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

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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