REVIEWS Marcyliena Morgan. the Real Hiphop

Journal of Popular Music Studies, Volume 21, Issue 4, Pages 427–439 REVIEWS Marcyliena Morgan. The Real Hiphop: Battling for Knowledge, Power, and Respect in the LA Underground. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009. 227 pp. $74.95 (cloth)/$21.95 (paper). Reviewed by Adam Bradley University of Colorado Very little about hip hop seems underground anymore. As the lingua franca of global youth culture, it is nearly inescapable. During the last thirty years, hip hop has not only remixed popular music; it has restyled language, fashion, even politics. Its best-known artists, from Jay-Z to Kanye West to Common, are not just performers but public figures and de facto ambassadors of popular culture. Despite this exposure, hip hop is often misunderstood. Criticized and caricatured, commercialized and commodified, the “real” hip hop is sometimes hard to find. In her new book, fittingly titled The Real Hiphop, Marcyliena Morgan argues that the true spirit of the culture still resides underground. Morgan, a professor of African and African American Studies at Harvard University and the executive director of the Hiphop Archive, is by inclination and avocation a conservator of the culture. The Real Hiphop is born of her two-decade connection with a hip-hop institution that began as an after-hours gathering in an inner city Los Angeles health food store called the Good Life and went on to become a fixture on the underground scene known simply as Project Blowed. Project Blowed emerged in the early 1990s as a counterpoint to the more public face of West Coast hip hop, the so-called gangsta rap of artists like N.W.A. A loose collective of MCs that at various times included such underground icons as Aceyalone, Medusa, and Jurassic Five, Project Blowed constituted a kind of “counterpublic,” an effort born from within hip hop to resist the banalization and commodification of the culture. As different as Project Blowed’sMCs were from N.W.A.,they shared a common geography (Compton) and a common language of expression (the beats and rhymes of hip hop). “The underground began in earnest,” Morgan writes, “when hiphop was on the verge of losing its place as a socially relevant arts movement. It did not resurrect itself outside of other styles of hiphop but rather in discourse with them” (189). C 2009 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. 428 Reviews Morgan resists the inclination among some hip hop scholars to draw clear lines of demarcation between hip hop’s “good” and “bad,” between the conscious and the commercial. Instead, she makes a case for how the constellation of underground MCs that would come to orbit around Project Blowed partook of the same spirit of resistance embodied in Ice Cube’s memorable line from NWA’s “Fuck Tha Police”: “police think/they have the authority to kill a minority.” Regardless of the progressive tendencies on display at Project Blowed, Morgan shows that these did not inoculate it from the arbitrary exercise of power. In one of the book’scentral moments, Morgan describes a large-scale police raid on the Project Blowed performance space. Gangsta or not, she suggests, hip hop has always been Public Enemy #1. The Real Hiphop channels the generative spirit of Project Blowed in the language of academic discourse. As a self-described “message from the underground” (15), the book weaves together three strains of analysis: ethnographic study of the symbolic and tangible import of language, close consideration of social and cultural implications of hip hop, and strong claims for hip hop’s capacity to stimulate social and political movements. Morgan’s audacious aim for her book is that it might help foment a revolution in academia by inspiring it to adopt the principles and values of hip hop culture. Specifically, she calls for the “issues, ideologies, and love of knowledge and sense of fairness that is fundamental to hiphop culture to become part of academic culture” (Acknowledgments). Although this will seem sensible to some, it may sound absurd to those familiar with the sustained academic critiques of hip hop’sfailings, specifically when it comes to matters of gender and sexuality. Far from letting hip hop off the hook for its wrongs, however, Morgan acknowledges that such destructive forces are an inseparable part of the culture. The difference, however, is that she insists upon hip hop’s own strident critiques of these very ills. This strain of resistance is most apparent in hip hop’s homegrown responses to misogyny and sexism. “Most successful female MCs,” she points out, “recognize that for them the only place where they can negotiate race, class, gender, and sexuality with relative freedom is the hiphop world. It is not an ideal space but rather one populated by those searching for discourse that confronts power” (159). Thus, while Morgan is no apologist for hip hop, she is certainly an ardent and enthusiastic advocate for what she believes hip hop culture gets right. In particular, she celebrates hip hop in all its forms—as lyrics, as music, as dance, as visual art, and beyond—as a “space of hard work, skill, approval, and dreams” (5). As the creation of young black and brown men Reviews 429 and women, many of whom come from lower socioeconomic conditions, it has crafted a counternarrative to the public demonization directed toward them from without. Hip hop is very much about aesthetics and expression, but Morgan sees it as something more; it is a force that “redraws the urban grid and transforms ideal spaces into problematic ones and decaying spaces into fertile, creative landscapes” (5). Although this may sound grand and idealistic, perhaps just an empty rhetorical flourish, her case study of Project Blowed reveals the truth behind the claim. Perhaps most revealing for those unfamiliar with hip hop culture may be the book’s third chapter, “Thursday Night at Project Blowed,” in which Morgan takes us into the actual performance space, chronicling every nuance of sight and sound (and even smell). She reveals the collaborative and competitive relationship among artists as well as between the MC and the crowd. Anyone who has ever been to an open mic night or an underground artist showcase can vouch for the care with which Morgan has rendered the details of the experience. We witness her here as both ethnographer and hip hop head, a chronicler and a creator of the culture. Even by itself, this chapter makes The Real Hiphop an important contribution to the growing body of literature seeking to move the public discourse on hip hop beyond the trite assumptions of such spectacles as CNN’s 2007 “Hip Hop: Art or Poison?” Morgan rejects this binary, insisting upon a clear-eyed view of the contingent relationships and circumstances out of which hip hop is born. The book’s occasional missteps and excesses are almost always a consequence of Morgan’slove and respect for hip hop culture and its creators. This leads her at times to make claims that neither her book nor, likely, the underground movement she describes can support. For instance, she begins Chapter One with the claim that the hip hop workshop at Project Blowed was “one of the most profound commentaries of the last quarter of the twenty-first [sic] century” (21). This grand claim seems antithetical to the very spirit of the enterprise. Yet her point holds that something significant and revelatory was going on in Leimert Park in the last decade of the twentieth century that, when studied, offers deep insight into the function of the broader culture and, perhaps, promises direction for the future. To Morgan, the art form is hiphop—not hip hop. She connects the words to signal that “the words hip and hop are not related to the meaning of hiphop culture” (197). This gesture may strike some as a bit contrived and showy, but it nonetheless underscores the book’s broader commitment to remaking the image of the art. The Real Hiphop comes in at a modest 193 pages; one can only imagine what Morgan held back from 430 Reviews her many years of notes, observations, and interviews. Although we are treated to lengthy lyrical transcriptions from such legendary LA underground artists as Aceyalone and Medusa, one wishes at times for a more sustained engagement with these artists in their own words. Whether we call it hip hop or hiphop, the culture Morgan describes is one of standards and values, not of swagger and bling as the popular projections of it would lead one to believe. As Morgan notes near the book’s conclusion, “One of hiphop’s lasting contributions may be that it has made linguistics and the power of discourse visible and exciting” (191). More than that, hip hop enforces rigorous standards of craft, a constantly evolving set of aesthetic principles and values that demand much of the performer and something of the audience as well. Although the public image of hip hop culture is often one of conspicuous consumption, disregard for public norms, and brusque indifference, the reality is vastly more complex. Hip hop demands “attention to the art and role of practice, critical evaluation, and performance in order to develop artistic and technical skills. Evaluation in the underground is a thing of great value” (190). The Real Hiphop is a book written with the eyes of an ethnographer, the ears of a true hip hop head, and the love of a scholar whose commitment to her subject runs broad and deep. By chronicling the history of an unfairly neglected underground music scene and by championing the potentially transformative influence of a popular music genre more broadly upon the academy, it offers a significant contribution to popular music studies.

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