August 23, 2009
thinkin' of a master plan (chapter one excerpt)
sugarhigh! has been posting excerpts from this book for the last several months, and is completing one final cycle through the chapters, ending in late September
....Of tanatmount importance, the project of Black self-empowerment aligns the teachings of both the Five Percenters and the Nation of Islam with rap’s early development as an art form. The material, technological conditions allowing for rap’s genesis were orchestrated by the use of consumer electronics (most famously the turntable) as tools for the production, rather than reproduction, of music. This development is of course inseparable from rap’s struggle to be recognized as a legitimate music. Such a sequence — new art made by non-professionalized performers, followed by a backlash which pretends to police not the social eruption but the terms of the aesthetic — is not a new story. In this case, the backlash has been as extended and contentious as it is racialized. Such a conflict can only be understood as an attempt to maintain the barriers of entry which this new material empowerment had battered down, effectively allowing artists from a previously excluded class and race position to produce material for mass culture (albeit still mediated by certain studio and radio demands). New form, new social access, new content.
Thus it was inevitable that the content of hip-hop would swiftly come to express the possibility, novelty and force of such self-empowerment, and so gather in the self-empowerment discourses circulating in the hip-hop and broader Black community. These discourses would equally mutate rap’s artistic structures in a way that encapsulates the dialectical development of ideology and aesthetic form — a development most apparent in formidably talented emcee Rakim (Rakim Allah, born William Michael Griffin, Jr.), who effectively reimagined the lyrical possibilities of rap on his first two albums with Eric B, Paid In Full and Follow The Leader (1987 and 1988 respectively). Stretching enjambed sentences across syncopated and densely rhymed lines, Rakim did for rap something on the order of what Bob Dylan had done for rock and roll. Beyond technical triumph, Rakim fashioned a new rhetorical machine, able to articulate extended ideas as persuasively as catchphrases. He was pleased to use both, to connect old-school hustles about moving the crowd with doctrinal rallying cries in a style that instantly rendered obsolete the end-stopped couplet and quatrain format of early rap:
From century to century you'll remember meRakim’s formal revolution was thus also a revolution of ideas, or of the potential for ideas. The effect was to identify rap’s cultural power and Black Power explicitly, and to do so with a particular understanding: that the rhetoric of Black self-empowerment, now indistinguishable from eighties hip-hop, was not a bootstrapping self-determination but an oppositional stance, a Black nationalism based on a racialized theology.
In history, not a mystery or a memory —
God by nature, mind raised in Asia,
Since you was tricked, I have to raise ya
From the cradle to the grave, but remember
You're not a slave
Cause we was put here to be much more than that
But we couldn't see it because our mind was trapped
But I’m here to break away the chains, take away the pains
Remake the brains, reveal my name…
Posted by jane at August 23, 2009 08:17 AM | TrackBack