"HIP HOP HIPOCRAZY AND ITS ACADEMIC APOLOGISTS"

Great article thanks to the blog Assault on Black Sanity

I wrote this little essay during the course of 2006 and kept messing with it from time to time. It has been out in cyberspace in various versions. So some of you might've seen this thing already. In any case, this (I think) is the final version...

The second installment can be found here.

I am beyond concerned, I am alarmed. So I decided to write.Hip Hop is destroying our children’s minds. Hip Hop has taken hold of what is now the second generation of young adults and as far as the eye can see has produced adult bodies inhabited by children.When Hip Hop culture came into being in the mid-seventies many thought and hoped that it would be a culture of renewal and peace. At the outset it sure appeared that way. It was a way for gangs made up of young black people in the Bronx and later in other sections of New York to lay aside their violent rivalries and compete on artistic grounds.

The early Hip Hop culture wiped out the gang culture. That was the golden age of Hip Hop.Today we have descended into a kind of Dante’s Hell. Hip Hop has instilled the worst of values in our youth. All the values we fought against for decades, all of the values we identified as the legacy of slavery have returned like a virus to infect our black body politic. The delivery system of these slave-memes has been Hip Hop. Hip Hop today is a white supremacist’s dream. And just as in the olden days when house-slaves roamed the plantation to do their master’s bidding, that white supremacist dream has found its black apologists.The House Negro of yore has long been discredited. He/She is easily recognized.

Today’s House Negro, to be effective, must come in a progressive, even a revolutionary guise. One branch of this club is the black academic hip hop apologist.These black academic apologists, the modern-day House Negroes, are busy constructing a theoretical framework for the supposed revolutionary and progressive nature of today’s Hip Hop.

Spearheading this academic House Negro club are three individuals celebrated by certain types of white folks throughout the land: Cornel West, formerly of Harvard and presently Professor of Religion at Princeton University and an almost-member of the “Greatest Generation”, notable author and Humanities Professor Michael Eric Dyson of the University of Pennsylvania a late 1950’s “Baby Boomer”, and the newest, youngest and “hippest” member of the three, Imani Perry, Yale and Harvard graduate and currently law professor at Rutgers University, representing “Generation X”.So, that’s my introduction. Who the hell am I? What qualifies me to criticize these illustrious academics?

Well, I’ve helped create, design, market, and made money off Hip Hop for some twenty years.As far as the latter is concerned, in my defense, at first got I involved with this business because I thought I could make a difference and create capital to build progressive businesses. As time went by, I became pretty influential as a “grey eminence” in the business. I became one of those quiet guys in the background that pull a string here and make a deal there. One of those guys that does this again, and again, and again. As time went by I saw things develop that made me uneasy, but I bought the refrain hook, line and sinker: “Hip Hop Is the CNN of The Streets.” Mainly I bought it because the money was pretty good.Just as many of my peers in the business side of music, I had Hip Hop feed my family and kids, but I would never, never ever, allow my child to watch BET or MTV. Crack dealers don’t consume their own product.Recently I took some time out to finally read Imani Perry’s “Prophets of The Hood”.

It seemed enticing. Here was a young sister, I was told, who finally told the truth about Hip Hop in a coherent way. An African-American woman who had grown up with the culture. A Hip Hopademic so to say with the finest credentials: B.A. from my alma mater, Yale University, PhD and JD from Harvard. In sum: exuding intelligence and an academic black activist to boot. So, I sat down one afternoon recently at Borders and read her book (admittedly two years late as it was published in 2004).First I skimmed the book. Hmmm… ok, Biggie Smalls helped her peers through law school. Ok? Curious. But hey. What do I know…This is a new paradigm, ain’t it? Ok. Skim, skim… What’s this? “Hip Hop is a masculine music”. Is it now? And what is this?

I need to quote at length here:“I argue”, says Ms. Perry, “that masculinity in Hip Hop reflects the desire to assert black male subjectivity and that it sometimes does so at the expense of black female subjectivity and by subjugating women’s bodies, while at other times it simply reveals the complexity of the black male identity.”I was a little stumped at the verbiage at first, but then I understood: Black males in Hip Hop assert their manhood by playing Pimp “subjugating women’s bodies”. Ok. I get that. It’s not correct, but I get what she says. What she means by the “complexity of the black male identity” I’m not sure, but, ok.Now I’m reading in earnest: “The assertion of black male subjectivity achieves its most problematic manifestation over the bodies of women. In order to understand this phenomenon, we first must think about black masculinity in relation to white masculinity.

It is, in fact, a sense of powerlessness in the face of white masculinity, and the fear of being pimped at the hands of the wealthy white recording moguls, that guides the hyper-masculinist moment, and the heterosexist moment as racial anxiety is articulated through a patriarchal lens when fear of being “bitched” finds artistic expression.”What the heck is this? Lemme see: I need to translate this.

The choice of words reminds me a bit of Theodor Adorno and Juergen Habermas (now-obscure Marxist intellectuals attached to the German Institut fuer Sozialforschung, more popularly known as the Frankfurt School) so I had to go waaay back to the mental archives of my youth.The translation I came up with is thus: “Black males in Hip Hop assert their manhood by playing Pimp. That is troubling. But we’ve got to understand that the reason this is so is the existence of white men and their masculinity.” Is that so?

The translation continues: “These black Hip Hop MCs sense the might of the white man and his overpowering masculinity. In fact, they fear that they are being rented out as whores (pimped) by wealthy powerful white men.” Oh? Hmmm…. “Yep, and basically,” Ms. Perry continues (in my translation) “these black males, who are afraid not only of white men’s power, but the white men’s masculinity, seek to cure their white man induced fear neurosis by demeaning black women”.Ah, yes. That one I’ve heard before. It’s the good old “the black man is a whimp in the face of the white man and therefore victimizes the black woman” a/k/a “A N**** ain’t sht!”. Mr. Mr. and Celie in Hip Hop so to speak. I guess that’s what she means by the “complexity of black male identity” thing.Now to reality. First, Perry’s whole initial premise is wrong.

Hip Hop, particularly the “gansta” variety has nothing to do with “asserting black manhood”. It solely has to do with selling little plastic disks called records (today, downloads) and little pieces of card board called “tickets”. What was on these little things didn’t matter. What mattered was that someone bought them. Millions and millions of them.Around 1990 a conscious decision was made by a small number of record executives and artist managers out of Los Angeles that the best way to get young black men to buy records (black women were already buying tons of records featuring R&B) was to appeal to the most powerful fantasy alive in the average young heterosexual male: Unfettered access to attractive, sexy, young women.

The reality is thus: Swagger or not, the average of young adolescent boys, including black boys, feel wholly inadequate in facing young women. The more attractive these women are, the more inadequate they feel. Society teaches them that the most direct way to access women is material wealth. Money=Power=Respect FROM YOUNG SEXY GIRLS.The entertainment business is about selling dreams, about selling fantasy. Nice ones. Sexy ones.

Watch the average Hip Hop video. What is it about? Some ugly guy to whom the average girl in the street would not give the time of day is sitting in a mansion throwing money at beautiful black women who coo-coo all over him.This fantasy in reality is attainable only by older established men after a lengthy successful career of some sort. But we’ve got to sell plastic and cardboard and we’ve got to sell them to young males who want this lifestyle NOW. So it has to be shown as achievable by the young male who is supposed to buy the plastic disk.

That means a short-cut of some sort. The most logical short –cut? Rob someone or sell drugs or both.An added bonus: the young kid can revel in the adolescent male fantasy of having power over other boys. Thus the fantasy of the thug as hero who gets all the girls. Any kid can now be Al Pacino in Scarface (not without accident the most popular movie in Hip Hop culture). Heck, even a fat ugly, cross-eyed guy like Biggie Smalls can become a sex symbol. All he has to do is sell drugs and display thug swagger. Now that’s a powerful fantasy.This is a potent and attractive proposition to the average unformed and unguided adolescent male. Particularly when this male has little in terms of mature and manly male role models around the house.These music videos and rhymes are mini-Scarface movies.

That’s all.Plying young women with gifts and money or a wealthy life-style is not exactly pimping in the traditional meaning of the word: It’s being a John, a Trick. Being a Trick is not a salable notion. So the concept of “Trick” or “John” (i.e. paying women for sex) was turned on its head and the term for John now became “Pimp”. So now you can call yourself a “Pimp” even though in actuality you are a “John”.

Thus, in Hip Hop black males don’t “assert their manhood”. Tricks in reality and Pimps in their minds in music video after music video they can comfortably throw money at beautiful scantily clad women at strip clubs. In fact, the only Hip Hop artist playing the “real“ Pimp role is Tracy Morrow, better known as Ice-T (after legendary pimp-turned author Iceberg Slim). All the others, as their music-video behavior shows, are money-flashing thuggish Tricks.The fantasy is a powerful one for young black males. It has become enticing for young black females as well: The epitome of sexiness to many a young black girl today is the thug. Even young adult women in their twenties and thirties look for a thuggish romance: witness the increasing popularity of the “ghetto” romance novel. Thug Love is the theme. Find a thug, love a thug, change a thug, and make him yours.

It has become a vicious cycle. Boys live out their thug fantasies in order to get girl after girl to spread her legs, girl after girl spreads her legs to the enticing thug.No wonder Biggie proclaims on his first album on Sean “Puff Daddy” Combs’ Bad Boy Records Ready to Die: “the landlord dissed us/I used to wonder why Christmas missed us/Damned right I like the life I live/Cause I went from negative to positive”.Biggie, of course, got to show just how truly ready to die he was only a few years after the release of this record. His “negative to positive” actually was a negative - he went from negative to negativer.

That’s the thug life, ya know.How does Michael Eric Dyson assess Biggie? Referencing the above lyrics, he’s got the following to say in one of his latest books, Open Mike: “Biggie’s lyrics, like those of Tupac, speak directly to the question of black suffering and what’s known in theological circles as 'the problem of evil.' Biggie shares honors with Tupac in the articulation of a grassroots secular urban theodicy.”“Theodicy”? “Idiocy” is more apt.Dyson lifts Biggie and Tupac into the realm of the metaphysical:“So it seems to me that hip-hoppers, and hardcore rappers in particular, are trying to confront the discontinuity between destiny and merit, between social evil and the contention that God is good, a claim they hear from intellectuals and preachers like me.

I think these hardcore rappers and their fans, are attempting to negotiate the dominion of death and the sovereignty of suffering by rejecting its ultimate logic – of the utter finality of existence – and insist on an immortality of expression that is undiminished by physical displacement."This stuff sounds really smart. It sounds so smart that if one doesn’t understand this it would tend to induce self-doubt in any individual who reads this. “Negotiate the dominion of death”, “Sovereignty of Suffering”, “Utter finality of Existence”.

Fact is, the verbiage can not be understood in the context of daily, concrete, reality.What Dyson does here is use an old trick: Make an assertion about the going-ons of real life in abstract metaphysical terms which, by their very metaphysical nature, can not be logically challenged in terms of physical reality.The end result? Biggie Smalls, Tupac et al are not only secular “revolutionaries” in the Imani Perry sense, but now have become tainted with the theology of sainthood. Thugism thus becomes a matter of faith and theology rather than what’s really at issue: cold hard cash.Plain and simple: Dyson operates via obfuscation and gobbledygook. This is a time honored tradition among “radical” African-American “ethno-philosophers” who in the 1960s and 1970s could be found on any corner of Harlem’s 125th Street and in many “New Afrikan” cultural centers which sprung up throughout Black America during that time.

The type was best satirized by Damon Wayans’ deranged prison philosopher of Fox’ “In Living Color” TV show.Getting back to Biggie: Christmas missed a whole lot of people (though certainly not the vast majority of consumption-addicted African-Americans), but even if this were so, that did not give anyone the right to glorify thuggism and the pushing of drugs onto the black community. Nonetheless, Biggie was no idiot. He was mercenary. Dyson, unfortunately, is not an idiot either. So what’s up? Open up, Mike…Making revolutionaries and saints out of thugs does not serve the African-American community.

Whom then does it serve and what does all this have to do with white supremacy?White supremacy historically was the paradigm that provided a physical, legal, ideological, sociological, cultural, and above all psychological blueprint and mechanism both for the maintenance of a slaveholder caste as well as for the maintenance of a slave caste.In the last analysis, any system of slavery and American race-based slavery was no exception, can not be maintained without the cooperation of the slave. There is a profound difference between a psychologically free person who has been imprisoned and forced to labor and a slave.

The resources needed to keep a large number of such free persons in imprisonment are immense and tend make such a system unprofitable and therefore relatively short-lived. Slaves, on the other hand, operate under a slave paradigm – they are inculcated with the consciousness that they are creatures of servitude and thus so inculcated can be put on automatic pilot and allowed to roam God’s green earth without too much fear of their escape.Thus, by definition, the very longevity of a system of slavery, particularly one based on race or ethnicity, is evidence for the existence of the slave paradigm, or, as it is more popularly known, the slave mentality.

The operative principle in this slave paradigm is not really the acceptance by the slave of the slave’s condition of servitude. Rather it is an ingrained psychological notion of inferiority that serves as the complement to the slave master’s notion of supremacy.Consequently, without the slave paradigm there can be no slavery and, above all, there can be no supremacy. Without the slave paradigm there is only freedom or death.Interestingly enough, of the two psychological components of race-based slavery, the slave paradigm is the determining one: Remove the legal and cultural structure of the slave master’s supremacy, and all you have is a slave without a master.Now that is a condition which will not prevail for long.

There is no such thing as a slave operating in a social vacuum. A slave will attract a master, regardless of the origins of that new master, whether white, black, old master or new.The modern music business (as well as the movie industry), particularly its Hip Hop branch is the epitome of this syndrome: Slaves who, not quite knowing that they still operate under the slave paradigm, attract, by their very existence, new masters.

And who should blame the new masters? If it not they, it would be someone else – a slave who remains a slave in mentality and demeanor will create a master for himself. Always.Thus we’ve got the recreation of the plantation system of old under a “new” paradigm: This time the “Niggaz” are not picking the cotton, they are the cotton. This time no slave drivers are required to beat them into subservience. This time they do it all by themselves, enriching their new masters and debasing themselves and their kin while their “revolutionary” leader-intellectuals, in the time honored tradition of the slave eunuchs of the past, give them and their new Massa cover and cheer them on from the sidelines.