Hello Darknuss My Old Meme

246 Hello Darknuss My Old Meme
shine, washing them dishes, feeding them swine.” But it is in “Sugar
Baby,” the album’s swan song, a fnal address to a tearful, fearful nation,
that this record’s kinder, gentler, crustier, creakier Dylan quietly dons
his gold lamé glitter suit one last time and goes for the jugular with rundown, melancholic glee: “Every moment of existence seems like some
dirty trick. Happiness can come suddenly and leave just as quick. Any
minute of the day that bubble could burst. Trying to make things better for someone sometimes you just end up making it a thousand times
worse. Your charms have broken many a heart and mine is surely one.
You’ve got a way of tearing a world apart. Love see what you’ve done.”
Whether he’s speaking as Dylan the martyred lover or as some kind
of Jesus, the message appears abundantly clear: Tese may be the last
days, but not even Armageddon is going to save us from growing up, and
our learning curve remains steep.
– 2001 –
Hip-Hop Turns Thirty
We are now winding down the anniversary of hip-hop’s thirtieth year
of existence as a populist art form. Testimonials and televised tributes have been airing almost daily, thanks to Viacom and the like. As
those digitized hip-hop shout-outs get packed back into their binary
folders, however, some among us have been so gauche as to ask, What
the heck are we celebrating exactly? A right and proper question, that
one is, mate. One to which my best answer has been: Nothing less,
my man, than the marriage of heaven and hell, of New World African
ingenuity and that trick of the devil known as global hypercapitalism.
Hooray.
Given that what we call hip-hop is now inseparable from what we
call the hip-hop industry, in which the nouveau riche and the superrich
employers get richer, some say there’s really nothing to celebrate about
hip-hop right now but the money shakers and the moneymakers—who
got bank and who got more.
Hard to argue with that line of thinking since, hell, globally speaking, hip-hop is money at this point, a valued form of currency where
brothers are ofered stock options in exchange for letting some corporate entity stand next to their fre.
True hip-hop headz tend to get mad when you don’t separate so-called
hip-hop culture from the commercial rap industry, but at this stage of
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Hip-Hop Turns Tirty 247
the game that’s like trying to separate the culture of urban basketball
from the nba, the pro game from the players it puts on the foor.
Hip-hop may have begun as a folk culture, defned by its isolation
from mainstream society, but being that it was formed within the America that gave us the coon show, its folksiness was born to be bled once
it began entertaining the same mainstream that had once excluded its
originators. And have no doubt, before hip-hop had a name it was a folk
culture—literally visible in the way you see folk in Brooklyn and the
South Bronx of the eighties, styling, wilding, and profling in Jamel Shabazz’s photograph book Back in the Days. But from the moment “Rapper’s Delight” went platinum, hip-hop the folk culture became hip-hop
the American entertainment-industry sideshow.
No doubt it transformed the entertainment industry, and all kinds of
people’s notions of entertainment, style, and politics in the process. So
let’s be real. If hip-hop were only some static and rigid folk tradition preserved in amber, it would never have been such a site for radical change
or corporate exploitation in the frst place. Tis being America, where as
my man A.J.’s basketball coach dad likes to say, “Tey don’t pay niggas to
sit on the bench,” hip-hop was never going to not go for the gold as more
gold got laid out on the table for the goods that hip-hop brought to the
market. Problem today is that where hip-hop was once a buyer’s market in
which we, the elite hip-hop audience, decided what was street legit, it has
now become a seller’s market, in which what does or does not get sold as
hip-hop to the masses is whatever the boardroom approves.
Te bitter trick is that hip-hop, which may or may not include the
nba, is the face of Black America in the world today. It also still represents Black culture and Black creative license in unique ways to the
global marketplace, no matter how commodifed it becomes. No doubt,
there’s still more creative autonomy for Black artists and audiences in
hip-hop than in almost any other electronic mass-cultural medium we
have. You for damn sure can’t say that about radio, movies, or television. Te fact that hip-hop does connect so many Black folk worldwide,
whatever one might think of the product, is what makes it invaluable
to anyone coming from a Pan-African state of mind. Hip-hop’s ubiquity has created a common ground and a common vernacular for Black
folk from eighteen to ffty worldwide. Tis is why mainstream hip-hop
as a capitalist tool, as a market force, isn’t easily discounted: Te dialogue it has already set in motion between Long Beach and Cape Town
is a crucial one, whether Long Beach acknowledges it or not. What do
we do with that information, that communication, that transatlantic
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248 Hello Darknuss My Old Meme
mass-Black telepathic link? From the looks of things, we ain’t about
to do a goddamn thing other than send more cds and T-shirts across
the water.
But the Negro art form we call hip-hop wouldn’t even exist if African
Americans of whatever socioeconomic caste weren’t still niggers and not
just the more benign, congenial “niggas.” By which I mean if we weren’t
all understood by the people who run this purple-mountain loony bin as
both subhuman and superhuman, as sexy beasts on the order of King
Kong. Or as George Clinton once observed, without the humps there
ain’t no getting over. Meaning that only Africans could have survived
slavery in America, been branded lazy bums, and decided to overcompensate by turning every sporting contest that matters into a glorifed
battle royal.
Like King Kong had his island, we had the Bronx in the seventies, out
of which came the only signifcant artistic movement of the twentieth
century produced by born-and-bred New Yorkers, rather than Southwestern transients or Jersey transplants. It’s equally signifcant that
hip-hop came out of New York at the time it did, because hip-hop is
Black America’s Ellis Island. It’s our Delancey Street and our Fulton
Fish Market and garment district and Hollywoodian ethnic enclave/
empowerment zone that has served as a foothold for the poorest
among us to get a grip on the land of the prosperous.
Only because this convergence of ex-slaves and ch-ching fnally happened in the eighties because hey, African Americans weren’t allowed to
function in the real economic and educational system of these United
States like frst-generation immigrants until the 1980s—roughly four
centuries after they frst got here, ’case you forgot. Hip-hoppers weren’t
the frst generation who ever thought of just doing the damn thang entrepreneurially speaking, they were the frst ones with legal remedies
on the books when it came to getting a cut of the action. And the frst
generation for whom acquiring those legal remedies so they could just
do the damn thang wasn’t a priority requiring the energies of the race’s
best and brightest.
If we woke up tomorrow and there was no hip-hop on the radio or
on television, if there was no money in hip-hop, then we could see what
kind of culture it was, because my bet is that hip-hop as we know it
would cease to exist, except as nostalgia. It might resurrect itself as a
people’s protest music if we were lucky, might actually once again refect
a disenchantment with, rather than a reinforcement of, the have and
have-not status quo we cherish like breast milk here in the land of the
status-fending. But I won’t be holding my breath waiting to see.
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Hip-Hop Turns Tirty 249
Because the moment hip-hop disappeared from the air and marketplace might be the moment when we’d discover whether hip-hop truly
was a cultural force or a manufacturing plant, a way of being or a way of
selling porn dvds, crunk juice, and S. Carter signature sneakers, blessed
be the retired.
Tat might also be the moment at which poor Black communities
began contesting the reality of their surroundings, their life opportunities. An interesting question arises: If enough folk from the ’hood
get rich, does that sufce for all the rest who will die tryin’? And where
does hip-hop wealth leave the question of race politics? And racial
identity?
Picking up where Amiri Baraka and the Black Arts Movement left of,
George Clinton realized that anything Black folk do could be abstracted
and repackaged for capital gain. Tis has of late led to one mediocre
comedy after another about Negroes frolicking at hair shows, funerals,
family reunions, and backyard barbecues, but it has also given us Biz
Markie and Outkast.
Oh, the selling power of the Black Vernacular. Ralph Ellison only hoped
we’d translate it in such a way as to gain entry into the hallowed house
of art. How could he know that the House of Lauren and the House of
Polo would one day pray to broker that vernacular’s cool marketing prowess into a worldwide licensing deal for bedsheets writ large with Jay Z’s
John Hancock? Or that the vernacular’s seductive powers would drive
Estée Lauder to propose a union with the House of P. Diddy? Or send
Hewlett-Packard to come knocking under record exec Steve Stoute’s
shingle in search of a hip-hop-legit cool marketer?
Hip-hop’s efervescent and novel place in the global economy is further proof of that good old Marxian axiom that under the abstracting
powers of capitalism, “All that is solid melts into air” (or the ethernet, as the case might be). So that hip-hop foats through the virtual
marketplace of branded icons as another consumable ghost, parasitically feeding of the host of the real world’s people—urbanized and
institutionalized—whom it will claim till its dying day to “represent.”
And since those people just might need nothing more from hip-hop
in their geopolitically circumscribed lives than the escapism, glamour,
and voyeurism of hip-hop, why would they ever chasten hip-hop for
not steadily ringing the alarm about the African American community’s
aids crisis, or for romanticizing incarceration more than attacking the
prison-industrial complex, or for throwing a lyrical bone at issues of intimacy or literacy or, heaven forbid, debt relief in Africa and the evils
perpetuated by the World Bank and the imf on the motherland?
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250 Hello Darknuss My Old Meme
All of which is not to say “Vote or Die” wasn’t a wonderful attempt
to at least bring the phantasm of Black politics into the twenty-fourhour nonstop booty, blunts, and bling frame that now has the hiphop industry on lock. Or to devalue by any degree Russell Simmons’s
valiant eforts to educate, agitate, and organize around the Rockefeller drug-sentencing laws. Because at heart, hip-hop remains a radical,
revolutionary enterprise for no other reason than its rendering people
of African descent anything but invisible, forgettable, and dismissible
in the consensual hallucination-simulacrum twilight zone of digitized
mass distractions we call our lives in the matrixized, conservativeChristianized, Goebbelsized-by-Fox twenty-frst century. And because,
for the frst time in our lives, race was nowhere to be found as a campaign issue in presidential politics and because hip-hop is the only place
we can see large numbers of Black people being anything other than
sitcom window dressing, it maintains the potential to break out of the
box at the fip of the next lyrical genius who can articulate her people’s
sufering with the right doses of rhythm and noise to reach the bourgeois and still rock the boulevard.
Call me an unreconstructed Pan-African cultural nationalist, Africafer-the-Africans-at-home-and-abroad-type rock-and-roll nigga and I
won’t be mad at ya: I remember the Afrocentric dream of hip-hop’s becoming an agent of social change rather than elevating a few ex–drug
dealers’ bank accounts. Against my better judgment, I still count myself
among that faithful. To the extent that hip-hop was a part of the great
Black cultural nationalist reawakening of the 1980s and early ’90s, it was
because there was also an antiapartheid struggle and anticrack struggle,
and Minister Louis Farrakhan and Reverend Jesse Jackson were at the
height of their rhetorical powers, recruitment ambitions, and media
access, and a generation of Ivy League Black Public Intellectuals on
both sides of the Atlantic had come to the fore to raise the philosophical stakes in African American debate, and speaking locally, there were
protests organized around the police /White Citizens’ Council lynchings
of Bumpurs, Grifths, Hawkins, Diallo, Dorismond, etc. etc. etc. Point
being that hip-hop wasn’t born in a vacuum but as part of a political dynamo that seems to have been largely dissipated by the time we arrived
at the Million Man March, best described by one friend as the largest
gathering in history of a people come to protest themselves, given its
bizarre theme of atonement in the face of the goddamn White House.
Te problem with a politics that theoretically stops thinking at the
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Hip-Hop Turns Tirty 251
sciousness was utterly revealed at that moment—a point underscored
by the fact that the two most charged and memorable Black political
events of the 1990s were the mmm and the hollow victory of the O.J.
trial. Meaning, OK, a page had been turned in the book of African
American economic and political life—clearly because we showed up in
Washington en masse demanding absolutely nothing but atonement for
our sins—and we did victory dances when a doofus ex-athlete turned
Hertz spokesmodel bought his way out of lethal injection. Put another
way, hip-hop sucks because modern Black populist politics sucks. Ishmael Reed has a poem that goes: “I am outside of history . . . it looks
hungry . . . I am inside of history it’s hungrier than I thot.” Te problem
with progressive Black political organizing isn’t hip-hop but that the No.
1 issue on the table needs to be poverty, and nobody knows how to make
poverty sexy. Real poverty, that is, as opposed to studio-gangsta poverty, newly-inked-mc-with-a-story-to-sell poverty.
You could argue that we’re past the days of needing a Black agenda.
But only if you could argue that we’re past the days of there being poor
Black people and Driving While Black and structural, institutionalized
poverty. And those who argue that we don’t need leaders must mean
Bush is their leader too, since there are no people on the face of this
earth who aren’t being led by some of their own to hell or high water.
People who say that mean this: Who needs leadership when you’ve got
twenty-four-hour cable and PlayStations? And perhaps they’re partly
right, since what people can name and claim their own leaders when
they don’t have their own nation-state? And maybe in a virtual America
like the one we inhabit today, the only Black culture that matters is the
one that can be downloaded and perhaps needs only business leaders
at that. Certainly it’s easier to speak of hip-hop hoop dreams than of
structural racism and poverty, because for hip-hop America to not just
desire wealth but demand power with a capital P would require thinking
way outside the idiot box.
Consider, if you will, this “as above, so below” doomsday scenario:
Twenty years from now we’ll be able to tell our grandchildren and
great-grandchildren how we witnessed cultural genocide: the systematic
destruction of a people’s folkways.
We’ll tell them how fools thought they were celebrating the thirtieth
anniversary of hip-hop the year Bush came back with a gang bang, when
they were really presiding over a funeral. We’ll tell them how once upon
a time there was this marvelous art form where the Negro could fnally
say in public whatever was on his or her mind in rhyme and how the
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252 Hello Darknuss My Old Meme
Negro hip-hop artist, staring down minimum wage slavery, Iraq, or the
freedom of the incarcerated chose to take his emancipated motor mouth
and stuck it up a stripper’s ass because it turned out there really was gold
in them thar hills.
– 2004 –
Love and Crunk: Outkast
Speakerboxxx /Te Love Below
Six hot jawnts into the game, the release of any Outkast album is an Event.
Tey’ve given us the most scrumptious moments counter-nihilistic
hip-hop has ofered in recent memory. But none has loomed as more
Event-ful than Speakerboxxx /Te Love Below, because it may also be the
group’s last. Tis time the Outkast banner fies over two solo albums:
the frst in jewel-box order by the rowdy and irrepressible Big Boi, the
second by the belovedly fy eccentric Andre 3000, latest link in a lengthy
chain of supersoulful African American eccentrics stretching from Charley Patton and Jelly Roll Morton to Andre’s guiding light in eclectic negritude, Prince. All folk who wielded weirdness like a scalpel, albeit one
that carves order out of the cosmic slop of their free-associative funky
imaginations.
Since hip-hop is now the Kmart of the American id, where our dark
and unconscious shit turns into shinola, we need its democratic ideals
to be messy. Te Roots’ Ahmir Tompson credits crack for the genius of
eighties hip-hop music, and faults Bill Clinton for the generally agreed
suckitude of the music’s nineties genus. Fair enough, but Bill Clinton
also presided over the rise of hip-hop’s Dirty South oligarchies, an apt
legacy for the country prez who whipped his dick out in the Oval Ofce.
Just as Dirty Bill kept the White House close to the outhouse, southern hip-hop’s progressive wing was sustaining the tradition of brainteasing verbal panache and shock-of-the-new funk we once snootily
considered the sole province of us uppity upsouth cosmopolite muhfuhs. Tey also proved you could keep it thoughtful and pimpstrollful, goofball and gangsta, conspiracy-theoried and crunk. Being Dirty
Southern means never having to say you’re sorry for Master P or Te
Matrix Reloaded.
No, we ain’t about to get it twisted. We know that in the rhyme-soloist
mc gladiator arena New York, home of J-hova, Nas, L.L., and DMX, 50
Cent still rules the roost. But if you the kind that needs that good old
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