On Lit Hop (1)
What I do, mostly, is write fiction. And as a hip hopper – someone
who has participated in, observed, criticized, and championed the culture
for twenty years -- the aesthetic techniques and political assumptions
of my work derive from the foundational tenets of hip hop as I understand
them. Other writers of my generation have been similarly affected, in
ways more complex, profound and subtle than have generally been recognized
by readers, critics or the market. I want to do two things in this essay:
discuss my lit hop aesthetic, and explore some of the ways lit hop has
been misunderstood thus far, in hopes of preventing future works from
being dissed with the ease, ignorance and prejudice that currently pervade
the public discourse. I still maintain the increasingly-antiquated belief
that literature can be transformative, socially and spiritually, and
thus I don’t want to see the work of the hip hop generation marginalized
– not even for some probationary wait-outside-until-they-finally-get-it
period. We don’t have time for that. The literary establishment
grows ever more elitist and alienating, and threatens to exclude not
just a generation of writers, but a generation of readers.
Any discussion of hip hop’s original impulses tends to veer toward
rhapsody, dogma, or both. As a well-intentioned but problematic strand
of hip hop originalism emerges (2), it becomes common to hear hip hop
talked about as if it is a cosmic revelation, bestowed upon Herc, Flash
and Bam atop some Bronx-rooftop equivalent of Mount Sinai. Hip hop becomes
a single-narrative in the retelling, a child sprung full-grown from
the womb, five-elements-indivisible-for-which-we-stand. I don’t
think it’s possible to overstate the ingenuity, beauty, or political
significance of hip hop practices at their purest, but I’m
wary of pretending hip hop aesthetics represent a radical departure
from everything that came before them. The practices of b-boying, MCing,
graffiti writing and deejaying had never been seen before, but the aesthetic
concepts that underwrite them were updated, not invented. As with everything
in hip hop, the key is how everything is put together, and the energy
with which it is suffused.
For instance, one of the foundation elements I hold most dear, and try
hardest to translate on the page, is the notion of intellectual democracy
through collage: the idea that whatever’s hot is worthy of adoption
regardless of its location or context: a dope Monkees drumbreak is not
penalized for the corniness of its origins, any more than a lackluster
James Brown jam gets any run on reputation alone. Hip hop – as
dramatized by the crate-digging of DJs, by breakers’ assimilation
of everything from Capoiera to cinema kung fu, by graff writers’
blend-happy attitudes toward color and style – values a free-ranging,
studious, and critical-minded approach to source material and, by extension,
life.
In and of itself, there is nothing about this concept that is unique
to hip hop. (3) It is the way the influences are made to cohere, the
way the collage is put together sonically or visually, kinetically or
verbally, that is original. Hip hop introduces a specific sense of interplay
in revealing and obscuring the layers of the collage, takes a specific
kind of pleasure in the mash-up refreaking of technologies and texts,
understands history as something to backspin and cut up and cover with
fingerprints in a particular kind of way.
It is this energy that makes hip hop’s aesthetic principles its
own: what’s unique is not the reclamation of public space on behalf
of marginalized peoples and purposes, but the audacious brilliance of
jimmying open lamp-posts to steal electricity to run sound systems,
thus literally reclaiming power from a city that had denied it. Not
the notion of public expression through guerilla art, but the specific
genius of taking over the New York Transit System and engaging the same
city that had cut school funding for arts programs in a $250 million
subterranean war over art, ownership and access. Not just the impulse
to think interdisciplinarily, but the instinct to do so, hardwired
in hip hoppers in a way no previous generation can claim and made manifest
in every hip hop artform. Not just innovation-as-mandate, a feature
of many artistic movements, but the specific critical skills and frenetic
learning curve that hip hoppers taught themselves -- the way train pieces
and rhymes and musical productions became fodder for what was to come
next at the exact moment of their completion, went from innovative to
passe in the blink of an eye because of the sheer intellectual force
of every kid clocking and biting and scheming on how to take it one
step further, chop those wildstyle letter-segments or that rhyme scheme
or that drum loop just a little bit… flyer.
I like to think of a novel in terms of a mix board. Harry Allen once
claimed that Public Enemy’s seminal 1988 album It Takes A
Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back was the first rap record to
make use of all forty-eight channels: on any given song, layers of musical
and vocal samples overlap and abutt each other, swirling in and out
of the mix at the glide of a fader. The listener’s degree of appreciation
for the collage is related (probably directly, possibly inversely (4),
and maybe in some other way) to his or her degree of familiarity with
the elements of the collage. Resonances, echoes, homages and subversions
(5) bubble up: a Wattstax vocal sample evokes a historical moment of
black unity in the aftermath of chaos; a James Brown break summons up
not just the Godfather of Soul but the long history of the song’s
hip hop usage; an old-school rap snippet throws a headnod to a forgotten
predecessor; a Funkadelic loop reminds us that funkin’ on the
one has always been a political statement. On top, Chuck D builds a
vocal collage of his own, paraphrasing his contemporary Ced Gee before
embarking on a bob-and-weave narrative that touches on racial profiling,
the teachings of Farrakan, and Public Enemy’s mission, as well
as laying down a double-entendre that he himself will mine as a sample
later on this very album... and this is all in the first verse of “Bring
the Noise.”
My goal is to write fiction that works the same way: that builds layers
of reference and meaning and plot and dialogue and character, tweaks
the levels of the mix for smooth reading but still allows you to dissect
the individual elements and analyze them. If you read the three-page
prologue of my novel Angry Black White Boy and you’re familiar
with Kool Keith, Malcolm X, Michael Jackson, Winston Churchill, old GI Joe commercials, Martin Luther King, Jr., Amiri Baraka,
The Doors, Brown vs. The Board of Education, Nation of Gods and Earths
numerology, Native Son, Eyes on the Prize, Eldridge
Cleaver, Red Rodney and Bernhard Goetz -- some of them mentioned, some
referenced, others sampled -- you’ll appreciate the text (and
the character speaking) on one level. If not, it should still work.
But differently. If you were so inclined, you could drop out everything
but the samples and graph their meanings and connections the same way
you might drop everything on the PE mixboard but the drums, and just
peep those. Some samples might be deliberately forefronted; others,
in the tradition of DJs steaming off record labels to protect their
secret weapons and producers making artful chops to avoid illegal-useage
litigation, are obscured.
Sampling is more than an authorial technique in my work. It is also
a way to reveal character, and map a novel’s worldview: because ABWB is populated by hip hoppers, conversations and actions
are studded with a range of references and echoes, flips and homages.
Conversant with race literature and real-life struggle, the characters
are able to position themselves in relation to these traditons, both
playfully and seriously. The events of their lives are bound together
by the same internal logic, and with the same sense of tension, that
binds a bunch of disparate sounds into a coherent musical composition.
They make decisions to re-enact historical moments (like commandeering
the corner of 125th and Lenox Avenue, a la Malcolm X and the title of
Gil Scott-Heron’s first album), adopt and adapt and reject roles
like abolitionist John Brown, Native Son’s Bigger Thomas
and Crime and Punishment’s Raskolnikov, debate each other
in shorthand because a shared culture has given them a common language.
They act with the freewheeling, undisciplined vigor and all-embracing
attitude of hip hop: natural historians, but only for eight bars at
a time. Not the entire breadth and context: just the party-rocking shit.
Lest I sound too celebratory about it, I should also say that this mindstate
underwrites both their success and their failure. They face the same
void in leadership that hip hoppers did as we came of age in the eighties,
step into that void as best they can, and do just as brilliant and terrible
a job of it.
Ultimately, the notion of literary hip hop aesthetics begs the question
of form versus content. Can a novel whose plot has nothing to do with
hip hop culture -- one that takes place a hundred years before Herc
was born, or is populated by people with no relationship to hip hop
whatsoever -- take up the aesthetic and political concerns of the culture
and thus be lit hop? My answer would be yes; the jazz literature (6)
of Langston Hughes, Amiri Baraka or Yusef Komunyaakaa does not have
to take jazz as its subject, any more than the jazz painting of Romare
Bearden or Jacob Lawrence. Rather, they share techniques with the music.
They may have produced iconic images that, in turn, enhanced the popular
understanding of jazz; they may even have lionized their musical muses.
But such things are only an incidental part of their total work; their
genius was not in writing about jazz, but in writing jazz.
In some ways, the mark of success for lit hop will be when a book that
isn’t about hip hop is understood as beholden to the aesthetics
of the culture. That will mean we’ve surgeoned lit hop from the
crass market concerns that now define it, and enforced a fuller understanding
of the expansive ways in which a literature of hip hop can exist, and
flourish.
As it now stands, a ”hip hop novel” denotes any book in
which words usually ending in -er instead terminate in -a, any book
containing characters who are young, urban and black or at least two
out of the three, any book aimed at a demographic group more notorious
for purchasing CDs. As soon as the notion of using hip hop to market
literature dawned, belatedly, on the publishing industry, the phrase
started getting tossed around without much rigor – and thus, many
writers I know cringe at the prospect of being termed “hip hop
novelists.”
The literary world isn’t just late to the party in co-opting hip
hop to move product; it is equally tardy in throwing off the institutional
influence of old-guard critics (some of them quite young) determined
to act as cultural gatekeepers. To them, literature is the last bastion
of high culture, and hip hop a corrupting force. (7)
I should say what they think of as hip hop. Snobbery, racism
and the sheer desire to maintain a position of cultural centrality are
all factors in the critical resistance to lit hop, but benign ignorance
is in play, too. If I understood hip hop not as a culture rooted in
poetic, dexterous, inventive, courageous resistance to oppression, but
rather only through its most visible, consumable, mysogynistic manifestations,
I wouldn’t want that shit infesting literature either. (8)
Hip hop novelists don’t need a free pass, merely a critical infrastructure
that approaches lit hop as it would any other genre: on its own terms,
with an eye toward understanding what is being attempted. Some of the
most pointed and common critical complaints about lit hop stem from
resistance to hip hop paradigms. Ecstatic genre-crossing and cultural
multi-literacy have been fundamental since the first time Herc blended
a reggae record with a funk break, then threw a TV jingle over that,
but literary mash-ups are still a surefire way to get dissed -- to say
nothing of characters capable of both teaching the seminar and rocking
the boulevard. The number of times I’ve been told some variation
of “a drug dealer would never be as articulate as the one in your
book” by writing teachers and reviewers alike is surpassed only
by the number of young writing students who have contacted me to complain
about being on the receiving end of the same kinds of comments. What
is behind this incredulousness at the multiple literacies of the hip
hop generation? And why are book reviewers hanging out with such inarticulate
drug dealers?
For a compact seminar on pervasive anti-lit hop prejudices, peep this
1999 New York Times Book Review (9) of Victor Lavalle’s
debut collection of stories, Slapboxing With Jesus. Reviewer
Ray Sawhill begins by speculating that Lavalle’s ambition seems
to be “to make the book approximate an hour or two of rap videos”
(huh?), then describes the book as
“...full of peculiarities of punctuation and phrasing, creat[ing]
effects impressively close to the scratch-and-sample effects of rap...
A case could be made that LaValle has found a way to give linguistic
form to the brain patterns of media-soaked, post-PC street youth. But
readers less taken by the idea that literature should come out of a
boombox are likely find the book tediously juvenile.”
Note, first, the laziness of Sawhill’s take on hip hop: his unexplicated
video reference employs an obtuse critical shorthand, leaving the reader
to speculate on just what goes on in an hour or two of rap videos, and
how Lavalle might translate the sensibility of a three-minute clip into
a collection of stories. The only thing clear about the sentence is
that Sawhill thinks rap videos are all the same, and approximating them
is a bad idea. The reader is expected to agree; at work here is a tacit
disdain that necessitates no further explanation. Any evidence in support
of the ridiculous assertion that video-versimilitude is Lavalle’s
goal to begin with goes similarly uncited.
Sawhill then belittles scratches and samples as ‘effects,’
when they are, rather, the musical bedrock of contemporary hip hop production.
And note the phrase ‘peculiarities of punctuation and phrasing:’
Lavalle’s prose is being dissed for its departures from standard
English. Although “a case could be made” that the author’s
language is evocative of the brain patterns of ‘street youth’
(whatever that means -- none of Lavalle’s characters are homeless),
Sawhill certainly can’t be bothered to make that case himself,
or pretend he thinks Lavalle’s goal in presenting such characters
is valuable. Sawhill’s problem is not with Lavalle’s execution
(his scratch-and-sample effects, after all, come “impressively
close” to the real thing), but with the unworthiness of speaking
for, like, or about the hip hop generation.
The parting-shot image of literature spewing from a boombox makes this
clear. Putting aside for a moment the utter inaccuracy of this description
of Lavalle’s quiet, understated storytelling, what is the image
intended to connote? Literature from a boombox -- abrasive, confrontational,
noise pollution... rap. One can almost feel the wind as Sawhill shuts
the gate in Lavalle’s face. This is literature -- there’s
no place for boomboxes, street youth, or nonstandard phrasing. Go wait
outside with your hoodlum friends, Lavalle.
Behind such gatekeeping is a deep discomfort not only with the amplification
of marginalized voices (and what they might say if allowed to speak)
but with the way hip hop drags American race-hypocrisy and class-complacency
out of the catacombs, kicking and screaming, and throws them on the
examination table. It’s true that the mainstream press rewards
books that address race and class, but only if they do so within certain
parameters.
Those parameters, to quote my editor, Chris Jackson (10) are “give
us our lesson and go.” Tell us racism is tragic, or slavery was
an inhumane institution, and then get the fuck outta here. Give it to
us clean, simple, unambiguous, so we know how to feel: empathetic, indignant,
disturbed. Don’t start mucking around with satire, don’t
abandon gravitas or cross genres or switch tones on us. You start blurring
right and wrong, budddy, and it’s all over.
The New York Times Book Review of Angry Black White Boy delineates
the location of these parameters quite well. ABWB is a satire
about an Afrocentric white hip hopper who starts robbing white people,
becomes famous, and ends up orchestrating a disastrous National Day
of Apology on which whites are supposed to follow Malcolm X’s
rhetorical advice and apologize to blacks. The reviewer, Nathaniel Rich
(Frank’s kid), really liked the most straight-forward parts of
the book -- a series of chapters set in 1889 that detail the near-lynching
of the last black player in about-to-be-segregated major league baseball.
Those scenes, according to Rich “capture vividly the inhuman sadism
inherent in racial violence,” just the kind of unambiguous “lesson”
Race Novels are celebrated for imparting (it’s also a tiny part
of what those chapters were intended to do, but lemme not get into all
that).
ABWB’s modern-day storyline, meanwhile, Rich faults because
“despite the complexity of his subject, Mansbach’s tone
is distractingly breezy and frivolous,” and because it “unfolds
in jarring bursts of fantasy... Mansbach's shrewd observations of race
in America are too often obscured by... bizarrely whimsical excursions
that are ultimately too fanciful to unnerve.”
I’m far from imapartial on this one, and it’s certainly
possible that Rich is right. He seems unwilling, though, to accept the
notion that a novel purporting to grapple with race can depart from
the kind of earnestness he found so compelling in the 1889 sections.
The breeziness Rich found so distracting is a narrative voice calibrated
to reflect the young, intelligent hip hoppers who are ABWB’s
main characters -- and who, as members of a generation whose race politics
were forged equally in the flames of the Rodney King riots and the fiery
funk of Chuck D’s voice, possess an instinctive, interdisciplinary
comfort with both the absurdity and horror of race in America. Satire,
surrealism, absurdity, dream-sequences in which Ol’ Dirty Bastard
takes over Seinfeld, The Cosby Show and Beverly
Hills 90210 -- such tactics comprise an attempt to make race approachable,
to reflect its complexity, and to draw on the raucous, subversive legacy
of race novels like George Schuyler’s Black No More,
Ishmael Reed’s Flight to Canada, and Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man. If Angry Black White Boy doesn’t
manage to pull that off, so be it. But Rich seems antagonistic to the
very approach. This is race literature -- there’s no place
for breeziness or satire. Take your jarring bursts of fantasy and wait
outside with your homies until you learn to limit yourself to being
unnerving, Mansbach.
I could run down a further litany of critical hostilities, misreads,
and belittlements -- from the NYTBR’s characterization
of Danyel Smith’s novel More Like Wrestling as “save-the-drama-for-mama
fiction” (would they take that tone if a sixty-year-old white
writer from Connecticut had penned the tale?) to Kirkus Reviews’
standard practice of adopting faux-ebonics when reviewing so-called
“urban novels.” As I write this, the NYTBR has
just published a review of T Cooper’s novel Lipshitz Six,
which contains the following line, seemingly written just for this essay:
“Would a published novelist, even one who has taken to impersonating
a rap star, really write lines like ‘I know I can spit an ill
rhyme’?”
But you get the point. And anyway, there is more at stake than simply
offering critics a roadmap, or enfranchising hip hop writers. If lit
hop bumrushes the show, it threatens to break apart one of the most
psychotically hegemonic conversations in the literary world: The State
of the Novel.
Right now, that conversation looks like this: every few years, a writer
hungry for success and frustrated with his lack of popular acclaim publishes
an essay (typically in the pages of Harpers’) lambasting
whatever dominant set of aesthetics -- in stark contrast to his own
-- seems to be capturing the hearts and minds of readers. In so doing,
said writer (most recently Ben Marcus, and before that Jonathan Franzen)
knocks down a figurehead or two, gets people buzzing for a couple of
weeks, and sets high expectations for his own next work: with a framework
in place, readers can now anticipate and later understand just how the
writer will flip the paradigm upside-down. Ten years later, this writer,
and this paradigm, will again be flipped.
This perpetual king-killing accounts for only two paradigm positions:
rightside-up and upside-down. It enforces the notion of literary binaries
-- experimental vs. mainstream, accessible vs. alienating -- and excludes
from the conversation any writer or reader bored by the narrowness of
such strictures. It also tends to privilege a set of concerns and aesthetics
that dovetails neatly with a white, male, (over)educated writership.
(11) In the tradition of the New York Times Magazine praising
the new literary journal N+1 for being bold enough to editorialize
that 'it's time to say what we mean,' (12) the writers who pen these
essays are having a discussion about aesthetics and literary mores that
excludes the people doing some of the bravest and boldest work.
Perhaps 'saying what we mean' is a revolutionary idea for a generation
that, if you believe the New York Times, has grown up in the throes
of cynicism, irony, and disaffection. But these are tremendous luxuries,
and in truth, the dominant artforms of my generation have never embraced
them. Hip hop is a lot of things, but it has never been ironic. Nihilistic,
yes, but not cynical. It has always said what it means. The people who
pioneered hip hop and chaperoned it to global prominence have been too affected -- by poverty, by discrimmination, by incarceration,
by Reaganomics, by crack, by the struggle to survive and create -- to
cultivate the disaffect for which our generation is unfairly known.
Self-awareness -- the oft-lamented paralyzing postmodern condition of knowing that one is producing art, knowing that it’s
all been said and done before, fearing that in forging ahead you risk
redundancy, irrelevance, pretention -- has not produced paralysis in
hip hoppers. Perhaps our immunity from this generational malaise stems
from hip hop’s love of collaging, sampling, dislocating and reconfiguring:
the more that’s been said and done already, the more we have to
play with. Where others see defeat, we find liberation, empowerment.
This is the high culture/low culture dichotomy in full effect: despite
inventing one of the most brazen, earnest and political artforms on
the books, my generation is defined by the tortured self-aware pomo
aesthetic of a few writers, filmmakers and musicians. Then, when the
camps that cultivated and embraced disaffection begin to reconsider
it, they get props for doing so. This is the 21st century equivalent
of coronating Paul Whiteman the King of Jazz while Armstrong and Ellington
and Basie wait outside: you only find the Voice Of A Generation where
you look for it.
(1) The jury’s still
out on whether this contraction of ‘hip hop literature’
is corny, but we’ll go with it for now, because it’s mad
short.
(2) The hip hop version of Justice Scalia’s notorious judicial
philosophy, hip hop originalism deifies the founding fathers, insists
on strict fidelity to their supposed intentions, and treats dissenters
as heretics.
(3) The notion of hip
hop as a structural metaphor for democracy, for instance, has also been
applied to jazz and baseball, two other quintessentially American inventions.
(4) For instance, if you’d never heard Diana Ross, you might hear
“Mo Money, Mo Problems” and think Diddy was the greatest
musical mind of his generation.
(5) My favorite example
of sample-as-subversion is the Notorious B.I.G.’s first song,
“Party and Bullshit,” in which a line from The Last Poets’
“When The Revolution Comes” is truncated in such a way that
Jalal’s critique of folks too caught up in hedonism to fight for
change becomes a celebration of that hedonism.
(6) If jazz were hip hop, (and it’s a common enough metaphor)
it would be roughly 1935, and we’d be in the middle of the swing
era. Charlie Parker would be a teenager in Kansas City, Miles Davis
a nine-year-old in East St. Louis. John Coltrane wouldn’t be jamming
with Thelonious Monk at the Five Spot for another twenty years. Bebop,
modal, free and fusion would all be things of the future. All this should
be reassuring to those of us who worry that hip hop peaked in 1988 and
has increasingly been on some bullshit ever since -- as should the fact
that critics were pronouncing jazz dead as early as the 1930s. None
of this is reassuring in the least, of course. But it should be.
(7) Do we need their approval, or would it be a death knell? That’s
an eternal conversation, and I don’t want to spend too much time
on it. My investment isn’t in winning over critics, per se, but
on the mainstream audiences their support -- or even respect -- would
help us access. Those audiences need to hear what we have to say, and
through us understand hip hop as something deeper than what they flip
past on MTV.
(8) This seems like a good time to mention so-called ‘street-lit,’
the usually self-published books available on your finer 125th St card
tables, because so much of it seems intent on embodying this exact paradigm.
While I’m down with anything that encourages kids to read, or
allows folks to get paid for writing, it seems to me that the bulk of
these books are – from a literary perspective – garbage.
If we indulge the increasingly tired ‘hip hop vs. rap’ polarity,
these books would be rap: chocked with brand names, populated by blinged
out thugs and and video-vixen-style women, and plagued by shallow characters
and bad storytelling.
(9) There are two reasons I’m drawing so heavily on the NTYBR.
First, because as our national “newspaper of record,” it
wields more influence on a book’s fate than any other review source.
And second, because it publishes a lot of egregiously bigoted reviews.
(10) Who, in the interest of full disclosure, is also Victor Lavalle’s
editor and Danyel Smith’s. He also holds the distinction of being
the only hip hop generation black male Senior Editor in big publishing.
Yes. The only one.
(11) On paper, I’m totally one of those guys -- a white Jewish
novelist with an MFA from Columbia. I’ve never activated my membership
in that club, though. Nor have I ever made a conscious decision not
to; I’ve just always been a hip hopper, and the sensibilities,
artistically and politically, that followed from that have dictated
my path since I was eleven, memorizing Crinimal Minded and
beginning to understand the subjectivity of whiteness, as hip hop was
wont to make a whiteboy do back then. I’m relegating all this
to a footnote because I think us white folks tend to centralize ourselves
and our issues way too much when we do deign to talk about race or privilege
or access. Is it the role of yet another overeducated white guy to point
out the elitism of the State of the Novel convo? I think it can be,
for the same reason I wrote Angry Black White Boy: because
I can’t be labeled as just another complainer speaking from bitterness
and self-interest, which is the way people of color are often tagged,
and dismissed. To me, this is the proper use of privilege: to say things
for which people with less privilege might face knee-jerk recrimination.
(12) The author of this editorial is Keith Gessen. Not only is Gessen
my boy, but we co-edited the features section of our high school newspaper
circa 1993. Whaddup, Gessen.