I got a chance to read Brothers Gonna Work it Out by Charise Cheney over the past week while chilling in the northern tip of Michigan’s lower peninsula. It’s about that period between say 1987 and 1992 or so when hip-hop’s political potential was at its greatest. Or so they say anyway. Cheney’s work is sorely needed, but there are some places where she could’ve done a bit more work.
There were two questions that I had about the golden age that Cheney didn’t answer for me. How “golden” was it? Hip-hop is now old enough to wax nostalgic, to not only talk about the good old days, but to use power to jam those good old days down our throat. Remember the days when DJs used wax? When the MC and the DJ had equal billing? When cats did it for the love of the game, rather than the contract?
Um…yeah.
When KRS-One came to my yard to speak a few years back, I got a chance to talk to him and to thank him. He IS one of the reasons why I am where I am, why many of us are able to do what we do without compromise. Krisna Best’s post on the Universality of Hip-hop to gets at this in depth, and on the real it wasn’t JUST hip-hop. But there was a moment in the late eighties/early nineties where we realized that we could actually integrate into formerly white spaces without compromise. Hip-hop is at least partially responsible for that.
But when you really think about it, that golden age didn’t really have much in the way of content. In comparison to today? Maybe. But how many artists are we really talking about? X-Clan, KRS-One, Public Enemy, Paris, Poor Righteous Teachers, The Jungle Brothers, Sistah Souljah, Queen Latifah, A Tribe Called Quest, and even here I’m being liberal (there wasn’t much if any political substance in the Tribe’s work). And none of these groups ever really exploded. It would’ve been interesting to somehow figure out how golden the golden age really was…how many popular political tracks, how many popular political albums, how many groups, not in comparison to now, but within that moment in time.
The second question deals with the content. What exactly did these tracks say? Here’s where I thought that Cheney would go into depth as far as the lyrics. She gives an explanation why she doesn’t do this–she doesn’t want to be reductionist–but I don’t buy it. If the MCs are claiming to represent a certain type of politics, and if consumers are down with them because of those politics, we should be able to get a sense of what those politics are through the music–I mean what else IS there? Because they don’t have a history of praxis, all we really have to go on is their lyrics. And if you aren’t really talking about the lyrics…but you ARE talking about rap, what are you doing?
There are also a few other issues. Errol Henderon wrote what is probably the first academic treatise linking black nationalism and rap music, and Cheney doesn’t cite him at all, missing a real opportunity to talk about where rap could have been had there been more heft to their politics. Further, it’s easy to slap black nationalism around for its sexism, but it isn’t like integrationism is much better. Finally her discussion of what nationalism is/was could be stronger. When you look at nationalism across time you HAVE to look at dominant trends across time rather than differences WITHIN a given point. But still Cheney could’ve done a much better job here.
One comment that really got my attention in your review was when you stated “But when you really think about it, that golden age didn’t really have much in the way of content. ” I wish you would have expounded on that statement, because on it’s surface I have to disagree with it. Many of these groups lit the spark of political and social consciousness amongst many of us, myself included.
Being an conscious artist (recording, film, etc) has to be an extremely difficult balancing act, between being true to self and trying to attain commercial success. You drop too much and people’s attention wanders and the intended message gets lost.
Anyway, Prof, it was good seeing you last week at Rhino’s down in the “D.” Let’s stay in contact.
I’m going to try to get at this in more depth over the next few weeks, but I’m not sure I’ll have something ready for the blog for a while.
Here’s a first cut though.
When I say there was no content, I don’t mean that we had the wool pulled over our eyes by artists who ended up selling out. There’s a quote in the book that I didn’t cite, “this rap shit is a mothafucka.” What homeboy meant was that rap ain’t no part-time hobby if you want to make money at it. It’s more than a full-time job. And even though I don’t like the contemporary content, I appreciate that.
I also don’t mean that people are just making stuff up when they talk about this age. Chuck D. and KRS-One aren’t as responsible for me being here as you and the other old heads at Michigan were. I’m not saying they weren’t responsible, just that they weren’t as responsible as we might think.
In fact, I think I’d put more of the onus on the work WE were doing at places like Michigan, Dartmouth, UMass, Howard etc. The student led protests of the eighties led to more student controlled resources. These resources were largely spent on a combination of black nationalists academics (Molefi Asante, Ivan Van Sertima), conspiracy theorists (Steven Cokely, Francis Cress Welsing), and NOI leaders (Khallid Muhammad, Rasul Muhammad, Farrakhan). This helped to usher in a new wave of black nationalism that expanded when MCs were able to present these ideas to wider markets.
There were more politically conscious MCs then than now (at least on first glance). And the product they put out had a greater market than the product put out by contemporaries like Immortal Technique. But in raw terms there was never as much political rap out there as we think there was. And although we ate it up, I’m not sure (based purely on record sales) that their work was as widely consumed by people as we think. We may refer to that period as a golden age only because this age appears to be so bankrupt.
Prof. Spence,
Two points.
First, the content was, as you mention, sparse at best. All the above mentioned artists had no dinstinct and clear-cut worldview, but rather represented the various ideas; the dialogue of their age. If anything, it manifested a kind of black pluralism, a smorgasbord of historical black ideology. The music was merely the sounding board for figuring out which tendency would win (unfortunately it seems that, for the time being, it is black enterprise–even though most black folks are obviously not entrepreneurs).
You are right to thank KRS-One. I have yet to do that. I told Chuck D in 1996 (when I was 16) that his music was important. And it was. So I don’t think by looking at this era of hip-hop with a critical eye devalues or dismisses it. It just helps to give you a new notion, a new way to look at familiar shit.
Second, You are absolutely right to place primacy upon the black student movement of the late 80s/early 90s itself as the basis for “golden age” rap, rather than the other way around.
Throughout the past few years, I myself have butted heads with close friends of mine who are political MCs that tend to think that “conscious” (I hate that term, simply because all rap is conscious and most so-called conscious rappers are politically confused) rap will help usher in another movement.
I think if we have learned anything from history it is that movements throw up artists of all kinds which represent the tendencies and dominant ideas of their respective times. I don’t care what Amiri Baraka says, no amount of “revolutionary” theatres and poets and rappers will create a popular revolutionary culture. That is because they are attempting to relive their version of the past which is obviously out of step with the prevailing values, attitudes, and ideas of contemporary society.
To quote an anonymous author of a review of I Looked Over Jordan, “A distinctive and autonomous [working class] culture will develop as part of a distinctive and autonomous [working class].”
Ok that’s it. Feel free to point out any shortcomings in my response. I was nine-years-old when my Mom bought me To The East Blackwards, so I wasn’t exactly in college then. Peace.
From the Archives: Sexual Politics in the Golden Age of Rap Nationalism; A Review http://t.co/X50KEuN7