One Nation Under Hip-Hop? William Jelani Cobb and Jason Tanz Reviewed in the Washington Post

One Nation Under Hip-Hop

Even as its beat begins to fade, the influence of the music is everywhere.

Reviewed by Adam Bradley
Sunday, January 28, 2007; BW08

OTHER PEOPLE'S PROPERTY
A Shadow History of Hip-Hop in White America
By Jason Tanz
Bloomsbury. 254 pp. $24.95

TO THE BREAK OF DAWN
A Freestyle on the Hip Hop Aesthetic
By William Jelani Cobb
New York Univ. 200 pp. $22.95

Hip-hop is dead. That's what rap legend Nas claims in the title of his latest album. He just might be right. According to Nielsen Soundscan, album sales in all genres declined by nearly 5 percent in 2006, largely attributable to the increasing popularity of digital downloads. Rap sales, however, plummeted by more than 20 percent, the most of any genre. Ironically, this downturn comes at a time when hip-hop seems to be catering to commercial tastes as never before, often at the expense of artistic innovation.

But don't write rap's obituary yet. Hip-hop still remains a dominant voice in youth culture, though it undoubtedly faces an identity crisis. Now 30 years old, hip-hop must reconcile the twin tensions of art and commerce -- just as jazz did in the 1940s, when bebop supplanted swing and young lions such as Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie emerged as cultural icons capable of crossing the color line. And because the majority of rap artists are black and much of the audience is white, the genre bears both the promise and the peril of interracial encounter. Like jazz, hip-hop has the paradoxical potential to promote understanding and to reinforce stereotypes.

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Iona Rozeal Brown

UNC-Chapel Hill visiting artist Iona Rozeal Brown paints vivid images of ancient Japanese subjects, but with a twist. Her courtesans and geisha wear cornrows, afros and Adidas. She joins host Frank Stasio to discuss cultural appropriation of hip-hop among Japanese youth sub-cultures and its impact on her art.

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Note for a “Round the Way Girl”

Note for a “Round the Way Girl” on Craig Brewer’s Hustle & Flow

“In Hustle, we can appreciate Nola’s (Taryn Manning)
yearning to be more than a pimp’s pussy cash box …”

By Stephane Dunn

Hmmmm ... a film about a street hustling pimp with rap star aspirations ... how special, another ghetto rags to rap riches movie ‘cause Eminem’s 8 Mile (2002) hasn’t been remade enough. Still, I swallowed my considerable skepticism and went to see it like a good cultural critic should. Surprisingly, Hustle & Flow offers a bit more of an interesting and intelligent treatment of the ghetto rags-to-riches formula and blessedly avoids the Hollywood polish of such movies as 8 Mile. Writer-director Craig Brewer’s gritty Southern ’hood drama offers an unflinching physical and social portrait of contemporary Memphis street life. While it retains the inherent phallocentric dominance that has long structured such films, it offers a significant and unique contribution to the dialogue about ghettocentric cinematic representations.

The imagery of black female sexuality, particularly that associated with poor and working-class black women has long been a controversial and disturbing issue for African American audiences because of the historical problem of racist representations. In the nineteenth century, Euro-American scientists and cultural theorists associated the very bodies of African women with sexual abnormality. Through much of the twentieth century, American popular culture imaged black women as problematically hypersexual or asexual, bitchy, domineering, emasculating, unfeminine, and unwomanly. Encapsulated somewhere between slave-era notions of the Mammy and contemporary notions of the “Jezebel,” the portrait of sexualized black women encompasses contemporary stereotypes of ghettocentric lower class women, which Hip Hop culture — rap videos and ghetto action films — have popularized.

Hustle & Flow at least adds a bit of flesh to the representations of such characters. D-Jay, played deliciously by Tarence Howard, stars as the anti-hero pimp with rap success dreams who is, unlike the more popularized black pimp archetype, unadorned and materially poor. Though D-Jay is the film’s center, the female characters build the pathos of his representation and much of the film’s richness. In ghetto action films since the 1970s blaxploitation genre, white and black female characters have by and large been treated in simple terms: blond, po’ white trash trophy ho’ (Nola in Hustle), adoring black girlfriend and/or ho’ whom the hero may treat deferentially or not (Shug in Hustle), the sapphire-like fussy bitch (Lexus in Hustle), and the unsupportive, cold, uptight, black middle-class woman (Yevette in Hustle).

Read More at Bright Lights Film Journal

***

Stephane Dunn is a writer, professor, and film journalist living in Atlanta, GA. She has published several articles on film, literature, and popular culture and is the author of the forthcoming Baad Bitches and Sassy Supermamas: Race, Gender, & Sexuality in Black Power Action Fantasies (University of Illinois Press 2007).

Let the World Listen Right!

Documentary film producer Ali Neff explores hip-hop music as a bridge between people and place in her film, "Let the World Listen Right." She joins rap artist Jerome Williams, aka Top Notch, to discuss the role of afro-diasporic musical traditions in strengthening communities in the Mississippi Delta with host Frank Stasio.

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On the Road with Rap Sessions

NATIONAL TOWNHALL MEETINGS SEEK TO ANSWER THE QUESTION,
DOES HIP-HOP HATE WOMEN?

Critically-acclaimed author and hip-hop activist Bakari Kitwana collaborates with the Community Technology Foundation of California to announce a national tour focused on popular culture’s stereotypical representations of women and men in the hip-hop generation.

Rap Sessions presents a diverse panel of leading hip-hop intellectuals to engage youth and community leaders in candid, compelling conversations about the ways the mainstreaming of hip-hop culture influences relationships between young women and men. Targeting the hip-hop generation and their younger millennial siblings, these dynamic and provocative discussions tackle issues from hip-hop’s war of the sexes to ways of ensuring that hip-hop’s emerging political movement is inclusive of an empowering agenda for women.

“For too long the hip-hop community has failed to set forth a national agenda for women,” notes Kitwana. “The goal of these gatherings is to jumpstart a national discussion that asks young people, the hip-hop industry and our policy makers to assume responsibility for their complicity in making hip-hop synonymous with misogyny and homophobia.”

Reflecting on television programming like The Flava of Love, former Source editor-in-chief Kim Osario’s sexual harassment ruling and books like the New York Times bestseller Confessions of a Video Vixen, Kitwana added: “Throughout the last decade, from Congress to the campus center, hip-hop’s troubling representation of women is the question that will not go away. This tour hopes to ensure that solutions to this debate go beyond the ivory tower to intervene in the lives of everyday people.”

Beginning in March 2007, Rap Sessions' interactive community dialogues will convene in ten cities across the United States. Panelists include: Mark Anthony Neal (Duke University Black popular culture professor and author of four books including New Black Man); Hip-Hop journalist Joan Morgan (author of the groundbreaking When Chickenheads Come Home to Roost: My Life as a Hip-Hop Feminist); filmmaker Byron Hurt (director of Beyond Beats and Rhymes, a film about misogyny and hip-hop) and professor Tracy Sharpley-Whiting (director of African American and Diaspora Studies at Vanderbilt University and author of the forthcoming Pimps Up, Hos Down: Hip Hop and the New Gender Politics).

Kitwana, the moderator of these discussions, is co-founder of the first ever National Hip-Hop Political Convention and the former editor of The Source. His book The Hip-Hop Generation: Young Blacks and the Crisis in African American Culture has been adopted as a coursebook at over 100 colleges and universities across the country. A consultant for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, Kitwana has been acknowledged as an expert on youth culture and hip-hop politics by CNN, Fox News, CNBC, BET and other leading news outlets. His writings have appeared in the Village Voice, The New York Times, The Nation, Savoy and the Boston Globe. Why White Kids Love Hip-Hop: Wankstas, Wiggers, Wannabes and the New Reality of Race in America is his most recent book.

The Community Technology Foundation of California (CTFC) is a statewide public foundation dedicated to increasing access to and use of information and telecommunications technology by underserved communities, including communities of color, low-income, disabled, immigrant, limited English proficient, rural and inner-city communities, seniors and at-risk youth. CTFC has invested over $30 million in programs and initiatives and awarded over 500 grants to 393 non-profit organizations which promote digital inclusion. Founded in 1998, CTFC operates a portfolio of innovative grantmaking, initiatives and leadership programs through an array of partnerships with nonprofits, philanthropy and corporations. For more information, go to www.ZeroDivide.org

March
5th; Purdue University
13th; Los Angeles, CA
20th; Spelman College
22nd; St. Louis, MO
27th; Buffalo State College

April
4th; San Jose, CA
12th; Vanderbilt University
18th; Case Western University
28th; University of Chicago
30th; San Antonio, TX

For more information about Rap Sessions, log onto: http://www.rapsessions.org/

Press Contact: Nicole Balin, Ballin PR, 323-651-1580, email at: nik@ballinpr.com.

Reading Jigga in Chi-Town

The Center for Black Diaspora Presents

“My Passport Says Shawn: Trafficking in Monikers”

Mark Anthony Neal, Ph.D.
African and African American Studies,
Duke University

Thursday, February 8, 2007
3:30-5:30pm
Richardson Library, Dorothy Day Room 400
2350 N. Sheffield Ave.


Using the example of hip-hop artist and mogul Jay Z (Shawn Carter), Dr. Mark Anthony Neal examines how hip-hop artists might construct hybrid identities as not only a strategy to circulate in the various commercial and cultural markets that cosmopolitanism affords, but as a means to negotiate and respond to the queering that occurs as individual artists challenge the essential nigga tropes, the performed masculinities preva-lent in contemporary commercial that hip-hop circulates.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

OFFICE OF MEDIA RELATIONS
HEALTHY START ACADEMY
DURHAM, N.C. 27701
JANUARY 19, 2007

CONTACT: ARONDA HILL OR R. TERREL MOORE
(919) 956-5599

HEALTHY START ACADEMY TO HOLD “HIP-HOP SPEAKOUT”
WITH SPECIAL GUEST: ACTOR/RAPPER, CHRISTOPHER ‘PLAY’ MARTIN,
AND SCHOLAR/CULTURAL CRITIC, MARK ANTHONY NEAL

DURHAM, N.C. - Healthy Start Academy, the first charter school established in North Carolina will kick-off its 10 year celebration of “Academic Excellence in Choice Education” with its first annual Hip-Hop Speak Out on Monday, January 22, 2007. The event will begin at 10:00 a.m. in Chamberlain Auditorium on the campus of Healthy Start Academy. The event is free and open to the public.

“We believe our students will benefit from the kind of exchange this panel discussion is bound to inspire”, said Principal Dietrich A.M. Danner. “With the King Holiday celebration just past, and Black History month on the horizon, we thought this would be an opportune time to discuss the relationship between Hip-Hop culture and academic achievement”, Danner said.

Christopher Martin, better known as ‘Play’ from the rap and acting duo, “Kid ‘N Play”, and an artist-in-residence at North Carolina Central University will serve as a panelist along with Cicero Leak and Mike Wilson, producers of the award-winning documentary, “Welcome to Durham USA”. Scholar and cultural critic Mark Anthony Neal, associate professor of Black Popular Culture at Duke University will also serve as a panelist. The purpose of the event is to engage students in a dialogue with university scholars, community activists and city officials to examine the effects of Hip-Hop Culture on academic achievement. A press conference will immediately follow the event.

Healthy Start Academy is located at 807 West Chapel Hill Street. The event is free and open to the public. For more information please contact Ms. Aronda Hill or Mr. Terrell Moore at (919) 956-5599.

The Hip-Hop Aesthetic: The Syllabus

The Hip-Hop Aesthetic (AAAS 199)
Mark Anthony Neal, Ph.D.
Spring 2007—T/TH 08:30-9:45 am
West Duke 108B

No doubt it transformed the entertainment industry, and all kinds of people's notions of entertainment, style, and politics in the process. So let's be real. If hiphop were only some static and rigid folk tradition preserved in amber, it would never have been such a site for radical change or corporate exploitation in the first place. This being America, where as my man A.J.'s basketball coach dad likes to say, "They don't pay niggas to sit on the bench," hiphop was never going to not go for the gold as more gold got laid out on the table for the goods that hiphop brought to the market. Problem today is that where hiphop was once a buyer's market in which we, the elite hiphop audience, decided what was street legit, it has now become a seller's market, in which what does or does not get sold as hiphop to the masses is whatever the boardroom approves.—Greg Tate

Although minstrelsy began with white performers putting shoe polish on their faces and acting out their distorted, obscene notions of Blackness, Black performers also performed Blackness. Black performance of Blackness was not simply self-mockery; it was also mockery of those white people who initiated and patronized this tradition. Most important it must be understood that Black performers had no options. Their survival as performers was dependent on self-derision, and any portrayal of Blackness that challenged the deeply racists beliefs around which the society was organized were prohibited. Indeed, whiteness was defined in opposition to all that was Black, and thus its existence depended upon the recapitulation of Blackness as deviant and grotesque. Thus, Black performers have always been pressured to perform the Blackness of the white imagination, and that Blackness is most often in the service of white supremacy. —Andrea Queeley

Today rap, for all its excesses and commercialization, reasserts the African core of black music: polyrhythmic dance beat, improvisational spontaneity, incantatory use of the word to name, blame, shame and summon power, the obligation of ritual to instruct and enthuse. It’s no coincidence that rap exploded as the big business of music was luring many black artists into “crossing over.” Huge sums were paid to black recording artists; then a kind of lobotomy was performed on their work, homogenizing, commodifying, pacifying it by removing large portions of what made the music think and be. Like angry ancestral spirits, the imperatives of tradition rose up, reanimated themselves, mounted the corner chanters and hip hoppers. As Soul diminished to a category on the pop charts, the beat from the street said no, no, no, you’re too sweet. Try some of this instead.—John Edgar Wideman

Developing a style nobody can deal with—a style that cannot be easily understood or erased, a style that has the reflexivity to create counterdominant narratives against a mobile and shifting enemy—may be one of the effective ways to fortify communities of resistance and simultaneously reserve the right to communal pleasure. With few economic assets and abundant cultural and aesthetic resources, Afro-diasporic youth have designated the street as the arena for competition, and style as the prestige awarding event. In the postindustrial urban context of dwindling low-income housing, a trickle of meaningless jobs for young people, mounting police brutality, and increasingly draconian depictions of young inner city residents, hip hop style is black urban renewal.—Tricia Rose

“You got Nas coming back and saying ‘hip-hop is dead’. Who is he to say ‘hip-hop is dead’?...You look at them first week numbers, and we’ll talk about it…If Nas Say Hip-hop is dead, I say hip hop is alive. Tell Nas to get at me.”—Young Jeezy

***

COURSE DESCRIPTION (THE “I GOT CHA OPIN” REMIX)

Let’s accept for moment that hip-hop is more than a heavily commodified form of popular expression. Let us accept for another moment that hip-hop is more than one of the most powerful forms of vernacular expression produced during the “American Century” (holla back Henry Luce) and that this expression was largely the product of the urban landless. Let’s us also accept during some other moments that hip-hop is “more brilliant than the sun” and that brilliance has been used in the service of those black and brown to give meaning to the worlds they possess and the demons that possess them—as brilliant as the lindy-hoppers, be-boppers and folk of Soul (shout to both W.E.B and Uncle Ray in that regard) that came before, who appear again and again in this thing we call hip-hop. Let us accept that Hip-hop is a metaphor for a generation—x, y or post-Soul—a lived aesthetic, post-modern by definition, informed by sonic, audio, televisual, and digitized collages (think Romare Beardon, Katherine Dunham, Basquiat, Dinah Washington and Redd Foxx sharing a “blunt” on 125th Street HARLEM for a reference) for which the ability to make new out of what already exist—no different that them old Negroes who made “a way out of no way”—is the accepted, demanded really, way of life. And naw, this ain’t about celebrating hip-hop. Hip-hop don’t need no celebrations. Its legacy as the primary conduit of black—and increasingly American—youth expression in the post-Civil Rights era is intact. But with that legacy comes scrutiny—interrogation and deconstruction—and what we do here in this space, in this classroom, under this watch, will be about the bizness of seriously offering a meaningful critique of this thing we call hip-hop.

Examining hip-hop as part of legitimate social, cultural, and intellectual movements, The Hip-Hop Aesthetic will explore the ways in which rap music and hip-hop culture have impacted American youth culture, particularly within the realms of music, film, television, clothing styles, politics, language, public policy, race relations, gender and sexuality and advertising. The Hip-Hop Aesthetic will provide an over-view of the most important (popular) cultural phenomenon to emerge in the Post-Civil Rights era.

BOOKS

Yes Yes Y'All: The Experience Music Project Oral History of Hip-Hop's First Decade edited by Jim Fricke & Charlie Ahearn

Hip Hop Matters: Politics, Pop Culture, and the Struggle for the Soul of a Movement
by S. Craig Watkins

Explicit Content (Fiction)
by Black Artemis

That’s the Joint!: The Hip-Hop Studies Reader
edited by Murray Forman and Mark Anthony Neal

To the Break of Dawn: A Freestyle on the Hip-Hop Aesthetic

by William Jelani Cobb

Total Chaos: The Art And Aesthetics of Hip-hop edited by Jeff Chang

Home Girls Make Some Noise!: Hip-hop Feminism Anthology
edited by Gwendolyn Pough, Elaine Richardson, et al

Other People's Property: A Shadow History of Hip-Hop in White America by Jason Tanz

Freedom Writers: Two Views

The Right Thing to Do
by Cynthia Fuchs, PopMatters Film and TV Editor

A prim young woman with a pearl necklace sits near the edge of her chair, so excited by her new employment that she scarcely hears her supervisor’s admonitions. She needs to focus on her students’ vocabulary lessons, sniffs Miss Campbell (Imelda Staunton), adding that The Odyssey would be “too difficult” for them. Many of them ride the bus for 90 minutes to get to school, so they’re too tired and distracted to get homework done. And maybe she shouldn’t wear the pearls to class.

Erin Gruwell (Hilary Swank) smiles. She recalls her father, a civil rights activist during the 1960s, meaning that she believes, like he used to, that “at-risk” students only need a chance. “I think the real fighting should happen in the classroom,” she beams. And don’t even doubt her sincerity: “I’m a really good student,” Erin insists, touching the pearls her mother gave her. Margaret leans her head back, eyebrows arched in disbelief. The girl won’t last a day.

Read More...

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“Freedom” of Voice
by Esther Iverem, SeeingBlack.com Editor and Film Critic

I know what you’re thinking.

You saw those trailers for “Freedom Writers” and sucked your teeth, dismissing the film as another White-savior-in-the-hood rehash that you could do without.

But I am happy—and surprised—to report that this is a very good movie, an extremely poignant tale about something very real in our lives—educating teenagers who are growing up in an urban gang culture that mangles or snuffs out their lives.

Based on a true story, the film recounts the experiences of a rookie English teacher, Erin Gruwell (Hillary Swank), at a high school in Long Beach, Ca. during the 1990’s. Forced to integrate to achieve racial integration, the school is fractured into racial camps—Blacks, Latinos, Asians and a few remaining Whites who have not abandoned the public school system. The school also employs a number of Whites who resent what they consider the downfall of a once high-performing school because of the influx of poor people of color.

Most importantly, “Freedom Writers” also chronicles the lives of the students who come from these various school camps, referred to by one student as “little Cambodia, the ghetto, Wonder Bread-land and South of the Border.” Because their stories are presented in a quality way, without broad clichés, in their own voices and punctuated with the hip hop music of the era, this film honors the humanity and history of the students in a way that many so-called “urban” dramas do not.

Read More...

Red-Carpet Premiere of Let the World Listen Right:
Freestyle Hip-Hop in the Mississippi Delta

What: Red-carpet world premiere of Let the World Listen Right: a film about the life of Jerome "TopNotch the Villain" Williams, a hip-hop artist in the Mississippi Delta

When: Sunday, January 7th. Half-hour documentary begins at 7 p.m., with an artist meet and greet at 6:30 p.m.

Where: The historic Clarksdale Cinema, 11 3rd Street (at Sunflower),
Clarksdale, Mississippi 38614

***

Please join University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill graduate student filmmakers Brian Graves and Ali Colleen Neff, Mississippi Delta hip-hop artist Jerome "Top Notch the Villain," and a group of Mississippi Delta singers, guitarists and rappers to celebrate the release of Let the World Listen Right, a half-hour documentary celebrating the work of young inheritors of the Delta blues legacy. Let the World Listen Right traces the daily life of Mississippi Delta rapper Jerome "Top Notch the Villain" Williams and his group Da FAM (For All Mississippi) as they struggle with hardship, solidify friendship and express community values through improvised rhyme, song and celebration.

Drawing from the deep well of documentary film on the Delta blues by ethnographers Bill Ferris, Alan Lomax and others, University of North Carolina student filmmakers Ali Colleen Neff and Brian Graves sought to document contemporary practitioners of Delta musical traditions. Neff, a UNC Folklore M.A. student who has been working with hip-hop, blues and gospel artists in the Delta since 2004, invited Jerome Williams (A.K.A. Top Notch the Villian), a Mississippi hip-hop artist, to collaborate on the half-hour piece, which follows Top Notch through the Delta's cultural landscape. Filmed over the course of a summer in Clarksdale, Mississippi, Let the World Listen Right provides insight into the rich musical interactions of the Mississippi Delta while documenting the dreams and struggles of young people in the region today. The piece is tied together with hip-hop performances by Top Notch and Da Fam as well as performances by blues artist Terry "Big T" Williams and gospel singer Martha Raybon.

The red-carpet film premiere, a first for Clarksdale, will take place at the historic Delta Cinema at 7 p.m. on Sunday, January 7th. A meet-and-greet with the artists will take place in the cinema at 6:30 p.m. Semi-formal attire is encouraged, and donations for the hip-hop artists featured in the film will be accepted.

For more information, contact Ali Colleen Neff at (919) 259-1591 or alineff@email.unc.edu

Let the World Listen Right is an excellent film reflecting a contemporary freestyle hip-hop artist drawing from the traditional Delta blues. In the lives of TopNotch the Villain, Da FAM, and the blues and gospel singers in the film, we see a compelling portrait of contemporary music in the Mississippi Delta.
--William R. Ferris; Folklorist, filmmaker, author and Professor of History at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, also the advisor to the film

The Last Soul Brother

The Last Soul Brother: James Brown (1933-2006)
by Mark Anthony Neal

James Brown was of a generation of black men—mythological in many ways—who helped define the contours of freedom and possibility for black folk in the 20th century. They were the generation of “Soul Brothers”. Born shortly before and during the decade of the Great Depression, these men came to adulthood after World War II and had little choice than to be swept up in the whirlwinds of anticommunism and the burgeoning Civil Rights Movement. There was little question that these men were patriots—and in the best sense of the word—as they held American Democracy to the same standard at home and that it championed abroad. If Sam Cooke, shot dead before his prime, was the metaphor of possibility for this generation of black men, and Martin Luther King, Jr. and El Hajj Malik El Shabazz (Malcolm X), shot dead in their prime, were the very emblem of those possibilities fully realized, than James Brown was the bittersweet reminder that the men behind the mythologies rarely age with the grace that their iconography affords them.

As Soul Brother #1, the secular power of James Brown was palpable in every way to that of the King who was assassinated in Memphis and emboldened even more so after the King’s demise. It was Brown, remember, who was called to duty, as rioters were poised to tear the city of Boston to shreds in the days after Martin Luther King, Jr.’s murder. “Say It Loud, I’m Black and I’m Proud”—equally ripe for the discourses of Black Power and marketplace integration—resonated more powerfully than “We Shall Overcame” ever would for the watchful eyes of that soon to be post-Civil Rights Generation. But the humanity of the man—with its funky and messy flaws and frailties—could never sustain the myth, so much so that the image of the man who gave Black Power its soundtrack became a harsh reminder of its fractured legacy. And perhaps that’s the way it should be.

Read the full essay at Popmatters.com

*thanks to Guy Ramsey for the on-the-ground photo