Logos<\/em>?\u201d
\nJPMS 23(2): 190\u2013194 \/ June 2011
\nWayne Marshall
\n<\/strong><\/p>\nThis journal aims to encourage \u201cwriterly\u201d approaches to our various encounters with popular music. And sensibly so. After all, despite some recent and relatively modest multimedia enhancements, this is a space primarily for words. <\/p>\n
A writerly tack embraces the peculiar challenges of bridging what Charles Seeger referred to as the \u201cmusicological juncture,\u201d or the inevitable slippages more folksily described as \u201cdancing about architecture\u201d: in other words, the problems inherent to translating sonic material and embodied experience into written text. As the quip about dancing implies, many seem to think that such a project dooms itself to reducing, recoding, and reifying its subject. But if such outcomes are, in their way, unavoidable, better to acknowledge the mediation and embrace the medium. To press our words to rise to the occasion, and dance. Or more modestly, we think there is space for such discourse, and we want this<\/em> space to offer some.<\/p>\nAgainst this ideal, the recent publication of The Anthology of Rap<\/em> (Yale University Press, 2010), edited by Adam Bradley and Andrew DuBois, offers a timely reminder of what can get lost in the translation from popular music\u2014with all the p-word entails, from commerce to contexts\u2014to words on a page. Admittedly, the enterprise of representing rap music as lyrics abstracted from recorded performances or any particular encounter with them\u2014indeed, as poetry\u2014goes well beyond questions of \u201cwriterly\u201d approaches. But it also presents a sort of limit case. In an effort to perform a kind of alchemy on hip-hop\u2019s texts, the anthology highlights, by their very absence, how crucial dimensions of popular music as actually encountered<\/em> demand a special sort of textual recognition. <\/p>\nFrom the so-called \u201cgrain\u201d of the voice to the inextricable entrainment of a lyric\u2019s sonic shape and setting to the meanings these things take on in different times and places, the texts (in the broadest sense) of popular music beckon for language that registers as it grapples with questions of form and force, interpretation and affect. It may be unsurprising that a collection edited by two professors of English, seeking to read rap as an \u201cestimable body of contemporary poetry\u201d (xxxiii), would downplay the genre\u2019s sonic dimensions. But in justifying their project, the authors go so far as to assert that rap\u2019s poetics can be examined with no reference to matters of sound. <\/p>\n
The Anthology of Rap<\/em> exhibits a pervasive and often bald logocentrism even as it bears subtle and consistent witness to rap as a fundamentally musical phenomenon. In his foreword, Henry Louis Gates concludes that \u201cthe words are finally the best reason for the beat\u201d (xxvi). He marshals this rhetorical flourish to affirm the larger goal of the anthology: positioning rap, as Gates puts it, in the \u201cnew vanguard of American poetry\u201d (xxvi). Gates\u2019s primary strategy here is to ennoble rap by linking its rhymes to the African-American oral traditions\u2014the dozens, signifyin(g)\u2014that Gates built his own career around recuperating and recoding. But, tellingly, in order to draw us into the narrative, Gates highlights a number of crucial, performative qualities that resist easy render to the page. Recalling what arrested him as a young man watching his father recite Stagolee stanzas, Gates calls our attention to \u201call that a virtuosic performer possessed: an excellent memory, a mastery of pace and timing, the capacity to inflect and gesture, the ability to summon the identities of different characters simply through the nuance of their voices\u201d (xxii). Clearly, all of these aspects\u2014many of which we might include in the realm of the musical\u2014are indispensible aspects of a performance\u2019s poetics, and yet the anthology, its editors, and Gates himself all ask us, implicitly and explicitly, to set them aside.<\/p>\nA bias toward the words of rap, and against its music, rears its head throughout the editors\u2019 introduction, whether they\u2019re casually referring to rap\u2019s \u201cfundamental literary and artistic nature\u201d (xxix)\u2014see what they did there?\u2014or asserting, with no support other than their own authority, that lyrics constitute \u201cthe most enduring part\u201d (xxxiv) of hip-hop songs and that, moreover, lyrics \u201cgenerally retain much of their resonance and meaning when isolated from their music\u201d (xxxv). O rly? Sounds scientific enough, I suppose. Adding insult to injury, the editors have the audacity to employ \u201cthe music\u201d synecdochically: \u201cThe parody of rap as doggerel does not touch truly on much of the music\u201d (xxii). In its way, of course, such a slip registers the music\u2019s refusal to recede from our imaginative engagements with hip-hop.<\/p>\n
For all this rationalization, the collection suffers from a central and ultimately unacknowledged paradox. \u201cThis anthology treats rap as a literary form,\u201d write the editors, \u201calbeit one primarily experienced as music\u201d (xxxv). There\u2019s a lot riding on that \u201calbeit\u201d\u2014a lot that never truly gets addressed. Instead, sleight of hand is meant to suffice: \u201cFar from denying rap\u2019s value as music,\u201d they defend, \u201creaders stand to gain a renewed appreciation for rap\u2019s music by considering the poetry of its lyrics\u201d (xxxv). <\/p>\n
What this means is profoundly unclear, especially as the previous page finds the editors willingly enlisting unwieldy Eurocentric critiques of rap as \u201cunmusical\u201d\u2014a surprising and needless concession: \u201cThe very qualities that leave rap open to criticism as music\u2014heavy reliance on 4\/4 beats, limited use of melody and harmony\u2014are precisely what make it such an effective vehicle for poetry\u201d (xxxiv). Would a hip-hop waltz be better? Perhaps something in 7\/8 time? Is a \u201climited use of melody and harmony\u201d really an accurate or fair description of the staggering variety of rap\u2019s tonalities and omnivorous musical borrowings? The editors\u2019 eagerness to throw rap\u2019s music under the bus raises flags, to say the least. Indeed, this is one place where the book\u2019s inherent conservatism betrays itself: Bradley and DuBois seek to admit hip-hop\u2019s spectacular vernacular into the hallowed halls where people teach poetry. To do so, they embrace, rather than subvert, the elitist politics of canon. But a paramount part of hip-hop\u2019s poetics\u2014and a central reason for the genre\u2019s resiliency and appeal\u2014is a refusal to measure up to old models (aka, \u201call that jazz\u201d). Following an imperative to flip the script, hip-hop artists, producers, and entrepreneurs have consistently opened doors\u2014whether aesthetic or commercial\u2014on their own terms, smashing canons in the process. <\/p>\n
Moreover, while rap is doubtless a verbose genre at heart, even a casual survey of listening habits reveals that devotees and even casual listeners attend to a great deal more than rap\u2019s lyrics, sometimes ignoring lexical content altogether to focus on the beats or flows, on the timbres and textures and rhythms of a recording, all of which crucially contribute to a song\u2019s poetics. The editors\u2019 subordination of musical wholes to an abstracted logos<\/em> is not only misguided, it\u2019s irresponsible, playing back into the hands of rap\u2019s rarefied critics rather than elucidating hip-hop\u2019s poetics on their own terms. <\/p>\nIt is especially ironic to find prose neglecting, if not dismissing, the musical dimensions of a musical genre in a book that carries a clear agenda of validation. Legitimacy has been a hobgoblin haunting much of the academic literature on hip-hop. Such a stance may have made sense at a certain time, when hip-hop was roundly attacked in public media even as it made its commercial ascent, and it may yet make sense in certain contexts (English and music departments come to mind). But it\u2019s a revealing and distracting preoccupation, saying more about the academic contexts in which young scholars seek sanction to teach hip-hop in their classes than, say, the wider world, where hip-hop pervades popular culture. Rap conquered the world some time ago, and as it happens, universities are demonstrably eager to offer and promote large-enrollment courses centered on the genre. Tricia Rose called her groundbreaking book Black Noise<\/em> for a reason\u2014and began chapter 3 with the revealing tale of encountering some racist, and familiar, opposition from the chairman of Brown\u2019s music department: “Well, you must be writing on rap’s social impact and political lyrics, because there is nothing to the music” (62). But she wrote that book\u2014and had that conversation\u2014nearly twenty years ago. Hip-hop has moved on, and so should we.<\/p>\nAt a launch event in Cambridge last November, Bradley asserted that the anthology \u201ccan help sustain a culture that already sustains itself.\u201d This seems disingenuous, or at best, wrong. As Rose herself told me as an aspiring hip-hop scholar some ten years ago, hip-hop needs no help from academics. If anything, the academy could use some help from hip-hop. And while we might read the anthology as an attempt to stage such an intervention, we might better see it as a telling symptom of the ways that elite institutions such as universities and university presses inform the shape of our own cultural production. Looking for a silver lining, at the same event Jamaica Kincaid praised the anthology as a \u201csanctifying\u201d project\u2014an interesting choice given the etymological linkage between canonization<\/em> and sainthood. As Kincaid elaborated, however, what she meant by this was that this rather humanities-style elevation of rap\u2019s lyrics to the level of poetry works as a humanizing gesture\u2014for \u201cthe people and the situation,\u201d as she put it, though she also said she didn\u2019t want to \u201cfreight the thing.\u201d <\/p>\nObviously, it\u2019s plenty fraught already. Still, I\u2019d like to be a good relativist of sorts. It\u2019s a wide world after all. And I don\u2019t mean, in turn, to disrespect or dismiss a valid listening position on the part of the anthologizers: that one important set of meanings of popular music do stem from abstractions and analyses of song texts. Clearly, to the editors\u2019 ears, and in their minds, the beats stand in the background, or, ironically, as the ground itself, \u201cthe perfect sonic climate for poetically sophisticated lyrics to flourish\u201d (xxxv). But respecting the editors\u2019 right to read rap as they will, and understanding their approach in relation to the political economy of scholarly production and academic promotion, does not mean that one cannot also remain a strong advocate for popular music scholarship that cares more about the power of music and the power relations shot through our various engagements with it, than in further consolidating power and prestige for certain kinds of academic labor.<\/p>\n
The longstanding attempt to legitimize hip-hop for our colleagues and patrons distracts from more meaningful research, the sort of work that takes hip-hop\u2019s artistic (or, if you must, \u201cliterary\u201d) merits for granted, and then proceeds to ask other questions about how its poetics function (and, necessarily, how they\u2019re anchored in sonic and social experience). If such work could also aspire to be writerly, to dance on the page in a manner commensurate with its subject, perhaps one of hip-hop\u2019s \u201cgolden age\u201d ideals\u2014rap as \u201cedutainment\u201d\u2014could finally find some real footing in the academy. Until we make that space for ourselves, we\u2019re doomed to reproduce a certain wackness.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Ok, rounding things out, here’s the 3rd review\/polemic in the 3-part series I’ve been running here (see parts 1 and 2). This one’s the most recently published, hardly a year old! (That’s not bad for lag, as these things go.) On the surface, it’s a review of 2010’s Anthology of Rap (Yale); but again, while […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[400,55,191,404,35,197],"class_list":["post-6743","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-academic","tag-bookish","tag-ethno","tag-hip-hop","tag-poetry","tag-review"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wayneandwax.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6743","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wayneandwax.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wayneandwax.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wayneandwax.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wayneandwax.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6743"}],"version-history":[{"count":12,"href":"https:\/\/wayneandwax.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6743\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8195,"href":"https:\/\/wayneandwax.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6743\/revisions\/8195"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wayneandwax.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6743"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wayneandwax.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6743"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wayneandwax.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6743"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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