Wednesday, July 15, 2009
Tuesday, July 14, 2009
Jay-Z on His iPod
special to NewBlackMan
Jay-Z on His iPod:
Barack Obama as a Hip-Hop Generation Pop Icon
by Halifu Osumare
There is little doubt that President Barack Obama has brought a new style---a new panache, if you will---to the White House and the US Presidency. But what are the sources of this new style and approach in his handling of everything from international relations to his cabinet choices, and from his cool demeanor dealing with one of the biggest financial crisis since the Great Depression to taking Michele out on a date night in a trendy DC restaurant? Besides his obvious intelligence and political savvy, Barack Obama has swagger! Barack Obama is hip! Barack Obama is cool! This style that he has brought to the highest office of the land is grounded in what black popular culture scholar Mark Anthony Neal calls the “post-soul generation”---the hip-hop generation.
Case in point: 27-year old Jon Favreau , the valedictorian for the class of 2003 at College of the Holy Cross in Massachusetts, is Obama’s chief speech-writer, the second youngest to ever hold that position. The young Favreau was responsible for Obama’s now famous inaugural speech that arguably rivals some of Abraham Lincoln’s speeches, which was exactly the intention. Favreau is said to carry around a copy of Dreams from My Father, Obama’s first autobiography, as his holy grail, and Obama, himself has said that he thinks Favreau “reads his mind.” The point is that Obama has tapped into a youth current that was partially responsible for electing him as the 44th President of the U.S., and this youth-factor is constituent of his style that appeals to the current hip-hop generation. As LA Times journalist Sam Fulwood III analyzes, “Young is to hip as old is to fogey . . . Obama has modern instincts and attitudes that appeal to younger people, and more than any other president in recent memory, that makes him a role model. He is green, open, athletic, tech-savvy, healthy. And his hip image certainly isn’t hurt by his wife,” Michele Obama, who has captured the world’s imagination in her own right.
Even the statistics show how sophisticated his presidential campaign was. According to Gwen Ifill, PBS-TV moderator, managing editor of Washington Week, and senior correspondent of the NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, “In the general election, Obama improved on 2004 nominee John Kerry’s performance with voters under thirty by 12 percent,” and there was “a little over thirteen million new voters jumping into the process,” . . . and among those new voters Barack Obama won close to 70 % of them. Part of his strategy from the beginning was [to] change the face of the electorate.” Changing of the face of the electorate is the primary factor that won him the election; this change had a lot to do with the number of youths who got engaged in electoral politics for the first time.
As a great communicator, known for his oratory, President Obama is also a cultural code switcher—one who can use language, mannerism, and symbols to communication with various audiences---a black audience, a youth audience, and a hip-hop audience. He is very aware of his popularity with the hip-hop generation and has directly addressed his penchant for some rap music and artists.
This youth factor responsible for electing President Obama is not simply lodged in the positive aspects of generational politics, but has also generated negative aspects that challenged the old-guard black leaders of the Civil Rights Generation, preceding the post-soul generation or the contemporary hip-hop generation born in the 1980 and 90s. As Ifill accurately opines in her The Breakthrough: Politics and Race in the Age of Obama, “Obama did not argue that he was not a black candidate, but the generational split did in some ways transcend race,” with many seasoned white politicians being brought into the Obama camp by pressure from their own children. At the same time, to the old-guard civil rights activists like Andrew Young, Congressman John Lewis, former presidential candidate Jesse Jackson, the Reverend Calvin Butts of Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem, and Oakland Mayor Ron Dellums, all of whom endorsed Hillary Clinton for president, Obama represented a black upstart candidate who had not come through their dues-paying ranks.
Yet a few of the old guard did make the generational transition: Roger Wilkins, assistant attorney general under Lyndon Johnson, has said, “I love this transition, because my generation has done its work. Whatever one thinks of the result of that work, it was consequential work, and it did help change the nation. But now we’re old. And there are people whose path we made possible who see the country very, very differently than we did.” Though Obama is steeped in this different vision, he is definitely grounded in the past efforts of the Civil Rights generation. This was evident in his November 4th acceptance speech when he called the nation’s attention to the 106-year old African American Mrs. Ann Cooper, who voted for him in Atlanta. However, he created breakthrough politics with his ability to change the face of the electorate in a way that previous black leaders had not been able to accomplish. The generational divide worked in Obama’s favor, along with his intelligence, emphasis on transparency in government, and most of all his “cool pose” that appealed to the younger generation.
This generational meaning of Obama has shown itself also in the plethora of pop iconic images that proliferate magazine covers, street posters, and, of course, the Internet. During the campaign the famous red, white, and blue “HOPE” print created by street artist Shepard Fairey emerged as a veritable sign that signifies Obama the Man. This iconic image later got Fairey arrested for graffiti (a direct attack on hip-hop as a suspect subculture) for papering the now famous poster throughout the city of Boston. In cyberspace, there is even a “Obamaicon.Me.com” website where you can now upload your own photo, choose your own message, and they will make you a similar “Hope” poster for your own 20-minutes of fame in this era of reality television and the cult of personality. As the Obamaicon website says, “Here’s your chance to sound off.” Barack Obama has inspired various pop culture cottage industries that were initially meant to commercialize his image, but have now generated numerous spin-offs that are stretching our definition of democracy and the place of the populist everyman/everywoman’s voice (and now image) in the process.
This youthful Obama design rage has infinite ramifications. Journalist art designer Don Button reveals the effect of Obama’s original use of design and the internet in his campaign: “Never before had a presidential candidate utilized design aesthetics and brand-image marketing in such a comprehensive and effective way---and the designers around the world took notice immediately.” Since Obama first started campaigning and developing his tech-savvy and design–savvy branding, like Spike Lee’s Joint, it became a “Barack Obama Joint” that “Did the Right Thing” to get elected, including having a seasoned older generation politician as his running mate in Joe Biden. All of this showed political know-how, capturing the younger generation that changed the electorate in the 2008 presidential election.
But none of these unprecedented generational socio-cultural dynamics around Obama can be understood without the lens of hip-hop. One of the main tenets of this in-your-face rebellious youth sub-culture is “flippin’ the script,” a cultural directive that is responsible for the best of rap music as a counter-narrative to mainstream ideologies. As Neal has accurately analyzed, rap music is often the initial reply to topical news stories affecting black people. “Whether it’s Katrina four years ago, the LA riots in 1993, or Jesse Jackson’s run for President in 1984 . . ., hip-hop was seen as black American’s first response.” This statement becomes an addendum to Chuck D’s famous adage: “Rap is black people’s CNN.” So it is no wonder that many famous and infamous rap stars got on the Obama campaign bandwagon: Young Jeezy’s “My President” was an early anthem during the campaign, Nas released “Election Night” the day before the November 4 election, and it got major Internet play the day of the election; Brother Ali released “Mr. President (You’re the Man)”, and Lil Wayne reworked his previous song “A Mili” renaming it “Obama Obama.” And not only did they rap about Obama as a new hope for young, struggling black people, but they all voted for the first time. Young Jeezy represented for all first-time voting rappers with: “ Yeah, Yeah, I got to vote. It felt like I went and bought my first car without a co-sign; it felt good.” Because of Obama’s new voice, his new message, young Black America stood on its own for the first time in the electoral process because they had hope.
Neal assesses that Candidate Obama had to walk a thin line between accepting these young rappers’ endorsements while maintaining the dignity of his legitimate candidacy with the socio-political mainstream, both black and white. Neal articulates the proverbial special constituency vs. mainstream quagmire when he gives voice to Obama’s strategy regarding his hip-hop supporters: “[He was saying] I really can’t acknowledge you in the mainstream, but understand that I’m hearing what your critique is, I’m hearing what your concerns are, and you now have a wide-open space in the so-called underground . . .to talk about why my candidacy is important.” However, now that he is President, he has become bolder in hinting that he may utilize hip-hop in his administration. When asked by a Vibe magazine journalist about “a place in your administration” to explore the use of hip-hop’s potential to deal with “young people that you have to deal with around education and incarceration,” Obama became emphatically clear:
Absolutely, I don’t think there can be any doubt that it can be. And I have met with Jay-Z, with Kanye, and with other artists to see how potentially to bridge that gap. It’s incredible--- the potential for them to deliver a message to get people thinking. The thing about hip-hop today is it’s smart. It’s insightful. The way that they can communicate a complex message in a very short space is remarkable. A lot of these kids are not going to be reading The New York Times. That’s not how they’re getting their information. So the question then is what’s the content? What’s the message? And I always say hip-hop is not only a reflection of what is; but it should be a reflection of what can be.
No only does Obama understand how rap music has been used as a vehicle for information delivery, but he is thinking about its potential for the kinds of messages that he wants to convey to the young people of urban America.
Neal further reveals that mainstream cross-over emcees, like Queen Latifah who has hosted the Academy Awards Ceremony, and Snoop Dogg who appeared on the Larry King Show to talk about the Obama candidacy, utilize similar strategies in negotiating their own mainstream celebrity with their underground hip-hop cult following. These are ostensibly what I call “power moves” in The Africanist Aesthetic in Global Hip-Hop: Power Moves. I contend that there has been a virtual “cultural shift in power induced by hip-hop’s privileged place in the marketplace,” even as there continues to be what Keith Negus calls “regimes of containment” that limit young black hip-hop males. This dynamic of containment of black males in US society has existed historically and continues even in this era of the ghetto as a central trope regarding how youth of all races identify themselves through hip hop. Linda Tucker explores this dynamic in her recent book Lockstep and Dance: Images of Black Men in Popular Culture. She analyzes:
There is no doubt that we are in the era of the Hip-Hop Generation when the President of the United States has admitted to having arguably the most influential rapper, Jay-Z, on his iPod. Furthermore, during his North Carolina come-back speech, after the April 16, 2008 debate between Candidate Obama and his opponent Hillary Rodham Clinton, Obama showed his acuity with hip-hop style by executing Jay-Z’s brush the dirt off your shoulders, creating a wild audience reaction with a standing ovation. Hip-hop semiotics, such as the Dirt-off-my Shoulder move, are significations that communicate to a large number of young U.S. citizens, and can be successful exploited to win in electoral politics. As Teresa Wiltz says in a Washington Post article on Obama’s North Carolina hip-hop gesture, “Talk about a major Jay-Z move. People, we’re talking about a seminal movement in the campaign, the merging of politics and pop culture: in which a presidential candidate---a self-confessed hip-hop head and Jay-Z fan--references a rap hit and a dance move.” The gesture is a direct quotation from the rap and video “Dirt off Your Shoulder” on Jay-Z’s 2003 Black Album. The meaning is clear: Obama is the proverbial duck, from whose back water just rolls right off. In politics one must brush off the negative jabs that one’s opponents (“playa haters”) might inflict. Obama had to frequently do just that during the Democratic Primary Campaign with Clinton in order to debate the real issues facing the U.S.
Of course these challenges have only intensified for Obama as President. He will have to continue to navigate his course between mainstream America and the hip-hop generation in increasingly savvy ways that keep all constituencies in his boat. One huge task is the creation of a living wage for young black men, when some black communities are reeling from 31% unemployment. As hip-hop activist and 2008 vice- presidential candidate for the Green Party, Rosa Clemente said, “just because you brush off your shoulders, fist bump the First Lady, or play a mean game of street ball, doesn’t make you Hip Hop.” Youth who live hip-hop want him to “keep it real” in terms of their needs on the street, and to do this he has his job cut out for him. He has to somehow blend his youthful coolness with the dignity and seriousness that the office demands, while making real changes happen in people’s lives economically. But if he follows the age-old pervasive adage that has permeated the African American community for generations—“You can’t be just as good; you have to be twice as good to get ahead in this world”—he’ll do just fine.
Case in point: 27-year old Jon Favreau , the valedictorian for the class of 2003 at College of the Holy Cross in Massachusetts, is Obama’s chief speech-writer, the second youngest to ever hold that position. The young Favreau was responsible for Obama’s now famous inaugural speech that arguably rivals some of Abraham Lincoln’s speeches, which was exactly the intention. Favreau is said to carry around a copy of Dreams from My Father, Obama’s first autobiography, as his holy grail, and Obama, himself has said that he thinks Favreau “reads his mind.” The point is that Obama has tapped into a youth current that was partially responsible for electing him as the 44th President of the U.S., and this youth-factor is constituent of his style that appeals to the current hip-hop generation. As LA Times journalist Sam Fulwood III analyzes, “Young is to hip as old is to fogey . . . Obama has modern instincts and attitudes that appeal to younger people, and more than any other president in recent memory, that makes him a role model. He is green, open, athletic, tech-savvy, healthy. And his hip image certainly isn’t hurt by his wife,” Michele Obama, who has captured the world’s imagination in her own right.
Even the statistics show how sophisticated his presidential campaign was. According to Gwen Ifill, PBS-TV moderator, managing editor of Washington Week, and senior correspondent of the NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, “In the general election, Obama improved on 2004 nominee John Kerry’s performance with voters under thirty by 12 percent,” and there was “a little over thirteen million new voters jumping into the process,” . . . and among those new voters Barack Obama won close to 70 % of them. Part of his strategy from the beginning was [to] change the face of the electorate.” Changing of the face of the electorate is the primary factor that won him the election; this change had a lot to do with the number of youths who got engaged in electoral politics for the first time.
As a great communicator, known for his oratory, President Obama is also a cultural code switcher—one who can use language, mannerism, and symbols to communication with various audiences---a black audience, a youth audience, and a hip-hop audience. He is very aware of his popularity with the hip-hop generation and has directly addressed his penchant for some rap music and artists.
This youth factor responsible for electing President Obama is not simply lodged in the positive aspects of generational politics, but has also generated negative aspects that challenged the old-guard black leaders of the Civil Rights Generation, preceding the post-soul generation or the contemporary hip-hop generation born in the 1980 and 90s. As Ifill accurately opines in her The Breakthrough: Politics and Race in the Age of Obama, “Obama did not argue that he was not a black candidate, but the generational split did in some ways transcend race,” with many seasoned white politicians being brought into the Obama camp by pressure from their own children. At the same time, to the old-guard civil rights activists like Andrew Young, Congressman John Lewis, former presidential candidate Jesse Jackson, the Reverend Calvin Butts of Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem, and Oakland Mayor Ron Dellums, all of whom endorsed Hillary Clinton for president, Obama represented a black upstart candidate who had not come through their dues-paying ranks.
Yet a few of the old guard did make the generational transition: Roger Wilkins, assistant attorney general under Lyndon Johnson, has said, “I love this transition, because my generation has done its work. Whatever one thinks of the result of that work, it was consequential work, and it did help change the nation. But now we’re old. And there are people whose path we made possible who see the country very, very differently than we did.” Though Obama is steeped in this different vision, he is definitely grounded in the past efforts of the Civil Rights generation. This was evident in his November 4th acceptance speech when he called the nation’s attention to the 106-year old African American Mrs. Ann Cooper, who voted for him in Atlanta. However, he created breakthrough politics with his ability to change the face of the electorate in a way that previous black leaders had not been able to accomplish. The generational divide worked in Obama’s favor, along with his intelligence, emphasis on transparency in government, and most of all his “cool pose” that appealed to the younger generation.
This generational meaning of Obama has shown itself also in the plethora of pop iconic images that proliferate magazine covers, street posters, and, of course, the Internet. During the campaign the famous red, white, and blue “HOPE” print created by street artist Shepard Fairey emerged as a veritable sign that signifies Obama the Man. This iconic image later got Fairey arrested for graffiti (a direct attack on hip-hop as a suspect subculture) for papering the now famous poster throughout the city of Boston. In cyberspace, there is even a “Obamaicon.Me.com” website where you can now upload your own photo, choose your own message, and they will make you a similar “Hope” poster for your own 20-minutes of fame in this era of reality television and the cult of personality. As the Obamaicon website says, “Here’s your chance to sound off.” Barack Obama has inspired various pop culture cottage industries that were initially meant to commercialize his image, but have now generated numerous spin-offs that are stretching our definition of democracy and the place of the populist everyman/everywoman’s voice (and now image) in the process.
This youthful Obama design rage has infinite ramifications. Journalist art designer Don Button reveals the effect of Obama’s original use of design and the internet in his campaign: “Never before had a presidential candidate utilized design aesthetics and brand-image marketing in such a comprehensive and effective way---and the designers around the world took notice immediately.” Since Obama first started campaigning and developing his tech-savvy and design–savvy branding, like Spike Lee’s Joint, it became a “Barack Obama Joint” that “Did the Right Thing” to get elected, including having a seasoned older generation politician as his running mate in Joe Biden. All of this showed political know-how, capturing the younger generation that changed the electorate in the 2008 presidential election.
But none of these unprecedented generational socio-cultural dynamics around Obama can be understood without the lens of hip-hop. One of the main tenets of this in-your-face rebellious youth sub-culture is “flippin’ the script,” a cultural directive that is responsible for the best of rap music as a counter-narrative to mainstream ideologies. As Neal has accurately analyzed, rap music is often the initial reply to topical news stories affecting black people. “Whether it’s Katrina four years ago, the LA riots in 1993, or Jesse Jackson’s run for President in 1984 . . ., hip-hop was seen as black American’s first response.” This statement becomes an addendum to Chuck D’s famous adage: “Rap is black people’s CNN.” So it is no wonder that many famous and infamous rap stars got on the Obama campaign bandwagon: Young Jeezy’s “My President” was an early anthem during the campaign, Nas released “Election Night” the day before the November 4 election, and it got major Internet play the day of the election; Brother Ali released “Mr. President (You’re the Man)”, and Lil Wayne reworked his previous song “A Mili” renaming it “Obama Obama.” And not only did they rap about Obama as a new hope for young, struggling black people, but they all voted for the first time. Young Jeezy represented for all first-time voting rappers with: “ Yeah, Yeah, I got to vote. It felt like I went and bought my first car without a co-sign; it felt good.” Because of Obama’s new voice, his new message, young Black America stood on its own for the first time in the electoral process because they had hope.
Neal assesses that Candidate Obama had to walk a thin line between accepting these young rappers’ endorsements while maintaining the dignity of his legitimate candidacy with the socio-political mainstream, both black and white. Neal articulates the proverbial special constituency vs. mainstream quagmire when he gives voice to Obama’s strategy regarding his hip-hop supporters: “[He was saying] I really can’t acknowledge you in the mainstream, but understand that I’m hearing what your critique is, I’m hearing what your concerns are, and you now have a wide-open space in the so-called underground . . .to talk about why my candidacy is important.” However, now that he is President, he has become bolder in hinting that he may utilize hip-hop in his administration. When asked by a Vibe magazine journalist about “a place in your administration” to explore the use of hip-hop’s potential to deal with “young people that you have to deal with around education and incarceration,” Obama became emphatically clear:
Absolutely, I don’t think there can be any doubt that it can be. And I have met with Jay-Z, with Kanye, and with other artists to see how potentially to bridge that gap. It’s incredible--- the potential for them to deliver a message to get people thinking. The thing about hip-hop today is it’s smart. It’s insightful. The way that they can communicate a complex message in a very short space is remarkable. A lot of these kids are not going to be reading The New York Times. That’s not how they’re getting their information. So the question then is what’s the content? What’s the message? And I always say hip-hop is not only a reflection of what is; but it should be a reflection of what can be.
No only does Obama understand how rap music has been used as a vehicle for information delivery, but he is thinking about its potential for the kinds of messages that he wants to convey to the young people of urban America.
Neal further reveals that mainstream cross-over emcees, like Queen Latifah who has hosted the Academy Awards Ceremony, and Snoop Dogg who appeared on the Larry King Show to talk about the Obama candidacy, utilize similar strategies in negotiating their own mainstream celebrity with their underground hip-hop cult following. These are ostensibly what I call “power moves” in The Africanist Aesthetic in Global Hip-Hop: Power Moves. I contend that there has been a virtual “cultural shift in power induced by hip-hop’s privileged place in the marketplace,” even as there continues to be what Keith Negus calls “regimes of containment” that limit young black hip-hop males. This dynamic of containment of black males in US society has existed historically and continues even in this era of the ghetto as a central trope regarding how youth of all races identify themselves through hip hop. Linda Tucker explores this dynamic in her recent book Lockstep and Dance: Images of Black Men in Popular Culture. She analyzes:
Black men function within a prison writ large structured by various technologies of containment ranging from actual prisons to representational practices. Black men are subject to techniques of containment that criminalize their images and render them silent, depending on the context, either threatening or comic, hypervisible or invisible. Despite their heterogeneity and pervasive presence, however, such technologies do not function absolutely, as they are constantly subjected to equally heterogeneous and pervasive responses, reversals, and forms of resistance enacted by black men.These reversals, or flippin’ the script, have been a part of the Africanist aesthetic in our rhetorical, musical, and dance traditions for centuries, and they show themselves in unique ways in hip-hop that has captured the imagination of today’s generation. It is this cultural shift, created by hip-hop’s cultural, economic, and now political, power moves that have aided Obama in the era of 21st century late capitalist politics.
There is no doubt that we are in the era of the Hip-Hop Generation when the President of the United States has admitted to having arguably the most influential rapper, Jay-Z, on his iPod. Furthermore, during his North Carolina come-back speech, after the April 16, 2008 debate between Candidate Obama and his opponent Hillary Rodham Clinton, Obama showed his acuity with hip-hop style by executing Jay-Z’s brush the dirt off your shoulders, creating a wild audience reaction with a standing ovation. Hip-hop semiotics, such as the Dirt-off-my Shoulder move, are significations that communicate to a large number of young U.S. citizens, and can be successful exploited to win in electoral politics. As Teresa Wiltz says in a Washington Post article on Obama’s North Carolina hip-hop gesture, “Talk about a major Jay-Z move. People, we’re talking about a seminal movement in the campaign, the merging of politics and pop culture: in which a presidential candidate---a self-confessed hip-hop head and Jay-Z fan--references a rap hit and a dance move.” The gesture is a direct quotation from the rap and video “Dirt off Your Shoulder” on Jay-Z’s 2003 Black Album. The meaning is clear: Obama is the proverbial duck, from whose back water just rolls right off. In politics one must brush off the negative jabs that one’s opponents (“playa haters”) might inflict. Obama had to frequently do just that during the Democratic Primary Campaign with Clinton in order to debate the real issues facing the U.S.
Of course these challenges have only intensified for Obama as President. He will have to continue to navigate his course between mainstream America and the hip-hop generation in increasingly savvy ways that keep all constituencies in his boat. One huge task is the creation of a living wage for young black men, when some black communities are reeling from 31% unemployment. As hip-hop activist and 2008 vice- presidential candidate for the Green Party, Rosa Clemente said, “just because you brush off your shoulders, fist bump the First Lady, or play a mean game of street ball, doesn’t make you Hip Hop.” Youth who live hip-hop want him to “keep it real” in terms of their needs on the street, and to do this he has his job cut out for him. He has to somehow blend his youthful coolness with the dignity and seriousness that the office demands, while making real changes happen in people’s lives economically. But if he follows the age-old pervasive adage that has permeated the African American community for generations—“You can’t be just as good; you have to be twice as good to get ahead in this world”—he’ll do just fine.
***
Halifu Osumare is Associate Professor of African American and African Studies at University of California, Davis and the author of The Africanist Aesthetic in Global Hip-Hop: Power Moves.
Monday, July 13, 2009
Even So-Called "Conscious" Rappers Cross the Line
"Make Her Say (Poke Her Face)”:
Un-conscious Hip Hop, Oral Rape and the Silencing of Women
by Jennifer McLune
Author’s Note: The following essay represents my attempt at articulating a response to Kid Cudi’s “Make Her Say (Poke Her Face),” featuring Common and Kanye West. I’d like to be honest in stating upfront that, during the process of writing this piece I only listened to the song and read over its lyrics on an absolutely-as-needed basis. The words & the images these contempt-ridden lyrics created in my mind left me feeling physically sick and emotionally depleted, even at times to the point of being traumatized.
As a female listener, one willing to allow herself to really hear this song’s words and take them to heart, the message was painfully clear: women like dick; we like it violently shoved in our faces, and, according to Common at least, we want oral sex forced upon us, however brutally men see fit to give it. We even enjoy having a man’s penis shoved down our throats, pushed up our mouths, literally rammed through our faces so far and with so much force that a penetration of the internal matter of our skulls occurs, i.e. the man hits “brain” with his dick. According to Common, Kanye and Kid Cudi, some women enjoy this kind of brutal, body punishing oral sex; they can learn how to beg, not only to be used as receptacles for men’s semen, but to be violated to the point of physical injury. Having to deal with this type of pure, unmitigated misogyny, and needing to think about it for an extended period of time in order to write about it made the completion of this piece extremely difficult. I enlisted the help of another radical feminist, Stephanie Cleveland, whose support and contributions in editing and writing spared me the ordeal of having to complete this essay all alone.
When the song “I Poke Her Face” was first brought to my attention, I thought that, if nothing else, at least Common’s “consciousness pimping” would finally being exposed. I imagined the singer would no longer be able to hide behind what we his listening public have so long pretended he’s about; this songs lyrics seemed to make it painfully clear who Common really is, and has in fact always been: a consciousness pimp who likes and expects to get my dick sucked by “stripper bitches,” just like any other woman-hating guy. Common seemed to be indisputably articulating that sentiment in the song, but leave it to one of his male fans, DC area poet and activist Kenneth Carroll, to dissent with a comment that is not only unoriginal, but also does exactly what Common and Kanye must have banked on—it demonstrates how their fans will dismiss any song, even one this overtly hateful, as a mere “inconsistency” in their struggle to be better men, certainly not an overt manifestations of the sadistic, full-blown misogynist these men really and truly are. Carroll writes:
Read the Full Essay @ Celie's Revenge
Un-conscious Hip Hop, Oral Rape and the Silencing of Women
by Jennifer McLune
Author’s Note: The following essay represents my attempt at articulating a response to Kid Cudi’s “Make Her Say (Poke Her Face),” featuring Common and Kanye West. I’d like to be honest in stating upfront that, during the process of writing this piece I only listened to the song and read over its lyrics on an absolutely-as-needed basis. The words & the images these contempt-ridden lyrics created in my mind left me feeling physically sick and emotionally depleted, even at times to the point of being traumatized.
As a female listener, one willing to allow herself to really hear this song’s words and take them to heart, the message was painfully clear: women like dick; we like it violently shoved in our faces, and, according to Common at least, we want oral sex forced upon us, however brutally men see fit to give it. We even enjoy having a man’s penis shoved down our throats, pushed up our mouths, literally rammed through our faces so far and with so much force that a penetration of the internal matter of our skulls occurs, i.e. the man hits “brain” with his dick. According to Common, Kanye and Kid Cudi, some women enjoy this kind of brutal, body punishing oral sex; they can learn how to beg, not only to be used as receptacles for men’s semen, but to be violated to the point of physical injury. Having to deal with this type of pure, unmitigated misogyny, and needing to think about it for an extended period of time in order to write about it made the completion of this piece extremely difficult. I enlisted the help of another radical feminist, Stephanie Cleveland, whose support and contributions in editing and writing spared me the ordeal of having to complete this essay all alone.
When the song “I Poke Her Face” was first brought to my attention, I thought that, if nothing else, at least Common’s “consciousness pimping” would finally being exposed. I imagined the singer would no longer be able to hide behind what we his listening public have so long pretended he’s about; this songs lyrics seemed to make it painfully clear who Common really is, and has in fact always been: a consciousness pimp who likes and expects to get my dick sucked by “stripper bitches,” just like any other woman-hating guy. Common seemed to be indisputably articulating that sentiment in the song, but leave it to one of his male fans, DC area poet and activist Kenneth Carroll, to dissent with a comment that is not only unoriginal, but also does exactly what Common and Kanye must have banked on—it demonstrates how their fans will dismiss any song, even one this overtly hateful, as a mere “inconsistency” in their struggle to be better men, certainly not an overt manifestations of the sadistic, full-blown misogynist these men really and truly are. Carroll writes:
I like Common, but this song reminds me of the Gil Scott Heron admonition to rappers on his album Spirits, when he told rappers "You can't be progressive on every other song. She's your queen on one song and your bitch on the other." Inconsistency is an issue for all of us however, that's part of the struggle to live to our highest ideals.Why did the above statement make me feel almost as nauseated as the actual song itself? For starters, Carroll's response demonstrates no mere inconsistency, but rather, a particularly dangerous form of hypocrisy with respect to violence against women. He purports to care about honoring black women, but then proceeds to mask the sexual abuse of his sisters in callous euphemisms. "Inconsistency" is way too mild a term to use for inflicting the kind of sexual abuse on a woman Common sings about. Often times, I have noticed that most men, who won’t actually bring themselves to defend a song like “Poke Her Face,” but will instead use vague excuses in order to avoiding critiquing its message, may be doing so in order to continue living vicariously through these kinds of misogynist lyrics. Common creates a fantasy with these songs that many men can relate to, a fantasy world where men can be sexually dominant over a woman, and, at least in their own minds, put her back in her place.
Read the Full Essay @ Celie's Revenge
Thursday, July 9, 2009
Book Review: Breaking the Silence: Toward a Black Male Feminist Criticism
special to New Black Man
Breaking the Silence: Toward a Black Male Feminist Criticism
Louisiana State University Press, 2007.
by David Ikard
Review by Kinohi Nishikawa
A pivotal moment in James Baldwin’s novel Go Tell It on the Mountain (1952) sees the churchman and patriarch Gabriel being confronted by his sister Florence over a devastating past infidelity. Upon fathering a child with his mistress Esther, Gabriel stole the savings of his first wife Deborah and gave it to Esther to hush up the matter. Deborah wrote a letter to Florence testifying to Gabriel’s ruinous behavior, which left her neglected, isolated, and economically dependent on him. When Florence musters up the courage to confront Gabriel, ten years after having received the letter, the effect on his psyche is profound: “It had lived in [Deborah’s] silence, then, all of those years? He could not believe it…And yet, this letter, her witness, spoke, breaking her long silence, now that she was beyond his reach forever” (212). Confronted with the suffering wrought by his patriarchal authority, Gabriel reels from the memory of Deborah as it is framed by Florence’s criticism of his actions. As if to underscore the power of speech in these women’s intertwined voices, Baldwin has Florence rebut Gabriel’s power over her by uttering, “When I go, brother, you better tremble, cause I ain’t going to go in silence” (215).
In Breaking the Silence David Ikard references Florence’s incitement to speak out against Gabriel’s power as a means of “expos[ing] and explod[ing] the victim status upon which black patriarchy is premised” (4). Following the example set by Michael Awkward’s black male feminist literary criticism, in which “critical perspective, not gender [identity], [is] the measuring stick of a black feminist methodology” (29), Ikard presents readings of Go Tell It on the Mountain and five other twentieth-century African American fictional works that stake out new terrain in thinking about black gender relations. Unlike Awkward’s body of criticism, however, Ikard is interested in parsing discourses of race and gender in not only black women’s writing (Toni Morrison, Toni Cade Bambara) but also black men’s writing (Chester Himes, Baldwin, Walter Mosley). Broadening the scope of black male feminist literary criticism to include works by men addresses a lacuna in Awkward’s thought: the notion that “only black women deal with issues of gender” in literary fiction (29). Ikard wants to show how black men too have advanced complex responses to patriarchy, sexism, and homophobia as these bear on so-called “race matters.” In this way, Breaking the Silence sketches a new direction for black male feminist critique. By staging an intergender dialogue about black gender relations, Ikard suggests that the discursive silence surrounding African American patriarchy must be undone by men and women alike.
One of the interpretive consequences of Ikard’s focus on black male literary texts is that he is able to deconstruct the ideology of black male victimization “from within.” In his analysis of Himes’s If He Hollers Let Him Go (1945), Ikard understands the protagonist Bob Jones as someone whose sense of racial oppression is decidedly gendered. Ikard’s argument is that Jones’s desire for different female characters indexes his struggle to overcome racism through a calculus of patriarchal privilege: “The tension between Jones’s need to be nurtured by black women and his desire to be recognized as a dominant patriarch contributes to his ‘crisis’ of masculine identity” (33). When Jones intuits that his needs are not being met by a black woman, Ella Mae, he pursues a near-white woman, Alice, in order to increase his social capital among whites. Yet when Alice attempts to pass in white society on her own terms, without Jones in tow, her behavior is read as a betrayal of the race. Drawing from Deborah King’s inquiry into the “monism” of black male political posturing, Ikard reads Jones’s relationships with Ella Mae and Alice as a reinscription of “phallocentric notions of power and control,” whereby “Black male oppression…masquerades as the oppression of all black people” (46, 40). Ikard begins here, with Himes’s sympathetic portrait of Jones, in order to foreground the harms done to black women in the name of racial resistance. By attending to female voices in Himes’s text which were largely ignored by previous critics, Ikard highlights the limited political vision of discourses of black male victimization.
In subsequent chapters of Breaking the Silence, Ikard is concerned to illuminate how authors since the male-dominated “protest school” of the 1940s have rendered the crisis of black masculinity in arguably more critical ways. Ikard’s chapter on Go Tell It on the Mountain is exemplary in this regard because it introduces the idea that both men and women have a stake in black patriarchy—a dynamic that underscores the need for genuine intergender dialogue (rather than, say, a feminist critique of male oppression as “only” an issue of men dominating women). On the one hand, Ikard shows how the novel’s patriarch, Gabriel, consistently shores up his sense of masculine identity by compelling the black women in his life to submit to his religious and familial authority. When his mistress Esther is left on her own with their unborn child, she is “virtually at Gabriel’s mercy” because she is a “poor pregnant woman of disreputable social standing” (64). Esther might reveal Gabriel’s infidelity to the church, but Ikard understands this as an impossible choice, given the practices of community policing which downplay such infidelity in the name of securing strong black male leaders. In this way, Gabriel’s sense of himself as “the chief victim of white oppression and the burden-bearer of his family” continues to justify his ill treatment of black women.
Yet in his chapter on Baldwin, Ikard is also keen to show how the novel “disrupts the victimization discourse that allows black men like Jones and Gabriel to explain away their subjection of black women” (50). Crucial to this narrative disruption, according to Ikard, is black women’s recognition of and rebellion against their complicity with black patriarchy. In the figures of Elizabeth (Gabriel’s current wife) and Gabriel’s mother, Ikard identifies how “women unknowingly support patriarchy in their relationships with men,” particularly through the “internalized…expectation of black female self-sacrifice” (50, 67). Elizabeth buttresses Gabriel’s authority by assuming guilt for being a “bad mother” and having had sex prior to their marriage. Gabriel’s mother is a more resonant example of black female patriarchy in that she “rears him to believe that as a man he should expect black women to cater to his every emotional, physical, and material desire” (55). In both cases, Ikard outlines a convincing case to extend the study of black patriarchy to women who support its ideological and institutional viability. Importantly, this perspective does not cast judgment on black women for supporting patriarchy but instead seeks to understand 1) how their stake in it is conditioned by white supremacy, and 2) how a more inclusive politics of resistance would overturn both racists and gendered structures of oppression. Ikard’s perspective is echoed in the character of Florence, who emerges as the novel’s privileged witness to the range of patriarchy’s harms precisely because she has also suffered from black women’s (her mother’s) investment in patriarchy.
The idea of complicity organizes Ikard’s readings of works by Morrison, Bambara, and Mosley. As Baldwin does with Gabriel’s mother, these authors represent black men and women who draw from victimizing discourses in order to justify violent and impoverishing acts of community policing. Among these interpretations, Ikard’s treatment of Mosley’s Always Outnumbered, Always Outgunned (1997) and Walkin’ the Dog (1999) is especially notable, given the fact that Mosley is rarely, if ever, mentioned in black feminist discourse. Yet in these two works from Mosley’s Socrates Fortlow cycle, Ikard brings his analysis full circle to identify ways in which black men reflexively deconstruct their investment in patriarchy and white supremacy. Socrates’s hardened criminal past informs his ability to mentor young urban black men who are trapped, Mosley wagers, between poverty and a racist criminal-justice system, on the one hand, and a community discourse of perpetual victimization, on the other. In his bravura readings from the Socrates cycle, Ikard shows how black men suffer from an “implosive victimization,” whereby “rage and despair are systematically turned against the victimized” (142). Like Florence, Socrates emerges as a voice warning against the internalization of racist and patriarchal ideals as a matter of securing short-term, small-scale privileges. That Socrates counsels mainly young men in these works illuminates Ikard’s point that intragender dialogue about resisting racism and patriarchy is not only productive for black gender relations but a way for black men to reclaim social agency over and against victimizing discourses.
It may well be Ikard’s identification as a black male feminist—a necessarily identity-transitive critical perspective—that allows him to analyze black complicity with racism and patriarchy in such a compelling fashion. Ikard’s critical voice allies itself with characters—both men and women—in the African American literary tradition that have challenged black patriarchy (and its concomitant dependency on white supremacy) from within. His Breaking the Silence exemplifies the spirit of a black male feminist criticism whose power comes from a mediating critical perspective rather than an essential gender identity. The inter- and intragender insights the book presents through African American fiction pave the way for a more robust practice of studying race and gender relations through literary interpretation. More broadly, in divesting black patriarchy of its ideological coherence—its harmful and self-replicating victimization (which often takes place through and at the expense of black women)—Ikard challenges African Americans to reconceptualize their social identities around new racial and gender possibilities.
***
Kinohi Nishikawa is a Ph.D. candidate in the Programs in Literature and Women’s Studies at Duke University. His dissertation analyzes the pulp fiction of Iceberg Slim and Donald Goines in the context of the black urban experience during the civil rights and Black Power movements.
Monday, July 6, 2009
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
