An op-ed from (of all places the Wall Street Journal) seems to fit with the
thread.
FRIDAY, MARCH 30, 2001 (A14)
Notes From the Hip-Hop Underground ---- By Shelby
Steele
The Wall Street Journal
Think about it. If you were a slave, what sort of legend or myth would most
warm your soul?
One of the great legends in black American culture has always been that of
the Bad Nigger. This
figure flaunts the constraints, laws and taboos that bind a person in
slavery. The BN is unbound
and contemptuous, and takes his vengeance on the master's women simply to
assert the broadest
possible freedom. His very indifference to human feeling makes him a
revolution incarnate. Nat
Turner, a slave who in 1831 led an insurrection in which some 60 whites were
massacred, was
the BN come to life.
But for the most part, the BN is the imagination's compensation for the
all-too-real impotence
and confinement that slaves and segregated blacks actually endured. He lives
out a
compensatory grandiosity -- a self-preening superiority combined with a
trickster's cunning and
a hyperbolic masculinity in which sexual potency is a vengeful and
revolutionary force.
This cultural archetype, I believe, is at the center of rap or hip-hop
culture. From "cop killer"
Ice T, Tupac Shakur and, today most noticeably, Sean "Puffy" Combs and
Eminem (who is
white), we get versions of the BN in all his sneering and inflated
masculinity.
Having beaten gun and bribery charges in a high-profile New York trial, Mr.
Combs -- who has
just announced that he wishes to be known, henceforth, as "P. Diddy" -- is
the baddest BN for
the moment. A man with both the entrepreneurial genius and the fortune
(estimated to be in the
hundreds of millions of dollars) to live far above the fray, he has
nevertheless tried to live out
the BN archetype in a series of ego feuds, thuggish assaults, and late-night
escapades that ought
to bore a man of his talent and wealth.
But Mr. Combs is caught in a contradiction. At the very least, he must
posture, if not act out, BN
themes, even as the actual condition of his life becomes conspicuously
bourgeois. Rap culture
essentially markets BN themes to American youth as an ideal form of
adolescent rebellion. And
this meeting of a black cultural archetype with the universal impulse of
youth to find themselves
by thumbing their nose at adults is extremely profitable. But the rappers
and promoters
themselves are pressured toward a thug life, simply to stay credible, by the
very BN themes they
sell. A rap promoter without an arrest record can start to look a lot like
Dick Clark.
But the Puffys of the world cannot market to an indifferent youth. The
important question is how
the BN archetype -- the slave's projection of lawless power and revenge --
has become the
MTV generation's metaphor for rebellion. And are conservatives right to see
all this as yet more
evidence of America's decline?
I think the answer to these questions begins in one fact: that what many of
today's youth
ironically share with yesterday's slave is a need for myths and images that
compensate for a
sense of alienation and ineffectuality.
Of course, today's youth do not remotely live the lives of slaves and know
nothing of the
alienation and impotence out of which slaves conjured the BN myth. Still,
the injury to family
life in America over the past 30 years (from high divorce and illegitimacy
rates, a sweeping
sexual revolution, dual-career households, etc.) may well have given us the
most interpersonally
alienated generation in our history.
Too many of today's youth experienced a faithlessness and tenuousness even
in that all-important
relationship with their parents. And outside the home, institutions rarely
offer the constancy,
structure, high expectations, and personal values they once did. So here is
another kind of
alienation that also diminishes and generates a sense of helplessness, that
sets up the need for
compensation -- for an imagined self that is bigger than life, unbound, and
powerful. Here the
suburban white kid, gawky and materially privileged, is oddly simpatico with
the black
American experience.
The success of people like Mr. Combs is built on this sense of the
simpatico. By some
estimates, 80% of rap music is bought by white youth. And this makes for
another irony. The
blooming of white alienation has brought us the first generation of black
entrepreneurs with
wide-open access to the American mainstream. Russell Simmons, known as the
"Godfather" of
rap entrepreneurs, as well as Mr. Combs, Master P and others, have launched
clothing lines,
restaurant chains, record labels, and production companies -- possibilities
seeded, in a sense,
by this strong new sympathy between black and white alienation.
Rap's adaptation, or update, of the BN archetype began in the post-'60s
black underclass. As is
now well established, this was essentially a matriarchal world in which
welfare-supported
women became the center of households and men became satellite fathers only
sporadically
supporting or visiting their children by different women. The children of
this world were not
primed to support a music of teen romance -- of "Stop in the Name of Love."
The alienation was
too withering. Not even the blues would do.
I think the appeal of the BN, on the deepest level, was his existential
indifference to feeling --
what might be called his immunity to feeling. The slave wanted not to feel
the loves and fears
that bound him to other people and thus weakened him into an accommodation
with slavery.
Better not to love at all if it meant such an accommodation. So the BN felt
nothing for anyone
and had no fear even of death. He could slap a white man around with no
regard for the
consequences.
Rappers, too, gain freedom through immunity to feeling. Women are "bitches"
and "hos," objects
of lust, but not of feeling. In many inner cities, where the illegitimacy
rate is over 80%, where
welfare has outbid the male as head of the household, where marriage is all
but nonexistent, and
where the decimation of drugs is everywhere -- in such places, a young
person of tender feelings
is certain to be devastated. Everything about rap -- the misogynistic
lyrics, the heaving swagger,
the violent sexuality, the cynical hipness -- screams "I'm bad because I
don't feel." Nonfeeling is
freedom. And it is important to note that this has nothing to do with race.
In rap, the BN nurtures
indifference toward those he is most likely to love.
Conservatives have rightly attacked rap for its misogyny, violence and
over-the-top vulgarity.
But it is important to remember that this music is a fairly accurate message
from a part of society
where human connections are fractured and impossible, so fraught with
disappointments and
pain that only an assault on human feeling itself can assuage. Rap makes the
conservative
argument about what happens when family life is eroded either by welfare and
drugs, or by the
stresses and indulgences of middle-class life.
I listened carefully to Eminem's recent Grammy performance expecting, I
guess, to be disgusted.
Instead I was drawn into a compelling rap about a boy who becomes a figure
of terrible pathos.
He is a male groupie who selfishly longs for the autograph of a rap star
while he has his
girlfriend tied up in the trunk of his car. Easy to be aghast at this until
I remembered that
Dostoyevsky's "Notes from the Underground" -- the first modern novel written
more than l50
years ago -- was also about a pathetic antihero whose alienation from
modernity made him
spiteful and finally cruel toward an innocent female.
Both works protest what we all protest -- societies that lose people to
alienation. This does not
excuse the vulgarity of rap. But the real problem is not as much rap's
cartoonish bravado as
what it compensates for.
---
Mr. Steele is a research fellow at the Hoover Institution and author, most
recently, of "A Dream
Deferred: The Second Betrayal of Black Freedom in America" (HarperCollins,
1998).
