Food for your thoughts : English Knowledge

Food for your thoughts : English Knowledge
 
Plutôt que de retrouver les discours de Condoleeza Rice ou les textes à thème de 50 Cent et The Game, vous trouverez ici en V.O dans le texte différents écrits et interviews de personnages dont la connaissance, l’ouverture d’esprit et le travail sont plus profitables au hip hop mondial que tous les business réunis…
 

Sommaire:

Mark Anthony Neal

Mark Anthony Neal / Gwendolyn Pough

Najee Ali

 

Hadji Williams

A.Thiel

 

Davey D

 

Wendy Day

Sommaire:

-Who is M.A.N?

-Extraits d’interview: la commercialisation du hip hop. Son sens politique.

Pourquoi tant d’ artistes ne se risquent pas à être originaux ?

Le Hip Hop, consécration de la misogynie?

-“Rhythm & Business, Cultural Imperialism and the HarvardReport” est un des meilleurs textes de MAN et une des meilleurs études de l’évolution du Rythm’ N Blues au Rhythm & Business qui fait tellement honte à l’histoire de la musique noire américaine.

Un héros du gouvernement américain finalement responsable d’ exactions envers les mouvements sociaux américains.

Qui est la conscience du hip hop?

-Who is M.A.N?

L’auteur noir américain Mark Anthony Neal  est un spécialiste du hip hop, un activiste et un fervent défenseur de la condition féminine.. Enjoy pure intelligence.

MARK ANTHONY NEAL is the author of four books, What the Music Said: Black Popular Music and Black Public Culture (1998), Soul Babies: Black Popular Culture and the Post-Soul Aesthetic (2002), Songs in the Keys of Black Life: A Rhythm and Blues Nation (2003) and New Black Man: Rethinking Black Masculinity (2005). Neal is also the co-editor (with Murray Forman) of That’s the Joint!: The Hip-Hop Studies Reader (2004). Neal's essays have been anthologized in more than half-a-dozen books, including the 2004 edition of the acclaimed series Da Capo Best Music Writing, edited by Mickey Hart. Neal is Associate Professor of Black Popular Culture in the Program in African and African American Studies at Duke University.

Extraits d’interview: la commercialisation du hip hop. Son sens politique.

Source :

9:36AMhttp://www.blogger.com/deletecomment.g?blogID=13096878&postID=111953381349616829

Mark Anthony Neal: The problem with the commercialization of hip-hop is that it trumpets just one aspect of hip-hop culture—say the 50 Cent phenomenon—at the expense of the diversity of ideas and styles that exist in hip-hop. I also think that it dulls the integrity of those in the industry, especially young acts coming in the business who might feel compelled to take short cuts that gets them on a Viacom channel, instead of really developing their skills. The best selling artists, quite frankly, are rarely the best artists. To suggest that appropriation by "white culture" is a problem, is too simple of an analysis. The best art conceived in America has been about the thoughtful exchange between people and cultures—we all borrow, and hip-hop has borrowed better than any form. But when these exchanges take place within a market culture where the artists are often exploited by the corporate machines that market and distribute their art, there's always the possibility that the originators of a particular art form are displaced from their innovations. Suddenly the most popular and often white artist (Elvis Presley, Eric Clapton, Eminem, being good examples) become synonymous with a particular art form, in which black artists were its primary innovators and creators.

/

Q: What are the "spatial-politics" of hip-hop?

MAN: In the early days of hip-hop, it was all about creating and in some cases reclaiming public space for black and Latino/a youth in urban settings. One of the reasons why hip-hop has always been political (no matter what the content) is because it was an assault on public space. The very sound—or noise—of hip-hop made it politically relevant and forced the larger society to take notice of those who created the noise. And that noise was created to deal with specific environments, thus hip-hop based in New York, particularly in the early days was a response to a built environment of elevated subways, underground subways, 20 story project buildings, etc, while West Coast hip-hop reflected a built environment of cars, freeways, beaches, etc.

Q: Part 5 in That's the Joint! is devoted to drawing connections between rap, politics and resistance. How has rap impacted economics, politics and gender within the African-American community?

MAN: Hip-hop has provided a forum for black youth to discuss issues of economics, politics, gender and sexuality. More often or not black youth have did so to the deaf ears of black politicians and Civil Rights leaders. While hip-hop has provided some real economic opportunity for those involved, I don't think its yet met its potential as a truly engaged space for political or economic change.

/

Pourquoi tant d’ artistes ne se risquent pas à être originaux ?

extraits d’interview de Farai Chideya pour The Africana:

What do artists risks by being original?

I thought it was important to close the book with a piece on Umar Bin Hassan (of the Last Poets), the rapper Paris, and Gino L. Morrow, who I went to school with, did spoken word with. They're gonna do what they're gonna do, not what the publicity people want.

There's been a whole tradition of black folks, artists, who've done this [sacrifice money for artistic control] their whole careers and been happy. I had a great conversation with Al Jarreau last week. He said he never made any money his whole career, but he's been happy being Al Jarreau and doing what he did.

Now there's a generation of black artists out there in music and literature who no longer want to make the kind of sacrifice you have to to be an artist.

I'm not hating on artists who want to be promoted. But when artists see it as natural to conform, that's a dangerous moment for black art.

Le Hip Hop, consécration de la misogynie?

Extrait de “Hip Hop's Gender Problem” posté par Mark Anthony Neal, Africana.com. , 2004.

In a society that remains largely ignorant of the scholarly, political and cultural contributions of women like Anna Julia Cooper, Audre Lorde, Angela Davis ("oh yeah, the chick with the afro, right?"), June Jordan, bell hooks, Michele Wallace, Patricia Hill-Collins, Jewell Gomez, Joy James, Beverley Guy-Sheftall and Masani Alexis De Veaux, how can we expect hip-hop to do the heavy-lifting that hasn't been done in the larger culture? Despite popular belief, hip-hop is not the most prominent site of sexism and misogyny in American society, but a reflection of the sexism and misogyny that more powerfully circulates within American culture. In many ways the images and lyrics used to objectify women of color in hip-hop videos serve as metaphors for the ways that American society actually treats those women. As Pough notes, "rappers become grunt workers for the patriarchy: They sow the field of misogyny for the patriarchy and provide the labor necessary to keep it in operation, much as Black men and women provided the free and exploited labor that built the United States." Remember, the black men on the screen are "performing" -- performing their notions of how American masculinity embodies power through force, violence and exploitation. (50 ain't the only thug or pimp in the room -- there are more than a few in the White House and at the Pentagon.)

In many ways, our discussions about hip-hop culture are the product of a very myopic view of contemporary black expressive culture. Yes, hip-hop needs to be reformed, but it's not as if hip-hop were the only place where young black men and women are discussing the very reasons why hip-hop remains so problematic to some of us. For example, Princeton University scholar Daphne Brooks asserts that few critics have paid attention to the significance of narratives by black female R&B artists. She argues that "Black Women's popular desire is thus depoliticized and disregarded for its reflections on domestic and socio-economic politics and sexual fulfillment." But she adds that what "critics have failed to fully interrogate are the ways in which this subgenre also operates as an extension of hip-hop culture itself." A good example of this is an artist like Syleena Johnson, who has circulated within hip-hop via remixes with the Flip-Mode Squad and most recently singing the hook on Kanye West's "All Falls Down" (no, that's not Lauryn Hill you're hearing). On her disc Chapter One: Love, Pain and Forgiveness (2001), Johnson, recorded the track "Hit on Me," which explicitly addressed the issue of domestic abuse.

If we think about contemporary black popular culture more broadly than what urban radio and BET tells us, then we are likely to find the work of artists like Ursula Rucker and Sarah Jones. Rucker first came to prominence, performing spoken word poetry on The Roots' recordings Do You Want More?!!!??! (1995), Illadelph Halflife (1996) and Things Fall Apart (1999). In 2001 she released her own disc Supa Sista, which included the track "What???", which challenged mainstream rappers to a battle. But Rucker sets up the rules for the battle stating "no krissy, no thongs, no baby-boos or baby-daddies/no tricks no whips no weight pushing/and absolutely no platinum or ice/no guns no lies about your ghetto rep..." essentially challenging her male colleagues to rely simply on their wit and creativity, instead of the standard tropes of ghetto authenticity. In a more celebrated example, performance artist Sarah Jones stepped to the mic to hold mainstream hip-hop accountable with her track "Your Revolution" (on DJ Vadim's USSR: Life from the Other Side). "Your Revolution" is a riff off Gil Scot-Heron's "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised," and on the track Jones takes shots at the sexist lyrics of artists like Biggie ("Big Poppa"), LL ("Doin' It"), and Shaggy ("Boombastic"). But in an ironic twist that perfectly captures the struggles of those who try to hold hip-hop accountable, Jones' lyrics were cited as "vulgar" by the FCC and a complaint was filed after the song was played on Portland, Oregon's KBOO in 1999.

“Rhythm & Business, Cultural Imperialism and the HarvardReport” est un des meilleurs textes de MAN et une des meilleurs études de l’évolution du Rythm’ N Blues au Rhythm & Business qui fait tellement honte à l’histoire de la musique noire américaine.

Initialement écrit par Mark Anthony Neal pour  “Pop Matters” et désormais disponible sur divers sites américains.

Part One: Rhythm & Business, Cultural Imperialism and the HarvardReport

Yeah, I’m nostalgic: When Mary J. Blige first uttered the opening lines to “You Remind Me,” it was about making sure that hip-hop remembered that R&B came from the same streets where crackheads roamed and the same tenement vestibules where drama went down on the regular. But as I listen to Mario’s “Let Me Love You” for the 727th time, it is perhaps easy to suggest that R&B has lost its Soul, or that Clear Channel,
Radio One (luv ya, Cathy!), AOL-Time Warner and Viacom – a neo-plantation cabal if ever there was one – ripped its heart out. Hip-hop may have sold out, but at least it has sold out on its own terms. R&B, on the other hand, has sold out on somebody else’s, on a pop-chart paper chase. Truth be told, U®sher was nothing more than a soon-past-his-peak R&B singer before John Smith laced him with some
crunk junk; Ray J could have sang the hook on “Yeah” and topped the pop charts. And now, 10 million units later, we want to act like Mr.Raymond is the second coming of Michael Jackson? I ain’t willing to
grant him the second coming of Bobby Brown. And it is not like we even knew Mr. Legend (in his own mind) and Ms. Queen of Crunk n’ B were in the room, until some hip-hop act sanctioned their presence. But what ails contemporary R&B is not just a matter of the commercial success of John Legend – and Amerie and Ciara and Mario. The current state of R&B comes not from a sudden decline, but a process more than 30 years in the making.

This story begins in 1972, when a few enterprising master’s students at the Harvard Business School prepared a study, commissioned by one of Columbia’s execs, detailing how the Columbia Records Group could better integrate the then largely independent black music industry into the mix. The now infamous Harvard Report – officially known as “A Study of the Soul Music Environment” – has often been referred to as a sinister blueprint aimed at arming a litany of “culture bandits” with the theoretical tools to return black culture to a neo-colonial state. There’s no denying that this is exactly the situation we’re staring at now, but it has nothing to do with the Harvard Report. What those MBA students articulated was a no-brainer marketing plan, informed by the commercial success of Motown and the cynical (though not mistaken) view that the Civil Rights “revolution” likely had more to do with the realities that black folk had disposable income and white folk consumed a hell of a lot of black popular culture than anything to do with real structural change in American society. In response to those expecting more sinister designs in the Harvard Report, David Sanjek rhetorically chimes, “why did [Columbia] feel the need to document what they should have already known?” (Rhythm and Business, 62). What Sanjek suggests is that eventually somebody in the music industry would have come up with their own version of the Harvard Report – say, Clive Davis, who incidentally was a president at Columbia at the time that the report was commissioned. The point is, with or without the Harvard Report, the takeover was well underway.

Black music has always had a complicated relationship with big business. That this relationship has typically had little to do with actual music perhaps explains the often unbalanced quality of this thing we’ve come to call R&B. This complicated relationship also partly explains what exactly R&B is. The term R&B is essentially a shortened version of “Rhythm & Blues", but as a novice might discern, that which is called R&B bears little resemblance to the musical landscape created by Ruth Brown, Louis Jordan, Laverne Baker, Charles Brown and the Coasters. And perhaps that was the point. Musical innovations aside, R&B was essentially a marketing ploy that finally gained a significant foothold during the late 1970s. R&B was born out of competing logics – record companies tried to negotiate the realities of black culture and identity within the history of race relations in America while trying at the same time to reach a wider audience of black consumers and white record buyers. As black radio needed mainstream advertisers to court the emerging black middle class (as much an ideology as a measurement of economic and social status) and mainstream record labels became fixated on crossing over black artists to white consumers, terms like Soul and Rhythm and Blues quickly became too black. The same terminology turnover occurred during the late 1970s when urban began to stand for radio stations that essentially programmed black music. As Nelson George explains, “Urban was supposedly a multicolored programming style tuned to the rhythms of America’s crossfertilized big cities…. But more often, urban was black radio in disguise.” (The Death of Rhythm and Blues, 159).

According to the “Harvard Report” black radio was strategically important to record companies because it provided “access to large and growing record buying public, namely, the Black consumer.” The report is oblivious to the fact that the very birth of what was called “race music” in the 1930s was premised on selling goods and services to a uniquely defined audience, namely African-Americans constrained by Jim Crow segregation-an audience that might even buy a record or two, in the process of buying furniture, cleaning supplies and an insurance policy. Nevertheless, the report is cognizant of the growth of an emerging black middle class, one that would prove attractive not just to record companies but also advertisers eager to fuel black desires to consume the fetishes of a post-Civil Rights world. In the aftermath of centuries of struggle, exploitation and violence, some members of the black middle class often viewed their ability to consume widely throughout mainstream society as an emblem of the “freedoms” won during the Civil Rights struggle.

To get a sense of what this urbane blackness would look and feel like, think of the immensely popular early 1980s Colt 45 commercials featuring Billy Dee Williams. Twenty years later, no one really blinked an eye when poet Sonia Sanchez and Eric Benet used “smooth” R&B to hawk for an automobile maker. As R&B began to be viewed as the quintessence of upscale blackness, the more gritter aspects of black popular music –that which was, as Houston Baker Jr. describes it, “too blackly public” (as in embarrassing, like black folk eating watermelon in public) – began to disappear from the program list of some urban radio outlets in the late 1970s. So-called Southern Soul – the ZZ Hills, Denise LaSalles and Betty Wrights of the world – was an example of the kind of music that vanished from urban radio. Though Southern Soul didn’t disappear – labels like Malaco and Ichiban continue to promote Southern Soul artists to this day – the more bluesier aspects of its sound and its references to black southern culture were the very antithesis of the post-Civil Rights worldviews of many African-Americans. The popped-over P-Funk of Rick James – one of the best selling black artists at the beginning of the post-Soul era –was emblematic of the brave new world of R&B. The challenge for record labels at this point was to come up with product to feed the R&B machine.

The Harvard Report was adamant that the Columbia Records Group should not attempt to purchase any of the prominent Soul labels (Motown, Atlantic, Stax) or poach from them any of their established artists. (CRG eventually purchased Stax, but only after the label was in serious decline.) What the report did advise was that CRG cultivate relationships with small independent labels, as was the case when CRG began a relationship with Kenny Gamble and Leon Huff. The product was Philadelphia International Records (PIR), and the impact of this groundbreaking relationship continues to reverberate 33 years later. As some critics – notably John A. Jackson in A House on Fire: The Rise and Fall of Philadelphia Soul – have observed, many of the Harvard Report’s suggestions were already in play at Columbia, and the relationship with PIR is one such example. This brings us back to Clive Davis, the point-person on both the PIR and Stax deals. Dismissed from Columbia is 1973 for financial irregularities (some have linked his dismissal to our jumble word for the day: alopya), Davis had nonetheless instigated the distribution and creative-resource relationship with PIR that would become the defining model for relationships between large corporate labels and black music, making Davis himself arguably the most prominent figure in the story of R&B.

The language that the Harvard Report uses to describe the value of indie Soul labels is undisputable: “These small independents could provide a source of product, in the form of ‘hot masters;’ talent which could have national potential; experienced personnel…in the areas of promotion and production; and serve as a source of captive independent producers.” Davis has claimed that he never read the Harvard Report, though it’s clear that he would have been one of key figures that the authors of the report would have interviewed, and Davis may well have provided them with substantive info regarding the importance of indie labels. Regardless of the source, what the report details is the blueprint for the black boutique label – essentially based on a model of neo-colonialism, where an imperialist power exploits the raw materials and talents of its satellites under the pretense that such satellites are autonomous. As Norman Kelley observes, “In classic colonialism, products were produced in raw periphery and sent back to the imperial motherland to be manufactured into commodities, then sold in metropolitan centers or back to the colonies. The outcome for the colony was stunted economic growth, as it was stripped of its ability to manufacture products for its own needs” (Rhythm and Business, 10). Looked at within the context of artistic production, the colonial model creates a context where black artistic production is mediated by a commodity culture more interested in “moving product” than cultivating art or developing artists, and then sold back to the masses as “art", in the process stunting creative development. The irony is that which could be defined as organic artistic expression is seen illegitimate by the masses, who have been programmed to accept corporate packaging as the real.

Clive Davis is probably less a sinister figure in the rise and fall of R&B and more the embodiment of the corporate hustler. But there’s no denying that the very blueprint he outlined at Columbia became the most bankable strategy for R&B especially as he ascended to the leadership of Arista. For example, the most significant and successful black “boutique” labels of the 1990s, LaFace and Bad Boy Entertainment, were developed in Clive Davis’s house. Despite the negative impact that the corporate co-opting of black culture has on black creativity, we’re still left with the brilliance of the boutique model, as witnessed by the success of PIR. It all began with the production: the simple elegance of Billy Paul’s “Me and Mrs. Jones” or Harold Melvin and the Bluenotes’ “If You Don’t Know Me By Now” or the glossy funk of The O’Jay’s “I Love Music". The “Philly sound” (include Thom Bell and Mighty Three Publishing in this mix) became the soundtrack for an upscale blackness as far removed from the plantations of the South as it was from the factories of the Midwest. Kenny Gamble and Leon Huff were the real deal, and although they were not the sole innovators of this sound – think of the symphonic landscapes of Gene Page or the string arrangements of Paul Riser – the promotional and distribution muscle of Columbia allowed the duo to nationalize what was essentially a regional sound. By the end of the 1970s strains of the PIR could be heard in virtually every popular R&B song.

The boutique model was not necessarily about crossing R&B over to the mainstream, but rather positioning the larger corporate labels to better control the R&B market. As such, R&B artists were less compelled to compete with so-called pop artists. Although this meant that R&B artists had less access to resources – particularly as the record industry went through a financial slump in the late 1970s – it also created conditions where the R&B sound could develop without the additional pressure of attracting a wider audience. Very few soul artists made the transition to the R&B world. Notable examples are figures like Bobby Womack, whose Poet (1981) and Poet II (1984) represented the best work of his career and Diana Ross, whose Diana (1980), produced by Nile Rodgers and Bernard Edwards, represents the apex of her solo career. And then there’s the case of Michael Jackson, who remade himself into an R&B artist on his groundbreaking Off the Wall (1979), three years after he sat at the feet of Gamble and Huff, who produced the Jackson’s first CRG album after the Jackson 5’s departure from Motown in 1975. Often lost in conversations about Jackson’s emergence as the “King of Pop” is that he was cultivated in the R&B world – along with such other singular black pop crossovers of the 1980s as Whitney Houston and Lionel Ritchie.

If there was one figure who defined the genius of R&B it was Luther Vandross, who with the release of his eponymous debut in 1981 became the genre’s dominant artist. By coyly distancing himself from the black gospel vocal tradition, which grounded so much of the soul music of the 1960s and 1970s, Vandross cemented his appeal as the quintessential R&B singer. Specifically Vandross was trying to distinguish himself from generations of “shouters” such as gospel artists Joe Ligon (lead vocalist of the Mighty Clouds of Joy) and the late Archie Brownlee (of the Five Blind Boys of Mississippi) or soul vocalists like Wilson Pickett, the late Otis Redding and James Brown. As Jason King and others have suggested, Vandross was a student of various music traditions, notably black female vocalists of the 1960s (Dionne Warwick, The Bluebelles, Aretha Franklin), the Burt Bacharach and Hal David songbook, and the background-vocal stylings of the Sweet Inspirations. In addition, the lush orchestrations that figured so prominently in Vandross ballads – he is the definitive balladeer of the last generation of popular singers – suggested that he too was a fan of Gamble and Huff and Gene Page.

Still others such as Stephanie Mills, Frankie Beverly and Maze, Jeffrey Osborne, Anita Baker, Peobo Bryson, Atlantic Starr, Kashif, Loose Ends, Alexander O’Neal, The Whispers, Kenny “Babyface” Edmonds, and Chaka Khan (post Rufus) helped give R&B a cohesive sound in the early 1980s. As R&B was about attracting upscale “urban” audiences – whether legitimate members of the black middle class or working class strivers – it was by definition a genre targeted to mature audiences. As the 1980s progressed R&B was increasingly out of touch with a generation of black youth consumers, who felt little need to distance themselves from the realities of the Jim Crow era, especially as they faced down the venomous edge of the Reagan era. In real terms the R&B world was being challenged by the embryonic sounds of hip-hop for the attention (and disposable income) of “urban” audiences. A telling sign was the success of Chaka Khan’s remake of Prince’s “I Feel for You” (1984), which featured an opening rap by Melle Mel (technically the first hip-hop and R&B collaboration, though in my mind Jody Whatley’s “Friends", which was blessed by Rakim, is more significant.) The song remains Khan’s best-selling single. Khan’s version of “I Feel for You” began a tenuous relationship between R&B and hip-hop, one which would finally earn hip-hop validation from the black mainstream and ultimately render R&B irrelevant.

Un héros du gouvernement américain finalement responsable d’ exactions envers les mouvements sociaux américains.

Posté en juin 2005 par Mark Anthony Neal sur son propre blog

Source : 3:44PMhttp://www.blogger.com/postedit.g?blogID=13096878&postID=111782834778772434&quickEdit=true

Deep Covers: “Deep Throat,” Civil Rights and COINTELPRO

I was a mere 8-years old when the Watergate Hearings were taking place. Despite my general lack of knowledge of electoral politics at the time, like many in my generation, the hearings and the subsequent resignation of then President Richard Nixon, long colored my view of electoral politics. Years after Nixon’s resignation, Gil Scott-Heron’s “H20 Gate Blues”, a chilling critique of the debacle (“the government you have elected is inoperable), was echoed in KRS-ONE’s “Why is That?”(1988)—evidence perhaps that Watergate was part of the political fabric of the hip-hop generation. But I suspect that for many in the post-Civil Rights generation, the fine points of Watergate were conveyed to us via the film All the President’s Men. More than anything the film—based on a book by Washington Post journalists Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward—provided me with a romantic view of the power of Fourth Estate (a romance dutifully squashed in the Bush era). Indeed the figure of “Deep Throat” was a hero to me.

That all changed on Tuesday May, 31 2005 when 91-year-old Mark Felt, a former deputy director of the FBI, was identified as “Deep Throat.” While many heaped praise on the man who helped topple the damn-near despotic regime of Richard M. Nixon, the reality is that Mark Felt is no hero—he was a prominent cog in the mechanism that was used to destabilize many of the insurgent political movements in the United States in the 1950s, 1960s and early 1970s, including the Civil Rights Movement and the Black Power Movement. COINTELPRO (Counterintelligence program) was created by FBI director J. Edgar Hoover in 1956 to begin the illegal surveillance, infiltration and ultimate disruption of political organizations, particularly those aligned on the Left. Former US Attorney General William B. Saxbe made information about COINTELPRO public in 1975, including information about how the FBI targeted Martin Luther King, Jr. Many of the radicals of that era have been able to read files related to COINTELPRO via the “Federal Information Act”. It is because of the FIA that we now know the role that the FBI played, for example, in the death of Black Panther Party leader Fred Hampton.

COINTELPRO was supposedly disbanded in April of 1971 and that no doubt played a part in the Justice Department’s decision in 1975 not to prosecute any FBI officials implicated in COINTELPRO activities. That all changed a few years later when a Justice Department investigation led to the indictment and subsequent conviction of our man MARK FELT (Deep Throat) and Edward S. Miller for “illegal break-ins” (for the purpose of illegal surveillance) related to the activities of the Weather Underground. Felt served no jail time—he was fined $5,000—and was later pardoned by President Ronald Reagan a few month after he took office. According to Reagan, Felt and Miller, served the nation “with great distinction” (NYT 4/16/81)

The indictments of Felt and Miller led to a period when the practice of illegal surveillance by government entities was significantly curtailed. Because COINTELPRO is something that many Americans remains ignorant of, there is little connection made between COINTELPRO and some of the core attributes of the Patriot Act (2001)—this ironically at a time when one of COINTELPRO’s architects is being hailed as an “American hero”.

Qui est la conscience du hip hop?

Where is Hip-hop’s Audre Lorde? Or is it Time to Move On…

“To read the tribe astutely you sometimes have to leave the tribe ambitiously, and should you come home again, it’s not always to sing hosannas or a song that tribe necessarily has any desire to hear…Griots, it is decreed, are to be left to rot in hollow trees way on the outskirts of town. With that wisdom typical of African cosmologies, these messengers are guaranteed freedom of speech in exchange for a marginality that extends to the grave.”—Greg Tate, “Nobody Loves a Genius Child: Jean Michel Basquiat, Flyboy in the Buttermilk”

The above quote is taken from the title essay in Greg Tate’s 1992 book Flyboy in the Buttermilk: Essays on Contemporary America, which will be republished by Duke University Press next year. I thought hard about the current state of hip-hop as I re-read this passage in Tate’s book. Specifically I wondered where were the oppositional figures in hip-hop?—those “marginal” figures who are endowed with the responsibility of telling our truths, especially when we don’t want to hear them. Now I know that the common response is to look at the so-called conscious rappers, but in reality what many of them posit are common sense commentaries on the reality of race in contemporary America. The fact that so little of that actually exist is contemporary rap music is part of the reason that we place so much significance on the work that the conscious rappers do. But very rarely do their analysis of the work take into account the complexities of race, gender and sexuality—in fact a good many of the so-called conscious rappers need to be checked on their politics of gender and sexuality—calling a woman your queen ain’t necessarily any more liberating than calling her your bitch. What I want to know, is where is hip-hop’s theory of intersectionality? Where is hip-hop’s Bayard Rustin? Where is hip-hop’s George S. Schuyler? Where is hip-hop’s Audre Lorde? In other words where are those folk in hip-hop that we will banish the far recesses of our consciousness because they made us uncomfortable and forced us to think and respond to the things we never want to talk about. And I ain’t saying Bill Cosby is nobody’s George Schuyler.

Mark Anthony Neal / Gwendolyn Pough

Who is Gwendolyn Pough?

Gwendolyn Pough is Associate Professor of Writing, Rhetoric, and Women's Studies at Syracuse University. Her first book, Check It While I Wreck it: Black Womanhood, Hip-Hop Culture, and the Public Sphere is already breaking ground within the realm of hip-hop studies.Pough loves hip-hop enough to critique it with the caring eyes of close friend. With chapters like “My Cipher Keeps Movin’ Like a Rollin’ Stone: Black Women’s Expressive Cultures and Black Feminist Legacies” and “Girls in the Hood and Other Ghetto Dramas: Representing Black Womanhood in Hip-hop Cinema and Novels” this is one sista whose keen perception brings wreck.

Interviews menées par Felicia Pride puis croisées pour BackList. Extraits abordant les études sur le hip hop, les actions politiques de célébrités hip hop, la légitimité littéraire du hip hop:

BackList: What is the future of hip-hop studies?

GP: The future of hip-hop studies is as wide open and diverse as the culture it seeks to represent. There is so much work to be done and so many ideas to be expressed. A cursory look at the listing of college classes being offered across the country on some aspect of hip-hop let’s us know that it is an area that is steadily growing. Another search on dissertations written in the past five years that looked at some aspect of hip-hop would no doubt yield a wealth of citations. With new books and anthologies such as That’s the Joint! coming out, the knowledge production in the field is on a steady rise. One thing that is clear as we think about the future of hip-hop studies, taking all these developments into mind, is that there is a future to speak of. We can point to a firm body of knowledge that continues to grow.

MAN: There isa hip-hop archive up at Harvard. There are numerous scholarly conferences on hip-hop. Everyone I know working in the field has dozens of grad students who are doing work on hip-hop or some aspect of urban popular culture. You got to understand, the logic of the academy is to institutionalize things—it allows it to sanction the formal modes of scholarly inquiry on any subject. It’s an act of control, no doubt, but if hip-hop takes lessons from Women’s Studies, Black Studies and Ethnic Studies, it’ll use the academy as a site to generate public discussion about American youth culture, urban spaces and the politics of space and sound. I mean, what musical genre has so dramatically altered the sound of the world that we hear, the way hip-hop has? Hip-hop studies has to be engaged in the world for its institutionalization to matter, outside of plum academic gigs for some of its most well-known scholars.

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BackList: What do you think of P.Diddy’s “Citizen Change” campaign, along with Russell Simmons’ Hip-Hop Summit Action Network? Are they effective? Is this the extent to which the hip-hop community can be massively organized for political change?

GP: Both projects are worthwhile and important. It may be too soon, especially in relation to Diddy’s “Citizen Change” campaign, to judge how effective they are, if at all. Insofar as they are using their celebrity to bring attention to important political issues and projects, they are each useful.

In terms of the extent to which the hip-hop community can be used for massive political change, I would point people to works like my own and Yvonne Bynoe’s Stand and Deliver: Political Activism, Leadership, and Hip-Hop Culture. If we are talking about real and sustainable change, then it might not come from celebrity endorsements and the like. I don’t know about anyone else, but I personally am not willing to wait for a song or an artist to deliver my freedom. I think that real change is going to come from the work of a lot of people. So, in regard to hip-hop as a mass movement that crosses so many races, classes, genders, etc., there is tremendous potential there for activists and others to use in their work towards change. There is potential there, but we have to start tapping it and tapping it in the right ways.

MAN: If Combs and Simmons go beyond simply registering people to vote and actually deal with issues of voter education and developing critical thinking skills, I think their efforts are laudable. The importance of potential hip-hop generation voters is not about this year’s presidential election, but the impact they can have in local elections on a regular basis and in a context where voting can really affect their everyday conditions. At this point I have more faith in Diddy’s efforts, (and I’m not the biggest fan of Diddy), because I believe that Simmons has “race man” ambitions, and his efforts to register new voters seem motivated by the ability to claim that he can deliver a certain segment of voters to the highest bidder.

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MAN: For a long time, the only conversation about hip-hop in the academy was focused on its literary value. If fiction, autobiography, and poetry were some of the vehicles in which the black modernist impulse was expressed throughout the first half of the 20 th century, clearly hip-hop can be legitimately understood as a contemporary expression of that impulse. But my thing is, why spend time trying to find the hip-hop generation’s Langston Hughes or Margaret Walker? We should evaluate hip-hop genius in the context on hip-hop’s own criteria of what is great art. That doesn’t mean that hip-hop isn’t indebted to myriad forms of black expression that came before it, but it does have its own aesthetic logics that must be respected. This is one of the things that hip-hop studies needs to be about.

Najee Ali

Project Islamic H.O.P.E, is a 501 C3 Non-profit national civil rights organization that works collectively with other ethnic and religious groups to stand on the frontlines in the war against poverty, hunger and social injustice. The H.O.P.E. is an acronym that stands for Helping Oppressed People Everywhere. Most people have heard of Project Hope because of their controversial and outspoken Founder and Co-Director Najee Ali.

Ali is a former convict and ex-Crip gang member from South Central L.A. Ali changed his life around in prison after becoming a Muslim. He was inspired to start Project Hope after watching the news and hearing that NBA star, Latrell Sprewell had choked his coach, PJ Carlesiimo. Ali didn't think that the NBA handed out a stiff enough penalty and this confirmed his belief that stars get special treatment in this society. http://www.projectislamichope.org/NewsClips.asp

Fast forward 6 years to today and the Men's support Group; Civil Rights Advocacy organization has chapters in Georgia and Chicago. http://www.projectislamichope.org

An interview with Najee Ali. From gangbanging to civil rights.

Banter: Thanks for taking the time out of your schedule of activism to talk with us. This interview is going to be very eclectic because you are a complex personality. By the way please correct us if we state something incorrectly.

Outside of California most people know of you because they hear about your protest of popular personalities that have done something your organization considers harmful to the communities moral fabric but inside of California you are known because of your work with gang members. This past year L.A. has seen a lot of gang homicides again. Many of us want to know what happened to the truce?

Ali: Well, Some gangs never signed the gang truce and then some situations go