The Politics of Rap Music
Is rap a legitimate medium of
political expression?
Content Standards!
• 11.8.8
Discuss forms of popular culture, with emphasis on
their origins and geographic diffusion (e.g., jazz and other forms
of popular music, professional sports, architectural and artistic
styles).
• 11.11
Students analyze the major social problems and
domestic policy issues in contemporary American society.
• 11.11.6
Analyze the persistence of poverty and how
different analyses of this issue influence welfare reform, health
insurance reform, and other social policies.
• 11.11.7
Explain how the federal, state, and local
governments have responded to demographic and social
changes such as population shifts to the suburbs and racial
concentrations in the cities.
Cultural History
• Cultural history combines the
approaches of anthropology and history
to look at popular cultural traditions and
cultural interpretations of historical
experience. It examines the records and
narrative descriptions of past
knowledge, customs, and arts of a
group of people.
The Bronx in the 1970s
The Post Industrial Context
• Industrial --> Service Economy
• Suburbanization: white flight, reduced
tax base for cities, red-lining
• Urban Renewal
• Poverty, Violence, Crime
• Hip-hop culture
Hip-Hop Stylistics
• Rap Music: flow, layering, rupture; DJ
and MC
• Graffiti: long, winding, sweeping letters,
interrupted, italics and shadowing
suggesting motion
• B-boying (break-dancing): flowing and
complex movements interrupted by
abrupt starts and stops
The Theory
• Continuity and Circularity
• Layering
• Highlighting of “threats” through break or
rupture
• Management of threat (continuing the flow)
• Use of public space (originally, at least)
• = BLUEPRINT FOR RESISTANCE
Wild Style, a 1982
movie by Charlie
Ahearn, connects
early hip-hop genres:
art (graffiti,) breaking,
and rap.
Black Oral Traditions: Toasting
• A toast is a lengthy, recited narrative or poem
describing a series of exploits by a central
character, focusing on the main character's
heroic acts and exercises of wit.
• Characters announce their intentions to
survive in style, which can mean "heroic
masculinity" or conspicuous consumption.
Black Oral Traditions:
Signifying
• According to Black literary scholar
Henry Louis Gates Jr., the practice
derived from the Trickster archetype
found in much African mythology,
folklore, and religion: a god, goddess,
spirit, man, woman, or anthropomorphic
animal who plays tricks or otherwise
disobeys normal rules and norms of
behavior.
Signifying
• The expression itself derives from the
numerous tales about the Signifying Monkey,
a folk trickster figure said to have originated
during slavery in the United States. In most of
these narratives, the Monkey manages to
dupe the powerful Lion by signifying.
Signifyin(g) directs attention to the
connotative, context-bound significance of
words, which is accessible only to those who
share the unique cultural values of a given
speech community.
Black Oral Traditions: “Playing the
Dozens”
• The dozens is an example of the African
American oral tradition in which two
competitors, usually males, go head-to-head
in an improvised competition of often goodnatured, ribald trash talk (think Yo Mama.)
• It’s an element of an African-American
custom of verbal sparring, of woofin' and
signifyin', intended to defuse conflict
nonviolently, descended from an oral tradition
rooted in traditional West African cultures.
So…
• How does this add complexity to
understanding of rap music?
• How do these traditions contribute to an
interpretation of rap as “political” or
“resistant?”
• Why was gangsta rap a particular target
for critics of rap?
Political/Cultural Rap: Public
Enemy
NOI Rap: Brand Nubian
Gangsta Rap: NWA
Straight Outta Compton
NWA (Niggaz with Attitude)
Guerrillas in tha Mist
Da Lench Mob
Questions
• Why was gangsta rap so much more heavily
critiqued and policed than other forms of rap?
• Why was gangsta rap a MUCH bigger
crossover genre of rap at the time?
• And the big cultural history question…was
gansta rap as much REFLECTIVE as
RESISTANT? CONTEXT has multiple and
multifaceted implications.
Gangsta Rap Made Me Do It
Ice Cube