This makes a lot of sense, but its scary. The step from BN to Columbine may
not be very large.
Ed
>
> 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).
>
>
