Oct. 31

Baldwin talks a lot about commodification in Black Empires, White Desires, which is a big part of the economic disparity that comes with hip-hop.  Many hip-hop artists talk about how they come from the streets, about being gansta and thug and real—meaning that they grew up and lived in low income housing in big city ghettos, basically.  However, many hip-hop artists (like Lil Wayne, for example) grew up in suburbs in middle (or upper) class households.  It’s wonderful that they want to connect with people of more limited means rather than just aiming for people with excessive amounts of money (which could lead to their own personal gain) but sometimes it just comes off as hypocritical.  50 Cent is a perfect example.  He constantly talks about being shot and being so hood and so street, but he’s living in a multi-million dollar house in an upscale neighborhood driving cars that are worth more than some people’s homes.  It doesn’t matter how many scars he has or tattoos or grills, he still spends more money a year than many of the people that he claims to be a part of make in ten.  Baldwin talks about how in the eighties hip-hop could be iconized with an image of a street in the Bronx with graffitied walls and kids in warm-up suits and Puma sneakers.  Now an image of hip-hop is T.I.’s music video where he’s talking about letting his girl use his jet to go wherever she wants and draping her in diamonds and expensive clothing and furs.  Consumerism is a big part of popular hip-hop, but in a big way it’s very anti what some people believe hip-hop to mean.  When I think of hip-hop, I think of kids in ghettos shouting out against the world that they have been a part of since birth.  I think of people like David Banner being frustrated and angry at the level of living in his home state and the lack of attention paid to the needy minority families that could definitely be helped.  I think of people bringing past injustices to light and demanding that people pay attention to parts of history that have been covered up or ignored.  That’s a big part of what hip-hop is supposed to represent, and so much of it has become consumerism and commodification.  You never see people like Rhianna or Usher in ratty old clothes; they are always dressed in the latest fashions.  The price of the jewelry or clothing that gets worn one time by one artist to an award show could support a family for months.  People on welfare can’t get enough money to have electricity in some parts of the country, but hip-hop artists can spend obscene amounts of money on tooth-jewelry.  

hip women

Baldwin talks about women in his piece, Black Empires, White Desires and he says that much of hip-hop is degrading and sometimes violent towards women.  While anyone who has heard (or seen) Tip Drill by Nelly would be forced to agree with that assessment, he makes the point that there are many artists breaking out of that role and pushing women into bigger and better roles.  One of my favorite songs is by Lil Kim and Christina Aguilera: Can’t Hold Us Down.  The lyrics include

“If you look back in history

It's a common double standard of society

The guy gets all the glory the more he can score

While the girl can do the same and yet you call her a whore

I don't understand why it's okay

The guy can get away with it the girl gets named

All my ladies come together and make a change

And start a new beginning for us, everybody sing

This is for my girls all around the world…”

The whole songs talks about double standards for men and women and about how women should be proud of who they are and not feel the need to just sit quietly and back up their men, but to either meet them on equal grounds (whatever that requires) or ditch them.  It also talks about how women get called names or get rumors made up about them whenever it looks like they might be achieving the “male” level of fame and success, which Baldwin also addresses in his writing when he talks about “a long musical history of black women taking a stance for sexual and economic self-satisfaction”. 

Another one of my favorite black female artists is Queen Latifah.  She does fall somewhat into the African queen stereotype that Baldwin talks about, partially because she’s decided to call herself a Queen, but she’s amazing to me.  She participates in the hip-hop aesthetic (some even call her hip-hop’s first lady), but she also does so much more.  She participates in movies and plays wonderfully strong women with amazing spirit and verve.  She played the kind of black community mother in Hairspray, which is a movie that addresses serious race issues along with the somewhat more frivolous storylines.  She spends a large portion of her role in the movie making sure that her kids (and their friends) do not feel any less important or insignificant because they just happen to have darker skin.  She stands up to the white authority figures and she pushes the black kids to make their own stands.  Queen Latifah also plays Matron Momma Morton in Chicago, a role that seems to be a sort of secondary character, but it turns out at the end of the movie that she was pulling most of the strings throughout the whole drama.  She was definitely more powerful than the whiny, lying lead roles and more vibrant, too.  Her entrance into the movie is sexy, powerful, and arrogant without conforming to any black stereotypes or any female stereotypes.  She doesn’t have a stick thin body—she flaunts and owns the body that she does have, and for that is more beautiful than any of the starving lead roles.  Along with Broadway musicals come to the silver screen, Queen Latifah plays roles in movies predominantly aimed towards black audiences and staffed with black actors (Brown Sugar, Beauty Shop, etc.) which is another important element to her career. 

Beyonce is another incredible black female role model.  She is absolutely beautiful, classy, sexy, old-school Hollywood, cutting edge fashion…the list could go on for ages.  Like Queen Latifah, she doesn’t have the currently fashionable model stick-thin body—she has her own, natural, healthy body that is absolutely perfect for her and gorgeous.  She keeps up with current trends and wears amazing clothing but she also dips back into classic Hollywood whenever she feels like it.  She follows trends, but doesn’t let them take over her life (or her wardrobe).  Irreplaceable came out in the last couple of years and while I’ll admit that it got played to death, it has an excellent message.  She talks about a man being unfaithful to her and she’s not going to listen to his excuses or reasons—she’s done.  She kicks him out and tells him that he can get his stuff and go; but don’t touch anything that she bought, cuz that’s just hers.  She also says that he’s crazy if he doesn’t think she can find another man like him—he’s not irreplaceable.  Songs like that are so empowering to women in general and to black women in particular.  Baldwin talks about the binaries between male and female in his piece and defends hip-hop for coming up with new material that doesn’t follow the old style of male superiority.

Of course, hip-hop isn’t the only music that’s doing this.  Sara Bareilles sings about someone who doesn’t deserve a love song, Gretchen Wilson knows that men don’t change, Carrie Underwood’s going to fuck up his truck when he cheats on her, Taylor Swift knows that in the end of a relationship he’s just another picture to burn…the list can go on forever.  Female artists are rising, not at the expense of men, but at their same level, or maybe even above it.  They are an important part of society because people are listening and hopefully learning something from their songs.

Oct. 24

So, I had a very hard time figuring out which post to talk about (or even finding one to talk about), so I just picked one that I actually could find and read that was actually written by him.  This very easy blog assignment got super-hard...but just because I apparently don't understand the very high-tech world of blogging.  Sorry--that's my disclaimer.

It makes me almost uncomfortable when black people continually remind everyone that they are black.  I understand that their blackness is a huge part of their personal identity and while that makes sense, it is still awkward to constantly have that blackness pushed in my face.  Race has never really seemed like a big deal to me, probably because I am white and I grew up in a very white-dominant area of the state, but I just don’t understand the need to continually remind the world of your skin color.  When Dr. Neil was writing to his daughter in his blog, “Chocolate Granola Girl”, he said his dad taught him how to be a man…no, a black man.  He didn’t just call her a little girl or a little ten-year-old girl, but a 10-year-old brown girl.  I don’t know why that’s the thing that jumped out at me so much, but it really bothered me.

It seems to me that what he’s doing is epidermalization or essentialization as much as white people judging people based on their skin color.  He’s not judging, but he’s constantly bringing it up.  Even the name of his blog is the “new black man”.  I think that until people can let race just be something in the background instead of at the forefront of everything that is said or done, it’ll always be an issue.  I guess I’ve never understood why the color of someone’s skin is such a hot-button issue and such an important factor in identity.  I mean, it feels like me saying—“life is tough for the green-eyed girls of the world”.  It’s just a colo;, it’s just the top layer of an organ on your body.  The whole thing is very frustrating to me.  From what I can tell, Marc Anthony Neil is a very intelligent, open-minded, excellent writer, but I don’t think it’s possible for the world to truly progress past the point of racial issues as long as everyone spends so much time focusing on them.

Midterm

I decided to use Soulja Boy’s “Crank That” for my example of a performative sample.  I didn’t choose it because I think it’s a wonderful song or dance, or because I think he’s an amazing artist or dancer.  I chose it because it’s a fantastic example of how hip-hop affects people’s lives, especially somewhere like this college town.  Most people have gotten completely sick of that song and that dance and almost no one would argue that there are any real musical merits to the song.  However, whenever it comes on at a bar or club or even in a clothing store, there is at least one person doing the dance (and usually more than one).  You can go on youtube and find countless videos of people doing the dance, including elementary age children who look like they might even be in gym class.  The fact that people got so into it is probably the only reason it even got famous.  They just loved the dance—nobody could get enough.  Soulja Boy made an instructional video of himself teaching the dance and put it on youtube.  The song/dance is one of the best examples of group participation in Southern hip-hop that can be mentioned.  Repetition and variation are also very present in “Crank That”.  The dance itself is a series of moves repeated over and over until the song is through and while a dancer can stick with the proscribed motions, there is also room for changing the dance and adding in moves of your own, if that’s what you want to do.  I’ve seen people in clubs back someone up with the “right” dance while the person with them breakdances or just completely does his/her own dance that may or may not incorporate any parts of the “right” dance.  The song is definitely part of Southern hip-hop because Soulja Boy has lived in the ATL since he was seven and was very influenced by the Atlanta music scene.  Personally, I think it’s incredible that he made his own video and his own single and got famous by putting them on youtube.  For me, that makes the whole thing more important.  He put his own video on youtube, probably not actually expecting it to go anywhere but he thought his song was important enough for the world (or at least the internet population of youtube) to see it so he did something about it.  And the wave of “Crank That” that swept the world after his leap of faith was definitely excellent validation.

I think that part of the reason that Soulja Boy did the video was just for fun.  He made a youtube video that managed to get him famous.  That’s incredible.  And he didn’t just get famous in the way that the chubby kid who sings and dances to the Romanian song (Ozone) did—he got commercially successful and he became a household name.  That’s incredible.  In addition to the fact that he put a really fun song out there on the market, made millions of dollars, and got ridiculously famous, he is an example of hope for every other Internet artist in the world.  He’s an example that you don’t have to be well known or rich or well connected to get famous and do what you want with your life—you just have to have the faith to try.  Personally, I think that’s what a lot of hip-hop is.  Many hip-hop artists capitalize off of the image of a ghetto-born, urban-poor gansta with criminal pasts or presents (drugs, gangs, shooting, etc) which seems to be a very defiant reaction to a negative perception of a lifestyle born of circumstance.  By that, I mean that many people look down on the type of person who is born into an environment that perpetuates violence and criminal activity as a means to survive, and a lot of what hip-hop does is defend or explain or even sometimes glorify that type of existence.  Upper middle class white collar workers have no idea what it is that many of these people have to overcome to even make a life for themselves and much of hip-hop (including David Banner, in particular) is a justification or even just an explanation of their actions.  That’s what a large part of the dirtiness of Southern hip-hop is.  Yes, it’s raw and gritty and dirty but it’s real.  “Crank That” has another aspect of dirtiness to it as well.  He talks about supermanning hos, which is a very explicit sexual act.  Along with that, there is a certain dirtiness to the language that he uses.  It’s not particularly coarse language, it’s just very Southern urban and black, which goes back to Keyes’ discussion of the words used in rap.  She calls the language used in most rap songs black street speech, which is the language used in “Crank That” and goes back to Soulja Boy growing up in Atlanta.

Personally, even reading the lyrics to “Crank That”, I don’t understand a word of it.  But that doesn’t really matter.  The thing that makes “Crank That” good is the social importance that has been attached to it.  The song means nothing to me, lyrically, but it’s just fun.  Even my seventy-two year old grandmother knows parts of the dance because it’s become such a huge part of the culture.  And again—it’s just because he thought it was important enough to try to put himself out there regardless of whether or not anyone ever saw it.  That goes back to what Cheryl Keyes talks about with the intersections between rap music and “blackness” and also what Hall says about differences and how they are represented.  Keyes talks about words, specifically, as well as how they are spoken contributing to meaning.  I have no idea what Soulja Boy is cranking in that song.  It means absolutely nothing to me in the sense of a definition.  However, it doesn’t really matter.  The song itself is what matters and the way that people react to it and each other when they hear it.  Halls talks about representing “otherness” and the way that we react to it.  When I first started listening to rap (or, more accurately hearing it) I hated it.  The words didn’t make sense, I can’t dance, and I just couldn’t follow it.  Now, I accept it as part of a culture of “otherness”.  I’m still not really a part of that culture, my biggest action as a practioner has been to take Crunkology, so when I listen to it I definitely get a sense of otherness from the music.  Despite that, I can find appreciation for the culture and the music that comes from it.  That more than anything else expresses to me how culturally defining this music is. 

A common sense understanding of hip-hop is that it’s dance music as much as it is a statement of anything else.  It is almost exclusively played in clubs for the sole purpose of dancing to it.  And Soulja Boy uses that in his song by coming up with a prescribed dance for it.  You don’t have to do his dance to it, but it’s easy for someone who doesn’t normally dance in public to dance to this song because you know exactly what you’re supposed to do when it comes on.  The “Cupid Shuffle” is another example of a song that is solely meant for dancing.  The difference is that the “Cupid Shuffle” tells you exactly what to do as the music plays and “Crank That” is a song as well as a dance.  

Cantewell Talk

One of the things that I identified most with when Mr. Cantewell was talking was the fact that music is one of the defining things in almost every moment of our lives.  Or at least, most people’s lives.  Almost every song that I love has some emotion or mental image irretrievably attached to it in my mind.  Annie Lennox’s “Walking on Broken Glass” started playing at the same time that I was walking into Virgin Mobile Megastore in Times Square in Manhattan (one of my favorite places) six years ago with my four favorite people in the entire world and every time I hear it now it brings back feelings of love, excitement, and complete happiness.  Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit” was one of the songs we played in the car (same four favorite people) while cruising in Winston-Salem, thinking we were bad-asses after we’d told each of our parents that we were at another parent’s house which brings back love again, a little fear, and rebellion.   One of the songs from Phantom of the Opera, “All I Ask of You” puts me right back in the Majestic Theatre in New York watching the Phantom try to come to terms with his feelings of love and betrayal for Christine while he watches her with Raoul and almost always puts tears in my eyes.  “Green Eyes” by Coldplay reminds me of the first boy I ever loved.  Simon and Garfunkel is my mother, Billy Joel is my father, Elton John is my seventh grade math teacher, All Saints is high school soccer practice and Be*Witched is my middle school best friend.  The list could go on indefinitely, but the point is that there is a continuous soundtrack to our lives, even if it’s not something that we dwell on in every moment.  Even music that we’ve never heard before brings out some kind of emotion, or at least it should.  A beautiful aria can bring tears, a fun hip-hop song in a club brings laughter and dancing, a rough rock song brings anger or rebellion, etc.  On a broader level, music documents the changes in the world.  The gay twenties was exemplified by the Charleston, the angry and rebellious sixties was the hey-day of rock and roll, the very confused eighties…well, yeah. 

Now, hip-hop speaks to so many levels of present society.  Sex, for one, is a huge part of hip-hop, which really relates to the world today.  Sex is rampant in our society and hip-hop talks about it unabashedly.  Drugs are also a huge issue that hip-hop artists address, along with racism, the economy, materialism, gangs, violence, love, anger with world events, the tragedy of domestic disasters, and even more.  Cantewell expressed concern that the cultural recognition and historical alignment between music and society is lost (or being lost) despite the massive amounts of music available, but I disagree.  When future generations look back on the music of today, while they’ll have to cull through an enormous volume of examples, they will be able to understand something about us.  So much of our generation is confused, angry, frustrated with the world and our own country, and trying to find some kind of meaning in their own lives.  Love songs have always been popular, but many of the ones that people will see from our generation deal with cheating or lying or the hope that maybe there is real love out there.  Divorce rates are higher than they’ve ever been, and our many people from this generation grew up in divorced homes, leading them to have difficulties believing that it’s possible to be happy with one person forever.  That’s just one example, but it’s an illustration of the fact that it is possible that music today does speak about our lives, you just have to look through more music that you would have in the past.  Another thing that pushed me to think that Cantewell might have been mistaken is the fact that our lives are more complicated now than they have been in the past.  Not to disparage the problems that people have had in the past, kids have to grow up faster now, the world’s problems are consistently part of our lives, the economy is falling fast, and we’re more connected to everything that past generations have been.  Yes, Vietnam was brought into people’s living rooms, but the war now can be found on our phones, our iPods, our computers, our TV’s, our newspapers (virtual or physical), and into every aspect of our lives.  Everyone and everything is consistently connected and hooked up to every other person and any part of the world.  You can find videos of people being beheaded in the Middle East if you’re so inclined.  And nothing’s stopping children from finding the same thing.  I’ve gone on a complete tangent, but the point is that the music of today does reflect our society, even if all it’s reflecting is complete confusion.   

Maybe music is the most important art form that currently exists.  I own books that I don’t remember reading, movies that I don’t remember watching, I’ve seen paintings that don’t bring out any kind of emotion at all, but music is always connected to something.  Cantewell calls it activity without an object.  It is sound that creates an entire world of meaning and understanding.

Oct. 3

Before the reading, and particularly before taking this class, I just considered rap to be a sub-genre of music.  I had a very snobby and somewhat condescending attitude towards rappers and their music.  However, bell hooks puts some of that into perspective for me and makes me understand that while some artists are probably not worth much respect as musicians, there are plenty of rappers who speak to something more than sex and drugs and crimes.  David Banner, P Diddy, Kanye West—all these men are very influential social activists, in their own individual ways.  David Banner, specifically, spends time and resources and energy trying to improve the lives of poor blacks in his home state (and other places) while trying to draw attention from the rest of the world to their plight.

bell hooks talks about poor black people their difficulty with aesthetics and beauty.  She says that the elderly want to appreciate beauty in defiance of the total lack thereof during slavery while the younger generation just sees the value in owning things.  She says that materialism overtakes the love of aesthetics.  David Banner’s song, Mississippi, proves that she is correct, at least in part, when he raps about a pinky ring on his hand, Cadillacs on vogues, and niggas flashin’ and ballin’.  Despite that, some of the lyrics in the song sound truly frustrated with the way that the people from his home are living.  He talks about people choking on sticky green to get high, the rebel flag is still flying, black kids aren’t learning about anything, there are crooked cops who bust anyone unless they get some kind of payoff, and any other disgust that he has for the standard of living there.  On the other hand, he still loves his home, which comes through in the lyrics about it being the home of the blues, and calling out for people to raise their hands up and wave them in pride for being from the “601, crooked letter, crooked letter”.  It seems to me that his feelings for his home in “the dirtiest part of the south” are incredibly mixed and entangled.  On the one hand, he loves it because it’s his home, it’s where he grew up, where his family is, but he gets incredibly frustrated by the lack of improvement and development there.  Going back to his interview in Congress, he says that he wouldn’t rap about the terrible parts of the south and he wouldn’t be vulgar and dirty and vile if things would only improve for his people.  He said that he makes his point as impossible to ignore as he can, because nobody is paying attention.  Katrina was only one example of the ways in which the delta gets ignored, even to this day.  Jim Crow laws are supposed to be over, but the poor black cities hardly get any attention from the government or the media because there is no monetary value to get back from them.  I’m sure it’s incredibly frustrating for David Banner and other artists like him to rise to the point of fame that he has reached and still be unable to improve the lives of the people from his home.  I mean, he can sell a billion records and be recognized by everyone in the world and still won’t have the power to help the people where he’s from.  bell hooks says “even though the house where I lived was ugly, it was a place where I could and did create art.  I painted, I wrote poetry.  Though it was an environment more concerned with practical reality than art, these aspirations were encouraged.”(2) David Banner must feel the same way about his home.  His art is of the less conventional variety, but it is still a valid form of creating something amazing from ugliness.  (Not to mention, profitable.)

bell hooks also discusses the fact that when black artists create on a level that is radical, or outside the norm, they are considered suspect by their own people and by outsiders. David Banner is a rapper, with much of the stereotypical black male criminal image, which definitely falls within the norm for black men who achieve notoriety.  In that way, he isn’t creating anything radical or outside the norm, but if you look more closely at his songs and his work outside of the musical arena, he is definitely outside the norm for the black male celebrity, particularly the southern black male celebrity.  He does work with underprivileged black children, growing up in the poor towns/cities of Mississippi, he donates money and time to their educations, he does work to gain justice for lynching victims, and many other things.  He also slides things into his songs, between all the curses and pimps and hoes that speak to a genuine love of his home and a desire for improvement there.