Durham E-Theses Boxing Obsession and Realness in London Rap: Racism, Temporality, Narcissism BERROCAL, EMILIO,GIACOMO How to cite: BERROCAL, EMILIO,GIACOMO (2013) Boxing Obsession and Realness in London Rap: Racism, Temporality, Narcissism, Durham theses, Durham University. Available at Durham E-Theses Online: http://etheses.dur.ac.uk/10603/ Use policy The full-text may be used and/or reproduced, and given to third parties in any format or medium, without prior permission or charge, for personal research or study, educational, or not-for-prot purposes provided that: • a full bibliographic reference is made to the original source • a link is made to the metadata record in Durham E-Theses • the full-text is not changed in any way The full-text must not be sold in any format or medium without the formal permission of the copyright holders. Please consult the full Durham E-Theses policy for further details. Academic Support Oce, Durham University, University Oce, Old Elvet, Durham DH1 3HP e-mail: [email protected] Tel: +44 0191 334 6107 http://etheses.dur.ac.uk 2 Boxing Obsession and Realness in London Rap: Racism, Temporality, Narcissism Emilio G. Berrocal Abstract: London Rap belongs to the transnational public of hip-hop. As a result of the birth of the genre of the music-video (in the 1980s) and the diffusion of music TV channels like MTV (from the 1990s), hip-hop has become a worldwide public first and foremost because of its visual power. The internet revolution has further expanded the audio-visuality of hip-hop, particularly via the current roles of YouTube and social media. The cognitive change this passage entails, for the younger generations of hip-hoppers, is that the technology of the video has become more commonly used than that of the book to captivate an audience. Yet, as suggested in this thesis, the screen brings to completion the search for visual analogues for words that alphabetic writing, since the birth of philosophy in ancient Greece, developed. If digital audio-visual capitalism declares the crisis of modern nationalism based on print, what I call here the “boxing obsession” – the obsession whereby words need to mean things – is still far from being dead. We observe through interviews, lyrics, speech and music-video analysis how London Conscious Rappers ambiguously relate to the boxing obsession with regards to what concerns the imagination of ethnicities. In viewing the “political correctness” of the dominant discourse as the hypocrisy to unmask, the rappers rebel against the effects the boxing obsession produces, such as police brutality, the crypto-racism of media talk, and everyday racist attacks; but in reifying views of “blackness”, “whiteness” and “Islam”, and in attaching them to specific bodies on the basis of their physical appearance, they struggle to identify the causes. The fieldwork methodology here presented (an “exit from the text”) offers a way for informants and anthropologists to definitively get to grips with the boxing obsession and move forward. Boxing Obsession and Realness in London Rap: Racism, Temporality, Narcissism Emilio G. Berrocal Ph.D. Anthropology Department Durham University 2013 Statement of Copyright: The copyright of this thesis rests with the author. No quotation from it should be published without the author’s prior written consent and information derived from it should be acknowledged. Acknowledgements I would like to express my gratitude to all the people I have interviewed and talked to, watched, heard, touched, felt and smelt during my fieldwork; recalled and talked about in the pages that follow. In particular: Babar, for being my Unofficial Mayor of London Town, mentor and friend; Donovan, for always being a great support no matter what; Giulia and Flo, for helping me at the start and throughout; Chris, for proofreading this; Adrian, Jordie and Gabriel for filming and editing the music-video; Captain Hotknives, Tom, Len, Junior and Tom for playing, recording and performing with Remaking Europe; Francesco, for his friendship; Sarina for being so nice and lovely. I would like to say many thanks to my supervisor, Elisabeth Kirtsoglou, for taking me on board and believing in my project; my examiners, Stephen Lyon and Paul Sant Cassia, for their comments and valuable views expressed during the Viva. I would like also to thank the entire Department of Anthropology, with a particular mention for Sandra Bell, for having been so supportive at a critical moment; Matei Candea and Michael Carrithers, for reading parts of this thesis. Since I joined the fabulous cosmopolitan community of Ustinov College in October 2009, three young lives have been taken us too early: Hirouy, Neal and Alex. Every one of us is eternal, once we have lived. This is why I thank them in the present, along with: Matt and Ustinov Live; Sakib, Joshua, Marek and We Are All Mixed; Yannis, Victor, Vyg, Fabio and the Ustinov Basketball Society; Paola, Claudia, Michele, Francesca, Stella, Nour, Nadir; Dave and Jam Jah; Angel Inn; Fishtank; Simpa and everybody in Durham. I am grateful to all the locations, accommodations and sorroundings where I have written and thought about this work, in Durham, London and Orvieto. I thank Silvio in Rome, all my people in Orvieto, in particular Dario and Pratini del Duomo. Last but always first, my family: Veronica, Magda, Brigita, Augusto; my mom Francesca and dad Emilio. This thesis is dedicated to our beloved little dog Dorotea whose spirit taught us a lot. 3 Table of Contents p. 8 Introduction 8 The Corporeality of the Athens School 12 The Immanency and Transcendency of Realness 13 First Definition of Transcendent Ethos: real-isation 18 Second Definition of Transcendent Ethos: denial of coevalness 23 The Gramscian Fieldworker 26 Place and Questions 30 Structure of the Thesis 32 Chapter 1: The Mental Sensation of the Boxing Obsession 32 Introduction 35 a) In the Situation 37 b) The “theory fragment” Situation 40 1) Political Correctness 40 From America… 41 …to Britain 44 Supporters 46 Anti-Racists 49 “Enoch Was Right” 51 2) Minimal Theory of the Linguistic Act 51 Pre-Linguistic Empathy 55 The Violence and Potentiality of the Linguistic Act 57 Externalising the Linguistic Medium to Chase Away the Crisis 62 3) Habitus of the Body of the Other as Truth 62 The Colonisation of the Common through the Public 65 Inverted Temporality: Pre defined by the Post 68 Sensory Racism 71 Conclusion 4 73 Chapter 2: Spitting ‘We Are All Mixed’ to Exit the Text 73 Introduction 75 1) Knowing One Flows 75 Flow as Dwelling 79 Placing Through Ritual 80 Hip-Hop as Interpellation 83 Jumping out of the Flow of Hegemony 85 Recognition of Flowing into the Flow of Sociality 88 a) Constitutive Rhetoric 88 b) Deconstruction of the Constitutive Rhetoric 89 Placing as Strategic Reflexivism 91 Ethnographic Content 93 2) Situation 93 Syncretism in London multiculturalism 99 “World Citizenship” 107 3) Location 107 The site of East London 113 London Patois 117 4) Solution 117 Producing Folklore 122 Conclusion 125 Chapter 3: Realness for and against Theory of Secularisation 125 Introduction 129 1) Memory of the Index 129 Appearing as Muslim per Abduction 133 Unprecedented Political Realness 139 The Space of the “Mixed” Denied and Embraced 146 2) Language of the Heart 146 Immediacy as Total Prestation 148 Inward vs Outward: Dawah by Example 152 3) Theory of Secularisation 152 Islamic or Conscious? 157 Flexibility vs Before and After 5 160 Conclusion 162 Chapter 4: Realness for and against Black Nationalism 162 Introduction 165 1) Technologies of Conversion 165 The Tape-Generation 169 The TV-Generation 171 The iPod-Generation 174 2) Malcolm’s Legacy 174 Malcolm X’s door to Islam 178 The Black Nationalism of Public Enemy 183 3) Sartre’s Legacy 183 Reverse Racism is Impossible 187 The Right to Write Their Own History 189 Conclusion 192 Chapter 5: Organic to the Worn Language 192 Introduction 194 1) The Worn Language 194 The Paradox of the Hype 198 Hyped Up by One’s Own Past 200 Nihilism as Scepticism 201 2) Rappers as Organic to Audio-Visuality 201 Gramsci vs Ascendancy 203 Sentimental Connection: 203 a) “I am just like you” 203 b) “I am a hip-hop member” 204 Movement in the Mind 205 Moral Direction: 205 c) “Will He think I’m ugly when He sees my clothes or sees my hair?” 207 d) “Who do you think has got us filling out the censuses?” 209 The Crystal Body of the Punchline 210 3) Bad Parrhesia of the Punchline 210 The Revolution Has Been Televised 6 212 Prisoner of One’s Own Image-on-the-Screen 214 a) Paranoia of the Heroic Death 214 b) Pleasure in being called Revolutionary 216 Toscanini Syndrome 218 4) Wearing 218 Arrogance vs Confidence 220 Wearing does not need Saying 221 Conclusion 223 Conclusion 227 References 7 Introduction The Corporeality of the Athens School This is an ethnography about London hip-hop culture and the practice of rapping. It is based on fieldwork research that lasted altogether fifteen months, from October 2010 to Christmas 2011. The first three months were devoted to a preliminary exploration of the city, and the following twelve to intensive research. However, this dissertation is also about something else: a mechanism which precedes and exceeds the local particularities that this text will describe, and without which these particularities would not acquire the disturbing mask they wear today. Hip-hop, which is and has been for three decades now a global culture, is based, along with many other youth cultures in the West, on this mechanism that keeps returning. Paul Gilroy (1993), sociologist and cultural critic, has called it “sameness that changes”, arguing that expressive black cultures on both sides of the Atlantic, among which he includes hip-hop, bring with them the inescapable ontological legacy of the pain and redemption of slavery.