On one side I hear John McWhorter, and on the other side I hear Michael Eric Dyson. In this book their voices come together because McWhorter has put forth his hip-hop apolitical argument in sharp contrast to the many political ones. In fact, Dyson provided the title of the book from a debate when he said hip-hop was “all about the beat.” In All About the Beat, McWhorter prepares rip-roaring arguments against Dyson, the very guru of hip-hop as politics.
I found John McWhorter directly through his groundbreaking Losing the Race. He was a linguistics professor at Stanford when he wrote it. Currently he is senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and was recently highlighted on Book TV. I have been reading and collecting his books for years - even an arcane one by the name of The Missing Spanish Creoles. I have done this because, 20 years ago, as a grad student, I worked as an editor's assistant on The Journal of Pidgin and Creole languages. I have loved linguistics and anthropology ever since.
During the Book TV segment, he was not a buttoned-down, GOP, conservative darling, but an open, talented, piano-playing professor (now fellow) who treasures his privacy and has found a public voice often heard on radio and television. When asked about his politics, he said simply, “For me, it’s an Obama year.”
The Real Prose of Politics VS. The Beat Poetry of Hip-Hop
I find McWhorter the embodiment of a ghetto nerd turned generational guru for the sandal wearing, clean cut (or beatnik), coffeehouse intellectual. He’s a true crowd pleaser. In All About the Beat, one gets a clear sense of what McWhorter thinks. It’s a great read to be sure by a master of the pen. I laughed out loud many times and read it cover-to-cover in one sitting. He does not mince words nor protract his argument. He knows his subject well, and loves and collects the music he critiques.
You listen to the beat, dance, and love to it. You think you know hip-hop as a unique American art form, but did you know it had a political message? That it was a politico in disguise? That it was really a revolution waiting in the wings? This and much more is what Dyson would have consumers and rappers believe. McWhorter argues that Dyson’s position does not pass the smell test. Hip-hop is a feel-good, sound-good phenom, period.
Hip-hop (or rap) is a black narcissist game evoking the sensate in all men. The hippocampus has hip-hop entombed, subsumed, and linked to the lizard brain - inescapable. Sensual, yes. Fun, yes. Rhythm and beat, yes. Heat and no light, yes. Politics, hell no! That is McWhorter’s powerful message, but the hip-hop makers and producers aren’t feeling it. He is almost apologetic about not getting the hip-hop cum politic nexus. The truth is that he does get it and compiles his arguments in a cogent, academic, witty, and logical manner.
Article comments
1 - Curry Kid
Peace and Blessings.
In the segment of Hip Hop that moves me, that is how some greet one another. I have yet to read Mr. McWorter's tome. Frankly he was completely off my radar until today. So i can only speak to what i have read in the above piece and one or two other critiques of the book. Also, if i could clarify, little aggravates Hip Hop purists more than when one substitutes the word 'Rap' for the phrase 'Hip Hop' like they are interchangeable. Hip Hop is a culture (some of us prefer 'kulture'), rap is a component of said culture. In terms of music, Rap is a subgenre of Hip Hop. As well, all a Rapper requires is a microphone and an audience. MCs are wordsmiths who can motivate whole groups of people to move their butts or, dare i say it... think.
Does Hip Hop employ a certain amount of bravado and posturing..? Sure. Are some short-sighted seeking only financial growth..? To my dismay, guilty again. However to paint this as the very fiber of Hip Hop is to pants Hip Hop in order to decry the folly of allowing ones' boxers to show.
It seems the prevailing logic here in is, with regard to Hip Hop, it is not worthy of note unless it is promoted via corporate America... Since when is Pete Rock a Rapper, let alone a conscious one? Saying something: political, reactionary or revolutionary on one rap song does not make one a Conscious MC. If it did: Flava Flav, Goapelle and Justin Timberlake would be among the genre's greats. 'Why?' and 'Jesus Walks' were good songs, but i somehow suspect the former didn't get Paris salivating to sign Jadakiss to Guerilla Funk nor the latter garner Kanye a shelf full of Stellar Awards. If you gage all of Hip Hop based on the image portrayed by the likes of Vivendi, Clear Channels and Viacom: not only do i understand your concern, but i wouldn't be surprised if you thought scratching was invented when someone spilled a beer on a turntable.
The truth is, just as throwing a LOT of money at one school district will not level a playing field still off kilter from the events of several millennia ago... Hip Hop too, is much deeper than what meets the eye. Next time you choose to demonize Hip Hop for how it is portrayed in pop culture, i beg of you... Take a fraction of the time you employed digging for Mr. Worter's books and apply it to investigating lesser-known Hip Hop projects. There are whole catalogs of albums with little or no expletives. There are whole sub-genres of music that refer to women as 'Sista' and 'Queen' not 'b****' or 'h*.'
I confess we as a Hip Hop Kulture did (in numbers larger than i wish to admit) buy into the notion that money trumps expression. However that does not mean to perform spoken word poetry to a Hip Hop beat is to perform music that is inherently synthetic, misogynistic or or self-destructive.
As for the social issues we as a kulture are not getting the credit for speaking to or working through...
To overlook the contributions of Hip Hop in the success of Barrack Obama is to all but admit that you still think rap is nothing more than a fad that children listen to to piss off their parents.
Just as the success of black students will not change exclusively by the rapid influx of greater sums of money, neither will the numbers of people of color in prison. Frankly both of those arguments sound to me like little more than conservative talking points. Hip Hop is so quick to speak ill of the prison industrial complex and the military industrial complex because next to rap and professional sports they seem to be held over the heads of youth as the ONLY options for success. There are several deeper socio-economic causes for this disparity and belittling Hip Hop for being a mouth-piece for the voices of people conscious enough to be concerned is not the most effective approach i can think of for resolving those issues.
Incidentally, people of color working in the prison system strikes me as less something to be heralded and more a modern day case of the house negro. Not saying that they get into the field for that reason, quite the contrary. I would imagine that many people of color who sign on to be members of law enforcement, military, educators or doctors do it for much the same reason anyone else does.... At root, they seek to help others. However, to declining degrees (when read respectively) it is a struggle not to give into the frustration of seeing people like yourself in that condition. Or worse to respond the way others may have millennia ago. Resolve some of those issues before shooting the messenger.
In conclusion, Hip Hop was never exclusively about shaking one's hind quarters. Yes, dancing has always been a part of Hip Hop. But so too has bragging rites (as won through battling) and politics. Because the reason that those youth in the South Bronx were scrambling to challenge each other to competitions of skill involving: dance, oratory, paint/markers and vinyl in the early 70s was that they just lost funding for after school programs. It took about three and a half decades for the system to persuade their offspring that Hip Hop is not a better route. Would you like to take the blame for that one?
One Love,
Curry Kid
OFFtheTOPradio.com
Ps. Its 'The Roots,' not 'The Root.'