs seem descriptively bleak, their pessimism is presented as realism.

Vivid descriptions of oppressed, discontent or alienated peoples living in a hostile city, these observations offer compelling insight into ostracized communities. Furthermore, they remind listeners that survival demands not simply exposure or reinvention, but active retaliation.

No group makes this more clear than dead prez. The release of their debut album lets get free was delayed several times due to a dispute over its cover art, a red- and yellow-washed photograph of young Soweto rebels raising their guns during the anti-government uprising of 1976. The work itself, a masterful blend of thick beats and conscious rhymes, offers a detailed vision of the examined life enacted.

For dead prez, hip-hop provides a practical platform to advance a political message and implement change. As group member M-1 described, “hip-hop is so popular and it get everywhere and it can go places that our people can’t even go ourselves. So we figure, let’s put it to use, let’s really dog it out, let’s gang bang on the system.” They have certainly seized upon this opportunity, challenging listeners to both question and (re)define their own values.

As the song “Dem Crazy” elaborates,

helped organize the Philadelphia Hip-Hop Summit, an event where attendees registered to vote prior to admission. Simmons has also worked with legislators in Albany to repeal the Rockefeller Drug Laws. Former Nation of Islam minister Conrad Muhammad’s “A Movement for CHHANGE” (Conscious Hip Hop Activism Necessary for Global Empowerment) has sponsored Million Youth Voter Registration Drives.

The Central Brooklyn Partnership opened a “hip-hop credit union” in Bedford-Stuyvesant, offering low-interest loans to neighborhood residents. And individual artists from David Banner to Mos Def have organized on behalf of causes ranging from New Orleans flood recovery efforts to the Jena Six. If political and community activism demands above all a common language, hip-hop offers a voice. As 21st Century Youth Leadership Movement’s co-founder Rose Sanders observed, “without hip-hop, I don’t see how we can connect with today’s youth.” Yet the movement is not simply an instrument for young peoples’ empowerment. Hip-hop speaks a broader language of self-sufficiency and selfdetermination, of survival and prosperity no matter the odds. It offers a progressive model of expression and coalition, one of distinctly practical value in an increasingly multicultural world. * * * * *

What you know is who you are, who are you?

Do you know who you are in the world? What is your world view?

What do you go through? What has your life showed you?

What are you learnin’ in this so called life?

Do you have principle or do you blow with the wind?

Do you wanna be free but don’t know where to begin?

Do you know your enemy from your friend, even you can It’s deep in this, scannin’ the system that keepin’ us here Will we survive, do you believe, are we afraid?

Would you rather have control of your life, or be a slave? dead prez’ album is a comprehensive effort to answer such questions, one that presents an exhaustive life-model to its listeners: the song “be healthy” extols the virtues of vegetarianism; “discipline” preaches moderation and selfrestraint; “i’m a african,” proudly affirms cultural heritage; “‘they’ schools” argues for educational reform; “mind sex” and “happiness” find joy in intimacy and a beautiful day; and “police state” and “behind enemy lines” describe in lucid detail police brutality, institutional discrimination, and the lives of civil rights radicals. dead prez is rare in the breadth and specificity of their vision. If many emcees mix self-consciousness with braggadocio, the duo approach music as a space of serious, sober reflection and agenda-setting. Furthermore, their daily lives reflect these concerns. M-1 is president of the New York chapter of the National People’s Democratic Uhuru Movement, an organization that promotes communal living, self-determination and democratic rights. And both members are involved in the People’s Army, a group whose communitybased activities include clothing drives, dinners, rallies, seminars, and Ile-Ijala (Home of the Spiritual Warrior), an African martial art. dead prez represents an extreme amalgam of hip-hop and politics, both in their uncompromising lyrics, and in their commitments beyond music. Providing a model useful to political artists and organizers alike, they preach, practice and reach an audience.

Other examples of hip-hop mobilization exist both within and beyond the artistic community. Russell Simmons and Mayor John F. Street

That said, such positive examples do not tell the entire tale. After all, hip-hop is hardly a bastion of universal consciousness. The art may well offer insight on urban poverty, racial discrimination, ghetto survival and conscious living; yet such examples are relatively few and far between. Nor is this necessarily a bad thing. As I have argued from the outset, hip-hop’s value lies in its diversity of expression. Political and “knowledge” raps can be interesting and uplifting, but they occupy few slices in a larger, messier pie. So-called “ignorant,” “gangsta” and hardcore rap is far more widespread – and no less celebrated amongst listeners. If part of hip-hop’s appeal lies in its deep connection to life, suspect lyrical narratives revel in this intensity of experience, with utter disregard for consequences and a brash emphasis on shock value.

Take, for example, the psychosexual Geto Boys track “Mind of a Lunatic” (indeed) or Kool G. Rap’s rapid-fire rumination on perversion, “Talk Like Sex”; anything from NWA’s infamous EP “100 Miles and Runnin’” or Necro’s vivid catalog of porno/horror fusion raps. These records and artists are, at times, unapologetically ignorant, violence, sexist, pathological, depraved. Yet they are also clever, artistically compelling and wildly popular.

In a broader sense, hip-hop hardly shies away from the unsavory. Nor is this stance necessarily adopted without a healthy dose of selfconsciousness or humor. Take, for example, the case of Houston-based Devin the Dude.

His first album cover pictured him on the toilet reading the paper. By his own description, he raps primarily about “pussy, alcohol and reefer.” A widely-praised storyteller, his narratives often revolve around quotidian concerns: (not) getting laid; driving an unreliable car; sneaking weed on a plane; being left by his girlfriend. Yet he does so with a refreshing lack of apology. As the chorus to “Who’s That Man, Momma” croons:

Who is the man, momma On stage with the brew in his hands, momma Don’t you think he’s bein’ rude to the fans, momma Grabbin his nuts, look at him doin it again, momma He’s doin it again, momma

A “little child in the crowd” sounds confused and curious, if not mildly perturbed: who is Devin? A dude who likes to drink (onstage). Is this disrespectful to the fans who have paid good money to see him perform? He hardly seems to care (grabbin’ his nuts), but at least he’s consistent (doin’ it again). This, in a nutshell, is Devin: not the best influence on kids, but hardly remorseful. Furthermore, the implication is clear: he is not changing to conform to anyone’s standards or expectations, least of all the parents of his consumers. Witness his response: (sings) You got to give the people Yeah I know, somethin’ other than just pussy, alcohol and reefer (sings) You must uplift the public And they’ll give love back, like just last night I got my nuts licked Ugly bitch in love with it but she hugged it and she rubbed it Fine big red hoe, but now my dickhead sore…

Most people don’t understand all the problems, pressure and pain They criticize and try to make you feel less of a man But look at these balls, they’re so big The hairs on ‘em look like two big old afro wigs No need to get alarmed, I don’t mean no harm If you got your kids with you and they tuggin’ your arm In short, fellatio is the only “uplifting” Devin seems concerned with. If you don’t like his style or want to criticize, he “don’t mean no harm.” He is, as both an artist and individual, Just Tryin’ Ta Live – the name, it so happens, of the album on which this song appears.

Those unfamiliar with Devin’s background might simply dismiss him as a juvenile rapper seeking fame (and sales) by spinning lewd, lascivious tales. Yet Devin is what Dr. Dre once termed ‘a rapper’s rapper,’ a uniquely compelling storyteller with a laid-back soulful style. He paid his dues while honing his skills, appearing on several Rap-A-Lot group projects in the 1990s (including the overlooked Odd Squad) prior to going solo. And long before his first record deal he was an accomplished b-boy. Furthermore, Devin is utterly devoid of pretension. He preaches as he practices, spinning stony narratives of trying to go about life with minimal hassles and maximal oral sex.

One reason hip-hop writing often dances around such artists (and lyrics) is because they are, in brief, absurd and offensive. Justification also rings, if not hollow, then certainly awkward, because much of this music’s appeals lies in the mood it sets; in the interplay between lyrics and beat that transports you to the emcee’s world. And this is an experience difficult to capture on paper.

Yet all too often in literature on hip-hop, authors obscure and ignore the culture’s apparent shortcomings. This oftentimes occurs by rationalizing the glorification of misogyny, capitalism and hustling with the experience of cultural oppression, and drawing strict lines between “good” and “bad” rap. Additionally, some overlook a large majority of lyrics which are far from positive, programmatic, or even coherent. Yet under this formula, hip-hop serves a positive social value only when its practitioners espouse conscious messages.

I argue, by contrast, that hip-hop is vital precisely because it incorporates such a wide range of values and styles. From the erudite to the juvenile, from the raucous to the politically conscious, from the vulgar to the nuanced, hip-hop offers a common language to express the full range of human emotions and, hence, humanity. As GURU of Gangstarr aptly notes in “No Shame in My Game,” “life’s a bitch, so who are we to judge each other/I know I got

faults, I ain’t the only motherfucker.” If hip-hop offers a common ground for civic communion, this foundation must be all-inclusive, a selfconscious mix which articulates both positivity and negativity, a recognition of ambivalence and contradiction coupled with a striving spirit.

In The Public and its Problems, John Dewey articulates the importance (and indeed, necessity) of cultivating just such an archetype. His work begins with a description of human life: “we live with and amongst our fellow man.”

While this holds universally true, “the fact of association does not of itself make a society.”

“Society” rather depends upon a “perception of the consequences of a joint activity and of the distinctive share of each element in producing it.” This simultaneous recognition and involvement in turn creates “common interest,” namely “concern on the part of each in the joint action and in the contribution of each of its members to it.” If we both perceive and take accountability for the consequences of joint activity, we can produce something “truly social and not merely associative.”

Towards this end, Dewey favors an “experimental social method” to fortify and redefine the citizen-as-public member. This requires surrendering fixed or determinate dogmas for a more fluid approach: shaping and testing concepts through active inquiry, and treating assumptions as working hypotheses. Furthermore, community is essential in this process of discovery because solitary ideas (much like solitary individuals) are “but soliloquy, and soliloquy is but broken and imperfect thought.”

By contrast, civic discourse strengthens and unites. It also engenders liberty, “that secure release and fulfillment of personal potentialities” which takes place only “in rich and manifold association with others.” The act of association therefore carries both political and ontological significance: it unites individual accomplishment with collective improvement,

while offering some measure of earthly freedom (release and fulfillment).

Like de Tocqueville, Dewey also believes that this process of democratic elevation must begin at home in the proverbial ‘hood. Yet how best to lay common ground, especially in times of rapid mobility and growing inequality? How might we organize a public and strengthen its ties, when “publics” are always shifting? The answer is far from deterministic, yet certainly aggressive: experiment in concert, and cultivate genuine public opinion by building stable connections in unstable times.

After all, the principle values of democratic citizenship – intimacy, communication, deliberation, action, mobility, and flexibility – must be nurtured by citizens in common, concerned with the consequences of their collective actions. And if the broader challenge of establishing localized communities that are “stable without being static, progressive without being merely mobile” sounds unrealizable, the optimism of Dewey’s work suggests hope.

Still, there is only one way to find out: together, testing the means to realize such a vision.

Music generally, and hip-hop specifically, offer just such a platform for diverse, exploratory integration. As a New York hip-hop head, I am certainly biased. Yet my own predilections are rooted in empirical fact: hip-hop has given disenfranchised groups an influential voice; it has flourished in a city historically hostile towards popular culture and ethnic minorities; it has been a catalyst for dialogue amongst people of all ages, ethnicities, economic and social backgrounds; it has, as Angela Ards argues, if nothing else raised popular consciousness.

And even if such awareness does not lead to explicit political congregation, hip-hop has certainly contributed to the rich stew of public dialogue, a phenomenon aligned with Dewey’s model of the strong community as one necessarily enriched by the diversity of its members.

The gritty group M.O.P.’s song “Ante Up” has as its chorus a raucous rally to rob ostentatious

peers at gunpoint. Their vision is brash and violent but jubilantly color-blind, an urban anthem of Robin Hood gone wild delivered with engrossing energy. By contrast, and no matter your background, you can laugh at Thirstin Howl III’s playfully honest song “I Still Live With My Moms.” Finally, people of all political leanings must, at the very least, take dead prez’ uncompromising political paradigm seriously.

From the severe to the quirky, the dour to the uplifting, the anarchic to the organized, hip-hop encourages individuals to disseminate ideas and values reflecting a broad (and, hence, truly public) coalition of concerns.

It is this very breadth combined with widespread influence that makes the culture so politically significant. Hip-hop promotes communities based not merely on benign cohabitation, but on an open-minded attempt to express the dizzying range of life’s experiences, to reconcile both optimistic growth and pessimistic fatalism, to embrace a survival strengthened and ennobled by trial. After all, a nation that (to paraphrase George Clinton) grooves together is a nation that dances, sweats, struggles, laughs, fights, and moves forward with one another.

In cultivating this groove amidst a period of globalization and political instability, we may follow Dewey’s lead and look first to our communities. Hip-hop inspires regional voices from an active, international public. A culture born and raised in one of the world’s most diverse cities, it allows people of all backgrounds a participatory voice in music, dance and art. Hip-hop is a culture bred by people seeking progress; it is inherently progressive.

It arose in the urban ghettos of New York, yet now crosses international borders bearing an ethos of resilience, endurance, confrontation and fun. If hip-hop fosters a civic bond bringing people worldwide together, it does so with striving, combative spirit. It is also truly popular, even in Barzun’s strictest sense of expressing “the hearts and minds of the people.”

Naked PunchASIA An Engaged Review of Politics

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How best to end this civic rap? In closing, we might rest with a definition of the culture taken from an emcee. In the words of Bronxborn Akbar, Hip-hop is… when you make something outta nothin’ like “chikka-boom-bap,” to the beat y’all My name in fly colors on a concrete wall Hip-hop is… a style that’s wild A ghetto child lookin’ for a reason to smile Hip-hop is the application of street knowledge For modern-day situations not learned in college This is real life, real emcees with steel mics A juggle, a constant struggle where you feel strife Hip-hop is… a ray of hope, a display of dope That started in the Bronx then spread across the globe, That’s what hip-hop is…

Authenticating Sincerity in Hip-Hop By I. Introduction That hip-hop’s politics of authenticity is generally concerned with adjudicating among the contested and sometimes contradictory interpretations of “the real” suggests that authenticity and reality are commonly thought of as interchangeable.

Thus, while actors within hip-hip may debate what it means to be “authentic” or “real,” they often implicitly agree to one of the critical terms of the debate: that authenticity itself is the dominant, if not only, interpretation of what counts as “the real” within hip-hop. This paper engages this larger debate by considering the consequences of a displacement of authenticity as the dominant interpretation of “the real”—broadly speaking, what people take to be true and meaningful in their lives—and offering sincerity as a distinct, alternative interpretation. I take as my theoretical point of departure John L. Jackson Jr.’s model of hip-hop reality as espoused in his book Real Black: Adventures in Racial Sincerity (2005), which I find particularly helpful in rearticulating “the real” in hip-hop, and recasting it in ways that help to illuminate the identities of marginalized individuals within hip-hop, and the identities of those hidden behind much of hip-hop scholarship’s focus on the production of rap music.

To set my analysis in motion, I buttress Jackson’s paradigm with data from a sociological research project I have conducted in the San Francisco Bay Area since January 2006. First, I demonstrate briefly how female disc jockeys (DJs) develop identities that they situate within the old-school tradition of hip-hop, tracing their experiences to a perceived “pure” time in hip-hop when hip-hop was enacted for art’s sake. They place a heavy emphasis on the integrity and sincerity of a performance: “real” hip-hop, they claim, fosters full creative self-expression. I turn to the crux of my argument in the second half of the paper. Here, I argue that sincerity’s poses a challenge not to male DJs, but rather to male masters of ceremonies (MCs, or rappers), who are insincere to the extent that they conform to commercial expectations for how a hip-hop black masculinity should look and act. While black male rappers may be considered authentic according to a popular set of criteria, on a sliding scale of reality, sincerity assumes an elevated status above authenticity. Within a culture shaped by black masculinity, characterized by sexism and misogyny, and deeply concerned with what counts as “the real,” male MCs serve as a conceptual foil to

Freeden Oeur female DJs. I do not argue that female DJs actively or explicitly resist certain groups of male MCs and the rap they produce (though they might); rather, I propose that comparing the collective experiences of each group provides clues into the deep complexities and multi-perspectival character of a hip-hop reality.

II. Imagining “the real” DJ Across numerous musical genres, a traditional model of the disc jockey locates her identity in the process of mediation. DJs are both literal mediators who manipulate physical forms of media such as vinyl records and compact discs, and also figurative ones who mediate the transmission of music to listeners (Wang 2004). The DJ holds a special position in hip-hop; the culture owes its origins to DJs (Brewster and Broughton 2000; Chang 2004; Forman 2002). Yet the DJ has largely ceded the spotlight to the MC, who at the first hip-hop parties was recruited to divert the attention away from the DJ, but soon after became the premier act. For Steven Hager, 1978 signaled the shift in emphasis from DJ to the MC, who by then had adapted rapping to a classic song structure, making the music more accessible for audiences (Poschardt 1998). For John L. Jackson Jr. (2005), “the ascension of the untethered emcee” disrupted not only the “productive symbiosis and interdependence between” the DJ and MC, but also signaled the growing divisions among the four original foundations (or “elements”) of hip-hop: DJing, MCing, breakdancing, and graffiti-writing (181).

These four elements recall a familiar script of authenticity in hip-hop, that of the “old school,” defined as “a close-knit community of breakdancers, DJs, MCs, and graffiti artists who helped nurture and develop hip-hop as a culture” (McLeod 1999: 143-144).

While reference to a romanticized notion of a “pure” culture is problematic, the old-school, characterized by symbiotic ties among the four elements (and particularly between DJing and MCing), is fundamentally different from contemporary hip-hop, which reflects a more strict division of labor among its participants (Jackson 2005).

Emile Durkheim (1984) argues that the

increasing volume and density of groups results in a division of labor whereby each individual specializes in some form of work, producing social cohesion—an organic solidarity—through the exchange of services. While the old-school conjures up images of a single aesthetic project, performed by practitioners who participated in multiple elements, hip-hop has now bred specialization (Jackson 2005). As divisions between workers (those who participate in the four elements) grow larger, and contact among them becomes less frequent, solidarity corrodes and individuals lose sight of a larger whole and collective project (Durkheim 1984; Jones 1986), one reminiscent of the old-school. The potentially fractured character of hip-hop’s landscape has several consequences for an understanding of authenticity. If a function of authenticity is to enable actors to make sense of their everyday realities, then it follows that people agree, often implicitly,

“Within a culture shaped by black masculinity, characterized by sexism and misogyny, and deeply concerned with what counts as “the real,” male MCs serve as a conceptual foil to female DJs” to a set of expectations—constituting, essentially, a contract or script—for how something or someone should look, sound, or feel (Grazian 2003). But the possibility remains that individuals in marginalized positions within hip-hop may experience different everyday realities, and may disagree with—but are coerced into abiding by—the dominant script, or scripts.

If authenticity is fundamentally a shared social script (Halbwachs 1992), then an individual can serve as arbiter to someone else’s authenticity. But this conception of authenticity is complicated by two factors. First, not everyone may have the right to assess authenticity within hip-hop. Indeed, when actors measure the degree to which someone else is authentic according to some agreed-upon

expectations within hip-hop, they may also determine that person’s right to measure authenticity herself. In other words, not everyone’s interpretations of authenticity may be treated equally. Second, within this conception of authenticity, individuals may mistake authenticity for inhering in people and things, rather than being derived from intersubjective meanings which are imposed on those people and things (Jackson 2005; Grazian 2003; Moore 2002).

As individuals within hip-hop construct meanings around events, people, and the culture in which they are personally invested, authenticity is taken to be reality, or what is true. Here, Jackson’s (2005) analytical model is particularly helpful for thinking about hip-hop reality.

Jackson writes that while authenticity presumes “a relation between subjects (who authenticate) and objects… sincerity presumes a liaison between subjects—not some external adjudicator and some lifeless scroll” (14-15, emphasis mine). In distinguishing between authenticity and sincerity as indicators of reality, this model not only enables us to ask how individuals conceptualize and measure authenticity (in the same way that authenticity is measured, but as a relationship between people), but also how authenticity and sincerity might be measured against each other.

Methods, Data, and the Local Context While my research has included in-depth interviews with both male and female DJs, the primary data for this paper is culled from interviews with 11 female DJs—a traditionally overlooked and hidden population in hip-hop —who reside in cities throughout the San Francisco Bay Area.

The DJs I interviewed are black, Filipino, Taiwanese, and white and are between the ages of 25 and 38. Each of my respondents is given a pseudonym. I used snowball sampling to obtain most of my female respondents, asking the first few women I interviewed to refer me to other female DJs they knew in the Bay Area. While race has served as a focal point for major scholarly treatments of hip-hop (Perry 2004; Rose 1994), with attention given to race as a potential marker of authenticity, this paper does not consider how racial background may shape the perspectives of female DJs. Rather, contextualizing their experiences within Jackson’s analytical model provides

I. Introduction That hip-hop’s politics of authenticity is generally concerned with adjudicating among the contested and sometimes contradictory interpretations of “the real” suggests that authenticity and reality are commonly thought of as interchangeable.

Thus, while actors within hip-hip may debate what it means to be “authentic” or “real,” they often implicitly agree to one of the critical terms of the debate: that authenticity itself is the dominant, if not only, interpretation of what counts as “the real” within hip-hop. This paper engages this larger debate by considering the consequences of a displacement of authenticity as the dominant interpretation of “the real”—broadly speaking, what people take to be true and meaningful in their lives—and offering sincerity as a distinct, alternative interpretation. I take as my theoretical point of departure John L. Jackson Jr.’s model of hip-hop reality as espoused in his book Real Black: Adventures in Racial Sincerity (2005), which I find particularly helpful in rearticulating “the real” in hip-hop, and recasting it in ways that help to illuminate the identities of marginalized individuals within hip-hop, and the identities of those hidden behind much of hip-hop scholarship’s focus on the production of rap music.

To set my analysis in motion, I buttress Jackson’s paradigm with data from a sociological research project I have conducted in the San Francisco Bay Area since January 2006. First, I demonstrate briefly how female disc jockeys (DJs) develop identities that they situate within the old-school tradition of hip-hop, tracing their experiences to a perceived “pure” time in hip-hop when hip-hop was enacted for art’s sake. They place a heavy emphasis on the integrity and sincerity of a performance: “real” hip-hop, they claim, fosters full creative self-expression. I turn to the crux of my argument in the second half of the paper. Here, I argue that sincerity’s poses a challenge not to male DJs, but rather to male masters of ceremonies (MCs, or rappers), who are insincere to the extent that they conform to commercial expectations for how a hip-hop black masculinity should look and act. While black male rappers may be considered authentic according to a popular set of criteria, on a sliding scale of reality, sincerity assumes an elevated status above authenticity. Within a culture shaped by black masculinity, characterized by sexism and misogyny, and deeply concerned with what counts as “the real,” male MCs serve as a conceptual foil to female DJs. I do not argue that female DJs actively or explicitly resist certain groups of male MCs and the rap they produce (though they might); rather, I propose that comparing the collective experiences of each group provides clues into the deep complexities and multi-perspectival character of a hip-hop reality.

II. Imagining “the real” DJ Across numerous musical genres, a traditional model of the disc jockey locates her identity in the process of mediation. DJs are both literal mediators who manipulate

physical forms of media such as vinyl records and compact discs, and also figurative ones who mediate the transmission of music to listeners (Wang 2004). The DJ holds a special position in hip-hop; the culture owes its origins to DJs (Brewster and Broughton 2000; Chang 2004; Forman 2002). Yet the DJ has largely ceded the spotlight to the MC, who at the first hip-hop parties was recruited to divert the attention away from the DJ, but soon after became the premier act. For Steven Hager, 1978 signaled the shift in emphasis from DJ to the MC, who by then had adapted rapping to a classic song structure, making the music more accessible for audiences (Poschardt 1998). For John L. Jackson Jr. (2005), “the ascension of the untethered emcee” disrupted not only the “productive symbiosis and interdependence between” the DJ and MC, but also signaled the growing divisions among the four original foundations (or “elements”) of hip-hop: DJing, MCing, breakdancing, and graffiti-writing (181).

These four elements recall a familiar script of authenticity in hip-hop, that of the “old school,” defined as “a close-knit community of breakdancers, DJs, MCs, and graffiti artists who helped nurture and develop hip-hop as a culture” (McLeod 1999: 143-144).

While reference to a romanticized notion of a “pure” culture is problematic, the old-school, characterized by symbiotic ties among the four elements (and particularly between DJing and MCing), is fundamentally different from contemporary hip-hop, which reflects a more strict division of labor among its participants (Jackson 2005).

Emile Durkheim (1984) argues that the increasing volume and density of groups results in a division of labor whereby each individual specializes in some form of work, producing social cohesion—an organic solidarity—through the exchange of services. While the old-school conjures up images of a single aesthetic project, performed by practitioners who participated in multiple elements, hip-hop has now bred specialization (Jackson 2005). As divisions between workers (those who participate in the four elements) grow larger, and contact among them becomes less frequent, solidarity corrodes and individuals lose sight of a larger whole and collective project (Durkheim 1984; Jones 1986), one reminiscent of the old-school. The potentially fractured character of hip-hop’s landscape has several consequences for an understanding of authenticity. If a function of authenticity is to enable actors to make sense of their everyday realities, then it follows that people agree, often implicitly, to a set of expectations—constituting, essentially, a contract or script—for how something or someone should look, sound, or feel (Grazian 2003). But the possibility remains that individuals in marginalized positions within hip-hop may experience different everyday realities, and may disagree with—but are coerced into abiding by—the dominant script, or scripts.

If authenticity is fundamentally a shared social script (Halbwachs 1992), then an individual can serve as arbiter to someone else’s authenticity. But this

conception of authenticity is complicated by two factors. First, not everyone may have the right to assess authenticity within hip-hop. Indeed, when actors measure the degree to which someone else is authentic according to some agreed-upon expectations within hip-hop, they may also determine that person’s right to measure authenticity herself. In other words, not everyone’s interpretations of authenticity may be treated equally. Second, within this conception of authenticity, individuals may mistake authenticity for inhering in people and things, rather than being derived from intersubjective meanings which are imposed on those people and things (Jackson 2005; Grazian 2003; Moore 2002).

As individuals within hip-hop construct meanings around events, people, and the culture in which they are personally invested, authenticity is taken to be reality, or what is true. Here, Jackson’s (2005) analytical model is particularly helpful for thinking about hip-hop reality.

Jackson writes that while authenticity presumes “a relation between subjects (who authenticate) and objects… sincerity presumes a liaison between subjects—not some external adjudicator and some lifeless scroll” (14-15, emphasis mine). In distinguishing between authenticity and sincerity as indicators of reality, this model not only enables us to ask how individuals conceptualize and measure authenticity (in the same way that authenticity is measured, but as a relationship between people), but also how authenticity and sincerity might be measured against each other.

Methods, Data, and the Local Context While my research has included in-depth interviews with both male and female DJs, the primary data for this paper is culled from interviews with 11 female DJs—a traditionally overlooked and hidden population in hip-hop —who reside in cities throughout the San Francisco Bay Area.

The DJs I interviewed are black, Filipino, Taiwanese, and white and are between the ages of 25 and 38. Each of my respondents is given a pseudonym. I used snowball sampling to obtain most of my female respondents, asking the first few women I interviewed to refer me to other female DJs they knew in the Bay Area. While race has served as a focal point for major scholarly treatments of hip-hop (Perry 2004; Rose 1994), with attention given to race as a potential marker of authenticity, this paper does not consider how racial background may shape the perspectives of female DJs. Rather, contextualizing their experiences within Jackson’s analytical model provides new ways of looking at black masculinity, which is fraught with the complexities of both race and gender.

The San Francisco Bay Area has a rich hip-hop tradition, with roots in the late 1970s soon after hip-hop emerged across the country in New York City. The Bay Area features a thriving and historically-rich DJ culture and is home to mainstream hip-hop artists and business moguls Too $hort and E-40, and was home, most prominently, to

Tupac Shakur before his death in 1996. The Bay Area has most recently experienced a revivial of sorts through hyphy, a dancedriven form of hip-hop which revels in playfulness and accentuates lyrical dexterity (Rosen 2007).

Self-Identification with the Old School In turning to the old school, individuals within hip-hop learn to embrace their sincerity. DJ Poetic is a white, 25 year-old woman. Upon arriving in the Bay Area six years ago, she pursued breakdancing, which she now refers to as her “true love.” She has also been a DJ for three years, and identifies primarily as a drum-and-bass and hip-hop DJ. When I ask Poetic to describe to me her identity as a DJ, she responds: Yeah, sure, I’m a DJ… but, I don’t know, it’s hard for me to say I’m a DJ, then I’m a b-girl… that I’m this and I’m that, or, like, one thing or the other. You can ask me who I am as a b-girl and it won’t be any different.

I feel the same way no matter what I do in hip-hop because I’m a hip-hop head. I’m better at breaking and I love it more… but it’s all a part of who I am, so it’s all important to me. It’s like when I wake up, I wake up to hip-hop. It’s my life. I’m a program director for a high school educational program that uses the original values of hip-hop such as nonviolence, acceptance, creative self-expression, and physical fitness as far as dancing goes, and using all that as an education tool.

Here, Poetic resists being classified as only either a DJ or a b-girl. Instead, while each of these roles is important to her, they are all subsumed under her self-understanding as “a hip-hop head.” She privileges creativity and self-expression, which she in turn seeks to support in the students with whom she works. She authenticates her hip-hop self-understanding by identifying “creative self-expression” as one of hip-hop’s “original values.” When I ask her to describe what in hip-hop she does not consider “original,” she contrasts self-expression with “being fake.” She adds: I tell my students, don’t force it… just say what’s already inside you. That’s the message I try to send. And it’s really important for the girls, for me to say, “don’t even hesitate, if you want to rap then you can, it’s not just for the boys. You also have that talent.”

Rapping, hip-hop’s most common form of musical production, is decidedly gendered, in part because forceful and deliberate speaking, or rapping, is cast as distinct from singing, which is seen as less masculine (Jackson 2005). Thus, hip-hop assigns the labor of singing to women. Challenging this division of labor is a mark of sincerity, a declaration that one is just doing as one wishes without regard to gender expectations (Jackson 2005).

When Poetic mentions the “the original values of hip-hop,” she adopts a familiar script in hip-hop’s politics of authenticity by identifying with the old school, the closeknit hip-hop community whose members nurture and participate in the four elements (rapping, DJing, breakdancing, and graffiti-

writing) for art’s sake, but most important, prioritize self-expression (Jackson 2005; McLeod 1999). In identifying with the old-school, Poetic engages in a process of self-identification with that community, locating herself “vis-à-vis known others” (Brubaker and Cooper 2000: 14). This self-identification with the old-school, which explicitly refers to membership in a social group is analytically distinct from a self-understanding as a “hip-hop head,” Poetic’s general sense of who she is and how she is prepared to act (Brubaker and Cooper 2000). Yet both connotations of identity point to sincerity, albeit in a different way. As a hip-hop head, Poetic advises her students to “say what’s already inside of you”: sincerity, in the form of being oneself and self-expression, emerges from within.

On the other hand, self-identification with the old-school moves in the other direction, linking an existing culture to the individual, who can now draw on that culture in order to claim the capacity to be sincere.

DJ Zany, a 27-year-old Filipina woman, acknowledges how self-expression is encouraged when individuals share in “a feeling of belonging together” (Brubaker and Cooper 2000: 20). When asked to describe her most memorable moment as a DJ, Zany recalls an experience from her tour (alongside another female DJ) with legendary MC KRS-One: KRS was like, “you know the original DJs were also MCs, so you better learn to rock the mic!”… I remember one of the first times being out on the mic and yelling out his lyrics with him, hypin’ up the crowd and everyone was like shocked. “Who are these girls?” And we were so nervous. He had this part of the show when he wants b-boys and b-girls [breakdancers] to get down… Now maybe there aren’t a lot of b-girls but maybe there are and they’re just not confident enough to get up there. But then there were like ten b-girls who jumped on stage… and that was the only time in my career when I was getting down with these women dancing. I play to people all the time, but playing for all those b-girls, it wasn’t even planned. I mean that’s really special. These girls didn’t give a shit about the guys. It was for them and no one else.

Returning to the old school—as KRS-One claims and hip-hop scholars (Jackson 2005; Poschardt 1998) note, the first DJs also rapped—Zany exerted her presence and inspired the b-girls to join her on stage.

This was a rare moment that challenged the expectations inscribed in an implicitly male-dominated space (“Who are these girls” and “These girls didn’t give a shit about the guys”) and, thus, provided the women with the opportunity to act according to their own expectations (“It was for them and no one else”). These women were being sincere by choosing to follow their own personal mandates over those social ones which may have otherwise relegated them to a marginalized position on the dancefloor.

Poetic and Zany claim sincerity while identifying with an authentic tradition (the old school), or we might say that sincerity is derived from identification with the old-school. Yet self-identification with the old-school presents a paradox for the notion of sincerity: if the old-school, in fact, demands adherence to a set of values, then that culture demands some level of conformity. Here we might propose a conception of sincerity with a dual meaning, accounting for both subjective self-understanding

(expression from within, being a hip-hop head) as well as identification with an objective category (in this case, the oldschool). It is also difficult to separate these meanings: hip-hop’s enduring concern with the old-school demonstrates that situating oneself in that community encourages full self-expression (Jackson 2005; McLeod 1999; Perry 2004). Female DJs render “sincerity” a flexible concept that is thus capable of representing their varied experiences.

Challenging Insincere Black Masculinity The previous section charted a possible course through hip-hop reality, showing how female DJs embrace sincerity. In this section I argue that female DJs indirectly challenge the expectations of insincerity placed on male MCs by commercialism and commercial demands. This challenge reveals some of the complexities behind sincerity, which may behave in the social world like authenticity: not as some truth that inheres in individuals, but rather, as an agreed-upon contract in the hip-hop community, and particularly between performers and consumers. I am not suggesting that commercial pressures are responsible for some of the negative behaviors linked to black masculinity— though some scholars (Hurt 2007; Pough 2004; Rose 1994) maintain that commercialism helps to perpetuate it—but rather, I intend to explore the consequences for an understanding of sincerity when male MCs are compelled to present these behaviors in their music.

When female DJs invoke a language of originality—referring to hip-hop’s original values and foundational elements—they conjure up a historical moment when hip-hop was not tainted by commercialism, and when hip-hop’s cultural practitioners performed hip-hop for art’s sake (Jackson 2005). But this invocation underscores DJs’ position as cultural practitioners within hiphop who are not constrained by commercialism in the same way that male MCs are.

Moreover, female DJs are hidden behind male DJs, who themselves are hidden on a cultural landscape that privileges male MCs, hip-hop’s dominant cultural practitioners.

Beginning in the 1980s, rappers were aggressively promoted by the music industry, maintaining a public visibility that makes rap arguably the most influential musical genre in the United States (Forman 2002).

DJs may help to spread the music in clubs, at parties, and on the radio, but they, along with breakdancers and graffiti-artists, make far less of a productive contribution to the rap industry than male MCs (Jackson 2005).

As members of the hip-hop community began to forge authenticity claims in order to resist hip-hop’s mainstream assimilation (McLeod 1999), the visible MC himself was exploited and asked to adjudicate the debate over what is taken to be “real” and “fake” in hip-hop.

Yet as arbiters of what counts as authentic in hip-hop, the male MC shoulders a burden: he is constrained by the very tropes— hypermasculinity and hip-hop black masculinity—that ensure his elevated status atop “authenticity’s hegemony” as Jackson (2005) calls it. I argue that as commercialization limits the possibilities of identity for male MCs, they are insincere—or forced into being insincere—to the extent that they are conforming to expectations for how black masculinity should look and act. And what form should this particular masculinity take? A hip-hop black masculinity is considered hypermasculine in its emphasis on aggressiveness (or “hardness”) and on

hiding vulnerability; but is also characterized by its set opposition to women, who are seen as expendable and whose bodies are objectified (Boyd 1997; Brown 2006; Iwamoto 2003). Perry (2004) argues that the black hypermasculine standard in hip-hop is exemplified by the badman, an outlaw that challenges a “societal order antithetical to the expression of African American humanity” (128). But as hip-hop masculinity is reified as it is packaged and sold, it resembles the development of country music in the first half of the twentieth century: record executives fabricated authenticity in creating the country music star, fusing the image of the western cowboy with stereotypical notions of southern hillbilly sensibilities that audiences interpreted and consumed as “real country” (Peterson 1997).

The dominance of a hip-hop black masculinity underscores the fact that black men have few productive choices available in defining both their self-understandings—how they see themselves—and their selfidentifications—the categories they identify with (Brown 2006; hooks 2004). Patricia Hill Collins (2006) argues that hegemonic white masculinity is responsible for helping to perpetuate a narrow set of representations of black masculinity. This hegemonic masculinity takes the form of patriarchy in its various guises—for example, men’s general power over women (Hartmann 1981) and men’s control of women’s bodies through sexuality and violence (MacKinnon 1983)—and provides hip-hop with gender scripts from which it can draw on. Further, hegemonic white masculinity requires the existence of marginalized masculinities—in particular black masculinity—to maintain its dominance (Collins 2006). It proscribes what black masculinity cannot be—feminine, gay, poor, boys, and even black—thus, leaving black men with few representational spaces (Collins 2006). Reaction may take the form of hypermasculinity, as black men seek to control their bodies and their physical posturings, and assert their physical and sexual dominance (Collins 2006; Hurt 2007). The ascendance of misogynistic and hypermasculine rap disguises a diversity of interests and masculinities, including that embodied by political rap-artists (Allen 1996), and further disguises femininities, including black female MCs with a workingclass youth aesthetic (Rose 1994). While these more progressive forms of black masculinity seek to elevate blackness, acknowledge racial oppression, and to find productive ways of challenging white hegemonic masculinity (Mutua 2006; Brown 2006), they carry little traction and are seen as unprofitable in the eyes of the rap industry (Brown 2006; hooks 2004).

As male MCs engaging in hypermasculine behaviors saturate the rap market, female DJs are provided with a foil to these hypermasculine identities. Expectations for black masculinity invite this insincerity, pushing black male MCs into what Byron Hurt calls a “duality of consciousness”: men “feel very much trapped inside of a box, that they have to perform a certain kind of masculinity in order to be received or validated as… credible rap artists” (“A Look at Hip-Hop” 2007). As Mark Anthony Neal further comments, not just superstar MCs but also “rank and file” artists are under enormous pressure from local radio and media outlets to produce “cookie-cutter performances” that conform to expectations for misogyny and hypermasculinity in rap (“A Look at Hip-Hop” 2007). Indeed, I suggest that the “duality of consciousness” and its accompanying pressures constitute

a form of emotional labor, or the management of feeling that “requires one to induce or suppress feeling in order to sustain the outward countenance that produces the proper state of mind in others” (Hochschild 2003: 7). In being forced to conform to a familiar script of hypermasculinity, in suspending their true emotions for the outward appearances required for the labor, male MCs may sacrifice their own sincerity for authenticity’s external verifications. Yet the rift between a visible self and an internal self may lead to estrangement from that internal self.

While “authenticity’s hegemony” (Jackson 2005) in hip-hop may construct static and stereotypical images meant for widespread consumption, sincerity actually assumes fans and listeners who do more than absorb the music without critical reflection. Sincerity is never optional because listeners always maintain the right to assess it; to strip away appearances; to leave aside for a moment the community in which an MC resides, and perhaps his visible swagger and other visible markers of authenticity (Jackson 2005); and to point to the MC’s heart and wonder: does the MC actually feel the way he looks, and is he being true to himself? Hip-hop fans might approach any MC—and any DJ, or anyone else in hip-hop—they confront for the first time with skepticism. Lionel Trilling (2006) maintains that so long as people claim to be something or someone they are not—regardless of whether others take them to be sincere—then sincerity cannot always be trusted. Within a culture that is preoccupied with identifying “the real,” the costs are high for faking sincerity and breaching the trust between hip-hop performer and fan. But the threat remains higher for the MC, who is more visible in public, on television, and on the radio; whose voice is more often heard in the ear of the fan; and who faces explicit expectations from a record industry for how an MC ought to look, act, and sound. While female DJs—and all DJs, for that matter—are less visible and do not face similar commercial demands placed on MCs, these factors may be to their advantage. As they “keep it real” by embracing the old-school and challenging conformity—while mainstream hip-hop is preoccupied with selling and consuming a hip-hop black masculinity—DJs assert their sincerity, invite others to experience in their community of artists, and trust that their own fans will see them as sincere. The enormous challenge for female DJs and other proponents of the old-school is not simply to assert a definition of the sincere, but to get others to agree to the terms of a contract of what is real and what is most meaningful in hip-hop.

Conclusion Hip-Hop is Dead, the title of the latest album from Nas, reflects the legendary MC’s sentiment that hip-hop as a culture has collapsed under the weight of commercialism.

As he raps: “Everybody sound the same / commercialize the game / reminiscin’ when it wasn’t all business” (Warren 2007). Nas is nostalgic for the old-school, and, in fact, situating one’s identity within an old-school tradition does appear to acknowledge that commercialism and commodification are at least partly responsible for a deep concern within hip-hop for wanting to keep it real. In this paper I have mined some of my interviews with female DJs to reveal a particular model of hip-hop reality that embraces sincerity and poses a challenge to the narrow expectations of black masculinity placed on male MCs.

Future research might explore how the myriad femininities and masculinities within hip-hop—including politically and religiously-conscious MCs, and gay and lesbian MCs—might employ the shifting meanings behind sincerity in order to shore up their self- and collective identities, and how sincerity might be used to identify and oppose other groups, within and outside of hip-hop. Scholars and others might also consider the consequences of the emotional labor performed by rappers, hip-hop’s most visible cultural practitioners, and how they may resist the commercial and mainstream expectations for hypermasculinity.

Moments of sincerity emerge all across hip-hop’s complex and evolving landscape; sincerity cannot be neglected. If in turning to an old-school tradition DJs, MCs, hip-hop heads and others are asked to turn inwards, to ask themselves if they are being true to themselves, to be final arbiter to their own personal realness, then, perhaps, “sincerity is hip-hop’s most dominant interpretation of the real” (Jackson 2006: 196).

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Fakin' the Funk?: Negotiating Racial Authenticity in HipHop

By Michael Barnes

Introduction Almost 20 years since the spectacular emergence and artistic demise of Vanilla Ice sparked a wide ranging debate within Rap on appropriation, race continues to be one of the strongest markers for authenticity in Hip-Hop. Ever since its inception, Hip-Hop music and culture has been primarily associated with African-Americans. Perhaps this is not surprising for even though a case can be made for the importance of Latinos and Whites in Hip-Hop’s emergence from the Bronx in the 1970s (Del Barco 1996; Flores 1994; George 1999), the historical foundations and the innovators of the music and culture have been overwhelmingly from the African Diaspora (Rose 1994; Keyes 2004). Over the last several years there has been more attention to non-Black performers and audiences in Hip-Hop, due in part to the extraordinary success of Eminem (Kitwana 2005). However, at a time when White involvement in Hip-Hop is well known and pervasive throughout the culture, why do there remain so few White mainstream rappers? Conversely, why are there comparatively so many non-Black MCs and DJs in what might be loosely called “the Underground”? In this article, I am interested in these dual questions and how we explain the exceptionalism of Eminem and the handful of other non-Black mainstream rap artists, with the simultaneous emergence of more non-Black rappers and DJs in the underground.

I would contend that what Eminem has, that Vanilla Ice was missing, is not just a certain degree of authenticity, but also sincerity. While meta-discourses of authenticity in Hip-Hop have often excluded non-Blacks, they do not bar them from gaining acclaim in the broader culture through the sincerity of their performance (Harrison 2004). While these same discourses may privilege blackness, it does not mean that Blacks receive a free pass. They must still measure up to the attendant discourse of authenticity, a discourse that shifts with changes to the genre. However, on the ground level in the various scenes where Hip-Hop is produced, we might want to speak about “authenticities”, which here in the 21st century may increasingly allow for a variety of individuals of racial/ethnic identity to authentically express a Hip-Hop identity in the US and abroad. This will likely continue to shift the meaning of authenticity in Hip-Hop, perhaps in unexpected ways.

Conceptualizing Authenticity in Hip-Hop “Authenticity” as a concept seems straightforward. We often take authenticity to mean the natural, true or essential characteristic of a person or object (Trilling 1972). Authenticity is that which cannot be faked, it is the essential truth. However, as Peterson (1997) and others (Grazian 2003, Jackson 2005) have shown, notions of authenticity are contextual, contested and constructed over time. Instead of being seen as natural or linked to some essential truth, claims of authenticity should be seen as attempts to cohere a particular notion of the authentic through processes of naturalization and institutionalization (Peterson 1997, 211-16). It requires “authenticity work” in order to actively mark and signify individuals, groups, cultural practices and objects as “authentic” representations to be recognized as such (Peterson 1997, 223-5). “Sincerity” is often a part of this authenticity work, with sincerity being an explicit performance of what is deemed authentic by the actor and the audience (Trilling 1972, 10-11).

In one of the most cited articles on the connections between Hip-Hop and authenticity, “Authenticity within Hip-Hop and Other Cultures Threatened with Assimilation” (1999), Kembrew McLeod focuses on six main semantic dimensions where claims of authenticity are made. Within each semantic pairing the “real” or authentic is juxtaposed with the “fake” or inauthentic: social-psychological (staying true to yourself vs. following mass trends), racial (Black vs. White), political-economic (the underground vs. commercial), gender-sexual (hard vs. soft), social-location (the street vs. the suburbs) and cultural (the old school vs. the mainstream) (McLeod 1999, 139). In other words, for McLeod being authentic in Hip-Hop means, “staying true to yourself (by identifying oneself as both hard and Black), representing the underground and the street, and remembering Hip-Hop’s cultural legacy, which is the old school. To be inauthentic, or fake, means being soft, following mass trends by listening to commercial rap music, and identifying oneself with White, mainstream culture that is geographically located in the suburbs” (McLeod 1999, 145).

While I find McLeod’s typology useful, and share his emphasis on race (and gender in my other work ), I also find it lacking on at least two key fronts. A first problem is that he only considers the cultural in terms of an insider/outsider dichotomy, but not how cultural practices within a culture are contested and how important skill as cultural competence (or “cultural capital” in Pierre Bourdieu’s parlance) can be in terms of an individual’s claims to authenticity. In this way Hip-Hop performers exhibit their sincerity to the culture through adhering to the norms of Hip-Hop . A second issue is that while McLeod considers how authenticity becomes important for Hip-Hop in its movement from subculture to the mainstream, he does not fully consider how discourses of authenticity themselves may have changed over time. Through the deployment of authenticity, the borders of the culture and practices through which members engage become negotiated understandings of what is “authentically” Hip-Hop and what is not. Changes to the culture would then necessarily affect the discourses of authenticity.

Shifting Discourses of Authenticity in Hip-Hop There have been at least three meta-discourses of authenticity in Hip-Hop culture and the way to talk about them is as building and shifting discourses.

1.

Old School: from the 80s; Concerned with the “real” as in from the Bronx. Here origin stories are important.

2.

True School: often referred to as “The Golden Era” from late 80s to mid 90s, where the “real” becomes concerned with questions of commercialism and selling out versus staying “true” to the culture and your individual artistry.

3.

New School: from mid-90s to the current time, the discourse becomes bifurcated between a mainstream discourse which links “keeping it real” to a specific Black urban experience, and the underground where discourses of the “real” draw on perceived qualities gained particularly from the “True school” period.

Within these discourses in Hip-Hop, race is very prevalent but rarely debated openly as a sign of authenticity. Instead, the connection of race to authenticity is largely taken as self-evident because of the culture’s connections to other African American cultural and musical forms (Keyes 2004). Race can be seen to work as a currency in each of the last two periods described above. In Hip-Hop the racial order of US society is inverted, where, to take a well known Jim Crow era rhyme and flip it:

If you’re Black, you alright Jack,

If you’re Brown, stick around,

But if you’re White, you’re a fright.

Whites in particular are seen as a “fright”, based on the history of appropriation of Black musical forms, including blues, jazz and rock’n’roll. As a fright, as something that based on racial identity is seen as qualitatively inauthentic, additional steps must be taken to overcome that barrier and prove that you belong within the culture. That, as a non-Black, you are in fact performing sincerely, if not authentically.

11 Supplement Naked Punch www.nakedpunch.com

But this does not mean that Blacks are exempt, simply given a pass and seen as being wholly authentic within these discourses either. For Blacks, while their racial authenticity is largely unproblematic, these discourses also demand that they sincerely perform. Some examples from these various periods may help to show this.

When “Rapper’s Delight” was released in 1979, this sparked a discourse of authenticity that was based not on race, but on location and practice. The explosion of rap in recorded form surprised those in the Bronx who had been the innovators of this culture. Over time they felt the need to assert that “real” Hip-Hop started in the Bronx (Fricke and Ahearn 2002). An example of this in recorded form would be Grandmixer DST’s “Home of Hip-Hop”, which includes the following verse: The Bronx is the home of Hip-Hop, We don’t care what anybody say, It’s been avoided and exploited, But it will never be taken away.

DST – “Home of Hip-Hop” (1984) Another notable song in line with this discourse of authenticity would be Boogie Down Productions, “South Bronx” (1987) a song written as a response to MC Shan’s “The Bridge” (1987) which Boogie Down Productions took as an attempt to claim that it was Queens, and not the Bronx, that created Hip-Hop (Smith 1997). Within this discourse, race is less of an issue which allows for the focus to be on the largely non-White spaces of New York.

A second major discourse of authenticity occurs in the late eighties and early nineties as Hip-Hop begins to move outside of New York and became a much more popular musical form. In this period the concern is less with fixing authenticity within a space, but within certain approaches. Though rap records had been commercial enterprises throughout Hip-Hop’s recorded history, during this period there began to be more of a concern with commercial success. Part of that concern came from the overwhelming commercial success of several White rappers, including the Beastie Boys, Vanilla Ice and Marky Mark, which was linked primarily to their success at crossing over to White audiences.

It is during this period of time that more of an explicit discourse of authenticity tied to the music being an authentic expression of the artist’s life is articulated. The concern being that artists are fabricating not only their rhymes but also fabricating stories about themselves for the explicit purpose of selling records. This is perhaps best expressed in the song where I took the title for this paper, Main Source’s “Fakin’ The Funk” (1992). The entire narrative of the song is concerned with rappers “fakin’ the funk” in terms of rapping about inauthentic experiences and portraying themselves as something they are not. Towards the end of the song the members of the group even list what they consider inauthentic performance of Hip-Hop, which includes: The people stealing beats (You’re fakin’ the funk) To all the chumps that’s claiming the streets (You’re fakin’ the funk) Fronting incredible feats (You’re fakin’ the funk)

Main Source – “Fakin’ The Funk” (1992)

Other songs from this period mirror these sentiments, particularly “Crossover” (1992) from EPMD and “Time’s Up” (1994) from O.C..

This was part of the reason why Vanilla Ice was seen as such an abomination, not only did he lack authenticity, but he also lacked sincerity, with an apparent disregard for the culture which made him a star. Nowhere is this perhaps more evident than in Ice’s gangsta posing in “Ice Ice Baby” (1990): Jealous cause I’m out gettin’ mine, J with the [12] Gauge [shotgun] and Vanilla with the 9 [mm handgun], Ready, for the chumps on the wall, The chumps are acting ill because they’re full of 8 ball, Gunshots ranged out like a bell, I grabbed my 9 and all I heard was shells, Fallin, on the concrete real fast, Jumped in my car, slammed on the gas, Bumber to bumber the avenue’s packed, I’m tryin’ to get away before the jackers jack, Police on the scene, you know what I mean?

They pass me up, confronted all the dope fiends, If there was a problem, yo I’ll solve it, Check out the hook while my DJ revolves it.

Vanilla Ice – “Ice Ice Baby” (1990) Vanilla Ice’s star fell quickly after it was revealed that he had fabricated his background story of a life in the ghetto in an attempt to give himself street credibility and also that his Black DJ/producer, Chocolate, had written a substantial amount of the rhymes on his debut record (Rose 1994, 11-12). It’s significant also that perhaps the most damning critique of Vanilla Ice as an artist came during this period from a group headed by two White MCs, 3rd Bass with “Pop Goes the Weasel” (1991). 3rd Bass, because of their legitimate ties to New York and the urban experience, were deemed sincere performers and generally more accepted within Hip-Hop culture (Forman 2002, 61).

But Ice wasn’t the only casualty of this discourse. A somewhat similar case would be African-American rapper MC Hammer, whose #1 record Vanilla Ice’s album dethroned in 1990. Hammer was embraced early on, but the massive crossover success of “U Can’t Touch This” (1990), and his subsequent commercial ubiquity, including action figures and a daytime animated series “Hammer Man” led to his downfall (Toop 2000, 208-09). The two men are often held up as paragons of inauthenticity from this period of time.

What is perhaps most key about this discourse is that it was articulated from within what at the time was the mainstream of Hip-Hop. Hip-Hop in the early nineties had not yet become the billion dollar industry that it would be. At this time it was still rarely played on commercial radio. There was a high emphasis in this period of time to remaining true to one’s self and to the culture, to not soften the content of your music and “go pop” just to sell records or achieve crossover success.

In just a few short years we would see another shift in the discourse as Hip-Hop did in fact become an economic juggernaut. As the nineties drew to a close, the discourse of authenticity split between a mainstream discourse with concerns about “keeping it real” in terms of individual experience, whereas in the underground the discourse was about “real” Hip-Hop vs. what was perceived as a diluted, commercialized and inauthentic rap. Both are highly concerned with sincerity in performance, but in very different ways. The mainstream discourse privileges the intersections of blackness, ghetto life and often a hyper-masculinity in its definition of the real (perhaps most fully realized in the artist 50 Cent), but for the underground what is privileged as “real” refers back to practices and principles gained from the old school and true school periods. As such, the underground allows for greater racial diversity (as well as gender diversity) because the emphasis is not on a politics of authenticity that is so explicitly tied to blackness, but instead to one that is tied to the sincere performance of what those in the underground consider “real” Hip-Hop. This is evidenced by the significant numbers of non-Black performers within the underground, including The Visionaries, Brother Ali, EL-P, Aesop Rock, Edan, Eyedea and Apathy.

It’s within this dual discourse that Eminem came into the scene, first through underground circles, winning freestyle competitions and making appearances on underground 12”s and mixtapes honing his skills. He is then introduced to the mainstream in 1999 by Dr. Dre, after spending several years in the underground (Forman 2002, 305). Unlike Vanilla Ice then, Eminem was safeguarded through his sincerity and also his legitimate connection to poverty and the urban space of Detroit. Like Eminem, those White rappers who have had success in the mainstream (Bubba Sparxx and Paul Wall come to mind) have also found themselves linked to significant Black inside men and just as significantly have come from poverty (Forman 2002, 61-2).

Hip-Hop Authenticities at the Local Level If we take a look at local scenes and consider how Hip-Hop culture has been produced in different areas, we find that while these prevailing discourses may influence the production of Hip-Hop, it does not always determine authenticity on the local level.

In my own research, an ongoing ethnographic comparison between the San Francisco Bay Area and Atlanta DJ scenes, virtually every DJ, regardless of race, mentioned something they had to overcome in route to continuing to be a DJ. For Whites in both scenes this has been highly racialized. An example of this occurred at an early point in the career of DJ Sky, a White male DJ in Atlanta, as he was performing at a homecoming party at Morris Brown, one of the historically Black colleges in the Atlanta area: So I’m setting up in the stands and there’s this…hype man [on the mic]…and he’s like ‘Yeah yeah y’all stick around we got Vanilla Ice back here settin’ up his tables.’ From that comment on it continued, it became like harassment. – Sky, Atlanta 2005 However, this harassment did not deter the DJs from continuing to learn and perform their craft. This is clear as we continue with the prior quote from Sky: Every challenge that could hit me that night hit me…in the end I made it through [and] it’s one of those things that built my confidence so much stronger. I wasn’t letting their taunting or heckling spook me out of an interest in the culture and [an] interest in doing what I was doing, but it was a major challenge. – Sky, Atlanta 2005 This was a recurring trend in many of these stories in my study. White DJs talked about how their whiteness made their coming into the culture a challenge but not something that was going to keep them out of the culture.

Has your race ever been an issue when you DJ?

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Yes when I started in Atlanta, because back then there weren’t a lot…first of all there weren’t a lot of women DJs, so then gender was one but then also race. I don’t know if I would have had the same issue in another city, but Atlanta is the south…and Atlanta is a metropolitan city so there’s a lot more opened minded people there but there is still a deep seated race issue down there. So I would go to the clubs and I wouldn’t even start playing and they would [say], ‘Get that White girl off the stage!’, ‘She’s not Hip-Hop!’ But once I started playing those same people would be asking me for an autograph or something like that. I’ve never had a tolerance for racism but usually it’s not against me it’s against people of color. But in that sense, it was because I was White and then female on top of it, so that was just like a double whammy. Whereas my husband [turntablist DJ Faust] is Puerto-Rican, but he looks White [so] everyone thought he was White too. So people would be like, ‘What do you guys know about Hip-Hop?’ ‘Hip-Hop’s Black music.’ But now, it’s not like that. – Shortee, Los Angeles 2007 And so often with White DJs, harassment was something that happened early on. With longevity in their local scene, they were able to exhibit their sincerity to Hip-Hop and were able to also create some space within the culture.

If you know who you are, and honestly, I just love the music and it moves me and I’m not trying to profit from it and the thing is that after a while people realize that. Because you can say what the hell you want, but it’s what you actually practice [that matters]. – Billy Jam, Berkeley 2004 One major exception to this lack of initial “face-value” authenticity for non-Blacks in my study were Asians in the Bay Area, and particularly Filipinos. Asian DJs, were insulated from this because of the strength and size of the Asian Hip-Hop community. In the Bay Area the connection of Filipino youth to Hip-Hop rose in a largely organic fashion out of mobile DJ crews that existed prior to Hip-Hop finding its way to the west coast. Additionally, some of the best known DJs from the Bay Area, including Q-Bert and other members of the legendary Invisible Skratch Piklz DJ Crew were Filipino (Tiongsong 2006).

Has race ever been an issue for you as a DJ? No, I’ve been very lucky about the race issue. Coming of age as a DJ in the Bay Area I was spoiled by the fact that this is the most diverse and multicultural community that you could be in and I don’t just mean demographically in terms of ‘we have 20% of this people, or 30% of that,’ I’m talking culturally the Bay Area is integrated in a way that old school east coast cities like Chicago, Boston or New York are still very segregated. Friends of mine who are Asian and live in New York have a much harder time finding acceptance versus what I experienced out here. It was never an issue, race was never raised as an issue, at least not that I could see as I was DJ-ing…I mean, look at who the best DJs are in the Bay Area, they’re all Filipino. So I don’t have much to worry about in that respect. – O-Dub, Berkeley 2004 In the Bay Area then it makes sense to say that certain non-Black groups have come to be seen as having an authentic relationship to this music, though this authenticity might not always be fully recognized within other parts of the country.

However, this type of authenticity does come at a price within the scene. The fixing of authenticity around a certain identity can be seen as limiting as in the case of Filipino DJs, who feel that the expectation is only for them to be turntablists like Q-Bert and perform Scratch music, but not other styles: Certain expectations are put on you…people are like, ‘oh you must scratch,’…and then when I bust out with something like Barry Manilow sometimes that will be looked down upon. But someone like Z-trip [who is White] can get away with it. I can’t play AC/DC at a gig a lot of times without a lot of negative reaction from the audience. But Z-trip can have the crowd at his knees by playing the same record. I’d hate to say [it but] it’s a matter of expectations. They see me and a certain appearance and expect me to play a certain way, they expect a certain thing out of me. – DJ Pone, Berkeley 2004 So, while the identification of Filipinos and Asians with Hip-Hop in the Bay Area shields these DJs from hostilities that might have been thrown their way in a different setting, this identification also essentialized notions of what a Filipino Hip-Hop DJ should be and how they should sincerely perform Hip-Hop. An additional effect of this most recent discourse of authenticity that has created different standards between the Mainstream and underground, is that even though this has created greater diversity in audiences and performers, bringing more non-Blacks into Hip-Hop, it is also creating a situation where Blacks are becoming increasingly shut out of some Hip-Hop spaces, to point where some consider being Black in Hip-Hop a disadvantage.

I would say of late, it can be perceived as a disadvantage, only because the principles have changed, the standards have changed, and now with this computer technology, you have a lot of people who can afford it, which is predominately White kids, cause a lot of Black kids can’t afford to buy a laptop and all these programs. So you have a lot of White kids, they can go buy Serato and instantly become a DJ and know somebody who knows somebody and can get a gig. They’re friends of a bartender who knows the owner and they’re getting gigs and they’re basically taking gigs from “real” DJs. So at that point it’s almost been like a disadvantage and I don’t want to make it a racial thing, but when you break it down to reality, that’s the fuckin’ reality. – Rascue, Oakland 2007 In connection to this, many of the White DJs in my study noted differences for Whites coming into Hip-Hop in the 21st century, versus their own experience coming in, primarily during the 1980s and early 1990s.

I think that’s one of the big problems with today’s Hip-Hop is a lot of these kids…you know let’s be honest, this used to be a dirty little secret now it’s pretty much known by everyone, that most of the people who buy rap music are White kids. The problem is today’s White kids don’t know that it’s a predominately Black man’s art. That’s what Hip-Hop is [but] there’s no kinda of respect for the culture surrounding it. The problem is that I think a lot of White kids today don’t know the history of Hip-Hop so they feel like they are just entitled to listen to Hip-Hop. And coming up, when I was listening to it, if you were a White kid that was a privilege, it wasn’t a right. You felt like you were lucky to be a part of that culture. I remember going into Hip-Hop shows in the early 90s and I used to be the only White guy there, the last thing you wanted to be was not respectful to the culture surrounding it. – Dainja, Atlanta 2006 DJs in my study noted that this demographic shift has created an interested schism in Hip-Hop, where underground performers and audiences, increasingly made up of Whites and other non-Blacks, criticize the mainstream, overwhelmingly associated with Blacks, as being inauthentic.

That’s the fucked up part, the shit that people call “real” Hip-Hop is the [underground] shit where you’ll see a lot more White people and those people will sit there and talk about working class music or blue collar “turf” music and say that’s not “real” Hip-Hop. They’ll say that shit all day and that’s dangerous if you think about it.

Why do you say that it’s dangerous?

Because you’re talking about a Black art form, that’s been Whitewashed and now you have White people controlling the culture dictating what’s real and what isn’t and they’re saying that the shit that Black people are participating in and creating isn’t real. It’s not the real shit. It’s dangerous in the sense of how racist this country is, how it understands race and how it deals with race. It’s dangerous in the sense that 10-20 years from now our kids could be just like we grew up thinking rock’n’roll was White music. These kids are going to come up thinking Hip-Hop is White music. – Sake One, Berkeley 2007 In these final quotes we hear DJs discuss the possibility that we are moving towards a discourse of authenticity in the underground that attempts to pass itself off as “color-blind”, by being focused on skills and adherence to a certain set of aesthetics, but which has explicitly racial consequences in terms of determining who is deemed authentic and inauthentic in Hip-Hop (Rodriguez 2006).

Consequences which, not too coincidentally, begin to mirror the dominant racial order of the US. Conclusions Race remains a significant barrier of inclusion to non-Blacks within the overall Hip-Hop culture, though it has become perhaps less significant in certain scenes and in the discourse of authenticity associated with the underground. Now that we are over 30 years past the inception of Hip-Hop culture, it makes intuitive sense that in the broader discourse we may see a de-emphasis of blackness as a prime marker of authenticity within Hip-Hop. It seems just as likely that what we will see is a re-articulation of blackness that will either make the distinctions between the mainstream representations of the culture and underground elements less distinct or make them even more apparent.

In some respects, this is already happening in the underground and particularly in areas around the US and the world where there are few Blacks. This creates a situation, as described by DJs in my study, where largely White or “local” actors denigrate the mainstream Hip-Hop produced in the US by Black artists such as 50 Cent, T.I. or Ludacris, while championing the work of White underground artists like EL-P or Brother Ali. This dynamic is mirrored in many places around the world which, because of the global dominance of multi-national corporations that produce the majority of mainstream Hip-Hop, receive an even more narrow view of US based Hip-Hop music and culture. Instead of a situation where all voices within the Hip-Hop world are viewed as valuable or at least respected for their individual merits, we continue to move towards greater fragmentation and division, increasingly along racial lines. My article represents only an introduction to some of the issues surrounding authenticity and Hip-Hop. We very much need more in-depth, ethnographic and comparative research on these issues to be done that locates Hip-Hop music and culture in the communities that produce it. If Hip-Hop music and culture is to become a truly multi-cultural, diverse and open space of creativity, we must be more critical and reflexive about the ways that cultural authenticity interconnects with race (and indeed other social categories such as gender, sexuality and nationality), power and society.

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Works Cited: Boogie Down Productions. 1987. Criminal Minded. B-Boy Records, vinyl recording.

Del Barco, Mandalit. 1996. “Rap’s Latino Sabor.” In Droppin’ Science: Critical Essays on Rap Music and Hip-Hop Culture, ed. William Eric Perkins, 63-84. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.

DST. 1984. Home of Hip-Hop. Celluloid Records, vinyl recording.

EPMD. 1992. Business Never Personal. Def Jam Records, vinyl recording.

Flores, Juan. 1994. “Puerto Rican and Proud, Boyee!: Rap Roots and Amnesia.” In Microphone Fiends: Youth Music and Youth Culture, eds. Andrew Ross and Tricia Rose, 89-98. New York: Routledge.

Forman, Murray. 2002. The ‘Hood Comes First: Race, Space and Place in Hip-Hop. Middleton, CT: Wesleyan University Press.

Fricke, Jim and Charlie Ahearn. 2002. Yes Yes Y’all: Oral History of Hip-Hop’s First Decade.

Cambridge: DaCapo.

George, Nelson. 1999. Hip-Hop America. New York: Penguin.

Grazian, David. 2003. Blue Chicago: The Search for Authenticity in Urban Blues Clubs.

Chicago: Chicago University Press.

Harrison, Anthony Kwame. 2004. “Authenticity and Hip-Hop: Is It Essential to be Black?” In Readings in Sociology, eds. Michael Hughes and John Ryan. New York: McGraw-Hill.

Jackson, John L., Jr. 2005. Real Black: Adventures in Racial Sincerity. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Keyes, Cheryl. 2004. Rap Music and Street Consciousness. Chicago: University of Illinois.

Kitwana, Bakari. 2005. Why White Kids Love Hip-Hop: Wankstas, Wiggers, Wannabes and the New Reality of Race in America. New York: Basic Civitas Books.

Main Source. 1992. Fakin’ the Funk. Capitol Records, vinyl recording.

MC Hammer. 1990. Please Hammer, Don’t Hurt ‘Em. Capitol Records, vinyl recording.

MC Shan. 1987. Down By Law. Cold Chillin’ Records, vinyl recording.

McLeod, Kembrew. 1999. “Authenticity within Hip-Hop and Other Cultures Threatened with Assimilation.” Journal of Communication, 49 no. 4: 134-150.

O.C. 1994. Word…Life. Wild Pitch Records, vinyl recording.

Peterson, Richard A. 1997. Creating Country Music: Fabricating Authenticity. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Piper, Stephen. 2007. “When ‘Fake’ Means Foreign: the Construction of the Gangsta as ‘Commodified Stereotype’ in the Imagination of ‘Real’ Britishness”. Unpublished paper presented at the annual meeting of the Pacific Sociological Association, Oakland, CA. Rodriguez, Jason. 2006. “Color-Blind Ideology and the Cultural Appropriation of Hip-Hop.” Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, 35 no. 6: 645-668.

Rose, Tricia. 1994. Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America.

Hanover: Wesleyan University Press.

Smith, Christopher Holmes. 1997. “Method in the Madness: Exploring the Boundaries of Identity in Hip-Hop Performativity.” Social Identities, 3 no. 3: 345-374.

Sugarhill Gang. 1979. Rapper’s Delight. Sugarhill Records, vinyl recording.

Tiongsong, Antonio. 2006. Filipino Youth Cultural Politics and DJ Culture. University of California, San Diego. Unpublished Ph.D. manuscript.

3rd Bass. 1991. Derelicts of Dialect. Def Jam Records, vinyl recording.

Toop, David. 2000 [1984]. Rap Attack #3: African Rap to Global Hip-Hop. London: Serpent’s Tail.

Trilling, Lionel. 1972. Sincerity and Authenticity. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Vanilla Ice. 1990. To The Extreme. SBK records, compact disc.

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Topographies of Sound: The Representation of Place in German Rap 1

by Ela Gezen

For twenty-five centuries, Western knowledge has tried to look upon the world. It has failed to understand that the world is not for the beholding. It is for hearing. It is not legible, but audible.

Jacques Attali (1977) 2 Popular music constitutes a terrain of social and cultural identity that can be mapped in terms of its spatiality, or, more precisely, as spaces of noise and places of music.

Thomas Swiss et al. (1998) 3

1 I would like to thank Vanessa Agnew and the Music Working Group, especially Seth Howes, at the University of Michigan, for their productive input.

2 Jacques Attali, Noise: The Political Economy of Music, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P), 3.

3 Thomas Swiss et al., eds., Mapping the Beat: Popular Music and Contemporary Theory (Malden: Blackwell Publishers, 1998), 6.

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_____ 1. Introduction In her seminal study on the emergence of hip hop culture in the US, Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America (1994), Tricia Rose defines rap songs as “local urban narratives,” whose “primary concerns are identity and locality.”1 Questioning how these “local narratives” manifest themselves in different geographical, cultural, and sociological settings, several recent studies of hip hop culture have investigated the appropriation, adaptation and re-signification of rap music in the non-American context.2 While the significance of spatial references in popular music in general, and rap in particular, has been widely acknowledged, the exploration of East and West German rap formations and their sonic representations of specific locales—the nexus between place, identity and music—remains sparse. 3 In Popular Music and Youth Culture (2000) Andy Bennett perceives the local “as the relationship between locality and identity” and recognizes “popular music as a resource in the construction of local identities.”4 He further defines “the ‘local’ not as a definite place but rather as a series of discourses, which constitute the local and one’s relation to it.”5 Similarly Martin Stokes posits “music is socially meaningful […] because it provides means by which people recognize identities and places and the boundaries which separate them.” He goes on to emphasize “how music is used by social actors in specific local situations to erect boundaries, to maintain distinction between us and them.”6 As Bennett and Stokes suggest, the representation of place through music reflects more than mere “Lokalpatriotismus,” by providing a means to relate oneself to a specific locale and a corresponding community. This paper investigates how German rap artists persistently reflect on, address, and refashion German locales such as neighborhoods, city districts and cities. For this paper I focus on rap formations that belong to the pioneering groups such as Islamic 1 Tricia Rose, Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America (Middletown: Wesleyan UP, 1994), 3;10.

2 See Jannis Androutsopolous, ed., HipHop: Globale Kultur – lokale Praktiken (Bielefeld: transcript, 2003), Dipanita Basu and Sidney J. Lemelle, eds., The Vinyl Ain’t Final: Hip Hop and the Globalization of Black Popular Culture (Ann Arbor: Pluto Press, 2006), Andy Bennett, Popular Music and Youth Culture: Music, Identity and Place (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000), Harris M. Berger and Michael Thomas Carroll, eds., Global Pop, Local Language, (Jackson: U of Mississippi Press, 2003), and Tony Mitchell, ed., Global Noise: Rap and Hip Hop Outside the USA, (Middletown: Wesleyan UP, 2001).

3 In the German context, the works of Andy Bennett, “Hip Hop am Main, Rappin’ on the Tyne: Hip Hop Culture as a Local Construct in Two European Cities,” in That’s the Joint! Hip-Hop Studies Reader, eds. Murray Forman and Mark Anthony Neal (New York: Routledge, 2004), 177-200; Ayşe S. Çağlar, “Popular Culture, Marginality and Institutional Incorporation: German-Turkish Rap and Turkish Pop in Berlin,” Cultural Dynamics 10.3 (1998): 243-263; Murat Güngör and Hannes Loh, “ ‘Wir schreien nullsechs-neun’: Ein Blick auf die Frankfurter Szene,” in HipHop: Globale Kultur, ed. Jannis Androutsopolous, 43-61; Ayhan Kaya, “ Scribo Ergo Sum: Islamic Force und Berlin-Türken,” in HipHop: Globale Kultur, ed.

Jannis Androutsopolous, 245-272; Gabriele Klein and Malte Friedrich, “Popuäre Stadtansichten. Bildinszenierung des Urbanen im Hip Hop,” in HipHop: Globale Kultur, ed. Jannis Androutsopolous, 85-101, have shown possible analyses of rap formations with regards to the intersections of identity and place.

4 Bennett, Popular Music, 63.

5 Ibid., 63.

6

Martin Stokes, ed., Ethnicity, Identity and Music: The Musical Construction of Place (Oxford: Berg, 1994), 5-6.

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Force and Killa Hakan (Berlin/Kreuzberg), Three M-Men (Dresden), Massive Töne (Stuttgart), and Advanced Chemistry (Heidelberg), hailing from Germany’s East, South and West respectively.7 Following Bennett and Stokes, I illustrate how these rap groups employ song as a resource to represent and connect to locales/place more deeply than through the simple deployment of geographical facts: by attaching meaning to place in a way that allows for multiple ways to situate the self (as individuals, as rappers, as residents).8 This requires an interrogation of the rhetorical devices, geographical referencing and thematic strategies these rappers use represent place. As these songs vocalize locations across Germany, the question arises as to what extent these representations differ and/or overlap with varying local issues and specificities at hand. Through close readings of several of these “urban narratives” I will not only offer a musical tour through the German ‘landscape’ of rap, but also begin to answer these questions.

2. Die Massiven Töne – Stuttgart Stuttgart, one of Germany’s hip hop capitals, is not only the home of the renowned Fantastischen Vier, but also the residence of Massive Töne. This famous rap group was formed in Stuttgart in 1991 by João dos Santos (Ju), Wasi Ntuanoglu (Wasi), JeanChristoph Ritter (Schowi), and Alexander Scheffel (DJ 5ter Ton) as its members. In addition to pursuing their own projects, these rappers participated in the Kolchose—a collaboration of various regional rap artists.

The Kolchose organized its first concert on September 10th in 1992, starring Massive Töne, Agit Jazz (the later Freundeskreis), Krähen and others.9 “Die Töne,” as they are called by their fans, refer to the Kolchose as “kreative stammzelle” [creative stem cell] and its members as “hip hop aktivisten” [activists].10 These artists regularly tour together and make guest-appearances on one another’s albums. Kolchmag has become their magazine and mouthpiece, with which they have provided their fans with information on tour dates, record releases and news relating to individual members. In 1996 Schowi and Strachi formed the 0711Büro, which later became the influential 0711 Entertainment promotion company (0711 being Stuttgart’s area code), organizing events as well as functioning as intermediaries and a contact address for booking of local artists. Even in their organizational structure, Massive Töne emphasize the local expressed through the zip code in its label’s name.

Through this booking agency they furthermore support and promote local artists and local music venues.

In 1996 Massive Töne released their debut album Kopfnicker, which became an enormous success in Germany and made it into the top five in the German album charts.

The song “mutterstadt” [mother city] on this album is dedicated to Stuttgart. The following excerpts are taken from this “hip hop 7

In presenting the aforementioned rap artists, I will provide an introduction (members, founding dates, engagement within the German scene) to the group at hand.

8

Martin Stokes, ed., Ethnicity, 3.

9

Verlan and Hannes Loh, 20 Jahre Hip Hop in Deutschland (Höfen: Hannibal, 2002), 214.

10

Massive Töne, “Massive Töne: Band.” http:// www.massivewelt.de. 10/08/2007.

hymn on their city, ”11 Welcome to the mother city, motor city at the Neckar Mecca for rappers […] I take the U6 to Schlossplatz and buy snacks at Udo’s […] since childhood shaped by the surroundings […] StuttgartPfaffenäcker makes itself heard, it is the place, it is the spirit, it is the location, do you want to know how we rock in the city of forests and valleys, money and cars […] get on the “yellow lightening” I show you my city, Wilhelm-Geiger Platz and all the kids sixsteps ninety-nines and headspincaps.12 The first few sentences establish two major points regarding Stuttgart’s particularities: its place as a “Mecca for rappers” as well as its significance to the car industry, being the home of Mercedes-Benz and Porsche. Here, Stuttgart’s cultural and industrial importance is stressed. Beyond its industrial and cultural qualities, though, Massive Töne add yet another facet: its status as “city of forests and valleys.” This further elaboration rounds out the Stuttgart the rappers herald, adding the significance of its natural landscape to cultural importance and industrial preeminence.

In addition to these general characteristics, Massive Töne also reference specific places, neighborhoods, and streets. Textually presenting their listeners with a tour through the city, from the “Schlossplatz” to “WilhelmGeiger-Platz,” a Stuttgart resident will have a different listening experience from somebody unfamiliar with these sites. The dependence on the listener’s cultural familiarity reflects what Jody Berland refers to as the ability of sounds moving “into the social spaces of its users and so plac[ing] and displac[ing] listeners differently.”13 The song provides audience members familiar with Stuttgart with an opportunity to recognize and as well as relate to these specific places. Those who do not know this city, however, are offered a tour by Massive Töne, the native musical tour guides.

They both clearly state their belongingness to the city they were born and raised in, and emphasize how the city shaped them “since childhood shaped by the surroundings.”

They particularly emphasize the city district where the majority of the group’s members spent their childhoods: the “multicultural

11

“HipHop Hymne auf ihre Stadt” in 20

Jahre Hip Hop in Deutschland, eds. Sascha Verlan and Hannes Loh, 292.

12

“Willkommen in der mutterstadt der motorstadt am neckar mekka für rapper […] ich setz mich in die u6 bis zum schlossplatz hol’ mir bei udo snacks […] von klein auf geprägt durch die umgebung […] stuttgart-pfaffenäcker meldet sich zu wort es ist der platz es ist der geist es ist der ort ihr wollt wissen wie wir rocken in der stadt der wälder und täler geld und autos […] ich lieb die plätze die ich kenne […] steig in den gelben blitz ich zeig dir meine stadt den wilhelm-geiger-platz und die ganzen kids sixsteps ninety-nines und headspincaps.”

Massive Töne, “Mutterstadt,” Kopfnicker (Stuttgart 1996). Translations are all mine unless noted otherwise.

13

Jody Berland, “Sound, Image and Social Space: Music Video and Media Reconstruction” in Sound and Vision: The Music Video Reader, eds.

Simon Frith, Andrew Goodwin and Lawrence Grossberg (London: Routledge, 1993), 27.

tower block complex Pfaffenäcker.”14 Having emphasized Stuttgart’s natural beauty, industrial importance, and cultural practices, Massive Töne add ethnic diversity: another appealing aspect.

The significance of Stuttgart in the German hip hop scene is further emphasized by direct references to the local breakdance scene as evidenced in the mentioning of “sixsteps ninety-nines und headspincaps.” Hip hop culture is an essential element in the depiction of Stuttgart as offered by Massive Töne who simultaneously document and circulate its presence through song. The title “mutterstadt,” a synonym for Stuttgart, captures and reflects the associations with this city: Stuttgart, the “mother,” support and nurturer as well forerunner and cornerstone. Massive Töne “picture and relate to the local,” to return to Bennett, on a personal level— Stuttgart being their hometown—and on the professional level—presenting Stuttgart as hip hop metropolis.

3. Islamic Force: “Kreuzberg City” In 1986, Kreuzberg locals Killa Hakan, DJ Derezon and Nellie, along with Boe B, hailing from Kadıköy (Istanbul) founded Islamic Force. They rap in Turkish and incorporate instruments and tunes from Turkish arabesk music into their songs. Unlike any other rap group in Berlin, they were considered closely anchored to the community structures in Kreuzberg.15 Their first album Mesaj resembles a tribute to Kreuzberg.16 The Berlin district, dubbed “Little Istanbul” due to the high number of Turkish residents and Turkish businesses, is thematized in the majority of the songs. The final song on the album is entitled “Kreuzberg” and casts their neighborhood as a person when they sing “you have not forgotten us, you brought us up Kreuzberg.”17 Having introduced this district on previous tracks, they synthesize the various references to Kreuzberg in this last song. Elucidating contemporary problems in the neighborhood, such as drug abuse and gang mentality, the group publicizes Kreuzberg’s reality.

Unlike Massive Töne, who give a detailed geographical account of Stuttgart, Islamic Force focus on a single district and highlight three particular streets: Adalbertstrasse, Oranienstrasse (the center), and Naunynstrasse (the location of the youth center Naunynritze Kinder & Jugend Kulturzentrum

14

“multi-kulti hochhaussiedlung pfaffenäcker.” Massive Töne. “Massive Töne: Band.” http://www. massivewelt.de. 10/08/2007.

15

Hannes Loh and Murat Güngör, eds., Fear of a Kanak Planet: Hip Hop zwischen Weltkultur und Nazi-Rap (Höfen: Verlagsgruppe Koch GmbH, 2002), 174.v

16

The album title “Mesaj” translates into “The Message,” and is clearly a reference to “The Message” by Grandmaster Flash and The Furious Five (1982). With this rap song they gave insight into the hard realities of living in the New York housing projects. It has been recognized as first major political and socially conscious rap piece. For further information see, Mark Anthony Neale, “Postindustrial Soul,” in That’s the Joint! Hip-Hop Studies Reader, eds. Murray Forman and Mark Anthony Neal (New York: Routledge, 2004), 372.

17

“Unutmadin, bizi büyütdün, helal olsun sana Kreuzberg.” The quotations from lyrics by Islamic Force are from songs of their first album: Islamic Force, Mesaj (Berlin 1997). The translations from Turkish into English are all mine.

).18 Rapping in Turkish, Islamic Force make a clear choice regarding their audience by addressing the “Kreuzbergliler” (inhabitants of Kreuzberg). As “Kreuzberg rapperleri” [rappers] they aim to establish a dialogue with their listeners from Kreuzberg, while excluding non-Turkish speakers from gaining access to their text.

In tandem with the emphasis on conveying a message through rap, the members of Islamic Force establish themselves as storytellers on the first track of their debut album, “Selaminaleyküm.” Here, they broaden their frame of reference, including Kadıköy in Turkey: “Everybody is shouting ‘Bobby, tell us’ […] And I am telling our story in the form of hip-hop in Kadıköy […] We tell you these things here and yes we spread our news to you. We are establishing a connection from our neighborhood to Kadıköy broadcasting real hip hop from here to you.”19 Prior to this passage, they bemoan the loss of Turkish lives due to the wave of xenophobic attacks that occurred in the early 1990s throughout Germany. Not only are they spreading—“broadcasting”— this information in Germany, they intend to be heard it in Turkey as well. This creates a sonic and textual link between Istanbul and Berlin, including both German and Turkish neighborhoods as settings and possible addressees.

The Vinyl Ain’t Final contributor Timothy Brown casts Kreuzberg Turks as “living an uneasy existence between and across cultures” and as a group “caught between two worlds” living in a “situation of uncertainty.”20 For Islamic Force belonging to ‘two worlds’ is perceived as advantage and enrichment rather than as a lack, as evident in their inclusion of Turkish and German components into their songs.

After the death of Boe B in 2000, the members of Islamic Force went solo, but a sense of loyalty to Kreuzberg has remained a constant feature in their work. This is evident in Killa Hakan’s albums, the most recent being Kreuzberg City, where Kreuzberg is referenced through lyrics, but also visually represented on his album covers through the number 36 (Kreuzberg’s former postal area code). Like Massive Töne, Killa Hakan uses the zip code of his hometown—his city-district to be more precise—to further emphasize its significance.

Belonging is expressed in relation to specific city-districts—Kreuzberg and Kadıköy— instead of Turkey and Germany. Through song, the members of Islamic Force locate themselves in multiple ways: as Turks in Berlin/Germany, as “Kreuzbergliler” in Berlin, and as rappers in their community. Having in mind that Turks have been marginalized and casted as “non-integrable,” “problem group” by German media and government officials for the past decades manifesting presence through local ties becomes crucial.

4. GDR: Beginnings and “Zonenrap” from Dresden In the German (both East and West) context, as in other European countries, artists, producers and academics have consistently cited two films as the main impetus and impetus for the emergence of hip hop culture in Germany (East and West equally): Wild Style (1983) and Beat Street (1984).21 Through these films German youth was introduced to the elements of hip hop culture: breakdance (B-boying), graffiti (spraying and tagging), rap and DJing. Wild Style, a combination of fiction and documentary portraying the New Yorker hip hop scene, was a co-production between Charlie Ahearn and the German public television channel ZDF and premiered on ZDF in English with German subtitles.

It features “godfathers of hip hop” such as Grandmaster Flash & The Furious Five.

Harry Belafonte’s Beat Street was the first commercial film made about hip hop culture, and, as in Wild Style, stars many of the influential pioneers in the NY scene: Afrika Bambaataa & The Soul Sonic Force and Kool Herc. Originating in the United States, one might assume that the East German government would have banned these movies and the cultural practices they represented.

To the contrary, Beat Street was shown in movie theaters in the GDR in 1985 and breakdance was even officially defined as “a combatant sport art of the culture of repressed masses in America” by the authorities.22 Hip hop culture was identified as “anti-imperial counter culture” and therefore promoted by the government.23 It is important to point out that in the GDR, public performances of music of any kind were only allowed with the SED regime’s approval, and were often supported, promoted, and organized by mass groupings like the FDJ.24 Furthermore, media access remained restricted for Easter German youth, records were smuggled in and West German television was watched illegally. Technically and financially it was also difficult (because) “every band had to pay for its studio sessions, records and technics, it was an extreme effort for all bands.”25 One of these bands is Three M-Men founded

by Marian Meinhardt (Snowman), Michael Kral (Mr. Michael MC) and Mike Wagner (Dynamike) in 1987 in Dresden, which, in a role comparable to Stuttgart in the West, became influential in the emergence as well as promotion of rap in the former East.26 In comparison to their Western colleagues, East German youth had a restricted, controlled and censored access to the media and the only ‘official’ medium for hip hop was the weekly radio show “Vibrationen” which was part of the “Jugendradio DT 64” pro21

Dieter Elflein, “From Krauts with Attitudes: Some Aspects of Hip-Hop History in Germany,” Popular Music 17.3 (1998): 255-265, Sebastian Krekow and Jens Steiner, Bei uns geht einiges: Die deutsche HipHop Szene (Berlin: Schwarzkopf, 2000), Mark Pennay, “Rap in Germany: The Birth of a Genre,” in Global Noise, ed. Tony Mitchell, 111-133.

Radebeul rap contest booms 2 da heave […] Foundin’ of a German Zulu Nation/In East Germany and da whole Saxony/Da figure-head is Electric B. [..] 64 is da only radio station/In da GDR 4 da Zulu Nation/4 fans and freaks, 4 bands and beats… Da town of rap, capital of hip hop/Is here in Dresden – drop and stop.28 In comparison to the rap formations in the West presented here, Three M-Men chose to rap in English, which was true for the majority of the East German rap bands.29 The song reveals itself as paying tribute to Dresden, its leading role in the emergence and dissemination of rap in East Germany, as evident in the references to the rap competitions in Radebeul, and dubbing Dresden the “capital of hip hop.” Further, as indicated by the title, they introduce and acknowledge prominent figures such as Electric B. By referencing the Zulu Nation, Three M-Men initiate two relevant identifications.

By expressing their desire to establish and East German branch of the Zulu Nation, they reassert locality; by looking to establish an East German branch of the Zulu Nation, they initiate a global process, by tying Dresden to the Bronx [emphasis mine].30 In bringing up the Zulu Nation, Three M-Men, similar to Islamic Force, acknowledge and pay tribute to seminal figures in the emergence of hip hop culture, in this case, Africa Bambaataa, “the ambassador of hip hop.”

5. Advanced Chemistry - Heidelberg Advanced Chemistry was founded in 1987

by Frederik Hahn (Torch), Toni Landomini (ToniL), Kofi Yakpo (Linguist), Mike Dippon (DJ mike MD), and Gonzales Maldonado (Gee-One). Their song “Fremd im eigenen Land” (1992) has been identified as the first recorded rap song in German.31 Like Islamic Force, Advanced Chemistry belong to the category of “socially conscious” or “message rap.” As with the majority of the bands presented here (Massive Töne for example), they also established their own independent label 360 Grad in 1994. Advanced Chemistry dedicated a song to their hometown as well: Heidelberg, city of poets and thinkers, and philosophers, many stanzas have been versed about this city […] ethnic diversity, of every

22

Olivia Henkel and Karsten Wolff quoted in Mark Pennay, “Rap in Germany: The Birth of a Genre,” 115.

18

The Naunyn Ritze has been crucial in the promotion of hip hop, particularly for Turkish youngsters. See Ayhan Kaya, “Sicher in Kreuzberg.”

Constructing Diasporas: Turkish hip-Hop Youth in Berlin. Berlin: transcript, 2001.

19

“Hepsi bağırıyor ‘Bobby söyle’ […] Ben de hip-hop şeklinde sunuyorum Kadıköy’de […]

Burda onlari size anlatıyoruz, haberlerimizi size evet sunuyorum. Bizim semtten Kadıköy’e bir bağlantı kuruyoruz Harbi hip-hop duyuyoruz burdan size yolluyoruz.”

20

Timothy Brown, “ ‘Keeping it Real’ in a Different Hood: (African-)Americanization and Hip Hop in Germany,” in The Vinyl Ain’t Final, eds. Dipanita Basu and Sidney J. Lemelle, 145-147.

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23

Dieter Rink, “Jugend- und Subkulutren in der ostdeutschen Transformationsgesellschaft,” 9. http://www.htwm.de/sa/mitarbeiter/rinksub.pdf.

10/08/2007.

24

Rachel Schröder, “Hip-hop in der DDR: Rappen für die Freiheit.” http://www.ard.de/radio/ pop/hiphop-in-der-ddr/-/id=7946/nid=7946/ did=551104/e13hkz/index.html.10/08/2007.

25

Jede Band hat ihre Studiotermine selbst bezahlt und die ganzen Platten und Technics, das war ein extremer Kraftakt, für alle bands. In Sascha Verlan and Hannes Loh, 20 Jahre Hip Hop in Deutschland (Höfen: Hannibal, 2002), 303. Translation mine.

26

Dietmar Elflein, Krauts, 256.

kind, and form […] This gives this city its current appearance and is the actual reason for it being so interesting […] Heidelberg is a mother who embraces me, I feel the warmth which rests in the paving stones in the entanglement of the alleys which already invited me early on, my blood runs slowly like the Neckar through the valley […] It is deeply engrained in my pores, I was born in Heidelberg […] I still have a suitcase in this place […] As if in trance you hear the dead who lived here, we are the inheritors, poets, reincarnation, musically accompanied minnesingers of tradition.32

gram.27 In the Dresden suburb Radebeul two major rap competitions took place in consecutive years, “Rap-contests” (1988, 1989) both attended by Three M-Men and constituted their first public appearances.

Their song “Talkin’ ‘Bout Da Scene” was first released on the radio show “Vibrationen” in 1989 and directly references these contests:

27

Sebastian Krekow and Jens Steiner, Bei uns geht einiges, 108

28

The lyrics are printed in Krekow and Steiner, Bei uns geht einiges, 120-122.

29

Ibid., 105.

30

For further information on the Zulu Nation, see David Toop “Uptown Throwdown,” in That’s the Joint! Hip-Hop Studies Reader, eds. Murray Forman and Mark Anthony Neal (New York: Routledge, 2004), 233-245.

31

Mark Pennay, “Rap in Germany: The Birth of a Genre,” 120. At this point Advanced Chemistry was reduced to Torch, Linguist and Toni L.

Similar to Massive Töne’s “mutterstadt” and Islamic Force’s “Kreuzberg,” Heidelberg is personified as mother, educator and source of support. Belonging to Heidelberg is deeply felt by the authorial voice, as manifest in statements such as “my blood runs slowly like the Neckar through the valley” and “It is deeply engrained in my pores, I was born in Heidelberg.” With these metaphors Advanced Chemistry situate themselves as descendant from Heidelberg: a striking personalization of their city.. In a similar vein “I still have a suitcase in this place” emphasizes this sense of belonging, and is at the same time an intertextual reference to Marlene Dietrich’s famous chanson, “Ich habe noch einen Koffer in Berlin” [I still have a suitcase in Berlin].

Whereas Three M-Men focus on rappers in Dresden, Islamic Force on “Kreuzbergliler,” Advanced Chemistry celebrate ethnic diversity in Heidelberg in general which “gives this city its current appearance and is the actual reason for it being so interesting.” Further, Heidelberg is a city of traditions and has been narrativized by poets and philosophers alike.33 In this song Advanced Chemistry connect rap with the German tradition of “Minnesang,” by rapping “As if in trance you hear the dead who lived here, we are the inheritors, poets, reincarnation, musically accompanied minnesingers of tradition.”

James McMahon, comparing contemporary “Liedermacher” and medieval “Minnesänger” or “Spruchdichter,” draws the following distinction between the latter two “Spruchdichter is preferable when referring to works that deal with topics other than love.”34 He further contends that: [t]he work of the Liedermacher is in many ways similar to that of the medieval German Spruchdichter. […] Members of both groups 32

“Heidelberg, Stadt der Dichter und Denker und Philosophen über diese Stadt gibt es viele Strophen gedichtet […] ethnische Vielfalt, jeder Art, Gestalt. […] Dies gibt der Stadt ihr gegenwärtiges Antlitz, ist der eigentliche Grund warum sie so interessant ist […] Heidelberg ist eine Mutter die mich an sich drückt ich spüre die Wärme die in den Pflastersteinen ruht im Gewirr der Gassen das mich schon sehr früh einlud mein Blut fliesst bedächtig wie der Neckar durch das Tal […] Es steckt tief in meinen Poren bin in Heidelberg geboren […] Ich hab noch nen Koffer in diesem Ort […] wie in Trance hört man die Toten die hier wohnten wir sind die Erben, Dichter Reinkarnation musikalisch begleitet Minnesänger in Tradition.”

33

As for example, Friedrich Hölderlin, Clemens Brentano, and Jean Paul.

34

James McMahon, “Spruchdichter and Liedermacher; Songs then and Now,” in The Medieval Voices in the 21st Century; the Paradigmatic Function of Medieval German Studies for German Studies; a Collection of Essays, ed. Albrecht Classen (Atlanta: Rodopi, 2000), 62.

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are politically aware and engaged; they take as their task to criticize their own political leaders as well as those of other lands and to advocate ideologies and causes. Further, they do not hesitate to sing about their own personal concerns, in the serene confidence that their problems are of interest to the world at large.35

References

In referring to themselves as “Dichter in Reinkarnation,” Advanced Chemistry aligns rap generally, and themselves in particular, with the German musical tradition of “Minnesang” (“Spruchdichtung” respectively).

Through this connection they rap themselves into the Heidelbergian past, further claiming and constructing a deep-rooted belongingness to Heidelberg. Additionally, in comparing themselves to this “politically aware and engaged group” they cast themselves in their function as rappers, similar to Islamic Force, as messengers and spokespeople of the community.

Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P. Basu, Dipanita and Sidney J. Lemelle, eds., The Vinyl Ain’t Final: Hip Hop and the Globalization of Black Popular Culture. Ann Arbor: Pluto Press, 2006.

Conclusion The purpose of this paper has been to investigate the representation of place in the landscape of German rap. Using examples drawn from various locations in Germany’s East, West, North and South, I examined the rhetoric employed by these rap formations. Although referencing and thematizing different cities, and city-districts, the tropes used and/or evoked in these songs show similarities. Massive Töne, Islamic Force and Advanced Chemistry personify their ‘locales’ as mothers and nurturers, who raised and educated them. In representing city spaces as mothers, they create both an intimate and lasting bond with this place, and pay tribute at the same time. Depicting their hometowns and city districts as mothers as opposed to referencing the “fatherland,” these groups further emphasize the significance of the local over the national.

By referencing specific streets or neighborhoods of their hometowns, from “Oranienstrasse” in Kreuzberg to “Schlossplatz” in Stuttgart, they offer a sonic tour through these places. The spatial representations evoked and constructed by these rap formations provide a means to relate to these places through song, for the artists and audiences alike. For their listeners these offer either an opportunity to recognize and relate to the familiar, or to familiarize oneself with the unknown. The artists themselves relate to their depicted communities on a “personal” level (being born and raised in a particular place) as well as a “professional” level (in elucidating their function and duties as rappers and acknowledging seminal figures in the emergence of hip hop culture). In the cases of Massive Töne, Islamic Force, and Three M-Men, the hometown is assigned a crucial role in the development of the German rap scene, and cast as “capital of hip hop” or “Mecca for rapper.” Not only are these places depicted as mothers, but also as teachers and supporters in promoting their skills as rap artists.

As is further evident in the songs analyzed here, belonging to a place is not expressed in national terms (in identifying as German, Turkish, or Italian), but in local terms (in identifying as Stuttgart, Kreuzberg, Dresden residents and/or inhabitants). These rappers present themselves as deeply rooted in and connected to their communities—their hometowns in general, or city-districts in particular. Through song, as I have shown, they create a sense of belonging based on spatial components (as opposed to national and ethnic), manifesting identity as exceedingly embedded in and linked to a specific place.

35

Ibid., 61; 62.

18 Supplement Naked Punch www.nakedpunch.com

Androutsopolous, Jannis ed. HipHop: Globale Kultur – lokale Praktiken. Bielefeld: transcript, 2003.

Attali, Jacques Noise: The Political Economy of Music, trans. Brian Massumi.

Bennett, Andy. Popular Music and Youth Culture: Music, Identity and Place. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000.

“Hip Hop am Main, Rappin’ on the Tyne: Hip Hop Culture as a Local Construct in Two European Cities.” In That’s the Joint!

Hip-Hop Studies Reader, eds. Murray Forman and Mark Anthony Neal. New York: Routledge, 2004. 177-200.

Berger, Harris M. and Michael Thomas Carroll, eds. Global Pop, Local Language.

Jackson: U of Mississippi Press, 2003.

Loh, Hannes and Murat Güngör, eds. Fear of a Kanak Planet: Hip Hop zwischen Weltkultur und Nazi-Rap. Höfen: Verlagsgruppe Koch GmbH, 2002.

‘Wir schreien null-sechs-neun’: Ein Blick auf die Frankfuerter Szene,” in HipHop: Globale Kultur, ed. Jannis Androutsopolous, 43-61.

McMahon, James. “Spruchdichter and Liedermacher; Songs then and Now.” In The Medieval Voices in the 21st Century; the Paradigmatic Function of Medieval German Studies for German Studies; a Collection of Essays, ed. Albrecht Classen.

Atlanta: Rodopi, 2000. 61-79.

Mitchell, Tony ed. Global Noise: Rap and Hip Hop Outside the USA. Middletown: Wesleyan UP, 2001.

Pennay, Mark. “Rap in Germany: The Birth of a Genre,” in Global Noise, 111-133.

Rink, Dieter . “Jugend- und Subkulutren in der ostdeutschen Transformationsgesellschaft.” http://www.htwm.de/sa/mitarbeiter/rinksub.pdf.

Berland, Jody. “Sound, Image and Social Space: Music Video and Media Reconstruction.” In Sound and Vision: The Music Video Reader, eds. Simon Frith, Andrew Goodwin and Lawrence Grossberg. London: Routledge, 1993. 2544.

Rose, Tricia. Black Noise: Rap music and Black Culture in Contemporary America.

Middletown: Wesleyan UP, 1994.

Brown ,Timothy. “ ‘Keeping it Real’ in a Different Hood: (African-)Americanization and Hip Hop in Germany.” In The Vinyl Ain’t Final, eds. Basu/Lemelle, 137-150.

Swiss, Thomas et al., eds. Mapping the Beat: Popular Music and Contemporary Theory Malden: Blackwell Publishers, 1998.

Caglar, Ayse. “Popular Culture, Marginality and Institutional Incorporation: GermanTurkish Rap and Turkish Pop in Berlin.”

Cultural Dynamics 10.3 (1998): 243263.

Dieter Elflein. “From Krauts with Attitudes: Some Aspects of Hip-Hop History in Germany.” Popular Music 17.3 (1998): 255-265.

Kaya, Ayhan. “ Scribo Ergo Sum: Islamic Force und Berlin-Türken.” In HipHop: Globale Kultur, ed. Jannis Androutsopolous, 245-272.

Klein, Gabriele and Malte Freidrich, “Populäre Stadtansichten. Bildinszenierungen des Urbanen im Hip Hop,” in HipHop: Globale Kultur, ed. Jannis Androutsopolous, 85-101.

Stokes, Martin ed. Ethnicity, Identity and Music: The Musical Construction of Place.

Oxford: Berg, 1994.

Toop, David. “Uptown Throwdown,” in That’s the Joint! Hip-Hop Studies Reader, ed. Murray Forman and Mark Anthony Neal, 233-245.

Verlan, Sascha and Hannes Loh. 20 Jahre Hip Hop in Deutschland. Höfen: Hannibal, 2002.

Discography Advanced Chemistry. Advanced Chemistry.

1995.

Islamic Force. Mesaj. 1997.

Killa Hakan. Kreuzberg City. 2007.

Massive Töne. Kopfnicker. 1996.

Krekow, Sebastian and Jens Steiner. Bei uns geht einiges: Die deutsche Hip-Hop Szene.

Berlin: Schwarzkopf, 2000.

For other Naked Punch Publications please visit www.nakedpunch.com

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The Expresssive Potentialities of the Freestyle

BY Zoe Sutherland

Introduction This paper will attempt to sketch out a description of the experimentally expressive potentialities of Hip Hop freestyling. Freestyling is, of course, the improvised form of rap, often occurring in formed circles called cyphers, in outside social spaces. Within freestyling, as opposed to the performance of pre-written rhymes, occurs a relative subordination of metre to rhythm. Within the reciprocal dynamic of metre and rhythm, rhythm becomes centralised during freestyles as the more prominent medium through which expression takes place. Expression in this paper is not restricted to mere linguistic utterances, but incorporates a whole range of more operational expressive communication from fully formed linguistic structures, to more primordial shout outs, to bodily gestures.

The subordination of metre to rhythm in the specific case of freestyling, I shall suggest, is linked to several factors; it’s purely oral or vocal nature, its being spontaneous and improvised, its particular emphasis upon a constant alertness to the immediate empirical surroundings of it’s outside social performance space, and the social dynamic of the cyphers within, for and against which freestyles are performed. These conditions will not explicitly be dissected and dealt with in isolation, but appear consistently, interwoven throughout the paper. The prominence of rhythm that these conditions of freestlying intensify and perpetuate, allows for expressive experimentation in a space, which is relatively free from the confines of pre-ordained expressive demands, including those of market forces. It would be naïve not to emphasise the word ‘relatively’ here, as, of course, many freestlyers use these spaces as a testing ground for developing their skills for the commercial market or as a spot from which to get discovered for that market. In addition to this, the influence of the commercial market on the underground and vice versa is obviously apparent in Hip Hop. Nevertheless, these experimental spaces offer the possibility of a continuation of the artistic form of resistance they so colourfully began in the 80’s.

Part I: The Subordination of Metre to Rhythm First of all, let me briefly flesh out a little what we might mean by the terms ‘rhythm’ 20 Supplement Naked Punch www.nakedpunch.com

and ‘metre’, before I begin outlining how the two may respond to one another in the case of freestyling. The Greek etymology for ‘rhythm’ is rheo, meaning ‘flow’ and this term is also used in Hip Hop to describe the rapper’s unique and individualised rhythmic delivery of their rhyme. By ‘rhyme’ I mean merely the (largely rhyming) rap they produce. Now, we can point to many different manifestations of rhythms and flows in our actual experience, from the rhythms of the earth, the systolic rhythms of the beating heart, the rhythmical effects in our capacity for breath, even. These are all what we might call natural rhythms, those movements which are always there around us, yet which probably go largely unnoticed amongst the constant din of modern living, itself a larger, socially constructed rhythm. Somewhere in relation to these natural rhythms or movements sit more conventionally understood rhythms found within verse and speech. Speech, as a form of human communication generates a small pool of rhythms through things like stress and inflection. Speech, as a more intentional generation of rhythms therefore is considered more amenable to temporal and mathematical calculation, yet, the rhythmical effects of oral formulaic composition remain connected and in response to more natural rhythms.

Now, in structured written verse we see the introduction of abstract line patterns, which determine the number and length of feet in a particular line, producing what we call metre. Structured metre thus manipulates, yields and places pressure upon the natural rhythms of words and speech restricting and altering them. Metre also makes binary opposites out of certain linguistic features such as stress, pitch and length of sounds.

The regular and repetitive patterns, which emerge from these binaries, do, of course allow for certain semantic and rhythmic effects which may not otherwise be possible in the absence of such structure. Through the manipulation of rhythm, a range of expressive possibilities emerge and this is, of course, why metrical verse is so cross-culturally prevalent as a literary form. Through the process of this regulation of rhythm however, the rhythmical life of the heartbeat and the breath and those surrounding natural and social rhythms are somehow smothered of life, or disallowed, to a certain degree, their own presence or spontaneity. The relationship is therefore complicated: metre provides abstract structure

within which empirical rhythmical movements can occur, but in regulated metre, larger rhythmical cadences are allowed only minimal effect upon these smaller threads. Too much adherence to standardised and pre-ordained metrical patterns can, therefore, restrict the capacity for rhythmical experimentation and thus for a more personalised attempt of the individual to tune into and respond to the rhythmical specificities of the moment.

Before I go on to discuss how this applies to freestyling, let me say a few words about the basic structure of rap as a form of vocalising.

Rap is the rhythmic delivery of rhyme and wordplay, which occupies a space somewhere between more conversational forms of speech, prose, poetry and song. The co-ordinates of rap within this space are ambiguous and varying, depending upon the way in which each individual rapper formulates a personally styled flow in relation to whatever accompanying beats they are working with.

In basic terms, the flow of each rapper is arrived at through variations in cadence or vocal modulation, and the prosody and speed of the rap, achieved largely through varying syncopations of rhythm. Due to the importance of the rhyme in Hip Hop, many rappers produce this syncopated rhythmical effect by alternating and varying the syllabic content of each line and by thus denying the rhythm any tangible symmetry, which results in a feel of a phrasing effect across the bar. When a rapper is performing a pre-written text, their main job is to resuscitate, what already exists within the text, to breathe life and expression into it through their own particular energy and style. The rapper can, of course, provide a certain amount of individualised syncopations, cadence and modulation, resulting in a more personalised form of phrasing. With written rhymes however, the rhythm is always limited to operating in a more pre-ordained manner within the verse line, anchored down by the words already arranged on the page, and by the designated beats accompanying and regulating it.

The freestyle however, is not dependent upon a pre-written text, but is an improvised performance. The spontaneous and versatile nature of vocal improvisation means that freestyling is less metrically restrained than written rhymes. As a purely vocal form of improvisation, freestyling can theoretically be performed anywhere, and at anytime, and

does not rely upon a studio setting with an array of accompanying mechanical instrumentation. Rhymes either go unaccompanied or are set off to human vocal beatboxing. When completely unaccompanied, the freestlyer is left relatively free to tap into both their own bodily and mental rhythms; from heartbeat and adrenalin, to mere capacity for breath or speed of thought, and also to the myriad of rhythmical potentialities in their empirical surroundings. Without the restraint of a pre-planned and strict metrical framework, within which they must compose their rhymes, the rhythm is more capable of giving nuance to each specific utterance they make, at each specific instance. Utterances may become less smothered or appropriated, in their individual stress for example, through the abstraction of metre, and more open to achieving their own particular vitality and meaning through the energy and style of the rapper. What is being expressed, fundamentally therefore, is the personal flow of the rapper, is his/ her manner of being, which is formulated in spontaneous response to the immediate empirical surroundings, to their understanding of the history of the art, and to its participating community. I take this to be what is meant by the Hip Hop community when they say that coming ‘off the dome’ is a mark of authenticity.

When accompanied by beatboxing, the freestyler becomes, to some extent, co-ordinated or directed in his/her rhythm by the beats provided. Beatboxing is, however, as a specifically manmade vocal beat, less perfectly regulated than a machine and thus, less abstract. Themselves an improvisational performer, the beatboxer can change the beats and the rhythm ad libitum, to produce a kind of rough and varying metre. Beatboxing is in fact often characterised by variations, which direct the rapper through ‘on the spot’ adaptations and push them to experiment with their flow. In response to this, the Freestyler has the capacity, not just to demonstrate their skill by transcending or out-rhythmatising the beat boxer, but also to reciprocally influence and direct the beatboxer’s improvisation. The relationship between the vocals and the beats can often be one of mutual challenge and reciprocity, with each performer simultaneously restraining and directing, provoking and invigorating the other. The Freestyle therefore, even when accompanied by beatboxing, is a relatively organic creative process led primarily by rhythm, a kind of ‘call and response’, which www.nakedpunch.com Supplement Naked Punch 20

requires each performer to be attentively tuned into what is happening in the moment. The success and skill of the freestyler is demonstrated by their level of ability in channelling their individual energy into the present situation, and to be able to sustain and develop it in the face of both its resistances and its provocations.

Conceptual Aspects

The centralising or pushing of rhythm to the foreground then means that freestyling is not best thought about as predominantly a presentation of ideas or concepts. In interview, Gift of Gab from Blackalicious told me that for him, the freestyle is more about catching the attention of the cypher or the audience through the energy of the flow, whilst leaving yourself conceptually open to go in whichever direction you wish to take. By claiming that Freestyles are predominantly rhythm led however, I do not mean to suggest that they are purely formal. Most Freestylers claim that in order to freestyle, you really have to know something, you have to have something to say. In short, freestyling improvisers are not creating these energised rhymes ex nihilo, but are drawing upon an entire social, cultural and artistic history, as well as upon the specific social, cultural and artistic moment. The emphasis that I place upon rhythmical flow does not imply that there is no conceptual content, merely that during the performative process, the rhythm to some extent takes over and becomes the main register and therefore transcends its role as a mere mode or manner through which to deliver some content and becomes, to some extent, part of that content.

The Freestyler Supernatural claims to spend everyday reading the dictionary and the rhyming dictionary, to expand his vocabulary, in addition to newspapers and journals that enable him to stay knowledgeable on current affairs. This gives him a vast cognitive stock upon which to draw when put on the spot.

There exists some dispute between rappers as to precisely what freestyling straight ‘off the dome’ might mean, but generally speaking, it seems to imply that the freestyler does not come to the cypher with a pre-prepared rhyme or a clearly thought out idea of what he/she is going to say. Like other forms of improvisation, credit is given to the freestyler who can respond to the immediate empirical situation in a manner appropriate specifically to that situation. An expansive array of linguistic and conceptual knowledge and an awareness of current social, cultural and political issues therefore, all contribute to a stock of tools that can be used to respond appropriately in this spontaneous way, to a wide variety of creative situations.

Another reason therefore, that Freestyle is less metrically restricted, and thus more open to be led by personalised rhythmical expressions, is that, although it may draw upon a rich cognitive stock and a technical understanding of the necessary skills of the domain, in the moment of performance, its content is largely improvised. What freestylers try to avoid is merely representing the performative situation through the application of entirely pre-conceived words, concepts or sentence structures, which may not sustain their vitality or meaning within that particular moment and would be considered relatively flat, approximate or inauthentic. The slackening in metrical constraints is thus coupled with a slackening of conceptual and linguistic rules. The pressure of improvising conceptually means that once the freestyle is underway, and the performer is ‘in the zone’, the rhyme becomes an organic 21 Supplement Naked Punch www.nakedpunch.com

process directed principally by the rhythm built up, with each preceding line directing where the freestyle goes next. In moments of rhythmical energy and inspiration then, the freestyler’s more conventional inhibitions are transcended. He/she is then occasionally able to hit upon something quite new, to configure and present concepts and language in a unique expressive manner and to thus generate new thought patterns and new ideas. Through finding their own personal expression, the freestyler has the potential to reach through the parameters of conventional mediation and touch the audience more palpably.

In addition to the freestyler having to think on their feet, and reach for words and phrasing to keep the rhythm going, his/ her own vocal capacities, in terms of tone, cadence and general rhythm, must also be able to instinctively adapt to the demands of the evolving content. The necessity to make the freestyle rhyme is an important example, with the anticipation of the rhyme placing pressure on both the rhythmical and conceptual elements leading up to it, and then directing the rhythmical and conceptual manner beyond it. The force of the freestyle is at once his/hers and simultaneously extends beyond him/her and the freestyler must be capable of sustaining this precarious balance between the possession of, and the being possessed by, the conceptual rhythm. Any instinctive adherence to metrical structure is pressurised too as the freestyle is, to an extent, progressing in response to its own history and in accordance with its own internal logic and coherence, as opposed to evolving within any pre-determined restraints of vocabulary, rhythm or metre, imposed on it prior to and externally from its performance.

Freestylers will invariably employ a range of different tactics to help them commence with their freestyles. Eminem will often start by feeling his way into the rhyme, using short sounds like “yo, yo, yo, yo, I started off, yo, my name is, Shady”, accompanied by bodily movements, orientating himself rhythmically and allowing those vocal and bodily gestures to direct him towards the manner and content of his flow. The general rhythm taken up or assumed by the freestyler then, can have an important impact upon the words or concepts they will end up gesturing towards or reaching for. Mos Def often eases into his freestyles using quite strictly regulated stress patterns, creating a clearly audible metrical setting, only to then go on, once he has found his bearings, to accentuate and enunciate a more fluid and syncopated rhythm, which transcends both the metre and the content of his rhyme in audibility. When in full flow, it can almost seem as though he’s just making rhythmical noises and allowing these to guide him through vague conceptual associations.

Supernatural, on the other hand, whose performances famously revolve around his responding to words or objects thrown at him by the audience, tends to focus to a greater extent upon the conceptual elements of the rhyme, and will immediately start trying to describe and construct conceptual associations around them, building up a powerfully enunciated and relentless rhythm that way.

Another common method is to begin with short introductory pre-formulated phrases, typically about the rappers own skill or credibility, to orientate the rapper into his rhyme.

Freestyles, then, usually begin relatively metrically and often at a slower pace, allowing the metre to guide them whilst the energy is being gathered up and the vague feeling of the freestyle is being sketched out and secured into firmer co-ordinates. Once underway however, the conditions of improvisation

require that metre be subordinated to rhythm as a means of being able to cope with and persist relentlessly in the face of the freestyle’s own empirically evolving logic.

The credit given to speed and the tendency for the freestyle to find its own force can often result in a ‘trip up’. This is when the rapper conceptually or rhythmically stumbles, or pauses for thought or breath. In short, either the rhythm has outrun the thinking process, or vice versa. Very often a competent rapper will deal with this by vocalising his temporary paralysis and weaving it into the rhyme, building himself a rhythmical and linguistic bridge back to his flow. Examples of this can be seen when ?uestLove points to a can indicating for Black Thought to incorporate it into his freestyle. Instead of pausing, Black Thought continues with his flow and says: “What did you say? I didn’t hear you my man, ah yes, there you go, you said the can”. Supernatural, also always expresses his ‘trip ups’, rapping: “I got tripped up one time inside my mind”, after a two second pause in his rhyme, and then goes on to reassure himself and his audience of his recovery: “Now my mind is back on track, excuse me for that, that trip up was kind of wack”. The rhythm is thus sustained throughout all the ups and downs, and the risk taking of the live improvisational creative process is laid bare to both the performer and his audience, creating a feeling of sincere and shared vulnerability.

‘Trip ups’ can often be avoided by what I shall call ‘fillers’. Fillers are tools used to fill time or to act as a kind of bridge, whilst the rapper gets a feel for the next move or direction to go in or thinks of the next thing to say. They can range from rhythmical sounds such as “ha, ha, ha, ha”, to characteristic and formulaic words or phrases such as “hey Mr DJ’, more reminiscent of the shout out’s of MC’s during street parties in the 70’s and 80’s. Another example of a filler would be the self-referential, pre-formulated sentences cited earlier and referencing the rapper’s style, image or flow. These fillers operate somewhat like pre-conceived personalised stamps or punctuation marks within the freestyle and are often more metrically regular, an example being Supernatural’s reference to himself: “world’s greatest freestyler, world’s greatest rhyme, world’s greatest lyricist, world’s greatest mind”. As well as providing temporary relief from the demands of the force and the pace of the organically evolving rhyme, these fillers are usually formulaic, collectively owned and understood phrases within the historical idiom of Hip Hop. They also act therefore, as a form of anchorage back into that idiom and a means of keeping a palpable connection with the intended audience. Ultimately however, these anchorages are to be transcended and are used as springboards to launch the more original rapper back into a more unique rhythmical and conceptual direction.

Cyphers: Interdependency and Organic Process So far I have tried to demonstrate how the rhythm becomes more greatly centralised as the predominant force and register in improvised freestyles, and have examined how the linguistic and conceptual forces of the freestyle itself operate as resistances and provocations that the rhythm attempts to transcend. I have also suggested that these conditions allow for a greater personalised and experimental response to the specific moment. There are other forms of resistance and provocation operating in the performance of freestyle however, and these emerge from the inter-dependent and inter-subjective conditions of the

cypher. Discussing the African roots of Jazz and Rap, Learthen Dorsey explains that music, particularly vocal improvisation, has largely been considered a participatory group activity in Afro-American culture. Music has historically had a didactic and cathartic function, used for sharing thoughts, airing grievances or teaching the community, through the channels of a commonly created language. This collective musical mentality is reflected in the cypher. A cypher is a circle formulated by a group of rappers in a park or on the street, as a performance space in which to both parade and develop their freestyling skills. Theoretically this can be done anywhere, but communities of rappers have tended to congregate in certain areas to form intense and dynamic spaces, heaving with creative potentialities. Greenwich Village has often been cited as the classic cypher spot of the golden age of the 90’s, for example.

As the non-promoted occupation of public spaces, cyphers also provide an environment of experimentation, under the critical review of the Hip Hop community, but relatively free from the demands and expectations of the commercial market.

Abioden Oyewole of The Last Poets, describes the cypher as generating the same energy and adrenalin as the circle typically formed during playground brawls, except instead of a destructive physical aggression, what is actually being generated is something creative, it is poetry. The cypher, he continues, contains a precarious tension between fostering an almost claustrophobic protection, an outlet for expression and a source of communal energy. In virtue of the sheer proximity of the participants, which presses in upon the freestyler, the cypher operates simultaneously in a supportive, inspiring and encouraging way to whoever is rapping at the time, but also as a challenging and perhaps threatening provocation. The aim of the freestyler is always both to keep up with the crowd, to woo them and to outdo them, drawing at all points upon the energy of the circle. As Oyewole says, rappers “want to be tight like that”, because it is through, in accordance with, and in opposition to the rhythmical energy of others, that the individual can both evoke, sustain and push his own rhythmical flow to new limits. The freestyler thus tries to outdo himself/herself and to expand his/her expressive parameters.

The participation of the other cypher members will be either vocal, in the provision of beats through beatboxing, which can often involve more than one beat being put out, or bodily, through rhythmical movements.

As already stated, this is always improvised.

Each member could then either follow and represent the general flow of either the freestyled rhyme, or otherwise, tap into their own rhythm. The vocal and bodily gestures expressing the vitality and vigour of each individual participant combine to create a one off complex rhythm, which is very specific to that moment and which cannot be reproduced. The rhythm or flow of the freestyler therefore, is never created in a vacuum, but is at all points both created and developed in response to the evolving complexity of the rhythm of the cypher; the various parts, operating upon one another, shape or formulate the whole and the general purposiveness of the whole, in turn animates the parts. This can be demonstrated by the way in which the rhythmical flow of the freestyler can vary in intensity and originality, depending upon the dynamics of the cypher.

In addition to this, the level of energy can vary depending upon how involved in the cypher you are willing to become. Improvisa-

tion is about risk-taking. To transcend your own conventionalised expressive and performative parameters you need to make yourself vulnerable to danger. The cypher both embodies that danger, in the form of a close and critical audience, and offers the protection and support required to confront and transcend it. To be in the (inner) cypher you must participate in the freestyle. This will often result in concentric circles of people, where the risk takers will be tight in the centre and the observers will stand behind them.

The centre of the circle is predominantly where the greatest energy force emerges and so both participation and the risks that may involve, is ultimately rewarded, both with esteem and creditability, and with creative and expressive fulfilment.

To promote public discourse and further the mission of the NP collective of engaging intellectuals and the wider public we are proud to announce the launch of our Free Newspaper Supplement. To read it on-line please visit our website: www.nakedpunch.com The print copy can be picked up at cultural centers in the UK and selected locations elsewhere.

COMPLEMENTRY SUPPLEMENT TO ISSUE 11: Contents Violent Thoughts about Zizek ..................................... 3

By Simon Critchley On Living After Derrida ............................................... 7

By Shahidha Kazi Bari The Poetic Strategy ..................................................... 11

By Hilary Lawson Drawings by Frank Phelan Back Cover Art: Hjørdis Dreschel

Conclusion Improvised freestyle rap, of the kind performed in cyphers in outside social spaces has then provides the setting in which individuals and communities can come to express and define themselves experimentally, through a kind of interactive and phenomenological mapping of their flow or manner of being in the world. In temporal terms, the self becomes co-ordinated by the rhythm, in relation both to an entire cultural and artistic history, and in immediate response to a whole range of potentialities in the moment. In spatial terms, or in terms of co-existence, through the dynamics of the cypher, the ontological reciprocity that exists between the self and the other is rendered palpable through the evolving logic of rhythm.

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k t o t he old sch ool Jay Santil

There is a trope in hip hop that prescribes both ‘keeping it real’ and ‘taking it back to the old school’. Either saying has fallen into cliché, yet the question remains of what kind of ‘return’ is being prescribed. Harry Allen, former journalist for Brooklyn’s City Sun and The Village Voice in the 80s, argues that hip hop optimum period was during the late 70s, when the ‘four elements’ (MCing, DJing, b-boying and writing) were unified and likens the explosion of hip hop to big bang theory in which, either the elements continue to spread away from each other, fundamentally becoming solitary each at the “deficit to the potency of the other (elements).” What I’ve read this to mean is that 1.

Hip hop was stronger at its gestation than it is now and, 2. That returning to the roots of hip hop (the collective four elements united, ‘keeping it real’ et al) would be preferential. Although there is much to be said about, and indeed learnt from, the origins of hip hop, I believe its evolution, including its appropriation across geographical boundaries and to a lesser extent, the commodification and use in pop music, are all part of its growth. I will argue that ‘hip hop’ as a concept both acts as commentary on the wants and needs (be they socio-economic or otherwise) can be seen in the plethora of styles, genres and mutations the culture and music has undergone as well as it being an inclusive concept that lends itself to innovation and augmentation. I will also argue that discourse which proposes that hip hop returns to ‘its roots’ or proposes the reversing of the evolution of hip hop is culture as conservative and against the very foundations upon the temple is built.

So what does it mean to take it back ‘to the old school’? Naturally, to speak of ‘the old school’ is relative however Allen opts for the dates of pre- September1979 New York as hip hop’s optimal point. These were the romantic heydays, of which I know of only through documentation, of block parties, MCs wishing they could DJ, gang truces, two decks and a shoddy turntable. These were the days when, as Allen puts it, the hip hop ‘superforce’ was present. All four elements co-existed in one culture. MC’s were writers, B-boys, broke and new styles emerged from different areas. It was at this point that the new members of the Rock Steady Crew that revived b-boying adding headspins, backspins and additional acrobatic moves into the mix of top rocking, popping and freezing. Although vibrant, the whole culture was insular. The lyrics were focused around the hopes, dreams and wants of New York youth, be it dancing, girls, rhyming, DJing, clothing, going ‘all city’ (writing/tagging all of the subway lines), or out styling other crews in virtue of one or more of the above . Many would agree that this was a special and electric time, and is well worth noting for anyone with more than a passing love for the culture, yet to want to “return” to this time is to neglect the premise upon which hip hop was founded; namely DIY culture, taking what already existed and creating something from it, and having that something ‘taste good’ as it were, namely have content and work either conceptually, stylistically or otherwise.

Hip hop, as opposed to many other musical styles, was built upon a kind of neophilia. From MC ciphers to b-boy battles and graf tags, ‘freshness’, flair and flavour, in short – creativity – was key. A 24 Supplement Naked Punch www.nakedpunch.com

culture steeped in creating something from very little (something illustrated well by Martha Cooper’s ‘Hip Hop Files: Photographs 1979-1984’ highlights). One may take ‘making lemons into lemonade’ as the crux of the culture. Allen’s timeframe is just before one of the most vibrant times in hip hop. Just prior to the commercial development in all of the elements. In 1979, Crazy Legs and Lenny Len joined Rock Steady crew, bringing the headspin, backspin and numerous other moves to breaking. This was the year some of the first socio-political rap appeared with ‘Rhymin’ and Rappin’ by Tanya Winley as well as hip hop’s ‘breakthrough’ record ‘Rapper’s Delight’ The Sugarhill Gang.

Interestingly enough this is not the old school Allen harks for, but the time prior. The time before it became evident the talent could be bought and sold as a commodity. Prior to money, egos and extended recognition. It seems that Allen wishes to return to the utopian hip hop period where the culture reflected the origins of the writers, MC’s, DJs and b-boys without any outside interference.

This thought, no matter how noble, seems to neglect the fact that, by opening up the floodgates of hip hop to commerce, by Run DMC setting precedent by being endorsed by Adidas, by making it a new, though rarely viable, option for living and revenue, it augmented the culture in the same manner a spectator interrupts that which they view. In short, the so called commodification of hip hop, is neither negative nor positive, but merely a part of the history in which it is contextualized. It doesn’t take a political theorist to see that we live in an age where talent of any form, from the highest to the basest, are commodified.

Hip hop, like anything else, is not ahistorical.

One would suspect Allen and his contemoporaries may retort that commodification of hip hop debases the artists that pander to the wants of the market - especially if it includes tenets such as misogyny, violence, robbery and drugs - it also debases the entire culture that it’s associated to. This may be true, but to this I have three responses. Firstly, if this is the music produced, it reflects something about the origins from whence it came, and if commodification is a pressure, then this is no doubt reflected in the music and is, if my analysis is correct, the very reflection of time that Allen pines for. The music, styles and techniques used in any of the four element vary from area to area, country to country depending on the local variances and leanings. For example, when speaking of breaking, the New York crews tend to be more flamboyant, using a mixture of feet moves and gymnastics whereas in LA they play up to the crowd more. The same can be said about the music. Brazilian hip hop tends to show convey, both latently and manifestly, the wants of those in Brazil. Or at least the surroundings of the artist. For example, if the trend is to rhyming in English, it conveys certain tastes and references which comments on the pocket it’s derives from. If the trend, or artist chooses to reference Brazilian prose, writers and artists, it reveals something. Even if, as I believe Allen sees it, the artists, especially US artists, choose to write three minute pop songs about dancing with girls at a party, it latently, if not manifestly comments on the wants of the artist, the industry and public it’s aimed for.

Secondly, connected to the first point, as hip hop is not bound by any restrictions of content be they geographical, socio-economic or ideological; various forms may live relatively peacefully together. Each revealing something particular to the practitioners of that particular strain. From conscious rappers, to breakers that pop exclusively, it becomes a running commentary on the evolution of hip hop.

Allen also seems to believe that the dispersion of the four elements has been detrimental.

“In the time since its creation, its subtending parts have gone off along their own vectors…all at the great deficit to the potency of the others” [Allan, pg.

9] I take this to mean that the interesting, though early, hip hop ‘superforce’ had cohered in a manner that they no longer do. For this reason it seems to be a small step to state that hip hop is falling apart as the four tenets have less and less to do with each other. The problem with this idea of Allen’s is that it assumes that each of the elements were inexplicably linked by some kind of unifying idea. Indeed, he even pines for a hip hop formula.

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“One of the holy grails of modern physics is a unifying, mathematical, description of the universes four forces… a formula ideally as compact, memorable and allencompassing as E= MC2. Hip hop could also use such a binding formula or philosophy.”

I sincerely doubt Allen would prescribe a doctrine which states that hip hop, similarly to champagne, can only emerge from the New York boroughs, but to consider such a formula would be to change the very essence of the culture. That hip hop has been conceptualized leads to a lack of perspicuity, yet also gives one freedom to work within the opaque framework. To speak of a return to the old school appear neither tenable, nor possible as the premise has not changed, only the context. Or to put it another way, there is nothing to return to if the essence has not changed.

J SAINTIL.

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Interview with Gift of Gab

by Zoe Sutherland

Q: You began as a battling MC in Sacramento in the late 80’s, and by recording songs on four tracks with your coband member Chief Xcel.

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Zoe: You began as a battling MC in Sacramento in the late 80’s, and by recording songs on four tracks with your co-band member Chief Xcel.

Who were your main influences and inspirations during those developmental stages?

Gift of Gab: KRS-1, Big Daddy Kane, T-LA Rock, the whole Juice crew and generally those MCs that brought a lot of word play. A big influence at that time was De la soul and Native Tongues because they were rhyming in styles that I had never heard before. In the same vein, the Freestyle Fellowship, even though they came later.

Zoe: What do you consider to be the main difference in skill between the more spontaneous art of freestyling and the production of written rhyme?

Gift of Gab: Both skills are important and I think that they both come from the same place. I think with freestyling you’re really in the moment and your rhymes are affected by what’s going on immediately around you, so it’s a bit more spontaneous and you go wherever the moment takes you. In this sense, the rhyme seems to flow out all at once. A written rhyme however, is more like a Polaroid: You’re recapturing or reconstructing a moment. The written rhyme is more structured and therefore takes more time. So I guess with freestyling you can be more free and go wherever you feel like going.

Zoe: Do you agree with the idea that these two practices are in opposition, and that a true freestyler cannot write effective verse, and vice versa? gift of Gab: I think it’s different for different people. There are some people that are great at both, freestyle and writing. I also think that there are freestylers who don’t project what they do when they freestyle into their writing. There are also people who may not be able to freestyle but are phenomenal writers. There are no rules.

Zoe: Divine Styler has described freestyling as ‘non-conceptual rhyme’, whilst freestyling legend Supernatural claims he reads both the dictionary and all the newspapers daily to arm himself with the vocabulary and knowledge necessary to win a battle. How important is the actual content or the message when putting out free flowing rhymes?

Gift of Gab: Whatever you’re saying, as long as you’re grabbing the listener’s attention and you’re keeping the listener interested, that’s the most important thing. You can rhyme about what’s going on around you, or you can rhyme about what you’re feeling at that particular moment, or you can just play with words. Sometimes it’s more about the energy.

Zoe: Your acclaimed tune Alphabet Aerobics sounds like a freestyle due to its quick and creative word play. How did you come up with the idea and how was it written?

Gift of Gab: Alphabet Aerobics is a remix of a song we have called A to G. Cut Chemist from Jurassic 5 brought the idea to us. We basically wanted to do something on a Hip-Hop track that no one had ever done. It was actually written the day before because he was coming to town the next day to record. I kind of had to just go into a zone and flow with it. But it came out really dope.

Zoe: The first line of that tune begins “Artificial amateurs aren’t at all amazing”. What makes an MC an artificial amateur and what is the (perhaps stylistic) obsession, even in non-aggressive Hip-Hop, with continuous self-confirmation and the systematic crushing of the opposition?

Gift of Gab: Rapping is like a sport. When I started rapping it wasn’t to make a record or to do a show. It was simply to crush the creative competition in my neighborhood. This is when Hip-Hop was still just an emerging culture and hadn’t blown up yet. The art of rhyming – and you would see jazz musicians doing this too - seems like an attempt to show each other out. In reality, rappers are challenging each other and pushing each other to be better players.

Zoe: Your experimental collectives Solesides and Quannam are known as championing a more ‘positive tip’ in Hip-Hop, associated largely with the West Coast. How would you distinguish the music you produce from East Coast and Gansta style rap, and why did the collective feel a new vision in Hip Hop was needed?

Gift of Gab: We grew up on everything from hardcore boom bap east coast Hip-Hop to gangsta rap and groups like NWA and Compton’s Most Wanted. For my crew it has always been about making good music. We don’t really get caught up in region versus region or positive versus negative. At the end of the day it’s all about honesty. If you’re honest you’re going to express who you are artistically.

Zoe: The UK is just beginning to experience a phenomenon right now, which the States might already be immune to. According to the British media, we are currently suffering an uncontrollable ‘wave’ in gun crime. The main scapegoats are of course Hip-Hop music and its accompanying ‘hoodie’ culture. Do you think that politicians and the media are right to suggest that artists and producers have a responsibility for the messages they put out?

Gift of Gab: I think that artists have a responsibility. I also think that politicians have a responsibility. I think the whole system has a responsibility. People want to reference ‘hoodie’ culture or whatever, but we have to see that it’s a reflection of the state of, not only America or UK today, but of the entire world right now. If you want the hood to become more positive, the world has to become more positive and constructive, particularly the people in power. I think that once that happens, the hood is going to reflect that.

Zoe: Many would say that Hip-Hop culture has undergone a rampant commercialisation in recent decades, leading some to proclaim the death of Hip-Hop. How would you characterise the relationship between the art and its commercialisation?

Gift of Gab: I would say that any time something becomes big enough, money comes into play - I mean we live in America, so there are always people ready to capitalize on new emerging cultural phenomena. And once it grows too big beyond that, it is open to the possibility of becoming diluted because the people that are now controlling it and presenting it to the rest of the world have no idea about the actual, original cultural experience.

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Zoe: People such as Chuck D have become well known, not just as Hip-Hop artists, but as Hip-Hop activists. Do you think there is a necessary relation between Hip-Hop and politics?

Gift of Gab: Hip-Hop incorporates everything, including the political. It definitely can be a tool for change.

I don’t think it can be the one thing that changes or guides people, but people do identify with their favorite artists, so I definitely think hip hop can be a tool to spread awareness.

Zoe: Part of this activism often involves Hip-Hop artists lecturing at Universities. How do you feel, both about the academic appropriation of Hip-Hop culture and the desire of some MC’s or practitioners to validate Hip-Hop academically?

Gift of Gab: I think it’s very important because, just like jazz or rock and roll, it’s such a huge part of American culture.

Zoe: How do you think it is possible that Hip-Hop has become such a global cultural phenomenon, when it originated in the Bronx and was born out of such a specific black American social predicament?

Gift of Gab: Music is universal, as is art in general. It’s just like sports, you know, music and art connect people. At the time, music was more segregated, but now I see rock kids listening to rap and I see rap kids listening to rock. If you have a soul, good music is going to touch you regardless.

Zoe: You have collaborated with certain UK Hip-Hop artists such as New Flesh. What are your thoughts on the UK scene in general and who in particular do you like?

Gift of Gab: I would really like to be up on the UK scene more. In the past I’ve run into groups like the Siaan Super Crew and MC Solaar, and just from having been out in the UK, I definitely feel the appreciation for the culture. But if I go into a mom and pop store in America and ask for world Hip Hop, it’s going to be hard to find.

Zoe: As a final question, do you remember high 5’ing me at the end of your show at the Camden Jazz Cafe London 2005?

Gift of Gab: Uh…sure.

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List of Contributors Michael Barnes – ‘Fakin’ the Funk?: Negotiating Racial Authenticity in Hip-Hop’ Michael Barnes received his Ph.D. from the department of Sociology at the University of California-Berkeley in 2007. His dissertation, Redefining the Real: Race, Gender and Place in the Construction of Hip-Hop Authenticity, focuses on the ways Hip-Hop DJs construct and negotiate their own sense of authenticity in Atlanta, GA and the San Francisco Bay Area.

Over the last 15 years he has been an avid record collector, DJ and radio programmer at stations in Atlanta, Madison, WI and Berkeley, CA. He is currently a Lecturer at California State University, Long Beach and a programmer at KCRW Santa Monica / KCRW.com.

Freeden Ouer – ‘Authenticating Sincerity in Hip Hop Freeden Oeur is Ph.D. candidate in the sociology department at the University of California, Berkeley. His Master’s research focused on the identities and experiences of female deejays in the San Francisco Bay Area, and his current research focuses on masculinity practices in public schools.

Ela Gezen - Topographies of Sound: The Representation of Place in German Rap Ela Gezen is a PhD candidate in German Studies at the University of Michigan. She received her bachelor equivalent from the Freie Universität in Berlin where she focused on minority writing—questions of identity, diaspora, and belonging—in the US, Canada, and the Maghreb. She graduated from Indiana University with an MA in Central Eurasian Studies (Turkish Studies). Her MA thesis was entitled “Emerging Voices: Turkish Minority Writing in Germany 1960-Present.” In her dissertation she engages in a comparative analysis of spatial practices in Turkish-German literature and music. She is particularly interested in the textual and musical representation of Berlin.

Zoe Sutherland – The Expressive potentialities of the Freestyle Zoe Sutherland is currently a Dphil candidate and Associate Tutor at the University of Sussex in Brighton, UK. Her doctoral thesis is titled ‘The Phenomenology of Conceptual Art’ and she holds a keen interest in all areas of Aesthetics and art history, particularly relating to contemporary visual art movements and music. She received her bachelor degree from Middlesex University in Continental Philosophy and her MA from King’s College London in Analytic Philosophy. She is currently an editorial assistant for Naked Punch and maintainer of the Postgraduate Journal of Aesthetics website.

Jay Santil – Back to the Old School?

After completing an MA in philosophy at Birkbeck College, University of London several years ago, Jean-Robert Saintil is currently an independent writer and thinker whose work spans international culture and trends, music, art and literature.

He is currently working as Editor at Large for Vs. Magazine and Head of Creative for the Grok Institute of art, in addition to being an international DJ. Josh Karant – A Civic Rap Joshua Karant teaches philosophy, political science and cultural studies at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, NY. He holds a Doctorate in Political Philosophy, and Masters degrees in Politics and Intellectual History. A former DJ, he currently teaches a seminar on the roots, past, present and future of hip hop, and writes extensively about the culture of food.

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The Poetic Strategy

By Hilary Lawson

Full article featured in Naked Punch Issue 11

I Is poetry capable of approaching a truth which lies beyond the grasp of literal meaning? In the face of the perceived failure of the literal to describe the nature of the world, philosophers, from Heidegger to Rorty, have been tempted by poetry as a possible alternative strategy. What however is the poetic strategy capable of delivering? If poetry avoids saying something in particular how is it capable of saying anything at all? Using TS Eliot’s Quartets as a focus I will explore the potential and the limits of such a strategy and outline some consequences for our understanding of language and the world.

Describing the world is a strangely perplexing process. It feels as if it should be effortless, but the more closely we seek to say how things are, the more we uncover our failure to do so. It is an outcome that philosophy both uncovers and relies upon for its continued existence. No doubt it is for this reason that poetry and philosophy, so seemingly distinct in their approach to the world, find themselves deeply entwined.

Now there are, of course, those who suppose that the task of describing the world is in some way solvable, who think we can access, in Richard Rorty’s phrase, ‘the really real’. It is a view adopted by many scientists and widely held in our culture, and embedded in the notion of progress and the increasing knowledge of humankind. In the philosophical world it is characterised as realism. Realist philosophers, and those who endorse the project to correctly describe an independent reality, have tended to regard poetry as a romantic flourish, a flowery plaything, while the true work of language takes place in the realm of the literal. Poetry may express emotion or create a mood, the emotion may be powerful and deep, but it has no place in our understanding of the world and is secondary and dependent on agreed and fixed meanings that we use in our factual descriptions.

In contrast, in an article published just a few months ago, within six months of his death, Rorty proposed that poetry was the source of the imagination, and without imagination, he argued, there would be no new words, and without new words, no reasoning, no intellectual or moral progress. Poetry is the fire of life. By giving poetry a central rather than secondary place, Rorty placed himself in a line of, what I shall call, ‘non-realist’ philosophers that includes Nietzsche, Heidegger, Wittgenstein and Derrida, and who between them have perhaps been the primary philosophical figures of non-analytic philosophy. Non-realism is not about the assertion of a different set of existent things separate from the material which is prior or more real. Instead it is a challenge to the possibility of saying how things are, a challenge to our ability to speak of the really real. Unlike the anti-realist, the non-realist denies the very possibility of an ontology.

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Each of these non-realist philosophers provided their own particular challenge to realism, and each grappled with the puzzle of how to respond to the perceived failure of the realist project. In each case they were led to place poetry or a poetic stance at the centre of the philosophical endeavour. They did so not in some romantic desire to escape the literal but in response to what they saw as the failure of the literal to deliver philosophic truths about the nature of the world. The attachment to poetry, as a metaphorical use of language, is not an outcome of a wooliness of thinking, or a lack of rigour, as critics have sometimes argued, but is the consequence of a determined and unflinching thinking through of the realist project and a recognition of its impossibility.

I do not intend here to rehearse the arguments against realism other than to note that realism cannot get off the ground without a theory about the means by which language describes or is hooked onto the world, and Hilary Putnam, the renowned American analytic philosopher, has described this project to identify the relationship between language and world as being ‘in tatters’. Furthermore, at the outset of the analytic school of thought, Wittgenstein in the Tractatus concluded that an account of the relationship between language and the world is not possible because the account would have to stand outside of language itself.

Non-realists maintain that in the 90 years since that conclusion, no viable realist response has been forthcoming.

While the challenge to realism is substantial, the alternative is far from evident. It is perhaps the difficulty of the non-realist ‘position’ – if for the moment one can call it such - that has enabled realists to pursue the metaphysical project, to say how things ultimately are, against the odds. For realists, however difficult it is to form a viable realist theory – and all admit its complexity – the alternative is notably less appealing; for non-realism is seemingly at once embedded in a mire. If it is not possible to say how the world really is, if it is not possible to connect language to the world, how is the non-realist to find a means to express any view at all? There are times when Nietzsche, Heidegger, Wittgenstein and Derrida appear to be making claims about the nature of the world and of the human condition, but on reflection they cannot hold to any of these claims for, were they to do so, they would seemingly be retaining an implicit realism.

The denial of our capacity to describe the really real would appear also to involve the denial of that denial itself. Such is the non-realist predicament.

It is for this reason that the nonrealist is led towards poetry. If we are not capable of describing the world, such a claim cannot be made literally without it being at once self-denying. For, if the statement ‘we are not capable of describing the world’ is itself taken as a

description of the world – which at first sight it appears to be – it is not possible to provide the statement with meaning since it denies itself.

More broadly, a non-realist account requires a means by which expression and meaning is made possible without it being at the same time a commitment to asserting a given state of affairs. If realists require an account of how language is hooked onto the world, non-realists require an account of how we can have meaning and can intervene successfully without access to the really real.

Non-realist philosophers would certainly appear to be trying to say how things are in some sense even if they cannot do so directly, even if they choose to describe this saying as playing in the language game, or exploring our vocabulary, or unravelling the tradition from within.

And it is here that a poetic stance seemingly allows the non-realist philosopher a space from which to be able to speak and a means of talking that does not involve a commitment to the real. Hence Wittgenstein’s remark: ‘I think I summed up my attitude to philosophy when I said: ‘Philosophy ought really to be written only as poetic composition’.Or Heidegger’s: ‘Poetically, man dwells on this earth.

It is the late Wittgenstein and late Heidegger who find in the poetic strategy a response to the implicit realism of their early works. It is in his later work that Rorty advocates the poeticisation of culture, and at the end of his life, after he is diagnosed with cancer, that Rorty comments: ‘I now wish that I had spent somewhat more of my life with verse’.

(Perhaps the desire of young men to build edifices of thought is tempered by age, and failure.) T.S. Eliot, however, came to the same conclusion, and for similar reasons, at the outset of his career. He came from Harvard to study at Oxford in 1914, not as poet but as a budding philosopher.

Two years later, while still in England, he submitted a dissertation, on ‘Knowledge and Experience in the philosophy of FH Bradley’, to Harvard as part of his doctorate. It was not published until 1964, less than a year before his death and is remarkable for the way in which it prefigures relativist and poststructural standpoints elaborated by non-realist philosophers many years later.

In his conclusion Eliot adopts the perspectival stance typical of non-realism when he writes: “We are certain of everything – relatively, and of nothing – positively”. And goes on to argue, in terms that could almost have been written by Derrida a half century later.”

This article continues on page 105 of Naked Punch Issue 11

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