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Philosophy and Hip-Hop This Page Intentionally Left Blank Philosophy and Hip-Hop Ruminations on Postmodern Cultural Form PHILOSOPHY AND HIP-HOP This page intentionally left blank Philosophy and Hip-Hop Ruminations on Postmodern Cultural Form Julius Bailey PHILOSOPHY AND HIP -HOP Copyright © Julius Bailey, 2014. Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2014 978-1-137-42993-3 All rights reserved. First published in 2014 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN® in the United States— a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world, this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN 978-1-349-49199-5 ISBN 978-1-137-42994-0 (eBook) DOI 10.1057/9781137429940 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Bailey, Julius, 1970– Philosophy and Hip-Hop : ruminations on postmodern cultural form / Julius Bailey, PhD. pages cm 1. Rap (Music)—Philosophy. 2. Rap (Music)—History and criticism. I. Title. ML3531.B367 2014 782.421649—dc23 2013049346 A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library. Design by Newgen Knowledge Works (P) Ltd., Chennai, India. First edition: June 2014 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 To all Philosophers, and those in preparation, who dare to expand our discipline This page intentionally left blank Contents Foreword Starting from the Bottom: The Meta-Philosophy of Hip-Hop Set against the Moral Condemnation of This Art Form Masquerading as Thinking ix Tommy J. Curry Prologue xv Acknowledgments xxi Introduction 1 Rumination 1 Of the Beauty and Wisdom of Hip-Hop 19 Rumination 2 Firebrands and Battle Plans: Jean-Paul Sartre, Friedrich Nietzsche, and G. W. F. Hegel 45 Rumination 3 Conscious Hip-Hop versus the Culture Industry 59 Rumination 4 Toward a Philosophy of Hip-Hop Education 71 Rumination 5 Lost in the City and Lost in the Self: Sin and Solipsism in Hip-Hop’s Dystopia; St. Augustine, Toni Morrison, and Paul Tillich 83 Rumination 6 Hip-Hop and International Voices of Revolution: Brazil, Cuba, Ghana, and Egypt 103 viii CONTENTS Rumination 7 The Artist and the Image: Ervin Goffman, Marshall McLuhan, and Roland Barthes 123 Rumination 8 Catastrophe of Success: Marshall McLuhan, Gilles Deleuze, and Felix Guattari 137 Notes 151 Bibliography 173 Index 189 Foreword Starting from the Bottom: The Meta-Philosophy of Hip-Hop Set against the Moral Condemnation of This Art Form Masquerading as Thinking Tommy J. Curry Hip-hop suffers, and like the melaninated voices that sing its songs, like the dark bodies that dance its rhythms, their Black pains are often unheard in the academy. The dominant mode of hip-hop scholarship is not in itself critical, but elevated to the level of a critique, because, as a polemic, it participates in a moral and political condemnation of the symbols, language, and prose Black folk use to express their lives. Largely framed by the implicit moral imperative to recognize the intersections of race, class, and gender, much of the work on hip-hop acts as if simply uttering these intersectional categories, even without any empirical account of how racism, sexual exploitation, and poverty concretely effect and determine the messages that reflect the conditions of urban oppression communicated by the lyrics and videos of many hip- hop artists, gives their account of Blackness moral authority/supe- riority. It is as if the liberal utopias that are asserted by ubiquitous discourses of equality, feminism, progressivism, and democracy matter more than the ghetto/dystopia that Black language is sub- merged within. There is a plethora of scholarship that objecti- fies the language and culture surrounding hip-hop as decadent, misogynistic, materialistic, and immature, and it is in the identi- fication of these pathologies within Black folk and the aesthetics they perform that academic currency, and disciplinary recognition of these writings on hip-hop are deemed insightful and viable as academic scholarship. x FOREWORD The dominant schema of America’s liberal democratic order sug- gests that history be read and time be gauged by the falling away of the organized oppressive structures of the past, where the present is known by the remnants of the last-fading vestiges of racism. The future will be identified by the absence of the barriers and atti- tudes of both past and present filled with only enlightened white folks who are antiracist, anticlassist, and ever progressive despite America’s Puritan sexual hang-ups. Hip-hop scholarship has been no less aggrandized among the bastard postcolonial enlighten- ments suckling at the bosoms of white disciplines for a taste of their paradigmatic elixirs, where marrying the disdain of Black music with discourses of power, the rhetorical tools of deconstruc- tion, and the pathology of sexism and misogyny allow entrance into the academy. As axiom, academic education determines for us what figures and categories are synonymous with knowledge; it is the bourgeois right of seeking to be “educated.” So too is the ethical barometer placed on writings about hip-hop; the slow chip- ping away, the endless deconstruction of hip-hop should make it not what it “is,” but what we, the academic elites, the moral intel- ligentsia, think (want) it to be. It is within this constraint of writing about hip-hop generally in the academy, and specifically in philosophy that I met Julius Bailey and encountered his project, Philosophy and Hip-Hop: Ruminations on a Postmodern Cultural Form. Hip-hop, as a genre of expression commenting on the postindustrial failings of the America through the manipulation of alternative musical forms, lyrical styles, and technology, is well known, but how to study these expressions beyond objectifying them and encapsulating them within the epi- dermalized spectacles of Blackness remains a mystery. A mystery, that is, until Bailey decided to engage in a philosophical project that thinks through hip-hop as both a location within the Black community, and one that expands well beyond these origins in the Black community. Hip-hop is a reflective global cultural com- munity that inspires as well as questions the validity of its cultural symbols and messages. Instead of fixating hip-hop upon the his- torical and material culture of Blackness, Bailey engages in a con- ceptual project that asks if we can think of hip-hop as the medium through which we understand the postindustrial matrices of capi- talist failure and the solidification of racial politics the world over. In arguing that hip-hop must be understood as both art form FOREWORD xi and community, Bailey has provided an aesthetic context to look forward in the postmodern, hyper-capitalist crisis of intellectual and material commodification that subjects knowledge and prod- uct to profit-based valuation. Bailey has suggested an alternative to fixating on the already somewhat-given-racialized-assumption that the Black community is coextensive with the hip-hop nation as articulated in Jared Ball’s I Mix What I Like, which is motivated by an internal colonialization model of Black existence. Instead, Bailey contends there is a reason to consider—to believe even— that hip-hop can be viewed as a dislocated location that pushes both participants and observers to consider the phenomenological boundaries of their social/cultural/economic location in history. It is from here that hip-hop retains the historical consciousness of the racialized community that suffers under the neocolonial, hyper- modern commodification of both person and product. At the same time, it strives to overturn the need for teleological accounts that routinely accompany its claims about community, especially when the hip-hop community so frequently finds itself in opposition to the calamitous, oppressive failures of modernity. In being an aes- thetic of the existential/political/social/cultural/economic crisis of white supremacy, the music, the dance, the various expressions of Blackness that expresses hip-hop need not be confined to the driv- ing ideologies of the sociohistorical locations from which it is pro- duced. The performance of hip-hop is not simply the imitation of the trends that are now “hip-hop.” Rather, the act of performing, the corporeal manipulation of dance and the lyrical contouring of soulful language, is the result of the process of thinking about one’s location and place in an ever-changing community that needs, as a function of its dynamism, new messages, concepts, and representa- tions daily. As Bailey says in his introduction to this work, The idea of the community at stake departs from modernity’s sensus communis. Understanding this community as a manifesta- tion of the postmodern or post-historical presents both a chal- lenge and an opportunity. Before jumping into unsettled waters, a simple diagram of community must be traced, touching upon a series of pivotal knots in postmodern institutionalized bodies. These include transgression and excess, immanence and transcen- dence, art and creativity, reconciliation and the construction of a postmodern community. This diagram will prove to be a support- ive underpinning for the philosophical dialogue that will follow. xii FOREWORD These pivotal points are, however, not meant to impose a specific order or hierarchy. They are simply
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