Showing posts with label Hip-Hop Studies. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Hip-Hop Studies. Show all posts
Friday, March 18, 2011
Tuesday, December 14, 2010
Adam Mansbach Responds to Boston Globe Screed on Hip-Hop Studies
from the Boston Globe
Meet the Rap-ademics
The Ivy League offers its esteemed interpretation on the ‘virtue and complexity’ of hip-hop lyrics
by Alex Beam
***
special to NewBlackMan
Adam Mansbach Responds
Dear Alex,
I wonder what you hope to accomplish with a piece like "Meet the Rap-ademics." Why bother to write about the music or the culture at all, if you're going to approach it with petulance, mockery, and ignorance? None of these is anything new, when it comes to coverage of hip-hop – not the shots you take, not the over-generalizations, not the factual errors (two glaring ones: Gates was in no way the first "rap-ademic" by virtue of his 1990 testimony; Craig Werner was teaching a course on hip-hop at the University of Wisconsin at Madison as early as 1985. And you misquote the Jay-Z lyric; it's "rub," not "run." Even the Anthology gets this line right – this error is all yours.)
Sure, you can isolate two Jay-Z lines lacking in complexity and ambivalence, quote them, and make the entire conversation about his work look silly. But if you're serious about making a critique, why take a cheap shot? Why not do it honestly, by discussing a lyric that possesses these qualities? You've got the Anthology in front of you, presumably. Why not flip the page to,"All the teachers couldn't reach me and my mama couldn't beat me/hard enough to match the pain of my pops not seeing me/so with that disdain in my membrane/got on my pimp game/f*** the world my defense came."
You mock Grandmaster Caz's clarification of his lyrics, but the truth is that it's precisely this kind of locale-specific reference that made the music vital at the moment of its inception – made it relevant, the voice of New York City kids who had been marginalized because of where they lived. Your tone here is insulting, deliberately so, but it's more than that, and probably more than you realize. Caz's stories do matter – more so because they were created in the face of just the kind of condescension and dismissal you replicate here. I wonder: why, in 2010, are you so invested in belittling them?
"Finally the academy has caught up with and embraced hip-hop," you write, as if it just happened. In reality, hundreds of courses on hip-hop are taught at universities all over the country. Neither I nor anyone else is "fretting" about a "lacunae in the hip-hop canon;" quite the contrary, we're arguing that this field of study – established and recognized – has specific standards that we intend to see met. I can't help but wonder whether you'd recognize any of the titles that make up that canon, but I'd be happy to send you a copy of the syllabus for the hip-hop course I'll be teaching this spring at Rutgers University.
All that said, I doubt I'd be bothering to write this email if not for the statement with which you end your piece. How it's connected to the rest of the essay, I can't tell. But the argument that hip-hop is "keeping African-Americans down" through its "celebration of ignorance, gangsterism... and violence against women" is just the kind of sweeping generalization that has always plagued the worst hip-hop scholarship. First of all, how can one generalize about a sprawling, multi-billion dollar industry like hip-hop? For every artist who trades in such ideas (and certainly, there are many), there is another whose lyrical content is deeply well-informed, explicitly anti-gangster, and explicitly anti-violence.
It's easy, of course, to stereotype an entire kind of music (though no one seems interested in doing do with rock, which last time I checked also had its share of sexist and violent content). More productive would be to examine the market forces that push the kind of songs you're talking about into positions of mainstream prominence – and to acknowledge that those forces do not act solely on hip hop, but on mass culture at large. But it’s easier to pretend that violence and misogyny were somehow smuggled into the country through hip hop, as opposed to forces that act profoundly on us all.
Ultimately, blaming hip-hop for "keeping African-Americans down" is a tried and true method of obscuring structural racism: if it's hip-hop's fault, then nobody has to care, do they? Nobody has to question inherent biases in education, law enforcement, the judicial system – all areas that hip-hop artists, ironically enough, have been addressing for thirty years. You’ve gotta listen to hear that part, though.
Meet the Rap-ademics
The Ivy League offers its esteemed interpretation on the ‘virtue and complexity’ of hip-hop lyrics
by Alex Beam
***
special to NewBlackMan
Adam Mansbach Responds
Dear Alex,
I wonder what you hope to accomplish with a piece like "Meet the Rap-ademics." Why bother to write about the music or the culture at all, if you're going to approach it with petulance, mockery, and ignorance? None of these is anything new, when it comes to coverage of hip-hop – not the shots you take, not the over-generalizations, not the factual errors (two glaring ones: Gates was in no way the first "rap-ademic" by virtue of his 1990 testimony; Craig Werner was teaching a course on hip-hop at the University of Wisconsin at Madison as early as 1985. And you misquote the Jay-Z lyric; it's "rub," not "run." Even the Anthology gets this line right – this error is all yours.)
Sure, you can isolate two Jay-Z lines lacking in complexity and ambivalence, quote them, and make the entire conversation about his work look silly. But if you're serious about making a critique, why take a cheap shot? Why not do it honestly, by discussing a lyric that possesses these qualities? You've got the Anthology in front of you, presumably. Why not flip the page to,"All the teachers couldn't reach me and my mama couldn't beat me/hard enough to match the pain of my pops not seeing me/so with that disdain in my membrane/got on my pimp game/f*** the world my defense came."
You mock Grandmaster Caz's clarification of his lyrics, but the truth is that it's precisely this kind of locale-specific reference that made the music vital at the moment of its inception – made it relevant, the voice of New York City kids who had been marginalized because of where they lived. Your tone here is insulting, deliberately so, but it's more than that, and probably more than you realize. Caz's stories do matter – more so because they were created in the face of just the kind of condescension and dismissal you replicate here. I wonder: why, in 2010, are you so invested in belittling them?
"Finally the academy has caught up with and embraced hip-hop," you write, as if it just happened. In reality, hundreds of courses on hip-hop are taught at universities all over the country. Neither I nor anyone else is "fretting" about a "lacunae in the hip-hop canon;" quite the contrary, we're arguing that this field of study – established and recognized – has specific standards that we intend to see met. I can't help but wonder whether you'd recognize any of the titles that make up that canon, but I'd be happy to send you a copy of the syllabus for the hip-hop course I'll be teaching this spring at Rutgers University.
All that said, I doubt I'd be bothering to write this email if not for the statement with which you end your piece. How it's connected to the rest of the essay, I can't tell. But the argument that hip-hop is "keeping African-Americans down" through its "celebration of ignorance, gangsterism... and violence against women" is just the kind of sweeping generalization that has always plagued the worst hip-hop scholarship. First of all, how can one generalize about a sprawling, multi-billion dollar industry like hip-hop? For every artist who trades in such ideas (and certainly, there are many), there is another whose lyrical content is deeply well-informed, explicitly anti-gangster, and explicitly anti-violence.
It's easy, of course, to stereotype an entire kind of music (though no one seems interested in doing do with rock, which last time I checked also had its share of sexist and violent content). More productive would be to examine the market forces that push the kind of songs you're talking about into positions of mainstream prominence – and to acknowledge that those forces do not act solely on hip hop, but on mass culture at large. But it’s easier to pretend that violence and misogyny were somehow smuggled into the country through hip hop, as opposed to forces that act profoundly on us all.
Ultimately, blaming hip-hop for "keeping African-Americans down" is a tried and true method of obscuring structural racism: if it's hip-hop's fault, then nobody has to care, do they? Nobody has to question inherent biases in education, law enforcement, the judicial system – all areas that hip-hop artists, ironically enough, have been addressing for thirty years. You’ve gotta listen to hear that part, though.
***
Adam Mansbach's latest novel, The End of the Jews (Spiegel & Grau) won the California Book Award. Named a Best Book of 2008 by the San Francisco Chronicle. Mansbach’s previous novel, the bestselling Angry Black White Boy (Crown), is taught at more than sixty colleges, universities and high schools. A satire about race, whiteness and hip-hop, it was a San Francisco Chronicle Best Book of 2005, and the recipient of an Honorable Citation from the Gustavus Myers Outstanding Book Awards and a PEN/Faulkner Writers in the Schools grant.
Thursday, September 10, 2009
The Future of Hip-Hop Studies @ The University of Wisconsin
THE OFFICE OF MULTICULTURAL ARTS INITIATIVES
THE HAVENS CENTER
THE OFFICE OF THE VICE PROVOST FOR DIVERSITY & CLIMATE
@ The University of Wisconsin at Madison
Present
JEFF CHANG
American Book Award Winner
&
MARK ANTHONY NEAL
Duke University
GETTING REAL: THE FUTURE OF HIP HOP STUDIES SCHOLARSHIP
Monday, September 14, 7pm,1100 Grainger Hall
This is the opening event of a 9 week series on "The Future of Hip Hop Studies Scholarship." Please join us for the rest of the series. All talks are free and open to the public. Monday nights, 7pm, 1100 Grainger. For more information, call 890-1006 or visit the Havens Center website: www.havenscenter.org.
Co-sponsoredby Afro-American Studies, the Art Department, Global Studies, the History Department, the School of Education, the School of Music, the Sociology Department, the Vice Provost for Faculty & Staff, & the Womens Studies Program.
JEFF CHANG has written extensively on culture, politics, the arts, and music. He is a 2008 USA Ford Fellow in Literature and a winner of the 2008 North Star News Prize. His first book, Cant Stop Wont Stop, garnered many honors, including the American Book Award and the Asian American Literary Award. He was a founding editor of ColorLines magazine, and a Senior Editor/Director at Russell Simmons 360hiphop.com. He has written for the San Francisco Chronicle, Vibe, The Nation, and Mother Jones, among others. In 1993, he co-founded and ran the influential hip-hop indie label, SoleSides, now Quannum Projects, helping launch the careers of DJ Shadow, Blackalicious, Lyrics Born and Lateef the Truth Speaker. He has helped produce over a dozen records, including the godfathers of gangsta rap, the Watts Prophets. After being politicized by the anti-apartheid and anti-racist movements at the University of California at Berkeley, Jeff worked as a community, labor and student organizer, and as a lobbyist for the students of the California State University system. He was an organizer of the inaugural National Hip-Hop Political Convention and has served as a board member for several organizations working for change through youth and community organizing, media justice, culture, the arts, and hip-hop activism.
MARK ANTHONY NEAL is Professor of Black Popular Culture in the Department of African and African American Studies at Duke University. He is engaged in interdisciplinary scholarly work in the fields of African-American, Cultural, and Gender Studies that draws upon modes of inquiry informed by the fields of literary theory, urban sociology, social history, postmodern philosophy, Queer theory and most notably popular culture. His broad project is to interrogate popular culture--music, television, film, and literature--produced within the context of Afro-diasporic expressive cultures. Neal is the author of four books, What the Music Said: Black Popular Music and Black Public Culture (1998), Soul Babies: Black Popular Culture and the Post-Soul Aesthetic (2002), Songs in the Keys of Black Life: A Rhythm and Blues Nation (2003) and New Black Man: Rethinking Black Masculinity (2005). Neal is also the co-editor (with Murray Forman) of Thats the Joint!: The Hip-Hop Studies Reader (2004). A frequent commentator for National Public Radios News and Notes with Farai Chideya Neal also contributes to several on-line media outlets, including NewsOne.com. Neals blog Critical Noir appears at Vibe Magazine.
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