Rapping in the Light: American Africanism and Rap Minstrelsy

Abstract

This article re-reads critiques of mainstream HipHop as minstrel reprise through the lens of Toni Morrison's concept of American Africanism. Synthesizing insights from Richard Iton and KRS-One, the author argues for the disentanglement of Hip Hop culture and rap culture to focalize the political antagonisms inherent in popular culture as a terrain of hegemonic struggle. Exposing how American Africanism works through rap culture offers a broader vantage to examine the context in which Black artists participate in modern minstrelsy by emphasizing causal factors beyond individual cultural producers and towards systemic representations of the national imaginary.

Keywords:

• African American music
• American Africanism
• art
• Black Civil War Thesis
• Black counterpublic
• Black fantastic
• Black popular culture
• culture
• hip hop
• literature
• minstrel
• minstrelsy
• Nicki Minaj
• Playing in the Dark
• politics
• rap
• rap culture
• Toni Morrison

Acknowledgment

The author dedicates this article to the incomparable Richard Iton: advisor of five years, mentor of a lifetime.

Notes

Following the Temple of Hiphop, I spell HipHop as one word, without a space or dash, to signify maturation of the term from a portmanteau meaning “cool dance” to a proper noun. However, unlike the Temple, I retain capitalization of the second “H” as an aesthetic preference. Unless otherwise noted, this article refers to HipHop and rap in the United States. This is for brevity and, of course, in no way means to discount the importance of global HipHop, which is my broader area of research.

“Conscious HipHop” is a term used to describe HipHop that is overtly concerned with sociopolitical issues.

I use “US-American” in place of “American” when referring exclusively to the United States to avoid the silencing of the rest of the Americas that Latin American writers (e.g., Hulme 1994) have argued is accomplished by the dominant convention.

Like the politics of respectability (Higginbotham 1993), the Black Civil War Thesis aims at Black uplift through a strategy of conformity to mainstream norms that ultimately reinscribes marginalization for the most disadvantaged. The Black Civil War Thesis differs from the politics of respectability in that its rhetorical style resonates more with contemporary Black popular culture (itself rooted in Black working- and subworking-class styles) rather than the Black middle class, even if its underlying values are more problematically in line with the latter. A further distinction is that the Black Civil War Thesis often—as in the cases of Chris Rock and NYOIL discussed herein—relies on language that is more violent and less paternalistic than that of the politics of respectability.

In Love and Theft (1992), Eric Lott argues that, repelled by the form's overt racism, critics have been unwilling to consider minstrelsy as evincing racial desire as much as repulsion and white anxiety as much as white power. He emphasizes that blanket condemnations of racist cultural productions cause us to overlook insights that can better inform our understandings of contemporary US-American racism. Thus, Lott concludes that more careful investigations are required to make us “aware of the resistant, oppositional, or emancipatory accents of the racial bad attitudes residing in American working-class culture today” (Lott 1992: 6, 11). While I share Saidiya Hartman's reservations regarding Lott's “claims about cross-racial solidarity and the subversive effects of minstrelsy,” (Hartman 1997: 212) I take inspiration from his willingness to engage this problematic form beyond superficial condemnation and I approach U.S. mainstream rap in this way.

For an example of this commonly held view, that HipHop has strayed from its progressive path, see Tricia Rose's The Hip Hop Wars (2008: xi). She laments that HipHop's emancipatory potential, celebrated in her seminal HipHop study, Black Noise (1994), is being overshadowed by the same problematic aspects denounced by critics of rap minstrelsy and embodied in the hegemonic “brand of hustlers' neo-minstrelsy” (28).

In the early 1990s, KRS-One began teaching that rap music, one of the four original “elements” of HipHop culture, has been singularly excised and commercialized to the extent that it no longer (in and of itself) represents HipHop culture (Boogie Down Productions 1992; KRS-One 1993). Following from this, I contend that a whole set of values, styles, and assumptions have come to be associated with commercial rap music that are distinct from (though overlapping with) those associated with HipHop culture. This pop culture, which mimics the aesthetics of HipHop but reinforces the values of mainstream US-American culture, is what I specify as rap culture.

For instance, a group like dead prez is considered “underground,” anti-mainstream, or non-commercial, based on their socio-political content, despite the fact that their best known works were circulated through mainstream channels and made available as commercial products by a major label. Correspondingly, an unknown rap artist whose content corresponds with mainstream expectations is understood to be producing “commercial rap,” even if no commercial product yet exists. Despite rearticulating these perennial HipHop binaries (underground/conscious/political/real vs. mainstream/commercial/pop/fake), I want to stress the unproductivity of strictly dichotomizing rappers, the HipHop community or, by extension, the Black community, into “good guys” and “bad guys.” I do not propose the heuristic distinction between HipHop culture and rap culture as a firm binary delineating praise-worthy HipHoppers from blame-worthy rappers. Rather, HipHop and rap are opposed cultural manifestations on a nonlinear continuum representing, on the one side, resistive expressions of people oppressed by US-America, and on the other, cultural expressions of US-America reasserting its hegemony. By nonlinear, I mean that any given cultural work, or artist's body of work, may be either, or a mixture of HipHop and rap. Naturally, cultural productions, like the people who create them, often exhibit multiple and contradictory politics.

Chuck D's 1988 remark that rap is “the Black CNN” is a favorite reference in HipHop studies. For instance, Dyson's seminal Reflecting Black (1993) references it twice (17, 280), and it is cited by no less than five authors (Light, Ards, Kitwana, Lusane, Dimitriadis) in Forman and Neal's HipHop anthology, That's the Joint! (2004). For examples of KRS-One's allusions to HipHop as coded Black speech see “Ah Yeah,” and “Free Mumia,” from the self-titled album by KRS-One (1995).

Here, I am using “critical” in the critical theory sense whereby attention to race, class, and gender entail antipathy to racism, capitalism, and hetero/sexism, respectively.

These lyrics also iterate the negative form of double consciousness, discussed later in this article.

NYOIL was not the first emcee to suggest lynching minstrel rappers. See Ogbar's discussion of HipHop group KMD's 1994 album (2007: 24).

The remix for Future's “Karate Chop” (2013) featured a verse by Lil Wayne in which he references the civil rights martyr Emmett Till in a misogynistic sexual metaphor—controversy ensued and the rapper apologized. Subsequently, the original cover art for Nicki Minaj's single “Lookin Ass” (2014) featured the iconic image of Malcolm X looking out of his home window with shot-gun in hand. In response to a slew of criticism, including petitions initiated by HipHop activists Rosa Clemente and Kevin Powell calling for removal of the artwork and boycotts of her and her label, Minaj apologized and removed the artwork. Wayne and Minaj both directed their apologies to the families of these martyrs, thus sidestepping and failing to address the greater substance and significance of the criticism. In her apology, Minaj claimed that the sole connection motivating the use of Malcolm's image was that she was “in the video shooting at Lookin Ass Niggaz and there happened to be an iconic photo of Malcolm X ready to do the same thing for what he believed in” (Minaj quoted in Martins 2014). For the sake of argument, suppose we accept her explanation as “genuinely” representing authorial intent: she simply conflated Malcolm's antagonists—elements of the Nation of Islam and the federal government who sought to assassinate him (and succeeded)—with Minaj's antagonists—working-class Black men who irritate her by looking at her and wanting her time without offering adequate monetary compensation. We are still left with the undeniably more insidious discursive connection constituted by the image of a Black working-class Malcom looking, and the titular and lyrical denunciation of Black working-class onlookers. In other words, we cannot deny the image's potential reception as Malcolm representing Minaj's disparaged onlookers, her targets—as opposed to her comrade in arms. This (mis)appropriation of Malcolm profoundly illustrates the problematic limits of post-structuralist Black productions, overly celebrated by Trey Ellis's “New Black Aesthetic” (1989) and Touré's refashioning of it as “Post-Blackness” (2011), but given a more nuanced reading by Mark Anthony Neal's notion of the “Post-Soul Aesthetic” (2002). This same iconic image of Malcolm is remixed, among other places, on the cover of Boogie Down Production's classic album, By Any Means Necessary, the cover of Ogbar's book Hip-Hop Revolution (2007), and the lyrics of Ice Cube's “When Will They Shoot?” (1992), in which he raps, “got my gun/ and I'm looking out the window like Malcolm.”

Admittedly, this reading is less sympathetic, though not necessarily incompatible, with Mark Anthony Neal's suggestion that Jay-Z's “Jigga” persona as meant to relay “his identity as the 'ghetto everyman'” (Neal 2013: 43).

To be clear, I assume my brother NYOIL to be guilty of the former, not the latter.

Razack emphasizes that the dependency of “racial myths” on “the language of culture … is an important reminder of why it is dangerous to consider culture apart from racism” (Razack 2008: 88). Further, she explains that culturalist analyses elide the effects of macro-systemic factors responsible for apparent group deficiencies (Razack 2008: 135).

For a shocking and offensive use of minstrel characters in contemporary mass culture, see Michael Bay's Hollywood blockbuster Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen (2009). In response to allegations of racism, Bay insisted that the two robot “twins”—with oversized ears, one with a gold tooth, who spoke with HipHop slang and were illiterate, constantly fighting buffoons—were included merely for “comic relief.”

While the rap industry's Black hypervisibility has belatedly produced a handful of prominent Black executives, Mark Anthony Neal qualifies that “they are little more than middle managers within transnational corporations” (2002: 8).

For a discussion of the variations of Du Boisan double consciousness see Gordon (2008: 73).

Despite his intentions, the superb execution of “the real intentions of the state which had formed him,” Baldwin argues, was the fate of Lawrence of Arabia (Baldwin 1976: 69).

Of course, the same can be said of misogyny, violence, and other oppressive ills whose origins are often erroneously attributed to communities of color.

Of course, the location and description of this necessarily otherized group can shift over time, and Black or Brown skin may not continue to be predominant markers of this difference (Mohanram 2007: xv). Razack's work, Casting Out: The Eviction of Muslims from Western Law and Politics, is a case study of how this shifting may occur. However, shifting markers and descriptions of the other, while sometimes incorporating numbers of previously stigmatized people into the dominant group(s), presents no challenge to the pillars of racism; it merely modifies the description and location of the imagined other.

See A Tribe Called Quest's “Sucka Nigga.”

For a starkly contrasting meaning of the same repetition—as an exclusively masculinist term of endearment—see the hit single “My Nigga” (YG 2013), in which the artists offer a heartfelt serenade to each other and their fellows. Here, the “my nigga, my nigga” refrain frames a homosocial celebration of sharing all things—from wealth to women (who figure repeatedly and exclusively as sexual objects). The unofficial cover for the single features an image from John Singleton's film Boyz-N-the-Hood (1991) of Ice Cube as “Dough Boy” in a convertible with fellow “gang-bangers.” This homage connects YG's 2013 hit to the era/aura of N.W.A., the group that did the most to bring the N-word from contextual to obligatory use in rap culture.

According to Dyson, “in the black elite's strained relations with poorer blacks, white supremacy got two for the price of one. The overly watched black aristocracy over-watched the black poor, themselves already fixed by a damning white gaze in the optics of racial paranoia” (2005: 110).

As crucial to Drake's commercial success as his ability to function as equal parts rapper and R&B heartthrob is his reliance on the trope of “the nigga.” Throughout his corpus, the term serves not only as endearment, insult, and punctuation, but also, as Paul Scott (2012) has argued, to legitimate Drake as a Black US-American rapper. The title of Drake's hit “Started from the Bottom” is curious considering that the “bottom” that he started from is a height of economic luxury and security that the majority of the world's rappers—as a majority non-white cross section of the global population—will never reach. Despite this, it is important for Drake to counter the popular conception that he “never struggled, wasn't hungry.” To this end, the song and music video recounts the woes of having to live in his “momma's house,” borrow his uncle's car, and work as the night manager in a drug store. However (un)precarious this struggle was, it is this hard-earned success that Drake intones qualifies him as a “real nigga” and licenses him to dismiss the “niggas” who “hate on” him for their own lack of success.

Future avenues of research in this area include an exploration of the complex of threats and incentives I have alluded to above, both conscious and unconscious, that invite and/or compel Black artists to participate in rap minstrelsy. Another useful application of American Africanism to critiques of rap minstrelsy is its ability to shed light on what Ogbar characterizes as a shift from golden-era anti-minstrel HipHop to Gangsta-era minstrel rap (Ogbar 2007: 16, 22, 68; see also Sullivan 2003; Watkins 2006; Aidi 2011) Most critics explain this shift—which saw the mainstream exchange conscious HipHoppers as the most prominent rappers for “Gangsta pop star pimps,” as KRS-One calls them (Boogie Down Productions 1990)—as the mere result of undirected market forces. Yet, the fact that conscious rappers can and have sold platinum records problematizes the proposition that the shift occurred simply because “sex and violence sells.” Even if true, the fact that one variety of a product outsells others does not stop profit-driven companies from exploiting smaller niches that demand the less popular variants. Thus, there must be some other reason that major labels relatively abruptly stopped signing and marketing conscious HipHop in the early 1990s. More importantly though, once we add racial voyeurism and denigration to the list of sex and violence, it should become all the more apparent how dismissive “market forces” arguments naturalize personal tastes, as if commodity values are not shaped by the economy of cultural values. Morrison tells us that, unseen, American Africanism motivated the mission of US-American literature. Similarly, I suggest, it may help explain the motivation for the oft-referenced but poorly explained shift from “golden”- to “gangsta”-era HipHop.