“Don't Believe the Hype”: the Polemics of Hip Hop and The
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ABSTRACT Title of Document: “DON’T BELIEVE THE HYPE”: THE POLEMICS OF HIP HOP AND THE POETICS OF RESISTANCE AND RESILIENCE IN BLACK GIRLHOOD. Chyann L. Oliver, PhD, 2009 Directed By: Associate Professor, Sheri L. Parks, Department of American Studies At a time when Hip Hop is mired in masculinity, and scholars are “struggling for the soul of this movement” through excavating legacies in a black nationalist past, black girls and women continue to be bombarded with incessant, one-dimensional, images of black women who are reduced solely to sum of their sexual parts. Without the presence of a counter narrative on black womanhood and femininity in Hip Hop, black girls who are growing up encountering Hip Hop are left to define and negotiate their identities as emerging black women within a sexualized context. This dissertation asks: how can black girls, and more specifically, working class black girls, who are faced with inequities because of their race, class, and gender find new ways to define themselves, and name their experiences, in their own words and on their own terms? How can black girls develop ways of being resistant and resilient in the face of adversity, and in the midst of this Hip Hop “attack on black womanhood?” Using myriad forms of writing and fusing genres of critical essay, poetry, prose, ethnography, and life history, this dissertation, as a feminist, artistic, cultural, and political Hip Hop intervention, seeks to address the aforementioned issues by demonstrating the importance of black women’s vocality in Hip Hop. It examines how black women in Hip Hop have negotiated race, class, gender, and sexuality from 1979 to the present. It addresses the disappearance or hiatus of the black female rapper and the subsequent rise and reign of the video vixen, and the implications this has for black girls coming of age during this hyper-commercialization of Hip Hop. It discusses how creative writing workshops, which teach black girls between the ages of 12-17 about the importance of vocality and feminist resistance through poetry/spoken word, can become a new method for investigating black girlhood and exploring issues of resistance and resilience. “DON’T BELIEVE THE HYPE”: THE POLEMICS OF HIP HOP AND THE POETICS OF RESISTANCE AND RESILIENCE IN BLACK GIRLHOOD By Chyann L. Oliver Dissertation submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of the University of Maryland, College Park, in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy 2009 Advisory Committee: Associate Professor Sheri L. Parks, Chair John L. Caughey Mary Corbin Sies Christina Hanhardt Barry Pearson © Copyright by Chyann L. Oliver 2009 Preface 1988 was a pivotal year in Hip Hop culture. Almost a decade after the release of Sugar Hill Gang’s, “Rapper’s Delight,” commencing the commercialization of rap music and hip hop culture, the rap group Public Enemy released, It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold us Back, which demonstrated rap music’s roots in radical, political, and oppositional cultural legacies. The album, which featured “Don’t Believe the Hype,” performed by lead emcee, Chuck D, and crowd enticer flavor flav--before he was searching for real ghetto love on VH1--used rap music as an intellectual forum and political device to address the issues plaguing urban black people. On this particular track, Chuck D informed listeners to disregard the hype, or propaganda, white supremacist capitalist patriarchal ideology, untruth, exaggerations, myths, and lies about Public Enemy being a threat or menace to society because of their personification and posthumous embodiment of black militancy. Espousing the rhetoric of black literary, cultural, religious, political/ revolutionary nationalisms of the late 1960s and 1970s, “Don’t Believe the Hype,” was a way of reaching the masses of disenfranchised and dispossessed black people. It urged them to reject the hype that they had no hope, that poverty and their plight was self- induced, that white people and the government would change and recognize black people as equal and full citizens, and that being radical would counter and impede the progress towards freedom. In this song, and throughout the album, Public Enemy encouraged urban black people to become agents of change and create their own destiny through the truth and “by any means necessary” as laid out in the historical, Black Nationalist blueprints for a black utopia. ii In addition to the emergence of Public Enemy, 1988 also witnessed the emergence of Niggaz With Attitude (NWA), Luther Campbell with 2 Live Crew, De La Soul, and KRS-One, and Queen Latifah, and thus ushered in the multiplicity of masculinist, afrocentric, sexist, misogynistic, and few female-ist voices, which created a great deal of cacophony in the industry. NWA, whose music was dubbed “gangsta rap,” or “reality rap,” and 2 Live Crew, whose music was deemed “pornographic rap,” gained notoriety for its inflammatory, blatant and glorified misogyny, sexism, violence, and illicit drug activity. But, these artists’ transgressive acts of insolence and irreverence for America and white American family values, ironically, became a profitable and palatable form of “pathological” blackness. Not only did this genre justify the law and order politics and policies of the 1980s, but also reflected and rationalized the anger of black men who were victimized by such policies. Twenty years later, these former sub-genres, namely “porno rap” and “gangsta rap” coalesced, roared over and made inaudible the variety of female- ist voices and pro-black and black love messages in rap music and hip hop, and formed a consumerist movement that has created the commercial, monolithic, self-loathing, self- fearing, and self-aggrandizing music that continues to reign supreme. At present, rap music and the culture, Hip Hop, which gave birth to it, is over 30 years old, all grown up, and dysfunctional. Rebellious, and in “its second childhood,” but urged to “get its grown man on” and become responsible and personally accountable, rap music is portrayed as being filled with conspicuously consuming, blinged-out, drunk, crunk, blunt smoking, Cristal toasting, haute-couture wearing, uneducated, hyper-sexed, bitches and hos, niggas and P.I.M.Ps, and their illegitimate, aberrant offspring who shun iii education and other Black middle class values. Consequently, some “conscious rappers” argue that Hip Hop is dead, while some scholars say that we are at a post-hip hop moment, but then there are those idealists among the two camps who are left with a shining thread of hope who believe that hip hop can reform itself and become what civil rights and black literary, cultural, religious, and political/revolutionary nationalisms could have been for the “underclass.” With an air of nostalgia, they lament and reminisce, “if only Hip Hop could wake up from this daze and revert back to its nascent oppositional golden age in 1988, it can fulfill the ‘seeds and legacies’ sown by black men 40 years prior.” Although critics and fans—male and female—wage a war over the legitimacy of hip hop culture and rap music, its social significance, who controls it, its content, its intentions, and its future, both believe the hype about black women serving limited, one- dimensional roles, offering no significant contribution to rap music and hip hop culture. They believe the hype that because black women are currently portrayed as performing non-intellectual, non-creative, non-political, sexualized—and thus devalued—labor in rap music and hip hop culture, that black men are better suited to be cultural producers while black women are expected to be cultural bearers in this potential hip hop movement. They believe the hype that all black girls are victims of hip hop’s “attack on black womanhood,” and thus are powerless and unable to resist or overcome such assaults and exploitations. “Don’t Believe the Hype”: The Polemics of Hip Hop and the Poetics of Resistance and Resilience in Black Girlhood is a political, cultural, artistic, and feminist iv intervention that examines the gender relationships in rap music and hip hop culture. It will investigate the roles that black women have played through the inception and evolution of rap music and Hip Hop culture, and the importance and necessity of black women’s intellectual and artistic contributions to the sustenance of rap music and hip hop culture. It will interrogate the ways black women have negotiated race, class, gender, and sexuality in a male dominated space. It also will explore the role feminism will play in the future of Hip Hop culture and the envisioned Hip Hop movement. Finally, it will propose and illustrate the myriad ways that black women and girls, whose voices are absent from or rendered inaudible in the mainstream music, culture, movement, and discourse, through the medium of poetry, exert and theorize resistance and resiliency growing up during the hyper-commercialization and hyper-sexualization of Hip Hop culture. v Dedication & this is for the 15 year old colored girl who sacrificed her childhood to create me and raise me and through the struggle and hard times we both emerged resistant and resilient black women who love each other fiercely vi Acknowledgements 13 years ago when I was going through my real black/reel black hip hop identity crisis, my middle school guidance counselor told me that I would never make anything of myself, I would only be a whore, and therefore, I should just kill myself. As I reflect on what she said, I am not sure if she offered me these words to scare me straight because she recognized the potential that I had, or if she really believed that I was nothing more than another ghetto, fatherless, black girl who would become another statistic because she emulated the style and aesthetics of Black womanhood on MTV.