444 - Rapsody in Black: Utopian Aspirations

Rapsody in Black: Utopian Aspirations

By Jon Michael Spencer

"It is not rapping per se--the style of vocalization, its syncopations, or its driving, percussive rhythms--that is dreaded by the protected white world. What threatens is the cultural and attitudinal blackness of the music, the verbal brashness of its performers, their irruption of speech, their 'insurrection of subjugated knowledges'.... The Jesus of old-style gospel is 'white' because the message that black people are nothing coincides with what long has been told them by white America. In gospel hip-hop, however, this tradition is being radically overturned. "

AS BLUES was becoming popular during the early decades of the twentieth century, black churchgoers and preachers denounced it as music "taken up from the devil," in part because its lyrics were sexually explicit. Jazz fared no better throughout the twenties when debate raged among whites regarding whether the music could intoxicate them and seduce them into sexual promiscuity and interracial mixing. This fear initially appears to be reminiscent of the theory of the nineteenth century French scholar J. A. Gobineau, who claimed that the black "female" races historically have been the seducers and corrupters of the white "male" races. ¹ The reaction that rap music engenders suggests that there is some greater terror beyond the "threat" of, racial seduction, namely the utter dread of the white "female" races being raped by the black "male" races. The late African activist and psychoanalyst, Frantz Fanon, claimed that for most white people, the black man represents "sexual instinct in its raw state" and is "the incarnation of a genital potency beyond all moralities and prohibitions." ² A close examination of the reactions that rap causes in certain constituencies of American society reveals a terror that rap may lead to racial insurrection-not so much the social unrest

Jon Michael Spencer is Associate Professor of Popular Culture, Bowling Green State University. He has served as Visiting Assistant Professor at Duke University Divinity School, where he did his theological training. He is author of a number of books, including Protest and Praise: Sacred Music of Black Religion (1990) and Black Hymnody: A Hymnological History of the African-American Church (1991). He is editor of Black Sacred Music: A Journal of Theomusicology.

¹ Martin Bernal, Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization, vol. 1 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1987), pp. 354-55.

² Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Charles Lam Markmann (New York: Grove Press, 1967), p. 177.

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witnessed during the sixties, but chaotic gang warfare and rampant rape.

I

The frequent juxtaposition of rap and rape, first seen in Tipper Gore's Washington Post editorial titled "Hate, Rape and Rap," justifies this postulate. ³ This again occurs in a Newsweek editorial titled "America's Slide Into the Sewer," in which journalist George F. Will juxtaposes the rap lyrics of 2 Live Crew and explicit testimonies of the legal defendants regarding the attack of the jogger in New York's Central Park in April, 1990. ⁴ In another newspaper, it was reported that during sentencing, one of the males convicted in this case "swaggered through a rambling, rap-styled poem he had composed in jail." ⁵

Is the attack on rap, then, not a consequence of the connection that when establishment whites see rap, they read rape, that they view the rappist as a rapist, that they understand rapsody to be sodomy? Fanon had long contended that when whites say "rape" they mean "black." ⁶ Now we understand that when they say "rap" they are saying "rape." This is what the legal defender of 2 Live Crew's album meant when he said to an all-white Florida jury that "rape is not a black artistic event." The title and substance of Public Enemy's third album, Fear of a Black Planet, signifies white fear of the ghetto's "illegitimate sexualities" penetrating their neighborhoods and their bodies, not to mention the "spiritual peril" of what C. G. Jung called "going black under the skin."⁷

The reality of rap has been overshadowed by the ominousness of these feelings and fears, as well as by debates regarding rap's legitimacy. When rap is considered in its authentic context, there is no question that the musicality, unique expressivity, sexuality, and ideology of rap have historical, social, political, and cultural continuity and legitimacy. The vocal style has its beginnings in African orature, which resurfaces in North America as "pattin' juba," a patting and rapping good-time enjoyed by the mid-nineteenth-century enslaved, and it continues to the present day in myriad manifestations of black street talk. On the ideological side, today's hard-core rappers follow in a tradition that, dating back to the liberation spirituals and antislavery songs of the nineteenth century, includes more recent expressions, such as Gil Scott-Heron's political poem, "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised;" Len Chandler's mid-sixties radical freedom song, "Move on Over or We'll Move on Over You;" James Brown's

³ Tipper Gore, "Hate, Rape and Rap," The Washington Post, January 8,1990.

⁴ George F. Will, "America's Slide Into the Sewer," Newsweek, July 30,1990.

⁵ 'NYC Crime: 3 Teens Get Prison for Assault of Jogger," USA Today, September 12, 1990.

⁶ Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, p. 166.

⁷ C. G. Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, rev. ed. (New York: Vintage Books, 1989), p. 245.

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late-sixties soul song, "Say It Loud, I'm Black and I'm Proud;" and Louis Farrakhan's first composed song for the Nation of Islam, "A White Man's Heaven is a Black Man's Hell." This revolutionary ethos and rapsodic expressionism, which is found in the musico-poetry of today's hard-core rappers, is a specific mood of attitude, such as the black-power black nationalism of Marcus Garvey, Elijah Muhammad, Malcolm X, Muhammad Ali, Stokely Carmichael, H. Rap Brown, Angela Davis, Louis Farrakhan, and many other apostles of black liberation. One young advocate of rap alluded to this attitudinal ethos when he said that rappers were his generation's "loosely organized Black Panthers." ⁸

This attitude, causative of what the late philosopher Michel Foucault called "insurrection of subjugated knowledges," is clearly connected with the "negritude" attitude of early-twentieth-century anticolonialist African intellectuals and activists. Fanon, one of the later advocates of negritude, foresaw that this attitude was to penetrate every reach of the African diaspora: "The poets of (negritudel will not stop at the limits of the [African] continent. From America, black voices will take up the hymn with fuller unison." ⁹ Even today, the problems of Afro-America-capitalist exploitation, state repression, selective prosecution, civil terrorism, personal and systemic racialismare not fundamentally different from the problems caused by apartheid in South Africa. In fact, Mandela has become a symbol of resistance to America's rapping "sidewalk prophets" who, as the juvenile, self-proclaimed oracles of God's wrath, declare that those who sow the wind shall-by whatever means necessary-reap the whirlwind.

II

It is not rapping per se--the style of vocalization, its syncopations, or its driving, percussive rhythms--that is dreaded by the protected white world. What threatens is the cultural and attitudinal blackness of the music, the verbal brashness of its performers, their irruption of speech, their "insurrection of subjugated knowledges." Whites had faced this discursive explosion in the sixties and were deeply distraught. Now the discursive explosion is re-emerging in such rappers as MC Supreme, whose rap and video, "Black in America," reveal the reality of attempted racial genocide, and NWA (Niggas With Attitudes), whose album, Straight Outta Compton, opens with the declaration: "You are now about to witness the strength of street knowledge." it is this strength of street knowledge, the triumph of the street ethic, that rapper Ice-T (on "The Oprah Winfrey Show") accused the critics of rap of fearing. But as the existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre says in the opening of Black Orpheus: "What then did you expect when you

⁸ James Bernard, "The Rise of Rap: Reflections on the Growth of the Hip Hop Nation," African Commentary, June 1990, p. 50.

⁹ Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (New York: Grove Press, 1966), p. 172.

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unbound the gag that had muted those black mouths? That they would chant your praises?" ¹⁰

This "insurrection of subjugated knowledges"-the ungagged black mouth and the power of street knowledge-was feared by whites in the sixties, and it is feared by them today. This is particularly the case since currently the "insurrection of subjugated knowledges" is coupled with an insurrection of subjugated sexualities. Male rappers, flaunting exaggerated perceptions of their sexual capacities, tease white fears of alleged black illicit sexualities and fuel the fantasy of the black penis and the illusion of the black rapist. As perhaps signified by 2 Live Crew's "Dick Almighty," on their album As Nasty as They Wanna Be, white fear has made rap into a phallic symbol. This supports Fanon's longtime contention that whites view the black male as a "terrifying penis," ¹¹ enthroned, as Jung would say, "ithyphallically" (upright). ¹² For oppressed black males, particularly those who are aware of this white terror of black male sexuality, it is gratifying, as Foucault alludes, to wield such power:

If sex is repressed, that is, condemned to prohibition, nonexistence, and silence, then the mere fact that one is speaking about it has the appearance of a deliberate transgression. A person who holds forth in such language places himself to a certain "tent outside the reach of power; he upsets established law; he somehow anticipates the coming freedom. ¹³

While modern society unceasingly speaks of sexuality within the repressive enclave of secrecy (while capitalism exploits it as the secret), and while the confession (the verbal ejection of evil) remains the customary standard for sexual discourse, ¹⁴ rap's insurgence of subjugated sexualities is radical because there is no secret, no confession, no self-interrogation. It is intentional, and deliberate transgression is always more forceful than failing astray, even though falling astray is more radical because of its totality. ¹⁵ It is the force of the emergence of rap that utterly penetrates white defenses.

Of course, not all rap is a protest music of insurrectionary knowledges or sexualities; some of it is simply pop, as some rappers say, "candy rap." Nonetheless, rap-pop or hard-core-tends to attract youths who are protest listeners, persons who, as players of language and listening politics, listen to rap as a means of protesting against the establishment. For black youths who embrace rap as a symbol of protest, it is an expression of negritude. For white youths-who customarily despise negritude but emulate soul, despise blackness of mind, but emulate "going black under the skin"-rap is an icon of the

¹⁰ Cited in Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, p. 29.

¹¹ Ibid., p. 177.

¹²Jung, op. cit, p. 12.

¹³ Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. I (New York: Vintage Books, 1980), p. 6.

¹⁴ Ibid., pp. 35, 63.

¹⁵ Paul Ricoeur, The Symbolism of Evil, (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969), p. 73.

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resentment they feel toward the "square" (white) status quo. As in any situation where an icon is attacked, the assault (iconoclasm) upon rap has imbued the music with even further symbolic potency and meaning for resentment listeners, has increased the population of listeners who subscribe to its newly broadened symbolism of protest, and has given rappers greater power. At present, rap not only symbolizes the attitude of negritude (especially for black youths), an anti-establishment sentiment (for some white youths), and "the emergency of black" (for black scholars), but also freedom of speech (for some liberal whites). Rap, as a resentment listening music, collectively comprises the power of emancipated knowledges, the determination to change established society, and the anticipation of liberation.

III

Who is to blame for this increased population of resentment listeners and the multiplied power of rappers? First to be blamed are those who Sartre would say have, in existentialist terms, "bad faith." Here, it would be those who have overreacted in their sense of dread that results from false racial characterizations, and have lynched and mutilated rap, seemingly as sexual revenge (white males) and as a rite of purification (white females). It is as though this population of rap iconoclasts believed that if they could subjugate "lower-class sexualities" and expunge the language that makes these sexualities a "discursive fact," that their own sexuality (especially their children's) could be repressed and controlled. White youths who understand this often protest their repression by parents by joining the ranks of rap's resentment listeners. Also to be blamed for the increased population of resentment listeners and the multiplied power of rappers is the Federal Government. Monitoring the insurrectionary knowledges of rap, as they do the negritudinal voice of Farrakhan, the FBI sent a warning letter to the record company of NWA regarding a rap they recorded titled "F---tha Police." While NWA maintains that the rap is simply a "revenge fantasy" that responds to the civil terrorism long perpetrated against the black ghetto poor, the FBI contends that it encourages violence against police.

Another instance of rap iconoclasm by the Federal Government is the selective prosecution of 2 Live Crew. During the summer of 1990, their album As Nasty as They Wanna Be was ruled obscene by a federal district court judge in Florida, and the group's leader, Luther Campbell, and one of the other two members were arrested on obscenity charges for performing raps from the album in a Florida nightclub. Although the group recorded a "nice" version of the album, titled As Nice as They Wanna Be, the iconoclasm fueled the sale of the "nasty" version and, for some negritudinal and protest-listening constituencies (respectively in the black and white communities), elevated the group's leader to the status of a traditional "badman" hero. In a long-playing single titled Banned in the USA, Campbell responded in

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role with a heroic "badman" assault upon the "white-collar people trying to cramp our style, saying we're too nasty and we're too loud." He concludes: "Too live is what we are." Because of the iconoclaststhe government "feds" and the religious "fundies" (fundamentalists)the voice of rap has become increasingly lengthy and loud. They attack rap as sexual revenge, as a rite of purification, as a political strategy to silence and suppress the oppressed; but if these iconoclasts were ever to destroy the badman-which is one means of annulling perceived threat, defilement, insurrection-they will have martyred him, as an H. Rap Brown.

This is essentially true for the "badman," not the "bad nigger." The attitude of the "bad nigger" is not negritude, it is narcissism and hedonism, and it is genocidal. Like the attitude of those who denigrate rap-reading it with "bad faith" as rape-so do "bad niggers" have "bad faith." The "bad nigger" is not viewed as a hero by the masses of the black community, whose safety and moral stability he threatens. Even other rappers volley against him for "dissin' " (disrespecting) members of their community. Ice Cube, in "The Nigga Ya Love to Hate" on his Amerikkka's Most Wanted album, portrays himself in this way.

Where the rap iconoclasts go wrong is in their castigating the negritude with the niggertude. The hard-core rappers, who engage in "insurrection of subjugated knowledges" are but "badmen" practicing self-determinative politico-moral leadership. The political rappers they are not "bad niggers"; they are but youths who "attitudinally" speak knowledgeably about the "bad faith" the establishment has essentially effected in their communities: social jingoism (such as black stereotyping) and civil terrorism (such as police-on-black crime). In response, the political rappers, alongside a new group of Christian rappers, advocate the formation of community: unity over disunity, economic self-determination over black-on-black crime and "gang banging." For them, it is the divine attribute of knowledge that can lead to the overcoming of fear, deception, and hatred that cause division and disrupt community.

IV

Christian hip-hop is the newest form of gospel music, whose genealogy includes the transitional period (begun in 1900), represented by the gospel hymns of Charles Albert Tindley and Charles Price Jones; the traditional period (begun in 1930), represented by Thomas A. Dorsey and Lucie E. Campbell; and the contemporary period (begun in 1969), represented by Edwin Hawkins and Andrae Crouch. Akin to contemporary gospel, Christian hip-hop (begun ca. 1989) has its beginnings as concert rather than liturgical music, and it, too, likely will find its way into black churches that are desperately seeking to speak to today's youths. Among the hip-hop evangelists that sing unto the Lord this "new song" are PID (Preachers in Disguise), ETW (End

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Time Warriors), SFC (Soldiers for Christ), DC Talk, Witness, D-Boy Rodriguez, Helen Baylor, Michael Peace, and Fresh Fish. Even secular pop star, MC Hammer, does a Christian rap (and video) titled "Pray.,'

Just as the hard-core rap of Public Enemy makes Michael Jackson's secular "Man in the Mirror" seem otherworldly, so does the existentially oriented hard-core style of PID make the messages of earlier forms of gospel seem drastically irrelevant. The difference is attitude. When PID addresses such issues as homelessness, sexually transmitted disease, and racism, and does so in a language that today's inner-city youths speak, the group succeeds where modern gospel has virtually failed. They get positive messages across to secular inner-city constituencies that have lost faith in a savior they have never seen and who, by all pictorial accounts, is white like the oppressor. Therefore, in contrast to the older forms of gospel (1900-1989), the hip-hop gospelers have begun to redefine what ministry to the "sick and shut-in" should entail. They perceive the "sick" to be those who lack unity with and self-actualization within the black community because, genocidally, they are politically held down, socially split up, and psychologically cut off from the root of their Africanity. The "shut-in" are those who are held captive on the modern plantations of America's neo-colonialist slavocracy, namely, the victims of economic exploitation, selective criminal prosecution, covert government harassment, civil terrorism, and personal and institutional racialism.

While the precursors of Christian hip-hop have had almost nothing to say about the life-and-death problems that the "ghetto poor" daily face-issues considered "worldly" by old-style gospel-Christian hiphop may turn out to be the single prophetically pragmatic voice in a new postmodern Christianity, a voice uninhibited by powers-that-be diplomacy. Despite the threat of postmodernism entering the parish, this "new song" must be embraced and encouraged by the black church if the historic institution is ever to reclaim its relevance to those who too often and for too long have been neglected by its otherworldly politics.

Not only does gospel hip-hop make its genealogical precursors appear otherworldly, but its Jesus makes the Jesus of old-style gospel appear increasingly "white." While the Jesus of old-style gospel clearly is the "white Jesus"-the ideological icon with lily-white complexion, long, flowing blond or brunette hair, and nordic facial features-the Jesus of gospel hip-hop is black, owing to the tradition of black Christian nationalism. In the era in which old-style gospel evolved, black churches customarily carried images of the "white Jesus" in portraits, murals, and stained glass windows, not to mention that Jesus was " white" in black parishioners' minds. Furthermore, the Jesus portrayed in old-style gospel is "white" because this music characteristically calls for a complete turn toward Jesus by means of fanatical self-effacement of individual identity and human personhood. Jesus is "everything" and "all," and human beings and human life are nothing.

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But this is antithetical to the attitude. Perhaps it is naturally religious for religious people to perceive themselves as nothing in order to edify and worship God as everything, but what is lacking in old-style gospel is the idea that in and through God people can become if not everything then at least something. The Jesus of old-style gospel is "white" because the message that black people are nothing coincides with what long has been told them by white America. In gospel hip-hop, however, this tradition is being radically overturned.

The hard-core gospel rap of PID clearly differs from that segment of secular rap that mutes or eliminates "utopian aspirations" aspirations seeking transcendence from or opposition to evil. ¹⁶ But hard-core gospel hip-hop is not fundamentally different from the secular corpus of rap that embodies "utopian aspirations." Kool Moe Dee has, for instance, a rap titled "God Made Me Funke." Like the God of gospel hip-hop, his is a black God; for only a black God would, after God's own image, make a brother or a sister "funke." Similarly, Public Enemy, in a piece titled "Welcome to the Terrordome" on their Fear of the Black Planet album, relates Jesus Christ's crucifixion to their own persecution by those who fear their negritude. Their statement that " crucifixion ain't no fiction"-that crucifixion is the living reality of the black oppressed-brings down to an experiential level what is for today's youths an archaic biblicism: the crucifixion of an incarnate "white" God.

Furthermore, rap is theological. "Utopian aspirations" in rap are epitomized in the idea of soteriological knowledge, rap gnosticism. This knowledge demystifies the socio-political context while uncovering the consciousness of the subject. Further, it embodies a principle of dignity and worth that stimulates new modes of thought and that approximates or effects a type of conversion. This knowledge is signified by the names of such rap groups as the Poor Righteous Teachers (PRT), the Intellectual Hoodlum, and KRS-One (Knowledge Reigns Supreme Over Nearly Everyone), and by myriad rap songs such as "Knowledge Is King" by Kool Moe Dee and "Holy Intellect" by PRT (which the rap says are "holy as the mind"). When various writers speak of the "message rappers," the "political rappers," or the "teachers," they are essentially alluding to the "utopian aspirations" inherent to rap gnosticism, as opposed to those rappers with "bad faith" who mute "utopian aspirations."

Amid the emergence of rap--which is the insurgence of subjugated knowledges and sexualities--there is, either latent or active, "utopian aspirations," or hope. If this hope is static, it perhaps needs only to be awakened through a knowledge that can reveal that hope is indeed present, and that it is, in the words of the Poor Righteous Teachers, "holy as the mind."

¹⁶ Cornel West, "On Afro-American Popular Music: From Bebop to Rap," in Prophetic Fragments (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans; Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 1988), p. 186.