Reading Well: Tricia Rose on Hip Hop

You may have noticed a lot of content on hip hop here lately …

As part of that, I re-read Tricia Rose‘s 1994 book Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America and read for the first time her 2008 work, The Hip Hop Wars: What We Talk About When We Talk About Hip Hop–And Why It Matters.

Black Noise remains a compelling work, and it deserves its place in the annals of scholarly work on hip hop. Note that both of these books are academic. They aren’t particularly theoretical or particularly dense, but they are detailed: it is not enough for Rose to claim that part of the originating context of hip hop involves urban decay; instead she traces that historically over the course of several pages.

Rose does a great job following the development of the art form while remaining focused on interactions between the historical facts and both the cultural and commercial forces at work. It is very much a work of its time: there is still a sense of optimism about hip hop, and there is still a notion that it will play a positive role in voicing the experience and concerns of (mostly) urban, (mostly) non-white populations that were, at a minimum, highly marginalized.

Which brings us to The Hip Hop Wars, published fourteen years later … Rose opens by declaring that

Hip hop is not dead, but it is gravely ill. The beauty and life force of hip hop have been squeezed out, wrung nearly dry by the compounding factors of commercialism, distorted racial and sexual fantasy, oppression, and alienation. It has been a sad thing to witness … It wasn’t ideal by any means: Carrying many of the seeds of destruction that were part of society itself, it had its gangsters, hustlers, misogynists, and opportunists; it suffered from the hallmarks of social neglect and disregard; it expressed anger and outrage in sometimes problematic ways.

Indeed. From there, though, she picks up on part of what made Black Noise such a great book, refusing to be drawn into simple-mindedness on either side of the debate. The rest of The Hip Hop Wars is separated into ten chapters, five focusing on common critiques of the genre and five on common defenses of it. Doing this allows her to complicate the issue, recognizing both the ridiculousness of claiming hip hop is the cause of a “decay of American values,” and refusing to concede that the presence of a few politically conscious artists means hip hop doesn’t have a political issue.

#BestBits

Black Noise‘s greatest contribution to the discussion is, I believe, the application of Arthur Jafa‘s categories of African-American expression to hip hop. The interrelated manifestations of flow, rupture in line, and layering offer a richly nuanced lens through which to interpret the art.

In The Hip Hop Wars, I was most appreciative of her constant reminder that hip hop exists as a commercial product, and while she never explicitly invokes Foucault, there a is a whiff of his presence in the way she unpacks how the figure of the pimp (or the gangster or the whore) is both created by artists and demanded by commercial interests in the wider culture.

#BottomLine

If you’re looking for historical context on the art form, and if you are interested in moving the discussion beyond the obvious, these two books are highly recommended.