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.