TAKING A SLAP AT RAP'S POLITICS

It Takes an "Evil Government" To Hold Him Back
An essay on Popmatters.com recently caught my eye: Ben Rubenstein's "The Message". In it, he lambasts hip-hop for its poor political style. He finds rap's rhetoric too angry and dogmatic, thereby discouraging open dialogue, unlike what his white, suburban parents taught him was the proper way to debate in a liberal society.

I had a far, far longer critique but my Zen master, Budd(hua) Hsu, instructed me to "build, not destroy. If you do choose destroy, destroy someone worth destroying," clearly feeling that going after Rubenstein full-bore was a waste of effort. Still, while I shelved my 3000 words annihilation of this column, I still felt like something needed to be said so I will content myself with pointing out some of the more egregious errors and arguments and leave it to the reader to plumb the rest.

CLICK HERE TO CONTINUE READING...

1) Rubenstein writes, "Politics and hip-hop go hand in hand, and it doesn't stop at choosing sides in the Biggy-2Pac feud."

That's B-I-G-G-I-E, not "Biggy."

2) Rubenstein offers up a hip-hop song that does politics right: Grandmaster Flash's "The Message," and writes about how "Flash goes on to paint a picture of his upbringing in the ghetto."

Rubenstein seems unaware that Flash isn't painting a single word on this (or any other) song: he's not a rapper, he's a DJ. That is not an obscure detail, any more then knowing that Coltrane played a sax and John Bonham was a drummer. On "The Message," Melle Mel and Duke Boottee share vocal duties. It's also worth noting that Flash himself hated "The Message," never wanted it released under his name and has basically disavowed it after Sylvia Robinson went over his head and put it out anyways.

3) Rubenstein also adds that "The Message," "screams of a culture of poverty the likes of which many of today's hip-hop listeners cannot comprehend."

I'm not making this up. He actually writes this.

4) He also writes, "as hip-hop continues to grow as a cultural phenomenon and expands its scope beyond the inner-city audience, those artists who offer their apocalyptic visions by way of overstatement and caricature will likely find their voices falling a bit flat."

Contradiction alert: He assumes here that hip-hop's core audience is still inner-city but he just wrote that most of today's hip-hop listeners can't comprehend "a culture of poverty." Ergo, according to Rubenstein, people in the inner city can't comprehend a culture of poverty.

In any case, hip-hop expanded its scope beyond the inner-city audience around 1986 ("Raising Hell") and cemented that reality by 1992 ("The Chronic"). Not coincidentally, hip-hop also largely stopped offering "apocalyptic visions" around the same time which is precisely why a vocal contingent of rap fans (Greg Tate, holla) have wrung their hands ever since about the death of hip-hop's politics.

5) The problems with these next few graphs speak for themselves, especially in their patronizing and racialized presumptions:

"The urban black population has a history of being marginalized: its concerns are often not represented by the politicians we elect. After years of such treatment, a feeling of hopelessness and anger undoubtedly festers, and arguments for action, however simplistic, might be the only logical way out. What seems like simple fear-mongering to me might actually resonate with the rappers' desired audience. I was not taught to mobilize in such a way. The frame doesn't work for me, and it doesn't work for most of my peers."

"By placing politics on a more accessible level, artists like Public Enemy succeeded in speaking to those from similar backgrounds, those who may have grown up with street-corner politicians and evidence of suffering at every turn. But for those of us accustomed to politics and art taking a little more effort to interpret and decipher, political hip hop can seem a little sophomoric."

"This need for complexity may explain the meteoric rise of hip-hop collectives such as Oakland's Anticon and New York's Definitive Jux... Their mostly white audience revels in the insularity of their songs, struggling to decipher what they might mean, and thinking that the nuggets of truth they do find are all the more meaningful because of the search.... Of course, this style of hip-hop is often dismissed out of hand by urban, black fans, who feel it is nothing more than being weird for the sake of being weird."

How Rubenstein manages to mention race in passing yet not remotely talk about race in any meaningful way is astounding.

6) Rubenstein writes, "Ranting about an 'evil government,' as Public Enemy loved to do, ends up being just as abstract, and causes as much overreaction, as Reagan evoking the "Evil Empire" or President Bush evoking the 'axis of evil'".

Public Enemy has never, ever uttered the term "evil government" in any song they have ever recorded. For that matter, if you do a search for the term, "evil government" on the Online Hip-Hop Lyrics Archive, not one single hit comes up for any rap artist. You will, however, find plenty of references to "the white devil" and "cave bitches" but that's another issue.

What I find most lacking in Rubenstein's discussion of Public Enemy (who became his strawmen in this essay), it's that he misses the point. P.E. didn't become the most important rap group in the late 1980s because of their politics. They did it because of their style and attitude. If all it took to sell units on the street was to have a good speech, Farrakhan would be sporting platinum plaques on his mosque walls. P.E. electrified critics, fans, etc. because their sound and image was unlike anything else out there. Politics were part of their performance, not the other way around. Anyone who's ever listened to a Public Enemy album should be able to pick up on this straight away. Suggesting that Bob Dylan was sophisticated while P.E. were simplistic and dogmatic is nothing more than typical white noise supremacy.

7) Lastly, I'll just say that with Rubenstein's cor eargument, it'd take me another essay to point out how flawed, patronizing and racially reductionist it is but the main thing that should be said is this: why is he comparing the way he learned about politics in his class and racial community (apples) with the politics of a music form (oranges). It'd be one thing to compare the political style and rhetoric of politicians in the Upper East Side vs. Harlem but he's treating rap's politics as if they speak for either the inner city or the Black community. Rubenstein proceeds under the assumption that hip-hop embodies and reflects the politics of the Black community rather than realizing that the Black community has a politics all its own outside of whatever rappers are putting on record. In any case, woe unto anyone who expects a song to teach them about political reality. If I want to be fully invested in social change, the record store is not my first stop.

I also don't understand why he needs/expects hip-hop to have to speak to his (self-described) community of upper class, white colleagues. Social justice and social action rarely comes about because upper class, white people are convinced to join in. In anything, most social justice comes about DESPITE the presence of upper class, white people who, as a whole, have the most to lose with the redistribution of social power and equality.

---

By the way, by sheer coincidence, Tamara Nopper emailed this link to me right after I posted: Hold My Gold: A White Girl's Guide to the Hip-Hop World. Choice chapters include:

• Da Basix: Vocabulary, Grammar and Translation
  
• Yo' Crib: A Home for the Homeys
  
• Mad Ice & Crazy Skinz [the "z" is backwards, btw]: Clothing and Accesories

AMAZING. I need these authors' book agent, for real. Coming soon: Eyes Forever Chinky: The AZN Guide to the Hip-Hop World.

--O.W.