THE KALEIDOSCOPE OF WRITING ON HIP-HOP CULTURE

By Gail Hilson Woldu

The publication of Tricia Roses Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America (1994)1 was a landmark moment for hiphop culture, giving tacit approval to scholarly discourse on hip-hop and leading to other important writing. Journalists, many proudly referring to themselves as hip-hop heads, wrote bold articles in trade and popular magazines and newspapers that included The Source, Vibe, XXL, and Rolling Stone as well as the Village Voice, Time, and Newsweek. Members of the academy responded with a freshet of articles and books that linked hip-hops roots to other African American vernacular expressions. At the beginning of the second decade of the twenty-rst century, writing about hip-hop, like the music and culture, is at an interesting crossroads. On the one hand, we continue to see a wealth of ne academic writing published by scholars in elds as diverse as cultural studies, musicology, and womens studies; on the other, we have noticed a dramatic decline in the quality of popular writing about hip-hop, much of which has succumbed to crude street language in an attempt to increase readership. This kaleidoscope, by turns overly pedantic and gratuitously coarse, creates a conundrum as hip-hop struggles to deneand redeneitself. Language dictates the tenor of writing on hip-hop, establishing both writer and audience. For the writer on hip-hop culture, whose prospective audiences comprise at least three distinct types of readerthe academic or scholar, the dilettante, and the fanlanguage is often the sole determinant. Audiences unaccustomed to the style of writing sometimes seen in the academy might not enthusiastically embrace the belief that hip-hop merely displays in phantasmagorical form the cultural logic of late capitalism and that hip-hop is a cultural form that attempts to
Gail Hilson Woldu is associate professor and chair of the Department of Music at Trinity College (CT). Her published scholarship focuses on two unlikely elds: French music at the turn of the twentieth century, and gangsta rap. She has written numerous articles, essays, and book chapters on black musical expression and hip-hop culture, including Contextualizing Rap, in American Popular Music: New Approaches to the Twentieth Century (University of Massachusetts Press, 2001) and Gender as Anomaly, in The Resisting Muse: Popular Music and Social Protest (Ashgate, 2006). Woldu is also the author of The Words and Music of Ice Cube, published by Praeger in 2008. 1. Titles not cited directly in footnotes are in the list of Selected Books on Hip-Hop Culture that concludes this article.

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negotiate the experiences of marginalization, brutally truncated opportunity, and oppression within the cultural imperatives of AfricanAmerican and Caribbean history, identity, and community.2 By contrast, readers accustomed to academic effusion are likely to require a denition of hip-hop more expansive than a term used for urban-based creativity and expression of culture.3 In the sections that follow a brief introduction to writing on hip-hop culture, I distinguish three categories of writing about hip-hopworks by academics, works by journalists and cultural critics, and works by hiphops devoteesand I discuss a handful of signicant publications of the years 19882008. There is a caveat, though: divisions exist within the worlds of writing about hip-hop. These are complicated divides that reect divergent perspectives often based on gender, race, and politics. For these reasons, in surveying the writing of a host of academics and journalists, I consider a twenty-year written history of hip-hop through a variety of lenses, with the hope that these various points of view might illuminate new directions for hip-hops chronicled future.4
BACKGROUND

The earliest period of writing about hip-hop focused on the newly emergent party music of the late 1970s through the early 1980s. Characterized by a pulsating, rhythmic bass and rhyming words, this was dance music at its best, intended to bring revelers to their feet. The lyrics are pure fun, with little in them to hint at the political direction rap would take in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Raps by the Fresh Prince (aka actor Will Smith), DJ Jazzy Jeff, and Kid N Play are archetypes of this genre. Engaging, insightful, and cleverly written, writing on hip-hop in this period is noted more for its journalistic air than its meticulous documentation. Rolling Stone featured an array of articles on hip-hop, some dating back to the genres early days and written by inuential writers on hip-hop culture, including activist and essayist Kevin Powell. Similarly, the Village Voice, long reputed for its arts reviews and alternative coverage of current affairs, highlighted the work of many notable hiphop artists, written by some of the nations most prominent cultural critics, among them Greg Tate and Nelson George.
2. Tricia Rose, Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America (Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press, 1994), 21. 3. Chuck D., The Sound of Our Young World, Time, 8 February 1999, 66. 4. There is a second caveat that must be mentioned: because the body of writing on hip-hop culture is enormous, no single article can address its multiple layers. I intend in this article to introduce curious readers whose specialties in music lie outside hip-hop culture to a sampling of the literature. Most of the books I cite contain lengthy bibliographies that are useful in pointing readers in other, or parallel, directions.

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Writing on hip-hop in the 1990s in generalist and popular-culture magazines focused largely on gangsta rap. Popularized in the late 1980s by the South Central Los Angeles group NWA, this subset of rap is the most controversial and written-about element of hip-hop culture. The period 198898, the years of gangsta raps peak popularity, saw a spate of articles. In 1992, gangsta rapand it is worth noting that in this presidential election year gangsta rap was a catch phrase for all species of rapbecame an agent for national debates on race, crime, and urban violence. The lead story of the 29 June 1992 issue of Newsweek, Rap and Race: Beyond Sister SouljahThe New Politics of Pop Music, featured angry, deant, and nger-pointing Sister Souljah of Public Enemy on its cover. The articles interior photographs are equallyand intentionally eye-catching: a two-page group shot of NWA posing with semiautomatic guns, coupled with an inset of NWA member Ice Cube scowling for the camera, is the background for the articles beginning; several pages later, an unshaven Ice-T (of Cop Killer infamy), decked out in black clothing and sporting platinum jewelry, glowers at the reader through black sunglasses. A year later Newsweek asked When Is Rap 2 Violent? and featured as its cover boy gangsta rapper Snoop Doggy Dogg, insolent and sweating beneath a navy blue ski cap. Journalist John Lelands article Criminal Records: Gangsta Rap and the Culture of Violence contains photographs of raps most infamous, including, in addition to Snoop Dogg, NWAs Eazy-E and Dr. Dre, and Tupac Shakur, who had been recently arrested on charges of sexual assault and attempted murder.5 Books, articles, and essays on hip-hop written in the 1990s abound. Among scholarly work, Roses Black Noise is without peer. This pioneering book, the rst comprehensive and copiously documented look at hip-hop culture, is especially noteworthy for its historiographical approach, detailed analysis of hip-hops evolution, and extensive bibliography. Although Houston Bakers collection of essays, Black Studies, Rap, and the Academy (1993), is the antithesis of Roses tightly-organized discussion of hip-hop culture, it is signicant for the provocative questions raised, including, especially, those focused on rap and the law. Three books written by insiders to hip-hop culture for lay readers and devotees of the culture are worth mentioning for their informal and lively discussions: Bring the Noise: A Guide to Rap Music and Hip-Hop Culture (1991) by Havelock Nelson and Michael Gonzales6; The New Beats: Exploring the Music, Culture, and Attitudes of Hip-Hop (1994) by S. H. Fernando, Jr 7;
5. John Leland, Criminal Records: Gangsta Rap and the Culture of Violence, Newsweek, 29 November 1993, 6064. 6. (New York: Harmony Books, 1991). 7. (New York: Anchor Books/Doubleday, 1994).

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Adam Sextons anthology Rap on Rap: Straight-Up Talk on Hip-Hop Culture (1995); and Hip Hop America (1998) by Nelson George. Also worthy of note are books narrowly focused on a particular performer or group, including Bill Adlers Tougher than Leather: The Rise of Run-DMC (2002)8 and Brian Crosss interview-based Its Not About a Salary: Rap, Race and Resistance in Los Angeles (1993).9 By the early 2000s, hip-hop was widely accepted as an academic discipline. The shifting mosaic of hip-hop writing at that time was particularly vibrant in the scholarly realm, as a range of academics published a variety of books and articles, many of which have already become staples in the literature. These publications are often reective, situating hip-hop, as does Guthrie Ramseys Race Music: Black Cultures from Bebop to Hip-Hop (2003),10 in the continuum of black musical expression; others, including Cheryl Keyess Rap Music and Street Consciousness (2002)11 are masterful blends of in situ interviews and ethnographic research. Among the comprehensive looks at hip-hop is Jeff Changs tour de force, Cant Stop, Wont Stop: A History of the Hip-Hop Generation (2005), which received the prestigious American Book Award in 2005 and has been touted by a whos who of cultural critics, hip-hop journalists, and popular-culture scholars. Changs book is a hybrid, combining careful research with an accessible and casual writing style that contains impassioned opinion. Lists of statistics, dates, and names coexist alongside sections of extended dialogue and interviews. The predominant themes in Changs book are race and the intersection of race in hip-hops agendas. This is not surprising, given the preeminence of race in American popular culture. Although this subject permeates the books nineteen chapters, it assumes a particularly signicant position in chapter eighteen, Becoming the Hip-Hop Generation. In subsections with provocative titles such as Hip-Hops Urban Lifestyle and Polyculturalism and PostWhiteness, Chang takes a hard look at the omnipresence of race in hiphop and the concomitant urbanization of American popular culture. Polyculturalism, says Chang, is built on the idea that civil society did not need Eurocentrism or whiteness at its core to function.12 In discussing raps crossover appeal, Chang cites an article whose author, white Chicago grafti writer William UPSKI Wimsatt, observed the inux of wiggers (a pejorative term for a white person who emulates African
8. (Los Angeles: Consafos; London: Turnaround, 2002). 9. (London; New York: Verso, 1993). 10. Music of the African Diaspora, 7 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003). 11. Music in American Life (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2002). 12. Jeff Chang, Cant Stop, Wont Stop: A History of the Hip-Hop Generation (New York: St. Martins Press, 2005), 421.

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American culture, often using and drawing on exaggerated stereotypes) in hip-hop culture and posited that one day the rap audience may be as white as tables in a jazz club, and rap will become just another platform for every white ethnic groupnot only the Irishto express their suddenly funky selves.13 Chang also explores race in terms of the cultural wars in popular culture. These wars peaked during the late 1980s and early 1990s, and were marked in particular by the controversies surrounding 2 Live Crews As Nasty as They Wanna Be, Ice-Ts Cop Killer, and presidential nominee Bill Clintons attacks on Public Enemys Sister Souljah in 1992. Of the commercial magazines and fanzines devoted to hip-hop culture, two stand out: The Source and Vibe. Founded by two Harvard students in 1988nearly a decade after the onset of hip-hops rst ourishing and at the outset of raps most infamous controversiesThe Source catapulted many journalists to renown in hip-hops realm, among them Selwyn Seyfu Hinds, Adario Strange, and Bakari Kitwana. This bible of hip-hop is noteworthy for its thoughtfully written articles and provocative editorials on the music and politics of hip-hop culture. By contrast, Vibe magazine, which was founded in 1993 by music producer Quincy Jones and ceased print publication in 2009, is less known for the probing quality of its articles than for its splashy ads and its commitment to making hip-hop accessible to audiences of many races and ethnicities. Other writing on hip-hop in popular trade magazines is found in XXL, Spin, and Rolling Stone, as well as in less-well-known and underground sources, including Kronick and Murder Dog magazines.
THE ACADEMICS

Any discussion of scholarly writing on hip-hop must begin with Roses Black Noise. This is not a book for the casual reader. Indeed, the qualities that make Roses book so appealing to academic audiencesthe abundant citations and the sophisticated language, for exampleare distracting to lay readers who struggle with Roses verbiage and extensive documentation. Whatever its aws, this most important of the early full-length books on rap established hip-hop as a bona de eld of scholarly endeavor; moreover, it provided a comprehensive history of the evolution of the culture. According to Rose, Black Noise examines the complex and contradictory relationships between forces of racial and sexual domination, black cultural priorities, and popular resistance in contemporary rap music14 as it describes the social context within which rap
13. Quoted in ibid., 421. 14. Rose, Black Noise, xiii.

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exists. To these ends, Rose uses a polyvocal approach, one that draws upon cultural theory, urban history, black feminism, and interviews with performers and listeners conducted throughout the United States as well as in Hong Kong and Japan. The most interesting chapters in Black Noise are the second, All Aboard the Night Train: Flow, Layering, and Rupture in Postindustrial New York, and fth, Bad Sistas: Black Women Rappers and Sexual Politics in Rap Music. In chapter two, Rose discusses hip-hops beginnings at length, introducing the reader to the cultures urban contexts, explaining that hip-hop is propelled by Afrodiasporic traditions and expounding on the stylistic continuities in dance, vocal articulations, and instrumentation between rap, break dancing, urban blues, bebop, and rock n roll [that] move within and between these historical junctions and larger social forces, creating Afrodiasporic narratives that manage and stabilize these transitions.15 In-depth discussions of the components of hip-hopgrafti, break dancing, and rap musicensue, each lled with the kinds of meticulous documentation that make this book a scholars delight. Chapter ve, on women in rap, is among the rst to consider the ways black women rappers work within and against dominant sexual and racial narratives in American culture.16 In this sense, Rose situates the music of female rappers in the same contexts argued by Hazel Carby in her essay on the sexual politics of the great blues women of the 1920s, and by Angela Davis on the historical legacy of black women and music.17 Rose takes these arguments several steps further, suggesting women rappers cannot be situated in total opposition to male rappers; they support and critique males rappers sexual discourse in a number of contradictory ways.18 She analyzes the messages of several early female rappers, among them Salt-n-Pepa, MC Lyte, and Queen Latifah, and suggests that just as male rappers sexual discourse is not consistently sexist . . . female sexual discourse is not consistently feminist.19 Of particular signicance in this chapter are Roses discussions of Salt-n-Pepas video Tramp and Latifahs landmark Ladies First.20

15. Ibid., 25. 16. Ibid., 147. 17. Hazel Carby, It Jus Bes Dat Way Sometime: The Sexual Politics of Womens Blues, Radical America 20, no. 4 (1986): 922. See as well Angela Y. Davis, Black Women and Music: A Historical Legacy of Struggle, in Wild Women in the Whirlwind: Afro-American Culture and the Contemporary Literary Renaissance, ed. Joanne M. Braxton and Andree Nicola McLaughlin, 321 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1990). 18. Rose, Black Noise, 150. 19. Ibid. 20. Ibid., 15566.

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Roses second full-length study of hip-hop culture, Hip Hop Wars: What We Talk About When We Talk About Hip HopAnd Why it Matters (2008), was written, in part, to address the terrible crisis of hip-hop in the early-twenty-rst century. She bemoans the dumbing down of hip-hops imagery and is critical of mainstream outlets for the dissemination of hip-hop that are exploitative and paint increasingly one-dimensional narratives of black ghetto life.21 The book is divided into two parts. In the rst and larger part, Rose presents ten arguments, ve on each side of highly polarized debates, that challenge excesses, myths, denials, and manipulations about hip-hop culture.22 Among these are chapters that explore hip-hops dualities, arguing, on the one hand, that hip-hop causes violence, demeans women, and reects dysfunctional ghetto culture, and claiming, on the other hand, that hip-hop is not responsible for sexism and that hip-hop performers are just keeping it real. Rose puts us in the middle of each inammatory debate. In the chapter entitled Hip-Hop Hurts Black People, Rose argues that unfair generalizations about hip-hop abound, stating that the worst of what we nd in the music and imagery is commercially promoted, encouraged, produced, and distributed by major corporations, while images and ideas that reect good will, love of community, and a diverse range of black experiences are relegated to the underground or to the commercial margins of youth culture.23 Rose also argues against the widespread and commonly accepted, among generalist audiences, images of ghetto street culture as the central brand of blackness for sale in American popular culture.24 Rose dismisses stereotyped caricatures of the bottom fth of black America and says that the dishonest use of keeping it real is often a manipulation of black prophetic histories that serve corporate and mainstream agendas.25 Issues of misrepresentation, manipulation, and demonization are the nucleus of Scott Wilsons Great Satans Rage: American Negativity and Rap/Metal in the Age of Supercapitalism (2008). Wilson juxtaposes these in rap and metalperhaps the two most controversial and contested forms of popular music at the end of the twentieth centuryand discusses the issues in the context of a negative turn in the publics eye of pop culture. In chapters entitled Negativity and Niggativity, Wilson discusses critical and public response to metal and rap, one identied as being
21. Tricia Rose, The Hip Hop Wars: What We Talk About When We Talk About Hip HopAnd Why it Matters (New York: Basic Civitas, 2008), 3. 22. Ibid., 5. 23. Ibid., 7879. 24. Ibid., 144. 25. Ibid., 145.

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white and the other black. His assertion that, according to popular racist belief, black men are naturally overlibidinal and inherently violent,26 provides the backdrop for a look at popular response to gangsta rap. Wilson gives an especially riveting assessment of metals aesthetic, writing of its locus between the desire for teenage rebellion and its commodication27 and the self-loathing that inhabits the music:
It succeeds in its failure and is contagious in that success, binding together an imaginary community based around the entertainment of negativity, inaugurating both an ethic and an aesthetic, a pose and a style, unleashing a future of negative becoming and (self-) marketing in various directions, speeds and tempos.28

As Wilson suggests, both genres have negotiated, raged against, survived, and exploited29 Satans rage. In this sense, metal, like rap, is both the victim and proteer of popular stereotyping. Houston Bakers Black Studies, Rap, and the Academy is an interesting read. Presented rst as lectures at Princeton University in 1992, these essays are more remarkable for the provocative issues raised than for any information about hip-hop culture. If language does, in fact, determine audience, Bakers book no doubt seeks a hybrid readership, given its variety of writing styles, which on the one hand epitomize academic arrogance and, on the other, streetwise cool. The point of the essays, it appears, is to convince readers of the cultural importance of rap, which Baker considers classical black sound,30 and to show that positive sites of rap represent a protable, agential resource for an alternative American legality.31 However we might interpret this latter, Baker argues that rap must become a center for intellectual discourse. Moreover, Baker illuminates how raps controversies are rmly rooted in media ignorance, and he says too many cultural critics, including raps defenders, are woefully underinformed about rap and hip-hop culture. One of Bakers most interesting discussions centers on the infamous Central Park jogger incident of 1989, and how rap became a scapegoat for acts of urban violence. In particular, Baker discusses the implications of the misinterpretation of the phrase wild thing, from Tone-Locs song. Because wild thing was misheard as wilding, a term that thereafter came to
26. Scott Wilson, Great Satans Rage: American Negativity and Rap/Metal in the Age of Supercapitalism (Manchester, NY: Manchester University Press, 2008), 69. 27. Ibid., 43. 28. Ibid. 29. Ibid., 4. 30. Houston A. Baker, Jr., Black Studies, Rap, and the Academy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 100. 31. Ibid., 59.

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refer to the act of going about in a group threatening, robbing, or attacking others, a public panic ensued, fueled by media images of marauding bands of black hoodlums whose inspiration to commit acts of violence derived from raps messages. Cheryl Keyess Rap Music and Street Consciousness (2002),32 which received a CHOICE Award for outstanding academic books in 2004, is the culmination of nearly twenty years of eldwork, and it is the rst musicological history of rap. This singularity is signicant: Keyess work is one of the few academic books on rap that includes musical analyses of the music of rap in addition to discussions of raps lyrics. The book also contains an outstanding array of photographs and annotations that bespeak the authors background in ethnomusicology as well as her avocations as a composer and performer. Keyess purpose is to provide a wide-ranging history of rap, tracing its roots to West African traditions, continuing through Caribbean dancehall music, and going on to explore African American vernacular expressions. The author divides her eight chapters into two sections, the rst centered on the sociocultural history and aesthetics of rap, the second on critical perspectives on rap and the hip-hop nation. The rst three chapters contain information on hip-hops antecedents and earliest beginnings not found in other sources. Keyes frequently writes in the rst person in these chapters, the reection, no doubt, of her many conversations with the performers discussed and the personal attachment she feels for the subject matter. The writing is clear and precise, with none of the verbosity that often mars academic work on rap. The rst chapter, on the roots and stylistic foundation of rap music, is a concise survey of three areas: West African bardic traditions, slave traditions, and raps African American forebears, including Gil Scott-Heron, and the Last Poets. Keyes also cites a number of nonmusicians who contributed in some way to raps expressive beginnings: boxing legend Muhammad Ali, black nationalist H. Rap Brown, and comedians Redd Foxx and Jackie Moms Mabley. This extramusical context is valuable, as it enables us to see the multiple strains of African American expression that led to rap. Chapters two and three, on the development and explosion of rap, contain careful discussions of New York gang culture, the inuence of Afrika Bambaataa, and the rise of rappers and rap impresarios between 1979 and 1985from the Sugarhill Gang to Russell Simmons to MC Hammer. Although Gwendolyn Poughs Check It While I Wreck It (to be discussed further on) provides a far more detailed look at women in rap than Keyess seventh chapter, which is devoted to this topic, Keyes introduces
32. Music in American Life (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2002).

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some of the central themesamong them sexuality, independence, and controlin womens rap.33 Two especially provocative scholarly books on rap and hip-hop written at the end of the twentieth century are Mark Anthony Neals What the Music Said (1999) and Russell Potters Spectacular Vernaculars: Hip-Hop and the Politics of Postmodernism (1995). In each case, the authors intellectual approach to hip-hop and their ideas about the music and culture matter more than the presentation of hard facts and data. Indeed, Neal afrms this in the preface to his book when he states that an understanding of all black music, hip-hop included, is grounded in the diversity of the Afrodiasporic experience:
I maintain that the black popular music tradition has served as a primary vehicle for communally derived critiques of the African-American experience, and that the quality and breadth of such critiques are wholly related to the quality of life within the black public sphere. . . . I suggest that issues as diverse as migration patterns, the dearth or abundance of public venues, national and local political movements, black religious institutions, black youth culture, the corporate annexation of black popular culture, crack cocaine, class stratication within the black community, gender relations, police brutality, and the structural and economic transformation of urban spaces all help shape the nature of black popular music particularly as such issues affect community transformation(s) within the African-American diaspora.34

Not all of What the Music Said is devoted to hip-hop; in fact, fewer than fty of the books one-hundred-ninety-eight pages are spent entirely on this subject. These are densely written pages that challenge the reader to think critically about hip-hops musical culture and its place in the public sphere. Neal offers multiple understandings of hip-hop, the result of the cultures multiple layers and complexities. For example, Neal writes, Hip-hop music and culture emerged as a narrative and stylistic distillation of African-American youth sensibilities in the late 1970s. Hip-hop differed from previous structures inuenced by African-American youth in that it was largely predicated and driven by black youth culture itself.35 Like Rose, Neal contends that the emergence of hip-hop, which appeared in a rudimentary state in the mid-1970s, was representative of a concerted effort by young urban blacks to use mass-culture to facilitate communal discourse across a fractured and dislocated national commu-

33. See as well Gail Hilson Woldu, Gender as Anomaly: Women in Rap, in The Resisting Muse: Popular Music and Social Protest, ed. Ian Peddie, 89102 (Aldershot, Eng.; Burlington, VT: Ashgate Press, 2006). 34. Mark Anthony Neal, What the Music Said: Black Popular Music and Black Public Culture (New York: Routledge, 1999), xi. 35. Ibid., 136.

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nity.36 And, importantly, Neal grounds hip-hop in musical and sociocultural contexts, reminding readers that hip-hop allowed African American youth to counter the iconography of fear, menace, and spectacle that dominated mass-mediated perceptions of contemporary black life by giving voice to the everyday human realities of black life in ways that could not be easily reduced to commodiable stereotypes.37 Elsewhere, Neal discusses the marketing of hip-hop, in which he discusses the vilication of hip-hops performers and audiences, citing in particular trends to criminalize hip-hop artists, their audiences, and the music itself. Russell Potters Spectacular Vernaculars is stylistically akin to Bakers Black Studies. The book seeks to serve two very different audiencesthe scholar and everyone elsewith the result being pages that weave in and out of academicspeak and street vernacular. In his introduction, Potter writes:
I hope this book enters into the mix, bringing academics, performers, and all who care about society in a postmodern, post-industrial world together, dropping some knowledge and breaking down some barriers. And for the rappers themselves, and everyone in the vast and growing hip-hop nation, I hope this book will help make evident the multiple connections between hiphops insurrectionary knowledges and the historical and societal forces against which they are posed, and in so doing expand and strengthen the depth of our determination to ght the powers that be.38

Like many early writers on hip-hop, Potter struggles to dene his subject matter. He informs us, for example, that hip-hop is a paradigmatic instance; at once carnival and contest . . . a cultural crossroads through which everyone passeswhether in a Lexus with the windows rolled up and the a/c on, or in a Jeep loaded with speakers blaring out phat bass lines.39 Potter dedicates Spectacular Vernaculars to the Last Poets, the most inuential of the pre-rap groups of the early 1970s. In addition to being a tting homage, the dedication to these maverick poet-musicians cements hip-hop rmly in the continuum of black musical expression. His discussions of signifying and the history of vernacular speech and hip-hops indebtedness to James Brown are particularly compelling. Signifying, we learn, has from its earliest origins deployed its linguistic games in
36. Ibid. 37. Ibid., 138. 38. Russell Potter, Spectacular Vernaculars: Hip-Hop and the Politics of Postmodernism, The SUNY Series in Postmodern Culture (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995), 23. 39. Ibid., 25.

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order to frame and mobilize larger questions of power relations.40 The power play of these games is the basis of much rap from the 1980s, employed with singular verve in the music of Public Enemy, Ice-T, and Ice Cube. Equally gripping are Potters discussions of hip-hop and race, which, for obvious reasons, entwine each section of the book, and his speculations on the future of global hip-hop. However, the focal discussions of Spectacular Vernaculars are on hip-hop and postmodernity. Itself a debated and often little-understood subject, postmodernism, as a concept and as a movement, becomes muddier still in the context of hiphop culture. Potter eases his way through this murkiness, contending that hip-hop is a form of radical postmodernism. He argues:
Hip-hop, far from being a simple object which a postmodernist project could bring to light or offer up as exemplary, is itself an active, ongoing, and highly sophisticated postmodernisma postmodernism which in many ways has gone farther and had more crucial consequences than all the academic books on postmodernism rolled into one.41

Adam Krims, author of Rap Music and the Poetics of Identity (2000), announces his intended audience at the beginning of the books rst chapter. In this poetics of music, Krims addresses scholars of popular music and cultural studies, and music scholars generally, including those engaged with progressive musicology42 and integrates cultural studies, critical theory, communications, musicology, and music theory. The books ve chapters focus on three key areas, all based, at least in part, on some form of musical analysis. In chapters one and two, which center on music theory and rap music, Krims discusses the function of theoretical analysis in rap. The third chapter looks at a single tune, Ice Cubes The Nigga Ya Love to Hate. In outlining its sonic organization and pointing to its homage to signifying tradition, Krims argues that The Nigga Ya Love to Hate established for Ice Cube an identity unique among African American revolutionaries. The nal chapters look at the geography of rap, exploring how raps musical poetics adapt to local requirements. To this end, Krims discusses Dutch rap and Cree rap. Krimss work is a breath of fresh air among other academic work on hip-hop culture. Not only does Krims examine topics not addressed elsewhere, he challenges his readers to consider his unique perspectives. A good example is the distinction Krims makes between the terms rap
40. Ibid., 82. 41. Ibid., 13. 42. Adam Krims, Rap Music and the Poetics of Identity, New Perspectives in Music History and Criticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 17.

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and hip-hop. Although certainly not the rst author to distinguish between these two terms (Rose discussed these differences in Black Noise), Krims reminds us that the terms are the objects of some contestation, and fans of the music and the culture in question are often particularly fussy about their usage.43 Krims understands rap to refer only to a kind of music, whereas hip-hop refers more broadly to an entire culture, comprising dancing, music, visual art, clothing, and politics. Even with these distinctions, some murkiness of denition remains, and Krims is wise to close this discussion by citing KRS-One who says rap is something you do, Hip-Hop is something you live.44 Even better examples of the challenges Krims presents us are found in chapter two, in which the author argues for creating a genre system for rap music that complements discussions of gender, race, and class in hip-hop. In Gwendolyn Poughs Check It While I Wreck It (2004) we nd that hiphops kaleidoscope of scholarly work has shifted, this time to focus on black women. Although several authors have written book chapters and articles on women rappers and womens responses to misogynist themes in rap, Pough is the rst academic writer to devote a full-length monograph to womens participation in hip-hop culture. The books seven chapters, each a tightly written section of thirty pages or so, center on black women, black womanist traditions, and the world of hip-hop. In particular, Pough is concerned with the ways in which the rhetorical practices of Black women participants in Hip-Hop culture bring wreckthat is moments when Black womens discourses disrupt dominant masculine discourses, break into the public sphere, and in some way impact or inuence the United States imaginary.45 To these ends, Pough discusses the rhetoric of black women in a variety of genresrap music, lm, spoken word poetry, and novelsand in so doing she eclipses other writers work on hip-hop, which is generally conned to explorations of the music alone. Pough establishes the framework for her discussions of wreck, the books dominant theme, by dening it as a:
Hip-Hop term that connotes ghting, recreation, skill, boasting, or violence. The Hip-Hop concept of wreck sheds new light on the things Blacks have had to do in order to obtain and maintain a presence in the larger public sphere, namely, ght hard and bring attention to their skill and right to be in the public sphere. Bringing wreck, for Black participants in the public sphere

43. Ibid., 10. 44. Ibid. 45. Gwendolyn Pough, Check It While I Wreck It: Black Womanhood, Hip Hop Culture, and the Public Sphere (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 2004), 12.

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Notes, September 2010 historically, has meant reshaping the public gaze in such a way as to be recognized as human beingsas functioning and worthwhile members of society and not to be shut out of or pushed away from the public sphere.46

Chapters three, four, and ve, centered on music, ction, and lm, are the heart of Poughs book. Here, Pough critiques the work of women of the hip-hop generationamong them spoken word artist Jessica Care Moore, rappers Queen Latifah, Lauryn Hill, Lil Kim, and Sister Souljah, and lmmaker Leslie Harrispresenting these as counterpoints to the work of black feminist writers and cultural critics. Poughs discussion of black womens roles in lms by black lmmakers is especially intriguing. Chapter ve, Girls in the Hood and Other Ghetto Dramas, looks at the stereotypes and marginalization of women in John Singletons Boyz n the Hood (1991) and feminist response to these depictions. Pough writes that although the demonization of Black motherhood is nothing new, Singletons lm adds to the pathological readings of Black motherhood that circulate in the larger public discourse.47 More vexing for Pough, as for black feminist scholar and cultural critic Michele Wallace, is the message the lm sends to Black women about raising their sons: that Black women cannot raise healthy, strong, and self-sufcient Black men, and that if no father is present, their sons will fail in life and perhaps even end up dead.48 Pough also discusses how the ghetto girl as lm and literary gure is depicted in work by black women. Her analysis of Leslie Harriss Just Another Girl on the IRT (1993), for example, reveals the lmmakers desire to capture realistic images of black women in lm from a black womans perspective and the ways in which Harris brought wreck to the ways black women are represented in lm and in society at large. Womens presence as rappers in the world of hip-hop is the subject of several other books and articles, some of which discuss the ambivalence with which women nd themselves in a male-dominated eld. In Gender as Anomaly: Women in Rap, a chapter in The Resisting Muse: Popular Music and Social Protest (2006),49 I challenge the male hegemony in rap and examine a handful of the rhetorical tropes (among them nancial, emotional, and sexual independence) in womens rap. This topic is developed further in T. Denean Sharpley-Whitings Pimps Up, Hos Down: Hip Hops Hold on Young Black Women (2007) and in Home Girls Make Some Noise: Hip Hop Feminism Anthology (2007), edited by Gwendolyn Pough and others.
46. Ibid., 17. 47. Ibid., 131. 48. Ibid. 49. Ed. by Ian Peddie, Ashgate Popular and Folk Music Series (Aldershot, Eng.; Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2006).

The Kaleidoscope of Writing on Hip-Hop Culture

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A former runway model, student at Brown University, and part of the hip-hop generation (which she denes as referring to blacks born between 1965 and 1984), Sharpley-Whiting, a professor in the Department of French and Italian at Vanderbilt University, wrote Pimps Up, Hos Down as a way to explore how and why we women do the things we do, what hip hop has to say about it all, and what we have to say back.50 The book is written in an intensely personal style, where passion and subjectivity supplant academic documentation and attempted objectivity. In this sense, the book is reminiscent of Bakers Black Studies, Rap, and the Academy. The essays, poetry, ction, artwork, and interviews in Poughs Home Girls Make Some Noise explore feminist perspectives on rap, rappers, and women in hip-hop. The forty-three authorsmale and female, scholar and layoffer a variety of examples of how feminists have begun to deal with, think about and write about rap music and hip-hop culture,51 and they ask the important question, What should hip-hop feminism be doing? Many of these are introspective and cathartic musings. Several poems speak to a feminist agenda in hip-hop, including Aya de Leons If Women Ran Hip Hop, which confronts biases against women and serves up a platter of remedies for hip-hops ills. In De Leons world, gangsta rappers would be referred to 21-day detox programs where they could get clean and sober from violence and misogyny, conict mediators would help men and women work through their differences, and, ultimately, hip-hop culture would have nothing to be ashamed of because destructive behaviors would not exist.52 Coeditor Elaine Richardson probes issues of gender and sexual inequality, an oftdiscussed topic in hip-hop, in Lil Kim, Hip-Hop Womanhood, and the Naked Truuf. In her article, Richardson discusses Kim, perhaps best known for inltrating areas of the hip-hop business that few women had dared and for her lurid and vulgar rap texts, in terms of the power she represents. She calls Kim (aka Kimberly Jones) the Queen Bitch, the Queen Bee, the Black Madonna of rap, and argues that Kim, like black women generally, has been socialized to consider herself as the embodiment of immorality53 as well as a racial and sexual object.54

50. T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting, Pimps Up, Hos Down: Hip Hops Hold on Young Black Women (New York: New York University Press, 2007), xviii. 51. Home Girls Make Some Noise: Hip Hop Feminism Anthology, ed. Gwendolyn Pough, et al. (Mira Loma, CA: Parker Publishing, 2007), vii. 52. Aya de Leon, If Women Ran Hip Hop, in Home Girls Make Some Noise, 18485. 53. Elaine Richardson, Lil Kim, Hip-Hop Womanhood, and the Naked Truuf, in Home Girls Make Some Noise, 191. 54. Sexuality, male and female, and issues of gender identity are explored in Freya Jarman-Ivenss Queer(ing) Masculinities in Heterosexist Rap Music, in Queering the Popular Pitch, ed. Sheila Whiteley and Jennifer Rycenga, 199219 (New York: Routledge, 2006).

24

Notes, September 2010

Thats the Joint!: The Hip-Hop Studies Reader (2004), an anthology coedited by Murray Forman and Mark Anthony Neal, is a hefty tome in seven chapters that contains forty-four articles by some of hip-hops most prominent authors. Articles by Forman and Neal introduce each chapter. Although I have included this book in the section on scholarly work, it is actually a hybrid, containing work by academics as well as by journalists and cultural critics. The result is an appealing combination of formats, which range from interviews to documented articles. Of the volumes many provocative titles, two are particularly interesting: Ronald Judys On the Question of Nigga Authenticity and Robin D. G. Kelleys Looking for the Real Nigga: Social Scientists Construct the Ghetto. Judy gives us an etymological look at niggerdom, and, in doing so, he illuminates the transformation of nigger into nigga, the distinctions that must be made between the badman and the bad nigger, and, ultimately, the implications of this for hip-hop and hardcore rap:
To be a nigga is ontologically authentic, because it takes care of the question of how a human really is among things. Niggadom, then, is a new dogmatics that is, an attempt to formulate an ontology of the higher thinking called hip-hop science.55

Kelley discusses the role of sociological, anthropological, and ethnographical research in dening black urban expressive culture. He cites dual arguments about rap musics cultural integrity, pointing, on the one hand, to those who criticize rap artistsespecially hardcore gangsta rappersfor their ignorance of black music other than rap and, on the other hand, to artists who categorically insist that rap music is the unmediated voice of ghetto youth. Written by a scholar and a fan, Imani Perrys Prophets of the Hood: Politics and Poetics in Hip Hop (2004) stands amid and relies on56 the extant body of hip-hop scholarship, and it considers the politics and art of hip-hop culture in seven chapters that focus largely on the aesthetic value of rap. Although the language of Perrys study makes its intended audience hip-hops cultural elite, the book is accessible to any reader interested in viewing hip-hop through a fresh lens. Not only does Prophets explore hip-hop through the continuum of black musical expression, as do hip-hops best scholarly studies, it also considers the artistry of the genre. This is seen with particular effectiveness in the second chapter,
55. Thats the Joint!: The Hip-Hop Studies Reader, ed. Murray Forman and Mark Anthony Neal (New York: Routledge, 2004), 115. 56. Imani Perry, Prophets of the Hood: Politics and Poetics in Hip Hop (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004), 3.

The Kaleidoscope of Writing on Hip-Hop Culture

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My Mic Sound Nice: Art, Community, and Consciousness, in which Perry discusses the intersection of poetry, prose, song, music, and theater in rap music, as well as raps intertextualities, which she arues are seen through the lenses of ideology, culture, and art.57 One of the most striking chapters is the sixth, The Venus Hip Hop and the Pink Ghetto: Negotiating Spaces for Women. Perrys goals here are several as she discusses women rappers efforts to create a space for themselves in the male-dominated world of hip-hop; the possibilities for gender liberation in hip-hops future; and conflicted representations of gender identity on the part of hip-hops female performers. Because hip-hop culture extends beyond the boundaries of the United States, readers are able to explore its manifestations throughout the world in full-length monographs as well as in articles in scholarly and trade publications. Indeed, as writes Halifu Osumare, author of The Africanist Aesthetic in Global Hip-Hop: Power Moves (2007), Hip-hop is actually made more vital by the varied and discrete political, historical, cultural, and social dynamics emanating from youth internationally.58 For the most part, these studies explore a variety of disparate cultures, focus on a particular country (for example, hip-hop in South Africa, France, Senegal, Brazil, Germany, Jamaica, Korea, and Japan), or discuss specific movements among immigrant communities (for example, hip-hop in the suburbs of Paris, Marseille, and Lyon). Books such as Global Noise: Rap and Hip-Hop Outside the USA (2001), edited by Tony Mitchell, and The Vinyl Aint Final: Hip-Hop and the Globalization of Black Popular Culture (2006), edited by Dipannita Basu and Sidney Lemelle, introduce readers to the worlds of global hip-hop and the complex issues that surround globalism. As an example of the latter, historian Robin D. G. Kelley informs readers in the foreword to The Vinyl Aint Final, hip-hop hasnt gone global. It has been global, or international at least, since its birth in the very local neighborhoods of the South Bronx, Washington Heights, and Harlem.59 Although Kelley acknowledges the centrality of the U.S. in the culture and distribution of hip hop culture, in particular the seminal role of Black and Latino kids in New York who launched this global movement in the first place, he and the contributors to the volume challenge readers to tackle hip-hops difficult questions and realize, ultimately, that there are no easy answers, no simple way to characterize what is at once a global social movement and a multibillion dollar
57. Ibid., 38. 58. Halifu Osumare, The Africanist Aesthetic in Global Hip-Hop: Power Moves (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 101. 59. The Vinyl Aint Final: Hip Hop and the Globalization of Black Culture, ed. Dipannita Basu and Sidney J. Lemelle (London: Pluto Press, 2006), xi.

26

Notes, September 2010

industry.60 To these ends, the book contains a diversity of perspectives, written by authors from various corners of the globe, with articles that look at hip-hop cultureand the business of hip-hopin Tokyo, Samoa, Cuba, as well as those focused on thorny issues that include rap, blackness, and citizenship in France, and gangsta rap in post-apartheid South Africa. Ian Condry explores cultural globalization, focused specifically on Japan, in Hip-Hop Japan: Rap and the Paths of Cultural Globalization (2006). In the introduction, Hip-Hop, Japan, and Cultural Globalization, Condry talks about his fieldwork in Japan: annual visits to Tokyo between 1994 and 2005 during which he attended a festival called B-Boy Park and observed, in 2001, participants clad in the latest thug fashion, with bandanas, do-rags, and platinum chains. Some of the fans had tanned skin, dread hair, or even beauty-salon-styled Afros to go with their NBA jerseys or FUBU wear.61 Despite these nods to American hip-hop with roots in urban African American and Latino communities, the festival was at heart Japanese, with Japanese lyrics and where emcees rapped about topics that carried a distinctly Japanese flavor.62 Condry looks at how Japanese interpret and embody ideas of hip-hop and race, as well as the ways in which race is debated, commodified, and contested in his second chapter, Yellow B-Boys, Black Culture, and the Elvis Effect. Here, issues of racial and cultural politics are particularly engaging, as they are seen through Japanese lenses. Condry calls to our attention the ways in which Japanese rappers address racism in their own society by drawing inspiration from the racial underpinnings of hip-hop as well as how they engage in a new cultural politics of affiliation.63 To these ends, he explores blackface Japan, and keeping it real in Japan.
THE JOURNALISTS AND CULTURAL CRITICS

The work of print media writers has reached larger audiences than that of their academic confreres, as a large number of journalists and cultural critics have written on hip-hop, and in a large number of sources. The journalists and cultural critics who write for generalist audiences wield a mighty sword, double-edged as it may be: when written well, their articlesones that often provide the only glimpse into hiphop culture for the massesintroduce lay readers to the vicissitudes and

60. Robin Kelley, in The Vinyl Aint Final, xvi. 61. Ian Condry, Hip-Hop Japan: Rap and the Paths to Cultural Globalization (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006), 8. 62. Ibid., 9. 63. Ibid., 29.

The Kaleidoscope of Writing on Hip-Hop Culture

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complexities of this arm of popular culture and black vernacular expression; when poorly written, the articles perpetuate negative stereotypes about contemporary black music, generally, or, more damaging, about black youth and black urban life. There is also the danger that generalist readers will look no further than the summaries of hip-hop culture provided in supermarket checkout-lane magazines; as a result, the burden of hip-hops journalists is even more onerous. A smorgasbord of articles on hip-hop written by prominent hip-hop journalists is contained in And It Dont Stop: The Best American Hip-Hop Journalism of the Last 25 Years (2004). According to editor Raquel Cepeda, hip-hop journalists are being faced with the task of covering more interesting aspects than what the mainstream predicates.64 In this collection, Cepeda has attempted to balance the negative, inated stereotypes afrmed by the artists themselves65 as well as the narrow vision of hip-hop culture served up by mainstream media. To these ends, a variety of perspectives is presented, according to decade and beginning with the 1980s, that considers hip-hop and race, hip-hop and gender, as well as snapshots of specic issues in regional and global hip-hop. Among the many articles written in general-audience magazines in the 1990s, those by journalists John Leland, Christopher John Farley, and Kevin Powell stand out. Race is the focal point in several of Lelands articles for generalist readers. In 1992 and 1993, Leland, a journalist and cultural critic who has written for the New York Times, Spin, and Newsweek magazines, and the author of Hip: The History (2004),66 wrote two cover stories for Newsweek that explored the national fascination with rap and the inevitable intersections between rap and race. In the earlier article, Rap and Race, Leland alleged that race and racial difference had become the rhetorical center of pop music and that in 1992, a presidential election year, pop music careered into national politics. And it did so as a stand-in for an inconvenient topic that had been looming over the campaign all along: race.67 Leland also discussed raps appeal to white Americans, noting in particular youthful white Americans attraction to hardcore rap: Rap taps racial insecurities, soothing them with the promise that one can experience real black life vicariously through records.68 Leland wisely linked the marketing and protable business of rap to race and class, concluding rap is locating white insecurity about
64. And It Dont Stop: The Best American Hip-Hop Journalism of the Last 25 Years, ed. Raquel Cepeda (New York: Faber and Faber, 2004), xviii. 65. Ibid., xix. 66. (New York: HarperCollins, 2004). 67. John Leland, Rap and Race, Newsweek, 29 June 1992, 47. 68. Ibid., 52.

28

Notes, September 2010

race and black insecurity about classand selling it back as entertainment.69 The issue of rap as entertainment versus rap as reality or sliceof-life is the subject of Lelands article on gangsta rap and the culture of violence, also written for Newsweek. In this article, Leland again discussed the appeal of this genre of rap to white youth, who he said constitute the largest segment of the rap industry. In discussing gangsta raps images of violent, profane, misogynist, and nihilistic young black menand the culture of violence that begat and drives the music, Leland asked whether there is a relationship between the musics messages and violence in black communities and, in particular, the pot of gold recording companies found in selling images of black-on-black crime to white America.70 One of the most interesting aspects of the kaleidoscope of writing on hip-hop culture is the variation in denition of the words hip-hop and rap. As I mentioned earlier, academic writers and those writing for scholarly audiences incline toward denitions laden with language peculiar to their disciplines; by contrast, journalists who write for generalist audiences wisely stray from idiosyncratic jargon. Christopher John Farley, pop-music critic for Time magazine, considered hip-hops denitions, complexities, and popularity in his retrospective cover story article HipHop Nation: After 20 YearsHow Its Changed America (1999).71 Although initially imprecise, writing the terms are nearly, but not completely, interchangeable,72 Farley later gives both pithy and lengthy denitions of hip-hop and rap. In his concise version, Farley denes hip-hop as the culture of rap and says that it refers to the backing music for rap; in another version, he denes rap as a form of rhythmic speaking in rhyme.73 Knowing that these denitions would prove inadequate, even to Time magazines generalist audience, Farley provides other ways to consider the terms, reserving his more expansive assessments for hip-hop:
Hip-hop represents a realignment of Americas cultural aesthetics. . . . Hiphop, much as the blues and jazz did in past eras, has compelled young people of all races to search for excitement, artistic fulllment and even a sense of identity by exploring the black underclass. . . . Hip-hop has forced advertisers, lmmakers and writers to adopt street signiers like cornrows and terms like player hater. Hip-hop has given invisibility a voice.74
69. Ibid. 70. John Leland, Criminal Records: Gangsta Rap and the Culture of Violence, Newsweek, 29 November 1993, 604. 71. Christopher John Farley, Hip-Hop Nation: After 20 YearsHow Its Changed America, Time, 8 February 1999, 5464. 72. Ibid., 56. 73. Ibid. 74. Ibid., 57.

The Kaleidoscope of Writing on Hip-Hop Culture

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Farley also cites lm star and director Warren Beatty and novelist Tom Wolfe in this discussion to support his arguments on the pervasiveness of hip-hop in American popular culture. More importantly, Farley situates hip-hop squarely in the consumer arena, proclaiming it to be perhaps the only art form that celebrates capitalism openly.75 To this end, he discusses corporate Americas infatuation with rap and cites the enthusiastic response of Hollywood and Madison Avenue to the phenomenon of hip-hop, whose style, according to fashion design mogul Tommy Hilger, can be embraced by people from a diversity of racial and ethnic backgrounds.76 Hip-hop historian Kevin Powell, a former senior writer for Vibe magazine and self-proclaimed hip-hop head for life, puts a different spin on hip-hop culture in his essay My Culture at the Crossroads (2000).77 Although Powells primary purpose is to lament the direction hip-hop had taken by 2000, he also denes the culture and explains what it has meant to him. Powell longs for the golden age of hip-hop in the late 1980s and early 1990s, and he bemoans the crass, formulaic approach to hip-hop in the twenty-rst century, in which rappers rhyme about jewelry, clothing, and alcohol; denigrate women in every conceivable way; and party and b.s. ad nauseam.78 Just as there are multiple ways to dene hip-hop, there are also multiple ways to present these denitions. The majority of hip-hops chroniclers offer their musings in prose, either in the sophisticated language of scholarly writing or in the language of hip-hop fanzines. This variety adds avor, to borrow from old-school hip-hop jargon, to the hodgepodge of views on hip-hops denition. Hip-hop journalist Frank Williams cast hip-hop lyrically in 1996 in his very clever analysis, HipHop Is. . . .79 The essay, in six paragraphs, is too lengthy to cite in full, but the following excerpt illustrates in part Williamss ideas about hiphops vicissitudes, inconsistencies, complexities, and enigmas:
Hip-hop is poetry. Langston Hughes meets Das EFX. Drunken adjectives and smoked out sentences lled with sex, guns, violence, and lust. Hip-hop is the Black existence. Hip-hop is lyin ass ni*gas telling lies to eyes, ears, pockets and TV screens. Hip-hop is tempting sexism and the glorication of a wack state of genocidal abyss. Hip-hop is agreeing with madness. Midsummer night fantasies conjured up by ghetto princesses and concrete princes in projects everywhere. Hip-hop rings of negro spirituals. African folktales. Ice Cube.
75. 76. 77. 78. 79. Ibid. Ibid. Kevin Powell, My Culture at the Crossroads, Newsweek, 9 October 2000, 66. Ibid. Frank Williams, Hip-Hop Is. . . , The Source, January 1996, 15.

30

Notes, September 2010 Eazy-Es gravesite. Hip-hop is all some brothers have as a guide book to life. True hip-hop is Not capitalism. It is a street code of laws. Black male insecurity. Hope. Perseverance.80

Three years earlier, in 1993, essayist Greg Tate wrote a similarly lyrical description of hip-hop. This version, called What Is Hip-Hop? seeks to riddle a paradox with a host of non sequiturs [and] end simpleminded conceptions of hip-hop that pervade the culture from within and without.81 The sardonic statement-cum-poem is in eight sections that pay homage to hip-hops roots in black vernacular expression and situate them in commercial and capitalist contexts. The rst section acknowledges the dozens tradition in hip-hop with four lines that each begin your mother is so hip-hop; the third of these iterations reads your mother is so hip-hop, she yelled ho fo I even axed her. The next sections look at the commodication of hip-hop, arguing, Hip-hop is the rst musical movement in history where black people pimped themselves before the white boy did.82 The penultimate verse explores the multicultural and technological components of hip-hop, asking, Pink people wanna know if other pink people like hip-hop how can it still be hip-hop? and stating, hip-hop is half black and half Japanese. Hip-hop is digital chips on the shoulders of African lips.83 In the closing lines, the author wants us to understand that in addition to being a grab bag of non sequitur, hip-hop is ultimately the seemingly disconnected elements that fuel and give meaning to black urban existence at the close of the twentieth century.
THE DEVOTEES

The writers whom I have designated as the devotees are a heterogeneous group. All are clearly more than devotees in the sense that they are far more than fans or hip-hop groupies. Some, like Nelson George, have written celebrated books on popular music and have enjoyed illustrious careers as cultural critics. Others, including Bill Adler and Brian Cross, have deep and abiding roots in the world of hip-hop as publicists and chroniclers. This notwithstanding, the term devotee is an apt moniker for each person whose work I discuss, because each began a written exploration of hip-hop from an enduring passion for the cultures art, dance, music, and performersand neither as scholarship re80. Ibid. 81. Greg Tate, What Is Hip-Hop? in Rap on Rap: Straight Up Talk on Hip Hop Culture, ed. Adam Sexton (New York: Delta Books, 1995), 17. 82. Cited in Rap on Rap, 1819. 83. Ibid., 20.

The Kaleidoscope of Writing on Hip-Hop Culture

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quired for graduate study or academic tenure nor as an assignment for a newspaper or journal. Bill Adler, a former rap publicist who owned a hip-hop arts gallery in New York called Eyejammie, wrote a biography of rappers Run-DMC. His Tougher Than Leather: The Rise of Run-DMC (1987),84 published at the height of the groups popularity, chronicles Run-DMCs rise to superstardom in the early 1980s; in so doing, it provides a glimpse into the development and cultivation of hip-hop from the late 1970s through the middle 1980s. Adlers book, one of the rst devoted to hip-hop performers, is a rsthand account, written in an informal style and peppered with dialogue that makes us feel that we are sitting in someones living room listening to a casual conversation between friends. The result is an as it happened historical document that situates the groups members Joseph Run Simmons (who resuscitated his career in the early 2000s as a television personality on the MTV reality show Runs House), Darryl DMC McDaniels, and Jason Jam Master Jay Mizellin a variety of milieus: as high-school students in their middle-class hometown of Hollis, Queens, New York; on concert stages in London, Tokyo, and throughout the United States, dressed in their trademark black velour Stetsons and white laceless Adidas; in the recording studio; and in lm studios. Adler also discusses the early career of Russell Simmons, Runs brother and one of hip-hops most successful entrepreneurs, charts the rise of Def Jam Records, and in passing names scores of people involved in early hip-hop, including rappers Afrika Bambaataa, Kurtis Blow, and the Beastie Boys, and record producers Rick Rubin and Lyor Cohen. Among the books most useful features are the abundant citations of the groups performances from contemporaneous reviews by critics Greg Tate, John Leland, and Nelson George. Adlers most recent work, DEFinition: The Art and Design of Hip-Hop (2008),85 written in collaboration with hip-hop graphic artist Cey Adams, tells the story of hip-hop through text and image. Nelson Georges name is synonymous with popular culture. The recipient of two ASCAP-Deems Taylor Awards and an American Book Award, George is the author of eight nonction books on African American culture, and he has written for the Village Voice, Essence, and Esquire. His Hip Hop America (1998) is a personal look at and tribute to the culture that played a key role in his life from the late 1970s to the late 1990s. Although Georges style of writing is lucid and accessible to a range of readers, the book itself is as complicated as its subject matter. George
84. (New York: New American Library, 1987; reprint, Los Angeles: Consafos Press, 2002). 85. (New York: Collins Design, 2008).

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Notes, September 2010

acknowledges the many branches on hip-hops tree, but he centers his discussion on rap and looks in particular at rapping as art, both as an extension of African-American maleness and as a showcase for the art of verbal dexterity and storytelling.86 He wants us to understand that the values that underpin so much of hip-hopmaterialism, brand consciousness, gun iconography, anti-intellectualismare very much by-products of the larger American culture and that the unsavory aspects of hip-hop (racism, sexism, and anti-Semitism) are ingrained in our national culture and not unique to rap music. Ultimately, as George tells us in his introduction, Hip Hop America reveals hip-hop culture as the product of schizophrenic, post-civil rights movement America.87 Each of the books sixteen chapters is in some way anecdotal, drawing on Georges engagement with hip-hop culture over the course of more than twenty years. This personal approach gives the book a credibility that is sometimes lacking in the work of other writers. In reading Hip Hop America, we feel an immediate and intimate connection to the culture that is enlivened by Georges experiences with hip-hop as it evolved. Because the book was published in 1998, we get an insiders glimpse into hip-hops early years. This, of course, is where the books value lies: in Georges recounting the history of hip-hop as it unfolded and reading his diary-like entries on the cultures iconic gures. Two of the most interesting chapters are the tenth and twelfth, National Music and Capitalist Tool. Like the other chapters in the book, these are subdivided into several very short sections, each focused on a single idea and often bearing a fanciful title, such as Fat Laces and The Beatles of Gangsterdom. In National Music, George looks at the rivalry between East and West Coast rappers. Much of this discussion looks at the music of NWA and at the conicting aesthetics and ideology of Death Row and Bad Boy records and their chief spokesmen, Suge Knight, Sean Puffy Combs, Tupac Shakur, and the Notorious B.I.G. George condes that when he was introduced to the music of NWA in 1988, his old-school New York, P.E.-is-God ears couldnt really hear NWA yet. It was too obscene. Too radical.88 He soon learned to respect the music of these Jhericurled suckers because he believed the groups success would unlock the dark imaginations of young black artists, freeing them to use raw language to say things on vinyl no generation of AfricanAmericans had felt comfortable expressing in public.89 George walks us through gangsta raps glory days, along the way explaining the downfall
86. 87. 88. 89. Nelson George, Hip Hop America (New York: Viking, 1998), xiii. Ibid., xiv. Ibid., 135. Ibid., 136.

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of Death Row Records cofounder Suge Knight and bewailing the murders of Tupac and Biggie. He concludes his analysis of West Coast rap with these words:
This music will serve as an essential part of the historical memory of Southern California in the 80s and 90s. Just as the Beach Boys spoke for an idealistic vision of the area in the 60s and the Eagles presented a cynical, mellow view in the 70s, the recordings from the Compton/Long Beach axis tell the story of the poverty, guns, and despair that everyone noticed after the 1992 riotsriots that had been happening on CDs all along.90

Chapter twelve, Capitalist Tool, looks at hip-hops inuence in the political and commerical arenas. While George acknowledges that hiphops major problem as a political movement is that MCs are not social activists by training or inclination, this has not precluded hip-hop from having left its mark on American politics.91 Much of the chapter focuses on the commodication of hip-hop; to this end, George discusses hiphops inuence in the fashion world and the multi-million-dollar businesses, started in the 1990s, owned by Russell Simmons, Karl Kani (aka Carl Williams), and Puffy Combs. Given the popularityindeed, ubiquityof hip-hip in the international sphere, it should not surprise that important studies of hip-hop have been written by those whose early lives were spent outside the cultures rst owering in Americas urban centers. Brian Cross, who was born and raised in Limerick, Ireland, wrote Its Not About a Salary: Rap, Race, and Resistance in Los Angeles (1993), a book that explored West Coast rap and the intersection of race and racial politics in this music. Crosss fascination with rap and hip-hop culture was inspired initially by the political nature of British and Irish punk music. In this music, as well as in the stories he read daily in the 1970s, Cross encountered the anomie his generation felt. This interest in lived experience led Cross to rap, with its stories that relate to the social geography that produces them.92 During his rst visit to the United States, in 1988, Cross encountered the racial realities that informed much early rap and that enlivened his fascination with the stories people tell. Cross divides his book into two unequal sections. The rst provides brief overviews of Los Angeles and Chicano hip-hop; the second and lengthier section is devoted entirely to interviews with performers of West Coast rap in the 1980s and early 1990s. Cross also includes an
90. Ibid., 143. 91. Ibid., 155. 92. Brian Cross, Its Not About a Salary: Rap, Race and Resistance in Los Angeles (London; New York: Verso, 1993), 3.

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Notes, September 2010

appendix, compiled from statistics gathered by the Coalition Against Police Abuse, that details police abuse in Los Angeles between 1965 and 1991. Although the bulk of Its Not About a Salary centers on performers of gangsta rap, it also includes interviews with a variety of Los Angelesbased musicians, including jazz notables Roy Porter and Horace Tapscott, performance poet Kamau Daaood, and Old School LA hiphoppers Chino, G Money, Cli-n-Tel, and Lonzo. The centerfold and most noteworthy interviews are those of gangsta rappers Ice-T, Dr. Dre, Eazy E, and Ice Cube. Most of the interviews were conducted in person, either in the performers studios or in Crosss apartment; others, including the interview with Ice Cube, were conducted by phone. Crosss interview style, which is forthright and tinged with street jargon, works well in establishing an informal tone that elicits equally forthright responses from the performers. Crosss interview with Ice Cube, an archetype of the hiphop interview, was conducted in two parts, both by phone, in October 1991 and November 1992. He considers Ice Cube to be Los Angeles most famous hip-hop son and he asks direct questions about the performers views on the Nation of Islam, black unity, LA hip-hop culture, homosexuality, and rap as political statement versus rap as entertainment. His interview with Eazy E, conducted in the fall of 1992, addresses the performers ignominious business dealings and NWAs image as nihilistic hoodlums.93
FUTURE DIRECTIONS: BEYOND 2010

If past trends in writing about hip-hop culture predict future trends accurately, we will continue to be ush in both quality and quantity of published material. Indeed, we might anticipate a veritable surfeit of this writing, and in a variety of styles that appeal to its diverse audiences. Trade magazines, with their strong fan base and eager advertisers, will undoubtedly continue to garner the lions share of hip-hops readership with pages of splashy advertisements trumpeting hip-hop fashion and articles that provide an insiders look at the culture and its icons. We might equally hope to nd more truly engaging writing on hip-hop by cultural critics such as Jon Pareles of the New York Times, whose insightful and probing articles have enhanced our understanding of hip-hops shifting parameters. Courses on hip-hop culture, anomalous in college curricula in the 1990s, have become staples, and academic discourse in these elds is
93. For a detailed look at NWA in the late 1980s and the cultural politics of gangsta rap, see Gail Hilson Woldu, The Words and Music of Ice Cube, The Praeger Singer-Songwriter Collection (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2008), 126.

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nearly as commonplace and acceptable as that on blues and jazz. Sessions on hip-hop topics are routinely included in the national meetings of the Society for Ethnomusicology, the College Music Society, and the American Musicological Society. By consequence, scholarly and other writing penned by academics and intended primarily for academic audiences will no doubt see a surge in the quantity of material published. Some of this writing will of necessity restate hip-hops history; most, however, would be wise to chronicle the years after 2000. The work of Rose and Chang, among others, will perhaps set the standard for writing focused on comprehensive explorations of hip-hop culture, while that of Condry, Keyes, Perry, Neal, and Pough might be the models against which topic-specic writing should be measured. Future audiences of scholarly writing on hip-hop would be well served by having at their disposal books and articles centered on the importance of race in dening and shaping hip-hops cultural politics. Given the multicultural, multiethnic, and multinational direction of hip-hop in the twenty-rst century, future readers must be reminded at every turn of the cultures origins and the racial dimension that spawned it. Future writing should also look more closely at womens roles in hip-hop and, in particular, at the dismantling of raps hegemonic structures. I have already noted the pioneering work of Rose, Pough, Keyes, and Angela Davis in this realm; to these I would also mention T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting, whose work I have cited. One nal area of published work on hip-hop culture needs to be pursued more ambitiously: monograph-length studies of individual performers and groups. While many books and articles exist in this domain, most are of fanzine quality, written for generalist and voyeuristic audiences. There are exceptions, of course, including Greg Thomass HipHop Revolution in the Flesh: Power, Knowledge, and Pleasure in Lil Kims Lyricism (2009), which delves into the new bodies of knowledge and new body politics94 that Kims music and presence invokes. Predictably, several books have been written about icons Tupac Shakur and Eminem; these are of varying quality, and we await either a denitive study of these legends or studies that explore in-depth a specic topic. Hip-hops kaleidoscope, with its rapidly shifting transformations, has proven itself perfectly suited to this range of writing. With the evergrowing popularity and inuence of hip-hop culture, there should be no shortage of provocative new writing.

94. Greg Thomas, Hip-Hop Revolution in the Flesh: Power, Knowledge, and Pleasure in Lil Kims Lyricism (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 5.

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SELECTED BOOKS ON HIP-HOP CULTURE

Alim, H. Samy, Awad Ibrahim, and Alastair Pennycook, editors. Global Linguistic Flows: Hip Hop Cultures, Youth Identities, and the Politics of Language. New York: Routledge, 2009. Baker, Houston A. Black Studies, Rap, and the Academy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993. Basu, Dipannita and Sidney J. Lemelle, editors. The Vinyl Aint Final: Hip Hop and the Globalization of Black Popular Culture. London: Pluto Press, 2006. Cepeda, Raquel, editor. And It Dont Stop: The Best American Hip-Hop Journalism of the Last 25 Years. New York: Faber and Faber, Inc., 2004. Chang, Jeff. Cant Stop, Wont Stop: A History of the Hip-Hop Generation. New York: St. Martins Press, 2005. , editor. Total Chaos: The Art and Aesthetics of Hip-Hop. New York: Basic Civitas, 2006. Cheney, Charise. Brothers Gonna Work It Out: Sexual Politics in the Golden Age of Rap Nationalism. New York: New York University Press, 2005. Condry, Ian. Hip-Hop Japan: Rap and the Paths of Cultural Globalization. Durham: Duke University Press, 2006. Costello, Mark and David Foster Wallace. Signifying Rappers: Rap and Race in the Urban Present. New York: Ecco Press, 1990. Dyson, Michael Eric. Between God and Gangsta Rap: Bearing Witness to Black Culture. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996. Forman, Murray. The Hood Comes First: Race, Space, and Place in Rap and Hip-Hop. Music/Culture. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2002. and Mark Anthony Neal, editors. Thats the Joint!: The Hip-Hop Studies Reader. New York: Routledge, 2004. George, Nelson. Hip Hop America. New York: Viking, 1998. Reprint, with a new chapter, 2005. Kitwana, Bakari. Why White Kids Love Hip Hop: Wankstas, Wiggers, Wannabes, and the New Reality of Race in America. New York: Basic Civitas Books, 2005. Krims, Adam. Rap Music and the Poetics of Identity. New Perspectives in Music History and Criticism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Mitchell, Tony, editor. Global Noise: Rap and Hip-Hop Outside the USA. Music/Culture. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2001. Neal, Mark Anthony. What the Music Said: Black Popular Music and Black Public Culture. New York: Routledge, 1999. Ogbar, Jeffrey O. G. Hip-Hop Revolution: The Culture and Politics of Rap. Culture America. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2007.

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Osumare, Halifu. The Africanist Aesthetic in Global Hip-Hop: Power Moves. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. Perry, Imani. Prophets of the Hood: Politics and Poetics in Hip Hop. Durham: Duke University Press, 2004. Potter, Russell A. Spectacular Vernaculars: Hip-Hop and the Politics of Postmodernism. The SUNY Series in Postmodern Culture. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995. Pough, Gwendolyn. Check It While I Wreck It: Black Womanhood, Hip Hop Culture, and the Public Sphere. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 2004. , et al., editors. Home Girls Make Some Noise: Hip Hop Feminism Anthology. Mira Loma, CA: Parker Publishing, 2007. Quinn, Eithne. Nuthin But a G Thang: The Culture and Commerce of Gangsta Rap. Popular Cultures, Everyday Lives. New York: Columbia University Press, 2005. Rose, Tricia. The Hip-Hop Wars: What We Talk About When We Talk About Hip HopAnd Why it Matters. New York: Basic Civitas, 2008. . Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America. Music/Culture. Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1994. Sexton, Adam, editor. Rap on Rap: Straight Up Talk on Hip Hop Culture. New York: Delta, 1995. Sharpley-Whiting, T. Denean. Pimps Up, Hos Down: Hip Hops Hold on Young Black Women. New York: New York University Press, 2007. Thomas, Greg. Hip-Hop Revolution in the Flesh: Power, Knowledge, and Pleasure in Lil Kims Lyricism. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. Watkins, S. Craig. Hip Hop Matters: Politics, Pop Culture, and the Struggle for the Soul of a Movement. Boston: Beacon Press, 2005. Whiteley, Sheila and Jennifer Rycenga, editors. Queering the Popular Pitch. New York: Routledge, 2006. Wilson, Scott. Great Satans Rage: American Negativity and Rap/Metal in the Age of Supercapitalism. Manchester, NY: Manchester University Press, 2008. Woldu, Gail Hilson. The Words and Music of Ice Cube. The Praeger SingerSongwriter Collection. Westport, CT: Praeger Books, 2008.
ABSTRACT

At the beginning of the second decade of the twenty-rst century, writing about hip-hop is at an interesting crossroads. On the one hand, we continue to see a wealth of ne academic writing published by scholars in elds as diverse as cultural studies, musicology, and womens studies; on the other, we have noticed a dramatic decline in the quality of popular writing about hip-hop, much of which has succumbed to crude

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street language in an attempt to increase readership. This kaleidoscope, by turns overly pedantic and gratuitously coarse, creates a conundrum as hip-hop struggles to deneand redeneitself. This article distinguishes three categories of writing about hip-hop works by academics, works by journalists and cultural critics, and works by hip-hops devoteesand discusses a handful of signicant publications written between 1988 and 2008. This twenty-year written history of hip-hop is considered through a variety of lenses, with the hope that the various points of view might illuminate new directions for hip-hops chronicled future.

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