Williams, Hipness, Hybridity, and Neo-Bohemian Hip-Hop

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HIPNESS, HYBRIDITY, AND “NEO-BOHEMIAN” HIP-HOP:

RETHINKING EXISTENCE IN THE AFRICAN DIASPORA

A Dissertation

Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School

of Cornell University

in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of

Doctor of Philosophy

Maxwell Lewis Williams

August 2020

HIPNESS, HYBRIDITY, AND “NEO-BOHEMIAN” HIP-HOP:

RETHINKING EXISTENCE IN THE AFRICAN DIASPORA

Maxwell Lewis Williams

Cornell University 2020

This dissertation theorizes a contemporary hip-hop genre that I call “neo-bohemian,” typified by rapper Kendrick Lamar and his collective, Black Hippy. I argue that, by reclaiming the origins of hipness as a set of hybridizing Black cultural responses to the experience of modernity, neo- bohemian rappers imagine and live out liberating ways of being beyond the West’s objectification and dehumanization of Blackness. In turn, I situate neo-bohemian hip-hop within a history of Black musical expression in the United States, Senegal, Mali, and South Africa to locate an “aesthetics of existence” in the African diaspora. By centering this aesthetics as a unifying component of these musical practices, I challenge top-down models of essential diasporic interconnection. Instead, I present diaspora as emerging primarily through comparable responses to experiences of paradigmatic racial violence, through which to imagine radical alternatives to our anti-Black global society. Overall, by rethinking the heuristic value of hipness as a musical and lived Black aesthetic, the project develops an innovative method for connecting the aesthetic and the social in music studies and Black studies, while offering original historical and musicological insights into Black metaphysics and studies of the African diaspora.

BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH

Maxwell Williams is a PhD candidate in musicology with a minor field in Africana studies at Cornell University. He received a B.A. in music from the University of Southampton, England, where he completed a dissertation on intersections between punctuation form and schema theory in Mozart’s symphonic minuets, and was awarded the Lyttel Prize and the Edward Wood

Memorial Prize for academic performance. His current research centers on questions of aesthetics and Blackness in hip-hop and musics of the African diaspora more broadly, while engaging closely with Black studies, postcolonial studies, and gender and sexuality studies.

Max has published a chapter based on his doctoral research, theorizing the contemporary hip-hop genre that he calls “neo-bohemian,” in The Oxford Handbook of Hip Hop Music (2018). He has also presented aspects of this work at the Annual Meeting of the American Musicological

Society, the Annual Meeting of the Society for Ethnomusicology, the Annual Meeting of the

African Studies Association, the Annual Meeting of the International Association for the Study of

Popular Music, U.S. and Canada branches, the Annual Meeting of the Pop Conference at the

Museum of Pop Culture, and the Annual Meeting of the Experience Music Project Pop

Conference. His 2017 paper, “‘Stand on Your Own Rude Boy!’: Rethinking Hybridity and

Belonging in Postcolonial London,” was awarded the Lise Waxer Student Paper Prize by the

Popular Music Section of the Society for Ethnomusicology.

As recipient of the Don M. Randel Teaching Fellowship at Cornell, Max taught an upper- level undergraduate course titled “Remixing Hip-Hop History.” He has also taught a first-year writing seminar, titled “From ‘Talented Tenth’ to ‘Bad and Boujee’: Exploring Racial Authenticity

Politics through Black Music,” and worked as a teaching assistant for courses on African music, the history of rock music, music theory, and music studies.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Biographical sketch iii

List of figures vi

Acknowledgements vii

INTRODUCTION 1

From Black Hipsters to Black Hippy:

The Cultural Genealogy of Neo-Bohemian Hip-Hop

CHAPTER ONE 49

“Welcome to the Control System”:

Being and Becoming a Black Hippy

CHAPTER TWO 92

Hood Tales of Hipness:

Black Hippies on the Run

CHAPTER THREE 134

“Rather Two-Step With Ya”:

Groovy Q’s (Dis)embodied Hipness

CHAPTER FOUR 187

From Hipness to HiiiPoWeR:

The Aesthetics of Existence in the African Diaspora

POSTSCRIPT 225

Reflections on Hip-Hop, Music, and Black Studies

References 239

Discography 266

LIST OF FIGURES

Figure 1.1. Ab-Soul on “Conscious Rap” (Twitter post from September 23, 2011) 31

Figure 3.1. Still from the music video for ScHoolboy Q, “Collard Greens,” [00:05] 144

Figure 3.2. Still from the music video for ScHoolboy Q, “Collard Greens,” [01:18] 145

Figure 3.3. Profile picture from ScHoolboyQVEVO YouTube user account 156

Figure 3.4. Cover art to Young Buck, Straight Outta Ca$hville (G-Unit Collector’s Edition) 156

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Thanks are due to all of the faculty, staff, students, and friends, in the Cornell Music

Department and beyond, who have helped shape this project and my memorable time as a graduate student. Catherine Appert has guided, supported, and advocated for me tirelessly over the years. I value her scholarship, treasure her mentorship, and admire her as a person. Benjamin Piekut and

Steven Pond provided invaluable support, feedback, and insight into this project and throughout my time at Cornell. Fumi Okiji and Gavin Steingo have been major intellectual influences and sources of support. Justin Burton and Jason Oakes helped shape the project as editors for my chapter in The

Oxford Handbook of Hip Hop Music. Jason’s comments delineating the relationship between hipness and bohemianism were particularly formative. Jordan Musser has been an intellectual role model from the beginning of graduate school and a cherished refiner of thought. Juan Carlos Melendez-

Torres has been my go-to source on all things hip-hop and Black studies (and everything else).

Kirsten Saracini has inspired me as a writer and thinker and nourished me as a friend.

Dayna Locitzer deserves a special mention. For restorative walks with Annie, for listening and sharing, and for widening my world, I appreciate her greatly. Bobby Capper has kept me going, bigged me up, and been a constant source of motivation and inspiration in work and life. Finally, I am grateful to my family for supporting me through this process with endless patience and love, for everything that came before, and for everything to come next. To my nan, my parents, and my sister, thank you for everything.

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INTRODUCTION

From Black Hipsters to Black Hippy: The Cultural Genealogy of Neo-Bohemian Hip-Hop

With the release of his major label debut album, good kid, m.A.A.d city (2012), rapper

Kendrick Lamar began his rise to superstar status while positioning himself at the forefront of a revolution in hip-hop culture.1 Kendrick’s day-in-the-life concept album captures the complexities and contradictions of youthful existence in contemporary Compton, California. In the process, it confounds the reductive and totalizing conceptions of Black masculinity for which hip-hop has become a contemporary repository. Throughout the record, Kendrick moves effortlessly between divergent rap paradigms. He tells street tales to rival those of Nas in his prime (“The Art of Peer

Pressure”), pairs up with quintessential sweet boy Drake to offer frank expressions of romantic desire (“Poetic Justice”), and takes 50 Cent’s get rich or die tryin’ mentality to its aspirational extremes (“Backseat Freestyle”). Moreover, he infects and undoes each of these spaces of hip-hop being, querying the linear, positivist assumptions of conventional autobiography, expressing a sense of love more nihilistic than sanguine, and riddling his own “thug capitalist” caricature with overblown, comical imagery.2 With devastating synchronicity, the Good Kid dismisses attempts to quietly reduce either Blackness or hip-hop to finite, easily capturable forms. good kid, m.A.A.d city went platinum within a year, earned four Grammy nominations, and provided an unassailable platform from which the West Coast native could provocatively dub himself the new King of New

York.3

1 I use the term “hip-hop” to encapsulate the range of characteristics (including music) that collectively delineate specific hip-hop genres, and “rap” to refer to the representative musical styles of these genres, which incorporate many of these characteristics. As such, the terms are often interchangeable. 2 On 50 Cent as “thug capitalist,” see Jeffries (2011, 97). 3 Kendrick claimed this title during a controversial guest verse on Big Sean’s “Control” (2013).

Kendrick’s disruptive ascent within the rap world has occurred against the backdrop of a broader set of cultural transformations in the last decade, driven by his Los Angeles-based hip-hop collective, Black Hippy, further comprising rappers Ab-Soul, ScHoolboy Q, and Jay Rock. These artists reach across time and space to recontextualize and “recombine” elements of disparate (and discursively opposed) rap genres.4 In the process, they destabilize hip-hop’s reified aesthetic categories, challenging the widely reproduced binary oppositions of “mainstream” versus

“alternative” and “commercial” versus “high art” styles.5 Lyrical rehearsals of thug-life tropes, popular amongst rap’s voyeuristic mainstream audiences, flow seamlessly into the self-consciously political forms of social commentary associated with alternative rap. Beats shift between the commercial G-funk and trap aesthetics that put West Coast and Southern hip-hop on the map, and the more esoteric jazz instrumentation of the Native Tongues collective. The sonic effects of marijuana, Adderall, and Lean consumption further distort the mix, bringing Snoop Doggy Dogg’s trademark stoner aesthetic into contact with the underworlds of anesthetized clubbers and self- medicating, agoraphobic millennials. What emerges is a seemingly incongruous but popular new rap aesthetic that poses a vociferous challenge to conventional understandings of hip-hop culture.

Although the musical style that I describe would seem to be characterized by its crossing of rap’s aesthetic boundaries, to understand it simply as the combination of mainstream/commercial and alternative/high art generic markers is to miss its significance. The music at the core of this dissertation falls into all and none of these categories at once, revealing their fundamental instability,

4 Hip-hop scholars use the term “genre” synonymously with “subgenre” to signal aesthetic delineations within hip-hop, which of course can be taken as a musical genre in its own right (see Krims 2000, 46–92). In my treatment of cross- generic dialogue within hip-hop, I use the metaphor of “recombination” to resist simplistic and totalizing ideas about musical mixture (or combination). In so doing, I aim to invoke something akin to the initial process of DNA deconstruction or breakage that characterizes the process of genetic recombination. This moment of deconstruction is central to my conception of hybridity. 5 I often use the term “style” interchangeably with “genre,” which I employ loosely to reflect its simultaneous semantic instability and heuristic utility. I use genre/style in contrast to “aesthetic category,” which refers to broader politicized groupings, each of which can account for a variety of genres/styles.

incompleteness, and, above all, reconcilability as part of a fluid continuum of Black cultural expression. At the same time, if the innovative group of artists that I study rejects singularity and casts doubt upon attempts to divide hip-hop into discrete aesthetic categories, these artists are nonetheless closely unified by the shared cultural histories, expressive practices, and political traditions that they engage in occupying this distinctive, inbetween musical space.

This dissertation theorizes the music of Black Hippy and its affiliates as comprising a new and transformative hip-hop genre. I call this genre “neo-bohemian” in reference to its engagement with the historical and ongoing processes of interracial exchange, social critique, and musical expression that constitute “hipness” as an “aesthetic” and “sensibility” (see Ford 2013, 4, 26). This aesthetic is crucial to understanding the genre’s deconstructive position in hip-hop culture, which emerges in dialogue with other hip musical styles, most notably 1940s bebop and 1980s/1990s

“jazz/bohemian hip-hop.”6 At the same time, given the intercultural, interracial, and international history of hipness, the genre’s significance necessarily transcends U.S. hip-hop. In theorizing the hip aesthetic that characterizes neo-bohemian hip-hop, I explore its radical potential for reconceptualizing Black existence in an anti-Black global hegemony.7 I argue that this potential is best grasped through a new, challenging, and wide-reaching reformulation of hipness as an “African diasporic aesthetic of existence.”

My study of the aesthetics of existence in neo-bohemian hip-hop breaks down into four intersecting claims, which govern the dissertation. First, I argue that understanding neo-bohemian hip-hop requires rehistoricizing Black hip expression in the United States. Problematizing dominant

6 Adam Krims coined this term in Rap Music and the Poetics of Identity (2000, 65–70). 7 The term anti-Blackness refers to a social structure in which the White, Human subject gains its coherence through the oppositional dehumanization and objectification of Blackness. This term can be understood as a necessary substitute for “White supremacy,” which displaces global transformations in the social status of Blackness during and after slavery. While White supremacy signifies a rational (in that it claims a rationale) power structure, anti-Blackness’s distinction between Black non-humanity and non-Black humanity is absolute, gratuitous, and requires no rational end for its enactment (Sexton 2016, ¶14; see also Wilderson 2010; Moten 2013; Anonymous 2017).

conceptions of hipness as a countercultural critique of inauthentic mainstream society, I forward a new understanding of the term that centers the hybridizing processes at the core of African diasporic culture, and particularly the deconstruction of reified divides between high and low art.8

Second, I argue that, as a result of its hybridizing musical aesthetic, neo-bohemian hip-hop disrupts existing binary divisions of hip-hop into mainstream versus alternative, and commercial versus high art styles. More broadly, the processes underlying this hybridizing aesthetic make the genre a privileged site for engaging hip-hop’s historically underexplored musical dimensions. Third, I argue that neo-bohemian rappers’ deconstructive work vis-à-vis hip-hop’s aesthetic categories extends to the broader, totalizing notions of cultural and racial authenticity around which artists and consumers have structured these categories.9 I conceive of this work not as resistant cultural practice, but rather as a form of aesthetic theorizing vis-à-vis the conditional terms of Black life. The deconstruction of normative cultural representations of Blackness, here, is thus directly tied to reimagining these terms.

This brings me to my fourth and final argument, that, in addition to (and alongside) challenging dominant ideas about Blackness, neo-bohemian rappers also imagine and live out new ways of being

Black in an anti-Black world. Neo-bohemian hip-hop’s insurgent engagement with anti-Blackness occurs through its musical expressions of hipness and intersects relationally with other musical examples from throughout the African diaspora. The result is my conception of hipness as an

“African diasporic aesthetic of existence.”

In making these claims, my dissertation intervenes in a range of historical and theoretical frameworks drawn from numerous intersecting disciplines. At the same time, it remains rooted within the field of musicology, with its scholarly scope unfolding along two lines. First, from an

8 Throughout the dissertation, I refer to “hybridizing” cultural processes, rather than “hybrid” cultures, to reflect my view of hybridity as a process of deconstruction. I elaborate on this conception of the term below. 9 As Fumi Okiji argues, such categories are deeply tied up in anti-Black violence, which emerges as an inevitable consequence of a “regulative drive that seeks to collapse black living into normative categories, conceptual straitjackets, as those living such lives look on, cognizant of this imaging but powerless to affect it” (2018, 53).

introspective standpoint, my reimagining of hipness provides a new analytical and interpretive methodology for connecting the aesthetic and the social in the study of African diasporic musics, and particularly hip-hop. It does so, moreover, while (and by) bringing Black studies to bear upon hip-hop studies, sound studies, and music studies in a way that remains all too infrequent, to the detriment of each of these disciplines.10 Second, and extrospectively, this music-oriented work facilitates fresh challenges to utopian and essentialist investigative approaches to postcoloniality and the African diaspora, and particularly ideas about cultural hybridity, connectivity, and resistance. In turn, by using musicological method to interrogate ideas about the determinate relationship between

(even the conceptual conflation of) aesthetic and social processes, I bring disruptive moments of musicality to bear upon influential and recent work in Black metaphysics. At the core of both of these sets of interventions is my retheorization of hipness as an African diasporic aesthetic and way of conceptualizing Black existence in a world dependent upon the association of Blackness with non-humanity. Understanding how the aesthetics of existence play out in neo-bohemian hip-hop, however, requires first unpacking the overlapping histories of hip-hop, Black (identity) politics, hipness, bohemianism, Black metaphysics, and diaspora underlying the emergence of this radical new genre.

Constructing Hip-Hop: Aesthetics, Genres, Authenticities

An expansive cultural form comprising numerous expressive elements, hip-hop emerged from the ongoing, multidirectional flows of the African diaspora, crystallizing into a seminal moment of convergence in New York City’s South Bronx in the late 1970s. Historically, hip-hop’s practitioners, consumers, and chroniclers have defined this convergence in terms of four (or five)

10 On the need to hold hip-hop studies accountable to Black studies, see Saucier and Woods (2014). For studies that respond to this call, see Saucier (2015) and Burton (2017). I elaborate on the specific relevance of both of these models to hipness in Chapter One.

central “pillars”: MCing, DJing, breakdancing, graffiti, (and “knowledge”) (see Rose 1994; Keyes

2004; Chang 2005; Gosa 2015). More recently, the term has become practically synonymous with the distillation of some of these features into the musical genre of “rap,” or “hip-hop” (I generally use these terms interchangeably — see note 1). Meanwhile, rap’s artists and audiences have divided the music into several aesthetic binaries, including most notably “mainstream” versus “alternative” and

“commercial” versus “high art” styles. And they have more-or-less rigidly positioned specific hip- hop genres in relation to these categories. Most important to my study are the constructions of

“gangsta rap” as a mainstream, commercial genre, and “jazz/bohemian rap” as an alternative, high art genre. The construction and maintenance of these categories relies upon overlapping ideas about cultural and racial in/authenticity, and specifically the competing understandings of strong Black masculinity that structure notions of hip-hop “realness.”11

It was in the late 1980s and 1990s that West Coast gangsta rap acts like N.W.A, Dr. Dre, and

Snoop Doggy Dogg first uncovered the massive commercial potential of hip-hop. With its self- assured braggadocio, depictions of alluringly debauched lifestyles (revolving around guns, drugs, money, and women), laid back flow (rapped delivery) styles, and auto-mobile friendly grooves, gangsta rap proved an eminently listenable style of hip-hop. Meanwhile, the window that the music provided into an exotic Black underworld prepared hip-hop’s crossover success amongst primarily

White suburban audiences. Despite the historical and aesthetic distinctiveness of the West Coast style, the term gangsta rap covers a geographically and temporally diverse range of commercialized hip-hop centering on imagery linked to gang or street life.12 By the early 2000s, the hip-hop

11 As musicologist Justin Burton describes in his discussion of hip-hop authenticity politics: “the music industry has defined genre categories according to racial categories more than musical ones” (Burton 2017, 66). On constructions of hip-hop and racial authenticity, or realness, see Gilroy (1993, 82–87); McLeod (1999); Krims (2000); Armstrong (2004); Neal (2004); Hess (2005); Neal (2005); Bogazianos (2012, 58–67). 12 It should be noted, though, that critics instead commonly use the roughly equivalent terms “hardcore” or “reality” rap when referencing East Coast gangsta rap artists like 50 Cent, Jay-Z, and Nas (see Krims 2000, 70–80).

mainstream would find a new home base amongst Southern artists, whose own variation of gangsta rap, known as “trap,” continues to enjoy huge success in the hands of rappers like Gucci Mane and

Future. In combination with its mainstream visibility, gangsta rap’s emphasis on physical domination, heteronormative sexual relations, and exceptionalist narratives of economic self-uplift helped to revive and reinvent long-held conservative ideals from within the Black public sphere that connected racial authenticity to strong Black masculinity (see Neal 2005, 21–28).13

In response to this dominant view of cultural and racial authenticity, a select but influential group of artists has critiqued commercial strains of hip-hop as selling out to a racist market and, in the process, reproducing ideas about Black pathology. As part of this critique, these artists have instead positioned themselves as representatives of a truly authentic “alternative” to the hip-hop mainstream. During the heyday of West Coast gangsta rap, this work was typified by what pioneering rap music theorist Adam Krims calls “jazz/bohemian rap,” representatives of which include De La Soul and A Tribe Called Quest of the Native Tongues collective. In his influential

“genre system for rap music,” Krims characterizes jazz/bohemian hip-hop in terms of its nonconformist ideals, esoteric topical references, distinctive flow styles, and jazz-influenced beats.

Moreover, he describes how, given their suburban upbringings, these artists often lacked access to the forms of hip-hop authenticity established by gangsta rap. Instead, through their musical, topical, and stylistic choices, jazz/bohemian rappers negotiated their own place in hip-hop culture by

13 Of course, iconic clashes between the likes of W. E. B. Du Bois and Booker T. Washington, or Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X, suggest the diversity and nuance underlying historical constructions of authentic Blackness. However, as historian Kevin Gaines observes, the usual dichotomizing of these figures overstates the differences between them, eliding the reality that their apparently competing ideologies have ultimately derived from the same patriarchal ideals (Gaines 1996, 2). Similarly, as I will argue, despite competing surface-level approaches to authenticity across hip-hop genres, the model of strong Black masculinity established by gangsta rap is ultimately typical. Accordingly, Paul Gilroy rejects simplistic attempts to counterpose “political” rap artists like KRS-One and the Poor Righteous Teachers against gangsta rap artists like Ice Cube, arguing that “the different styles and political perspectives expressed within the music are linked […] by the bonds of a stylised but aggressively masculinist discourse” (1993, 84– 85). I address Gilroy’s more complicated view of jazz/bohemian rap in note 16.

positioning themselves in direct opposition to gangsta rap (Krims 2000, 65–70; see also Quinn 2000,

196, 212; Williams 2013, 48).

It should be noted that hip-hop commentators usually frame the generic dichotomy that I observe between gangsta and jazz/bohemian rap as existing, rather, between gangsta (or, broadly, commercial) and so-called “conscious” rap (see Reynolds 2007, 116–119; Evans 2010, 106–107; Hill

2010, 98–99; Hill 2017, 11; Rollefson 2017, 7–9). Characterized by their eschewal of gang culture in favor of pointed social commentary, prominent conscious rappers include the likes of Yasiin Bey

(formerly Mos Def), Talib Kweli, and Common. More recently, critics have applied this label to artists like J. Cole and even Kendrick Lamar (an attribution that I will challenge) (see Lynch 2015;

Pizzo 2015). In fact, a great deal of overlap exists between the aesthetic and political characteristics of conscious rap and jazz/bohemian rap, and commentators have variously located groups like De

La Soul and A Tribe Called Quest within both styles (see Krims 2000, 65–70; Reynolds 2007, 116–

119; Evans 2010, 106–107; Hill 2010, 98–99; Williams 2013, 52–54; Hill 2017, 11).14 Moreover, despite the general terminological preference for the term conscious, I argue that the jazz aesthetics and Black bohemian politics signified by Krims’s term are crucial to developing a historically- informed critique of this reified dichotomy.

A case in point, musicologist Justin Williams situates the emergence of jazz/bohemian hip- hop against the backdrop of 1980s “jazz art ideology.” Proponents of this ideology revived 1940s bebop and the jazz styles that grew out of it and constructed them as possessing a fundamental

“association with the black middle class, a highbrow sophistication that could be juxtaposed against lower-class African American representation in popular culture.” In this context, by incorporating musical and lyrical “jazz codes” into their beats, from walking acoustic bass lines to explicit jazz references, groups like De La Soul and A Tribe Called Quest were able to establish a new space of

14 I explore the nuanced relationship between conscious and jazz/bohemian rap at length in Chapter One.

cultural authenticity within hip-hop discourse. And they constructed this space in direct opposition to mainstream and commercial genres like gangsta rap, instead marking themselves as representatives of a stylistically alternative, high art genre (Williams 2013, 47–72). In turn, jazz/bohemian rappers shored up this claim to authority by calling into question the authenticity of gangsta rap’s “‘ghettocentricity’ and ‘hardness,’” while simultaneously presenting themselves as possessing a deeper understanding of the real intricacies of street life (Krims 2000, 68–69). These authenticating strategies, including the critique of gangsta rap at their core, however, are not unproblematic. At least three representational issues undermine this project.

First, and most fundamentally, constructions of alternative artists as particularly “conscious” or “political” often lack basis, being rooted in a conflation of style and substance. As scholar and political commentator Marc Lamont Hill describes, “despite the relatively apolitical nature of their work, groups like The Roots and A Tribe Called Quest are hastily branded ‘conscious’ or ‘political’ because of their avant-garde music and aesthetics […] Within this superficial framework, hip-hop political consciousness is reduced to a thin politics of fashion and speech that privileges bourgeois bohemianism over engaged social critique and concrete action” (Hill 2010, 98–99). In this sense, understanding groups like The Roots and Tribe as part of the same genre requires rethinking the abstract assumptions about heightened political engagement through which that genre is defined

(and which its designated name, “conscious rap,” helps to reproduce).

Second, and relatedly, attempts at elevating jazz/bohemian and conscious rap artists over their gangsta counterparts depend on overstating the differences between the two groups and allowing the rigidities of discursive representation to overwrite the complexities and contradictions of cultural production (see Kelley 1996, 226; Hill 2010, 98–99; Rollefson 2017, 7). Obscured by such narratives, for instance, is the role that conscious rappers play in perpetuating the misogyny and

homophobia for which they critique gangsta rap.15 Indeed, despite their attempts to distance themselves from gangsta rap’s violent hypermasculinity, in constructing their own counter- authenticities, alternative artists ultimately reproduce a similarly patriarchal privileging of strong

Black masculinity, simply one with less obviously harmful manifestations (see note 13).16 By the same token, definitions of “political” hip-hop that prioritize the on-the-nose social commentary of some conscious rappers elide subtler but often more radical critiques of anti-Blackness by commercial artists (Hill 2010, 98–99). Take, for example, N.W.A’s trailblazing condemnation of state-sanctioned racial terror in “Fuck tha Police” (1988).

Third, even if we look past the simplistic rigidity of hip-hop’s aesthetic divisions, the problem remains that these hierarchized binaries rest on morally absolutist claims about the inherent iniquity of the Thug Life and the virtue of its rejection in the form of social consciousness. Such claims are contingent upon racist and classist constructions of legitimate existence as well as the erasure of state sanctioned forms of oppression against global Black communities, including mass incarceration and disenfranchisement, gratuitous police violence, the undermining of social infrastructures, and insidious forms of neo-colonialism. Indeed, I would argue that it is these very

15 For a nuanced discussion of this issue alongside questions of Black masculinity, racial sanitization, and racial scapegoating, see Neal (2005, 127–149). 16 In fact, while Gilroy correctly points out that “political” forms of rap are undermined by the same masculinism for which critics usually scapegoat gangsta rap (see note 13), he more problematically presents this masculinism as a specifically American, Black nationalist phenomenon, which he counterposes with the “ludic Africentrisms of [jazz/bohemian artists like] the Jungle Brothers, De La Soul, and A Tribe Called Quest.” For Gilroy, jazz/bohemian rap “may represent a third alternative — both in its respectful and egalitarian representation of women and in its more ambivalent relationship to America and Americanism” (Gilroy 1993, 84–85). By contrast, I would argue that jazz/bohemian rap has been similarly wrapped up in the same masculinist discourse that unifies political and gangsta rap. Gilroy’s ideas about the democratizing potential of jazz/bohemian rap’s Africentrism reflects the utopic character of his Black Atlantic theory more broadly. And, like his analysis of jazz/bohemian rap, Gilroy overlooks his theory’s own male- centricity (see Pinto 2013, 6). Moreover, his oppositional attempts to distance Africentric rap artists from misogyny and violent patriarchy in turn contribute to the harmful caricature of African American culture as, in Fred Moten’s words, “a particularly, indeed vulgarly, provincialist threat to a new Afro-diasporic cosmopolitanism.” Though Moten refers to Gilroy’s more recent work here, his curt response seems apt: “To whom is Gilroy speaking? (Or, in another register, by way of another structure of address, directly to him though I am certain he’ll never read this, Who the fuck are you talking to?)” (Moten 2017, 293n3). In this sense, Gilroy’s own attempts to construct jazz/bohemian rap’s “Black Atlantic” counter-authenticity are no less problematic than the artists’ own, elitist, bourgeois bohemian authenticating strategies.

practices that produce the maligned ways of being encapsulated by the Thug Life moniker, and moreover make them fundamental to the maintenance of hegemonic society. Finally, these binaries also rest on another, overlapping set of assumptions that position commerciality as inauthentic to hip-hop culture, while valorizing anti-commercial (alternative) political critique. But as criminologist

Dimitri Bogazianos argues, this oppositional construction of in/authenticity is rooted in an ahistorical assumption of rap’s uncommercialized origins, as well as a mythology of its connection to an originary Black counterpublic sphere. The resultant idea of a stable division between

(authentically Black) non-commercial rap and (inauthentically Black) commercial rap casts Blackness in ethnically absolutist terms that fail to fully account for “rap’s more complicated elective affinities with specific sociolegal logics and real-world violence” (Bogazianos 2012, 58–67; see also Burton

2017, 66–67).

In other words, despite so-called alternative rap’s performative and self-serving opposition to gangsta rap’s model of strong Black masculinity, these artists ultimately reproduce similar, and arguably even more regressive, conservative ideals. As I will show, this authenticating strategy is rooted in a long and powerful ideological tradition of self-uplift within the Black middle class that has long depended on the scapegoating and marginalization of other sectors of the Black community

(see Neal 2005, 21–28, 127–149). In navigating these issues, it is instructive to return to Hill’s critique of the “bourgeois bohemianism” through which he calls the authenticating strategies of alternative rappers into question. By historicizing this elitist stance and reconciling it with the realities of Black existence in an anti-Black world, I suggest that we can reach a more critical understanding of genre and authenticity, and gain access to the transformative, hybridizing space of neo-bohemian hip-hop.

The Rise and Fall of Black Hipness: Historicizing Bohemianism in the United States

The elitist politics at the core of jazz/bohemian rap’s claims to cultural and racial authenticity form part of a long history of interracial exchange within the United States, encapsulated by the dialogic, and often dialectical, relationship between “hipness” and

“bohemianism.” Scholars and cultural commentators generally characterize hipness as a countercultural aesthetic centering on critiques (and particularly musical ones) of an inauthentic social mainstream. In turn, they suggest that this emphasis on the countercultural connects hipness to a distinctive brand of U.S. bohemianism, extracted from the non-conformist social stance that emerged in Europe during the nineteenth century (Stansell 2000; Saul 2003, 29–96; Leland 2004;

Ford 2013; Konstantinou 2016, 22–36). Such attempts to offer singular, cross-racial definitions of hipness and bohemianism, however, have been necessarily limited in their failure to account for the material differences between Black and White existence in an anti-Black social context. Responding to these limitations, I offer a counter-history of hipness as a grounded, Black aesthetic of existence that was derailed by the racist and conservative politics underlying White and Black bohemianisms respectively. By unpacking these issues, I aim to show how a more complete understanding of hipness must account for a legacy of Black cultural production in White hegemonic society that cannot be reduced to a privileged politics of countercultural resistance.

In working toward this reimagining of hipness, I take my cue from the name of the collective (“Black Hippy”) at the core of this dissertation and the rap genre that I call “neo- bohemian.” On the one hand, the Black Hippy moniker would appear to invite close association with the decidedly countercultural hippie movement of the 1960s. On the other hand, however, its conspicuously racialized pre-modifier also signals a modulated engagement with that very cultural

moment (Guillory 2020, 25).17 As the necessity of this qualification suggests, both popular and scholarly discourse have, for some time, represented the hipster almost exclusively as a White, male, countercultural figure. As a result, the assumed incongruity of hip identities that fall outside of these social categories becomes necessarily marked (hence, Black Hippy). This racial hierarchy has not, however, historically represented the status quo in hip culture.

Moving beyond popular, contemporary conceptions of hipness, cultural anthropologist

Sheila Walker and journalist John Leland both locate its foundations in continental West African expressive practices (Walker 2001, 7, 10–13; Leland 2004, 5–6). More tangibly, though, hipness first crystallized into a discernible aesthetic as an African American response to the experience of urban modernity in the 1930s and 1940s, after which, musicologist Phil Ford argues, it must be historicized as a sort of sub-genealogy within the broader genealogy of modernism itself. As Ford puts it, “if modernism is a genealogy of cultural responses to centuries of capitalist modernity and hipness occupies a point on its family tree, then hipness itself constitutes a genealogy, a branching system of associations that bear a family resemblance to one another” (Ford 2013, 25–26).

Positioned at the center of hipness’s crystallizing cultural moment are 1940s bebop musicians like Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie, whose culturally-confounding musical aesthetic — to which I will return — helped them to navigate an encroaching urban modernity. In particular, commentators theorize the trademark “jive” talk of these early hipsters as an “Afrogenic” mode of interpreting and navigating modern life in the wake of slavery (Walker 2001, 10–13; see also Kelley

17 Specifically, this pre-modifier signals an engagement with hipness that is, in P. Khalil Saucier’s words, “necessarily Black.” This is to say, like the Cape Verdean youth to whom Saucier refers, when Black Hippy members perform Blackness, they do so in a way that overrides the superficiality of liberal identity politics by instead engaging with anti- Blackness and processes of racialization (Blackening) on a paradigmatic level. As such, they necessitate an understanding of race as not only discursive, ideological, and performative, but also as ontological (see Saucier 2015, vii-xii, 1–10; see also Wilderson 2010). E. Patrick Johnson captures this delicate balance when he observes both a dialogic and dialectic relationship between Blackness and performance. As he shows, Blackness is surely a performance. But it is also an irreducibility for which performance cannot fully account, and which thus forces us to redefine performance itself (Johnson 2003, 8).

1996, 162; Baldwin 1998, 780–783; Saul 2003, 35–40; Leland 2004, 23–24; Broyard 2010; Ford 2013,

47–54; Hill 2017, 49). By subtly deforming and reinventing an inherited colonial language, these hip figures began to surreptitiously subvert and develop alternatives to the hegemonic knowledge structures that continued (and continue) to deny Black humanity.18

For English scholar Scott Saul, the hip stance epitomized by jive talk comprised a “new intellectual vernacular” through which Black jazz musicians could reimagine the possibilities of urban modernity. In turn, Saul describes how White and Jewish intellectuals of 1950s and 1960s

New York — notable examples of which include Beat poets William S. Burroughs, Jack Kerouac, and Allen Ginsberg — appropriated this vernacular for their own critiques of mainstream culture

(Saul 2003, 29–96; see also Leland 2004, 137–160). Lee Konstantinou describes the specificities of this U.S. brand of counterculturalism in terms of a “bohemian ideal,” comprising overlapping forms of lived and literary experimentalism, culminating in a stance of ironic detachment from which to criticize and reject mainstream society (Konstantinou 2016, 23).19 More to the point, these emergent hipster figures built their countercultural aesthetic around a fetishistic appropriation of the most transgressive aspects of bebop culture, from unconventional sartorial codes to creative drug use

(Monson 1995; Saul 2003, 55–72; Leland 2004, 137–160; Szalay 2012, 4–23). Through the essentializing (re)production of ideas about Black social outsiderness, and the subsequent appropriation of these idealized markers, these White bohemians strategically claimed their own distance from the social mainstream.20 In this way, hipness began its transformation from a set of

18 In this sense, hip jive talk also shares a close relationship with the set of counter-hegemonic, Black vernacular practices that Henry Louis Gates Jr. (1988) terms “signifyin’.” 19 Of course, bohemianism writ large has its foundations in the lives of poor French writers and artists during the nineteenth century, as memorialized by novelist Henri Murger in his Scènes de la vie de Bohème (1851). When imported into the U.S. context, however, bohemianism took on a new meaning, referring to White writers who rebelliously “distanc[ed] themselves from the middle-class destinies laid out for them” by inscribing their connections to working- class people and immigrants (Stansell 2000, 13–14). 20 Norman Mailer’s “The White Negro” (1957) remains the foundational account of this appropriative process. Meanwhile, as writer, chronicler of U.S. race relations, and interlocuter of Mailer, James Baldwin describes in his essay on Black English and its influence on mainstream U.S. culture: “Beat to his socks, which was once the black’s most total

Black expressive practices grounded in real-world politics and designed to counter an oppressive social context, to a White aspirational aesthetic of counterculturalism that instead helped to maintain the status quo (see Szalay 2012, 4, 8–9, 13–14; Konstantinou 2016, 52).

Reinscribing this transformation in the contemporary moment, by focusing their discussions on later hip communities, scholars and commentators have allowed White countercultural models of hipness to overwrite the particularity of its origins in Black communities.21 Or, still more misleadingly, they have extrapolated this view of hipness back out onto these origins, thereby transforming the Beats’ reductive images of the early Black hipsters into historical truths and the foundation for a broad-based, cross-racial definition of hipness as a fundamentally countercultural aesthetic.22 Indeed, this cooptation of hipness proved influential from the get go, leading a range of

Black artists to engage in their own practices of bohemianism, drawn directly from the Beats’ model and including the manufactured image of bebop as the counterculture par excellence. In this way,

African Americans began to exchange their cutting-edge, hip expressive practices for the sorts of aspirational “hip” counterculturalism practiced by the Beats, with its promises of progress and social mobility within (if in opposition to) mainstream society (Saul 2003, 77–81). As such, if hipness began as a grounded Black expressive practice that was appropriated by White writers, then U.S. bohemianism followed the reverse path, originating as a form of White counterculturalism that

African Americans in turn adopted and adapted for their own purposes.23 Exemplifying this work is

and despairing image of poverty, was transformed into a thing called the Beat Generation, which phenomenon was, largely, composed of uptight, middle-class white people, imitating poverty, trying to get down, to get with it, doing their thing, doing their despairing best to be funky, which we, the blacks, never dreamed of doing — we were funky, baby, like funk was going out of style” (Baldwin 1998, 781). 21 Tom Perchard (2018, 137–138) makes this critique of Ford in particular. 22 Numerous commentators have positioned, a posteriori, bebop musicians as early representatives of Black bohemianism. Philosopher and cultural critic Bernard Gendron, for instance, suggests that the beboppers first drew closely upon early European bohemianism in pursuit of an elevated, high-art status for their music (Gendron 2002, 10; see also Baraka 2002, 219). Such descriptions, however, reflect the very conflation of hipness and bohemianism, as well as White and Black social experiences, that I am concerned with deconstructing here. Further, as I argue below, they depend on a misrepresentation of bebop as a fundamentally countercultural art form. 23 Thanks are due to Jason Oakes for helping me to delineate these dual transformations in his editorial comments on a different version of this chapter, which appears in The Oxford Handbook of Hip Hop Music (2018).

the important group of Black artists who developed their own countercultural sensibilities in direct dialogue with the Beat poets during the 1960s: the writers and artists of the Black Arts Movement.

Commonly thought of as the cultural wing of Black Power, Black Arts cultural production reflected a sort of populist modernism that sought to produce high art out of Black vernacular materials. Alongside its Black Nationalism, this project was characterized by ambivalent forms of

Black bohemianism that variously drew on and departed from European-American models. In capturing this dimension of the Black Arts Movement in the early 1960s, James Smethurst describes how founder LeRoi Jones (soon to become Amiri Baraka) “at this time adopts and adapts the Beat notion of African Americans as a class of permanent nonconformists (or involuntary saints) — who are nonetheless quintessentially American — and locates himself inside it without the sort of primitivist mysticism that often attended Beat expressions of this idea” (Smethurst 2005, 63).

Centering an elevated image of Blackness, Black Arts figures like Jones attempted to claim a conditional social insiderism that could run parallel to that enjoyed by the Beats. At the same time, this project was drastically undermined by its own set of representational issues.

In his attempts to position the African American as “quintessentially American,” Jones essentially risked replacing the Beats’ romantic racism with an elitist and bourgeois privileging of the

Black avant-garde tradition (Gennari 2003, 253–259). Contrary to well-rehearsed narratives about

Jones’s critique of the Black middle class, historian Daniel Matlin highlights the “censorious, moralizing tradition of Black social thought” that in fact undergirded Jones’s Black bohemianism (or populist modernism) (Matlin 2013, 26). Indeed, for Matlin, Jones’s bohemian politics engaged in a long tradition of “uplift ideology,” articulated exactly from within the Black middle class. As historian Kevin Gaines describes, in its elevation of exceptional, “positive” role models (exemplified by W. E. B. Du Bois’s “Talented Tenth”) and concomitant rejection of (implicitly unexceptional, or normative) Black deviance, this ideology ultimately reproduced the racist pathologization of

Blackness that it aimed to refute (Gaines 1996, 10). In this sense, if Jones did away with the Beats’

“primitivist mysticism” regarding jazz musicians, he did so only by (at least implicitly) reallocating such representations to other sectors of the Black community. If White bohemians did representational harm to bebop musicians by using them as fodder for a performative rejection of an all-too-attainable middle-class destiny, then Black bohemians like Jones did similar harm by using different Black urban communities as a foil for their own impossible claims to social insiderism.24 As a result, Jones’s attempts to strike a countercultural pose inevitably collapsed into a reification of traditional, conservative Black political ideals and their appeals to the White mainstream.

Returning to the hip-hop context, Jones’s conservative Black bohemianism provides a revealing parallel to jazz/bohemian rap’s bourgeois authenticating strategies. Indeed, Smethurst himself presents so-called alternative rappers as cultural heirs to the popular avant-garde tradition of by Black Arts figures like Jones. Moreover, situating this tradition against the backdrop of the broader 1960s U.S. avant-garde, Smethurst describes a “paradoxical conception of an avant-garde that had roots in actually existing and close-to-home popular culture and that was itself in some senses genuinely popular while retaining a countercultural, alternative stance” (Smethurst 2005, 3,

24 Jones’s case speaks here (if only tacitly and unwittingly) to a more fundamental tension between counterculturalism and Black social gains. As his flawed bohemianism reveals, ideas about countercultural resistance rely on privileged assumptions about a culture bearer’s pre-existing, insider status within mainstream society from which to push back. But such ideas fail to account for the contradictory and unstable relationship of Black culture to the U.S. mainstream. While Black cultures have been repeatedly appropriated and centralized throughout U.S. history, Black people have been simultaneously denied full citizenship (and humanity), and have thus lacked insider positions from which to mobilize countercultural politics. Now, some might view this critique of Black counterculturalism as predicated on a discursive grounding in British cultural studies that lacks applicability to the American context. Indeed, for British cultural studies scholar Paul Gilroy, the crucial difference between the Black British and the African American experience is that African Americans are, in fact, American. By contrast, for Gilroy, the exclusionary experience of being told to “go back to your own country” is a distinctly (non-)British one (Brand 2017). However, insofar as U.S. cultural studies scholars have shown the ontology of Blackness in the United States to be one of non-humanity and civic exclusion, it seems clear to me that the symptoms of this ontology are similarly symptomatic of a denial of full citizenship rights (see Wilderson 2003, 18; Anonymous 2017, 9–10). Indeed, Fred Moten directly contravenes Gilroy on this point: “There is a fundamental difference in the way Gilroy and I think of ourselves in relation to national identity […] while Gilroy seems to believe in the personal and analytic value of a phrase like ‘We Britons,’ I could never bring myself — for reasons affective and intellectual — to speak of ‘We Americans’” (Moten 2017, 293n3–295). As Ralph Ellison, another great chronicler of U.S. race relations, puts it (via the novel’s Black narrator) in Invisible Man, “[…] didn’t he [the White man] control that dream world — which, alas, is only too real! — and didn’t he rule me out of it?” (Ellison 1995, 14).

58–59). Observing jazz/bohemian rappers’ position within this avant-garde tradition explains how these representatives of an eminently popular musical form (hip-hop) could simultaneously position themselves as countercultural. Indeed, jazz/bohemian rappers’ elitist claims to (a constructed image of) bebop and pathologizing repudiations of gangsta rap reveal the same conservative underpinnings that undermine Jones’s own bohemian ideology. Moving beyond these constraining and marginalizing constructions of racial authenticity, then, requires challenging the bohemian, countercultural ideals at their core, and instead rehabilitating the productive originary potential of

Black hipness as a hybridizing aesthetic of existence.

Reclaiming Hipness, Rethinking Hybridity

Despite the contrasting social positions from which they stake their claims to hipness, White and Black bohemians have ultimately come together since mid-century to produce a harmful and mutually reinforcing politics of racial representation. The reification of racist mythologies arising from White bohemian attempts to claim distance from the social mainstream comprises what ethnomusicologist Ingrid Monson (1995) calls “the problem with white hipness.” In turn, the representational and appropriative processes that Monson critiques have generated defensive sublimations of Black masculinity, and bebop musicians in particular, through which Black bohemians renegotiate their own sense of self. The result is a sanitized, elitist, and constraining conception of authentic Black masculinity that simultaneously reproduces (while rerouting) the very racist ideas about Black pathology that it seeks to refute.25 We might call this process “the problem with Black bohemianism.” In developing an alternative to this conservative ideology, I turn to a

25 In envisioning what he calls a “New Black Man,” Mark Anthony Neal offers a sustained critique of sanitizing imagery in representations of Black culture. As he puts it, “New Black Man represents my efforts to create new tropes of black masculinity that challenge the most negative stereotypes associated with black masculinity, but more importantly, counter stringently sanitized images of black masculinity, largely created by blacks themselves in response to racist depictions of black men” (Neal 2005, xx-xxi, emphasis mine).

representational gap that speaks to the instability of its essentializing logic: namely, that these sanitized images in fact rely on an ahistorical view of bebop as a fundamentally countercultural high art form. In this sense, the bourgeois politics of jazz/bohemian rappers exist in tension with the very cultural moment through which these artists claim their authenticity. Furthermore, unpacking this tension and developing a more historical understanding of bebop points to a forgotten practice of hipness that exceeds White and Black bohemianism and offers a more critical route to conceptualizing Black existence in an anti-Black social context.

Challenging the conventional narratives about bebop’s anti-commercial stance upon which

Black bohemianism depends, Scott DeVeaux describes the competing commercial aspirations of its practitioners that complicate and nuance discursive misrepresentations of bebop as inherently countercultural (1997, 12–17, 168–171). Reframing this revisionist work specifically in relation to the connection between bebop and hipness, Michael Szalay argues that the image of the Black hipster as a fundamentally countercultural figure is a construction designed and appropriated by White bohemians to shore up their own social authenticity (Szalay 2012, 23). At the same time, despite normative divisions between the false consciousness of the social mainstream and the heightened political awareness of the socially alternative, DeVeaux’s and Szalay’s repositioning of bebop does not necessarily rid the music of its political potency.

A case in point, musicologist Guthrie P. Ramsey, Jr. theorizes the radical challenge that bebop posed to the premises of Western modernity. And, contrary to the self-consciously elevated constructions of bebop at the core of Black bohemianism, Ramsey locates the music’s political efficacy exactly in its transcendence of attempts within African American communities at elevating and

“smoothening” Black culture.26 For Ramsey, bebop’s capacity to destabilize the racist knowledge structures of White hegemonic society while rejecting Black bourgeois concessions to this ideology

26 For another take on bebop’s hipness as a challenge to “middle-class decorum,” see Hill (2017, 48).

arises from its blurring of the boundaries between the emergent (at that time) musical categories of art, popular, and folk. This attribute reflects bebop’s position as a site of “Afro-modernism,” a term that Ramsey uses to describe African American, hybridizing cultural responses to the experience of modernity that deconstruct the very aesthetic categories upon which dominant ideas about hipness as a form of authoritative countercultural critique depend.27 In this way, bebop musicians of the

1940s could assert their intellectual and artistic ability without constraining Blackness to a bourgeois politics of respectability (Ramsey 2003, 96–130).

Ramsey’s theory of Afro-modernity shares a close but underexplored relationship with the origins of Black hipness. Indeed, Ford himself suggests Afro-modernism as another possible way of historicizing the emergence of hipness as a series of responses to modernity, alongside his genealogical conception. He immediately dismisses this option, however, in favor of placing hipness within a “wider historical context,” in which bebop and Afro-modernism play a role, but quickly become shrouded in a sea of Whiteness (see Ford 2013, 25–26).

By contrast, this dissertation repeatedly returns to and picks at this Afro-modernist thread, considering its significance for reclaiming the productive origins of hipness following its derailment by White and Black bohemian projects. On the one hand, the fraught racial histories of hipness and bohemianism shine a light on both the historical and political significance of Afro-modernism and its broader diasporic resonances. On the other, Afro-modernism clarifies hipness’s original deconstructive function vis-à-vis the social-cultural binaries of Western modernity. In combination, these ideas point to a new way of conceptualizing Black existence in an anti-Black global hegemony.

27 Such processes of deconstruction, of course, also go beyond hipness, extending more broadly to the very cultural and epistemological categories of Western modernity. From this perspective, as Alexander Weheliye shows, the phrase “Afro-modernity” indexes no “minor modernity or counter-modernity,” as Gilroy would have it. Rather, and contrary to the West’s project of self-realization through opposition to Blackness, Afro-modernity signals the (disruptive) centrality of (sonic) Blackness and Black culture to Western modernity itself (Weheliye 2005, 3–5; see Gilroy 1993, 1–40).

Grasping the possibility of such a conception requires recognizing the function of Afro-modernism as, at its core, a theory of cultural hybridity.

Ideas about cultural hybridity have a long and troubled history in both scholarly and public discourse. As ethnomusicologist Catherine Appert describes, “in working from the assumption of preexisting, fundamentally distinct cultural units, frameworks of hybridity and syncretism risk reinscribing bounded cultural units and reaffirming the racial vocabulary of colonialism” (Appert

2016b, 281). Arguably the most influential response to these essentialist frameworks is postcolonial theorist Homi Bhabha’s theory of hybridity, which he predicates on a discursive shift beyond ideas about stable, pre-existing cultures and toward the conscious articulations of “partial presence” that emerge in the third, expressive spaces in between pre-imagined categories of difference, such as gender, class, race, and nation. For Bhabha, this “partializing process of hybridity” serves as a means of destabilizing the power-laden hierarchies that structure these social categories (Bhabha 2004, 163–

164, 172).

While Bhabha’s theory does closely inform my understandings of hybridity and Afro- modernism, the utopic, transformative potential that he attributes to hybridity (as though its subversive potential exists in a vacuum) stands at odds with my challenge to “counterculture” theories of hipness that center stylized forms of resistance over substantive political engagement. As such, in revising Bhabha’s theory, I draw on recent work by scholars who have nuanced ideas about the inherently resistant and transformative capacities of hybridizing cultural practices and instead sought more critical, grounded descriptions of such practices that account for the local and global situatedness of cultural actors (see Ramnarine 2007, 32–33; Appert 2016b). Following their lead, I suggest that examining tangible instances of musical hybridization, and situating these within specific contexts, leads to more critical understandings of Afro-modernism and hipness. Understanding the fruitfulness of such processes requires, to borrow from Appert (2016b, 294), reversing normative

ideas about hybridity as the localized “convergence of preexisting difference” into ambiguous forms of counter-hegemonic resistance, by instead conceptualizing hybridity as the relational (African diasporic) deconstruction of preconceived totalities, culminating in the production of alternative spaces of existence.

If Afro-modernism, as a theory of hybridity, describes moments of cultural deconstruction

(vis-à-vis Western knowledge structures) culminating in the production of alternate spaces of

(modern, Black) existence, then I view hipness as a specific instantiation of this work. Hipness is the mode through which these distinctly Black, hybridizing processes meet the legacies of Black conservative and radical politics. It is the mode through which these processes come to resonate on a lower, relational, diasporic frequency.28 And it is a mode that shares a particularly close relationship with Black music. In better capturing the distinctiveness of hipness as a musical aesthetic and way of being, it is instructive to turn to a work of mid-century African American literature, widely celebrated for its elaboration of Black social-cultural aesthetics, that dramatizes the radical existential aesthetic that I call hipness: Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man.29

The novel’s title refers to its protagonist, an unnamed Black narrator who moves through the world both living with and reflecting upon the social invisibility that he experiences as a result of his race. Throughout the novel, this invisibility manifests itself in the narrator’s persistent humiliation, terrorization, and dehumanization at the hands of White power. In the opening prologue, however, the narrator also alludes to the latent insurgency that lurks, waiting to be claimed, within his eponymous condition. Specifically, after introducing the reader to his life of invisibility, the narrator describes, as a symptom of this condition, the mysterious, subterranean

28 On diasporic connectivity as taking place on a “lower frequency,” see Gilroy (1993, 37). 29 For another perspective on the value of Ellison’s book for theorizing Black metaphysics, see Spillers (1977). Indeed, Spillers’s ideas drive all of the main theories of Blackness upon which I draw in conceptualizing hipness as an African diasporic aesthetic of existence (see Hartman 1997; Wilderson 2010; Weheliye 2014; Sexton 2016; Moten 2017).

room in which he secretly dwells, rent-free, and which he furtively lights with power stolen, untraceably, from the city’s electrical grid. By extension, he explains, it is this stolen light that prevents him from succumbing entirely to his miserable living conditions:

“Light confirms my reality, gives birth to my form […] Without light I am not only invisible, but formless as well; and to be unaware of one’s form is to live a death. I myself, after existing some twenty years, did not become alive until I discovered my invisibility” (1995, 6– 7).

In this way, the Invisible Man finds life within the hybridizing “border area” (Ellison 1995, 5) of his underground hole, which exists (like the narrator himself) in the spaces in between light and dark, visibility and invisibility, the land of the living and the land of the dead.

Throughout the rest of the novel, the narrator takes us back in time, recounting formative experiences of invisibility at various stages in his life, leading to the present moment and his ability to seize the radical potential of his condition and step back out into the world. In doing so, he refers instructively to the histories of hipness and bohemianism as they intersect with racism, Black

Nationalism, and conservative Black politics. By revisiting the aesthetic (and, in particular, musical) dimensions of Ellison’s text, my dissertation shows how it is exactly these histories that ultimately grant the narrator the ability not to resist or reverse his condition of invisibility (as normative notions of hipness would have it), but rather to find life within it.

In fact, while hipness does play a key role in Invisible Man, it is arguably represented most immediately by the novel’s unseen hipster character of Rinehart. However, a caricature of the Black hipster as imagined by the Beats, Rinehart embodies only those dominant conceptions of hipness, rooted in ideas about postwar irony and counterculturalism, that I critique in the previous section.30

By contrast, the Invisible Man’s insurgent harnessing of light arguably brings him far closer to the radical potential of hipness than Rinehart’s irony ever could. The signal difference between these

30 For an in-depth study of Rinehart as hipster, see Konstantinou (2016, 49–76); see also Szalay (2012, 147).

performances of hipness becomes clearer when considered in relation to another theory of hybridity at the core of Ellison’s novel: sociologist W. E. B. Du Bois’s concept of “double consciousness.”

Du Bois uses the term double consciousness to describe the fractured sense of self experienced by African Americans as a result of seeing themselves simultaneously through their own eyes and through the contemptuous gaze of a racist society (Du Bois 1994, 2–3). Within this bleak account, however, Du Bois also alludes to a more empowering experience in the privileged “second- sight” that double consciousness grants to its subjects with which to navigate the “veil” (the metaphor that Du Bois uses for structural racism). Political theorist George Ciccariello-Maher critiques Du Bois’s early, idealistic conception of this gift as the domain of an elite, Black “Talented

Tenth,” arguing that this view “neglects the materiality of the veil by suggesting its superability through education” (Ciccariello-Maher 2009, 372, 377). By contrast, Ciccariello-Maher argues that

Du Bois’s writings in and after The Souls of Black Folk (1903) reflect his extrication of the concept from this bourgeois ideology, as well as his new recognition of the veil in all of its inescapable materiality. It is from this more critical perspective on double consciousness that we can grasp its radical potential for negotiating life within the veil (Ciccariello-Maher 2009, 371–401).31

Following Ciccariello-Maher, we might think of Rinehart’s stylized, idealistic, and impossible attempts to cross the veil through the use of countercultural irony (like Du Bois’s early hopes to cross it through education) as a form of uncritical double consciousness. By contrast, like Du Bois’s eventual radical affirmation of the veil, the Invisible Man’s radical affirmation of his invisibility and attempt to find life within it reflects a more critical form of double consciousness. Returning, then, to the Invisible Man’s description of his underworld in the prologue, we rediscover the productive origins of Black hipness. By claiming his existence while affirming his invisibility, the narrator situates himself in a hybridizing space, in between the light and the dark, the visible and the invisible,

31 For another take on critical double consciousness, see Okiji (2018, 39–44).

the real world and the underground, that simultaneously destabilizes these binaries. By lighting up his subterranean hole, the ultimate symptom of his invisibility, the Invisible Man demonstrates the need not to escape the underground, but rather to find life within it. In this way, he produces an alternate space of existence or, to borrow from Konstantinou (though he misattributes the production of such spaces to the ironic style of Rinehart), “hitherto unrepresented zones of black life” (Konstantinou 2016, 63).

The light through which the Invisible Man comes to negotiate and reclaim his invisibility finds a number of metaphorical counterparts in Black aesthetics, and particularly music. Later in the prologue, for instance, the Invisible Man ponders his affinity with the music of Louis Armstrong, whose trumpet playing he tellingly likens to a beam of light:

“Sometimes now I listen […] as Louis bends that military instrument into a beam of lyrical sound. Perhaps I like Louis Armstrong because he’s made poetry out of being invisible. I think it must be because he’s unaware that he is invisible. And my own grasp of invisibility aids me to understand his music. […] Invisibility, let me explain, gives one a slightly different sense of time, you’re never quite on the beat. Sometimes you’re ahead, sometimes behind. Instead of the swift and imperceptible flowing of time, you are aware of its nodes, those points where time stands still or from which it leaps ahead. And you slip into the breaks and look around. That’s what you hear vaguely in Louis’ music” (Ellison 1995, 8).

In this passage, the Invisible Man posits the ability of music to open up the hybridizing space (“the breaks”) of Black hipness. Armstrong, apparently, leaves this task unfilled, remaining unaware of his invisibility and thus in the company of Rinehart with his uncritical double consciousness. And yet these breaks stay open, available to be slipped into and experienced by anybody with a song capable of revealing the radical potential of their invisibility. Tellingly, the Invisible Man’s account of such a song sounds very much like a description of bebop aesthetics, never quite on the beat but leaping in like Lester Young — or, as James Martin Harding has it in his own study of the relationship between

Invisible Man and bebop, Charlie Parker (see Harding 1997, 110; see also Spaulding 2004). Where

Louis fails, bebop musicians, the original Black hipsters, succeed in accessing the breaks.

Expanding, at length, on music’s capacity to open the hybridizing space of the breaks is Fred

Moten’s In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition (2003). Working in an Afro-modernist mode to rethink Western modernity’s very understandings of sound and music, Moten theorizes enslavement and resistance to this through musical (and other forms of) improvisation as “the performative essence of Blackness” (Moten 2003, 16). In doing so, he dwells on the same passage from Invisible Man cited above, and ultimately suggests that it is improvisation in particular that provides an analogue for the Invisible Man’s use of light. It follows that it is specifically improvisation that leads us to the break(s) and the alternative space of existence that it/they open(s), in which we can finally move from “the music of invisibility” to the “optic utterance” of being in the light (Moten 2003, 63–84).32

Importantly, the break does not signal an attempt to transcend the veil, with the sort of uncritical double consciousness that characterizes Black bohemianism. Rather, the break signals the ongoing, ever-present, and often untapped existential possibility of lighting up that invisibility iconized by the Invisible Man’s underground. Indeed, if Moten draws his concept of the break from

Ellison’s novel, he appears to be additionally drawn to this image of the underground, again offering his own equivalent in what he, with Stefano Harney, calls the “undercommons” (Harney and Moten

2013). As Jack Halberstam describes, it is exactly “in the break” that the radical relationality between the undercommons and mainstream society is sounded. After this (temporal, musical, existential) break comes something entirely new: an alternate space of being that affirms the materiality of the veil and nonetheless offers a way of living amongst (or after) it, “in jazz, in improvisation, in noise”

(Harney and Moten 2013, 7).

***

32 Spaulding (2004) similarly theorizes the importance of improvisation to the Invisible Man’s conception of Black existence and connects this explicitly to what he calls the novel’s “bebop aesthetic.”

If signifyin’, hybridity, Afro-modernism, invisibility, light, (critical) double consciousness, and the break are among the range of critical tools that Black people have developed, since slavery, for rethinking the possibilities of their existence in an anti-Black world, then by uncovering the unexplored but profound connections between these tools, I theorize a unified and rigorous Black metaphysics resting precisely upon their mutually reinforcing existential dynamics. In the chapters that follow, I will show that the framework that brings these tools together and reveals their potential for rethinking Black existence is, ultimately, hipness. Understood thus, hipness serves as a direct challenge to the thin politics of style underlying countercultural and bourgeois bohemianism.

These politics emerge as resting on an uncritical form of double consciousness that functions in opposition to the critical double consciousness (itself a form of existential hybridity) that characterizes originary Black hipness. In making this claim, however, I do not seek to dismiss the political power of culture and symbolism altogether.33 Rather, I intend to advocate for and model more critical approaches to focusing this power. In doing so, I foreground (while reimagining) the role of music — and specifically Black musical expressions rooted in improvisation (which, for some, is Blackness) — in getting at the hybridizing spaces opened through hipness. If, as

Konstantinou believes, bohemianism is a tradition of literary and lived experimentalism, then hipness is one of musical and existential radicalism: equally, as Ford puts it, “an aesthetic of music and the self” (2013, 77). I argue that, in the contemporary moment, nobody has managed to access the hybridizing space of Black hipness more fruitfully than the rappers that I call neo-bohemian.

33 As Ta-Nehisi Coates convincingly puts it in his discussion of Barack Obama’s symbolic, if not material, significance for Black people, “there is nothing ‘mere’ about symbols. The power embedded in the word nigger is also symbolic. Burning crosses do not literally raise the black poverty rate, and the Confederate flag does not directly expand the wealth gap” (Coates 2017). Similarly, by observing the hypothetical relative economic viability, for European Masters, of drawing their slave force from European workers, rather than Africans, historian David Eltis raises the possibility that slavery itself was exactly a symbolic enterprise of dehumanization, more than it was ever a material (economic) one (Eltis 1993, 1404; see Wilderson 2010, 13–15).

The Cultural Genealogy of Neo-Bohemian Hip-Hop

The cultural and social importance of neo-bohemian hip-hop lies in the challenge that its artists pose to constraining representations of hip-hop and Blackness, as well as their production of alternate spaces of Black existence that exceed the violent structures of an anti-Black world. If these artists resist the colonizing force of Western knowledge structures, however, they do so primarily through an engagement with the confused and counterproductive legacy of hip, Black cultural reactions to White supremacy that I outline above. Returning to Ford’s conception of hipness as part of a “genealogy of cultural responses” to modernity, understanding the ends and means of neo- bohemian hip-hop requires examining the place that its rappers occupy within the overlapping histories of hipness and bohemianism. I argue that neo-bohemian rappers remedy the historically appropriative and debilitating dynamic between these lived modalities, tapping into a long cultural history of conservative Black bohemianism and rerouting it toward a reclamation of the radical existential possibilities of Black hipness. Tracing this history returns us to the four central arguments that I outlined at the beginning of this chapter. I will now unpack these arguments in more detail, with neo-bohemian hip-hop more firmly in mind.

1) Reclaiming the Afro-modernist Origins of Hipness

If the overlapping practices of White and Black bohemianism began, at mid-century, to undermine the radical function of hipness as a Black musical and existential aesthetic, then neo- bohemian rappers have productively reclaimed these origins in the present. In understanding this process, I trace a historically, politically, and culturally interconnected sub-network within the broader family tree of hipness that Ford observes. Ford’s sprawling hip network is unified by what he calls, following cultural historian Thomas Frank, the “countercultural idea” (Ford 2013, 77; see

Frank 1997). By contrast, in facing the legacy of bohemian counterculturalism head on, neo-

bohemian rappers tap a cultural lineage leading directly to the Afro-modernist origins of hipness, after which stylized counterculturalisms fall flat.34 Put simply, I view neo-bohemian hip-hop as growing out of a transformative engagement with the high art musical aesthetic and bourgeois racial politics that govern 1980s and 1990s jazz/bohemian hip-hop, which in turn stem from an ahistorical musical and stylistic (mis)appropriation of 1940s bebop.

These three, interconnected moments of hip expression constitute what I call the “cultural genealogy” of neo-bohemian hip-hop. At its most revealing, neo-bohemian hip-hop’s position in this genealogy emerges musically. Focusing on the genre’s beats (all instrumental, vocal, and sound effect elements of rap songs other than the main rapped portions) and flow (rapped delivery) styles,

I explore how neo-bohemian rappers return to the musical style of jazz/bohemian rap while expanding on it in a way that produces a closer, more historical connection to bebop and the jazz styles that grew out of it.35 This connection is marked by a combination of direct musical similarities and broader shared aesthetic ideals. In this way, neo-bohemian rappers reinscribe jazz/bohemian rap’s unstable connection to bebop as one that more closely engages the hybridizing, Afro- modernist character of this early form of hip expression. In this sense, I use the prefix in “neo- bohemian” to signal how these artists intervene in the bourgeois racial politics of jazz/bohemian rap while (and by) taking its expressive style as their point of departure.

In tracing this genealogy, I seek to reimagine and complicate existing narratives that imagine

(at least implicitly) a relatively straightforward line from bebop, through jazz/bohemian rap, to the artists that I call neo-bohemian. Most notably, Africana studies scholar Reiland Rabaka traces a

34 Thus, my understanding of what it means to be a Black Hippy differs markedly from Patrice Evans’s (2010, 108) racially-flattened concept of the “Blipster,” or Black hipster, defined essentially along the same lines as the contemporary White hipster — because, “after all, hipsters are allowed to be any ethnicity” — and thus raising the question of why he doesn’t just called them “hipsters.” 35 Given my focus on the relationship between hipness and a select group of rappers, the dissertation does not include any sustained discussion of producers and beat-makers. Rather, my interest in beats centers on how they inform readings of these artists’ hip expressions, particularly given what I regard as the inextricability of rapped delivery (flow) from its broader musical counterpart (the beat).

similar lineage, arguing that, where bebop influenced the politics and aesthetics of jazz/bohemian hip-hop, this genre is in turn “crucial for any critical understanding of what is currently called

‘alternative’ rap” (Rabaka 2012, 138). As described, given his often politically-charged lyrics and jazz- influenced beats, numerous commentators have positioned Kendrick Lamar as a figurehead for this label in the contemporary moment (see Lynch 2015; Pizzo 2015).

In contrast, I argue that, if ideas about the connection between bebop and jazz/bohemian rap rely on an ahistorical conception of bebop’s aesthetics and politics, then attempts to treat

Kendrick Lamar and Black Hippy simply as heirs to a legacy of “alternative hip-hop” and “Black bohemianism” overlook the ways in which neo-bohemian rappers both distance themselves from such narratives and call the stability of these very categories into question. As early as 2010, on

“Ignorance is Bliss,” Kendrick called out critics for attempting to pigeon-hole him as a conscious rapper:

“Stop it, I’m hearing the comments, the critics are calling me conscious But truthfully, every shooter be calling me Compton So truthfully, only calling me Kweli and Common36 Proves, that ignorance is Bliss.”

Echoing Kendrick, in a Twitter post from 2011, Black Hippy member Ab-Soul — who, with his self-consciously “woke” lyrical expressions, still more obviously invites association with the conscious label — rejected the possibility of such a category: “fuck is a conscious rapper? who but the deceased is not conscious? dummies” (Figure 1.1; see Ab-Soul 2011).37

36 That is, comparing him only to well-known conscious rappers Talib Kweli and Common. 37 Thanks are due to my former student Mia Horton for bringing this Twitter post to my attention in a term paper submitted for my course, “From Talented Tenth to Bad and Boujee: Exploring Racial Authenticity Politics through Black Music.”

Figure 1.1. Ab-Soul on “Conscious Rap” (Twitter post from September 23, 2011)

Despite their protestations, neither Kendrick nor Soul deny the presence of a political element in their music. Rather, they reject the notion that such an element could encapsulate their style, preclude its engagement with other forms of expression, or indeed allow it to be pinned down and labeled at all. In nuancing understandings of neo-bohemian rappers that position them within such reductive narratives, then, I instead center the Afro-modernist aesthetic that characterizes their music. Recalling bebop’s challenge to the musical categories of art, pop, and folk, neo-bohemian hip-hop opens and indeed emerges through an expressive space in between hip-hop’s opposed aesthetic categories. Through this hybridizing aesthetic, neo-bohemian rappers are able to incorporate avant-garde aesthetics and pointed political commentary into their music without reproducing the conservative, bourgeois rejection of mainstream styles that characterizes so-called conscious rap.38 In addition to generating a new, more democratic racial politics (to which I return

38 Of course, in their own aforementioned attempts at a contemporary populist modernism with roots in the Black Arts Movement, jazz/bohemian rappers could similarly be thought of as occupying, to some extent, a space in between the commercial and the artful (see Smethurst 2005, 58–59). However, as Gilroy points out, while all hip-hop can be thought of as formally hybrid, certain styles have nonetheless been misguidedly privileged as “especially potent sign[s] and symbol[s] of racial authenticity,” conceived along ethnically absolutist lines (Gilroy 1993, 106–108). A case in point, jazz/bohemian rap’s core critique of gangsta rap arguably limits its realization of the representational versatility offered by expressive sites of Afro-modernism. Instead, the genre’s high art musical aesthetic serves to (re)articulate its bourgeois racial politics by distancing it from other contemporary styles and their supposedly inauthentic transgressions.

below), this deconstructive work also serves some specifically aesthetic functions, to which I now turn.

2) Deconstructing Hip-Hop’s Aesthetic Categories, Rethinking Musical Analysis in Hip-Hop Studies

My theorization of neo-bohemian hip-hop’s hybridizing musical aesthetic has at least two large-scale implications for understanding hip-hop culture, and rap music specifically. First, the deconstructive space that neo-bohemian rappers occupy between mainstream and alternative, commercial and high art styles, raises deeper questions about the stability of these categories and the genres with which they are associated. It is my hope that thinking about neo-bohemian hip-hop’s complex cultural position might help to generate more fluid and nuanced readings of hip-hop culture more broadly. Second, the hybridizing processes through which neo-bohemian rappers come to occupy this position make the genre a privileged site for engaging hip-hop’s underexplored musical dimensions. Having already dealt with the first point at some length, it is this second issue that I will address in more detail here.

Given the centrality of music to neo-bohemian hip-hop’s radical existential project, my theorization of the genre provides a rejoinder to the historically limited engagement with rap’s musical dimensions within scholarly and popular discourse on hip-hop. Hip-hop scholarship has traditionally foregrounded sociological and lyric-based analytical approaches and limited discussion of the “musical” aspects of rap to sampling and DJ practices.39 Following persistent calls within hip- hop studies for more sustained focus on other aspects of rap’s aesthetics, and particularly its beats and flow styles (Walser 1995, 193–199; Krims 2000, 1–45; Williams 2009; Kajikawa 2015, 1–16), perceived improvements in this realm have shifted the conversation toward calls to now integrate this work with the sort of social-political analysis that has characterized hip-hop studies from the

39 Examples of work on sampling and DJ practices include Schloss (2004) and Katz (2012).

outset. Stressing the need, in doing so, to avoid the uncritical search for musical expressions of stable essences, and particularly “Blackness,” scholars like Loren Kajikawa (2015) have instead modelled more critical treatments of the ways that rap songs might be said to “sound” race. This work is far from complete, however, as hip-hop studies continues to lack models for analyzing rap music that engage seriously with the ontological specificities of Blackness, or more broadly with enduring questions about the possibilities of connecting musical analysis to social commentary.40

This dissertation provides a new framework for analyzing beats and flow in rap music as they intersect with and shed light upon broader social-cultural formations such as race, gender, sexuality, and authenticity. I model this framework upon existing conceptions of hipness as a social- aesthetic nexus — “equally an aesthetic of music and the self” (Ford 2013, 77) — while modifying this perspective to account for the hybridizing, Afro-modernist processes at the core of African diasporic culture. Analyzing the role of beats and flow styles within these processes helps to avoid making uncritical inferences about sonic representations of identity based upon subjective and inconsistent readings of specific musical figures. Instead, through a dialogic examination of the aesthetic and social dimensions of hipness, my analytical model centers musical processes that tell us something about racialization processes, while revealing the inherent instability of the connection between the two.

40 For another recent discussion of the need for more critical approaches to popular music aesthetics see Steingo (2016). The limits that I observe of existing methodologies for connecting popular musics to their social contexts (and particularly identity politics) reflect Steingo’s claim that “musicology in the 1990s broached a number of important questions [vis-à-vis the autonomy of music] but then quickly answered these questions in a way that precluded other possibilities” (Steingo 2016, 224n12). Some of these answers included hasty and essentializing claims about “music as an affirmation of social identity, music as gendered performance, or music’s relationship to embodiment and sexual pleasure” (Steingo 2016, 8). Where Steingo attempts to move beyond these sorts of claims altogether, I choose to hold on to and attempt to enrich them. And I do so due to my conviction about the mutually reinforcing capacities of musicology and Black studies. The new social-aesthetic analytical framework that I develop in the dissertation thus serves not so much as one of the “precluded other possibilities” to which Steingo refers, but rather as a corrective to the issues that he observes in his implicit call for these other possibilities.

The aesthetic-social intersections that I observe in relation to neo-bohemian hip-hop emerge on several, overlapping levels. Most fundamentally, I analyze tangible moments of musical hybridization through which neo-bohemian rappers deconstruct hip-hop’s structuring aesthetic categories and, consequently, the broader ideas about racial authenticity in which these categories are entangled. In turn, I describe specific musical practices through which these rappers re-harness their deconstructive musical aesthetic and transform it into a more generative mode of aesthetic theorizing through which to imagine new forms of Black life in between totalizing constructions of

Blackness. I show how, by embracing adverse musical representations of Blackness, these artists challenge constraining characterizations of Blackness as (hopelessly) pathological or (impossibly) pure, and instead imagine the possibility of finding life and freedom within hegemonically disavowed experiences and expressions. In this way, neo-bohemian rappers disrupt the Western knowledge structures that overdetermine these limiting racial models, working in that musical and metaphysical break that brings the undercommons to bear on mainstream society. Analyzing these variegated productions of hybridity shifts focus away from the essentialist search for musical expressions of stable identities and toward the processes through which cultures and identities emerge as co- constitutive and unending. This shift models a robust, aesthetically-grounded hermeneutics of contemporary hip-hop identities.

If neo-bohemian hip-hop serves as a privileged site for engaging rap’s underexplored musical dimensions, then, conversely, musical analysis provides an invaluable tool for understanding neo- bohemian hip-hop’s Afro-modernist aesthetic. In making this claim, I build on the work of scholars who have used Black musical aesthetics to develop challenges to hegemonic (Western) narratives of modernity (see Gilroy 1993; Weheliye 2005; Burton 2017). In this way of thinking, self-consciously

(and all-too recognizably) political lyrics possess less revolutionary potential than the overlooked sounds of rap music themselves. I would (and will) challenge trendy suggestions that rap lyrics

cannot also exceed their normative discursive interpretations and representations. But, due to the elision of musical aesthetics within historical representations of hip-hop, I take these aesthetics as a particularly productive entry point for grasping neo-bohemian hip-hop’s social-political significances. Ultimately, I argue that neo-bohemian hip-hop is best understood not in terms of any legible politics of resistance, but rather in terms of its Afro-modernist aesthetic, through which its artists imagine an alternate space of existence outside of the anti-Black, neoliberal regime that countercultural politics counterintuitively help to sustain.

Finally, revealing the special role of aesthetics in neo-bohemian hip-hop’s existential project sheds new light on the debates over “style” versus “real-world politics” that have animated cultural studies theories of subcultures, and hipness in particular. As described, numerous scholars have critiqued bohemian and countercultural ideologies for their conflation of style and politics. Most relevant to my own discussion is Marc Lamont Hill’s critique of the avant-garde aesthetics upon which jazz/bohemian rappers have structured their own counterculturalism, at the expense of engaged political action.41 In response to such critiques, writers like Ta-Nehisi Coates (2017) and Lee

Konstantinou (2016, 33–34) warn that this discursive privileging of so-called real-world politics obscures the material impact of the symbolic. Similarly, ethnomusicologist Gavin Steingo suggests the need to separate music from politics altogether, and instead to take music seriously on its own

(aesthetic) terms (2016, viii, x–xi, 4–9, 88–89).

Taking such warnings into account, the hybridity frameworks that I employ in this project point toward a middle ground between the stylization of politics and the politics of style. While I

41 In addition, a variety of cultural commentators have observed the style-over-substance approach that has historically limited the political efficacy of White countercultural and subcultural practices in the West (see Hebdige 1979; McCann and Szalay 2005; Hall and Jefferson 2006; Szalay 2012). Summarizing these critiques, Konstantinou describes how “liberals and leftists who write in this mode argue that the conflation of ‘symbolic’ and ‘real’ politics has neutered the efficacy of reformist and revolutionary political projects. Practitioners of symbolic revolt are, they say, at best ineffective at achieving their aims and at worst secretly complicit with the oppressive systems they claim to oppose” (Konstantinou 2016, 33).

remain committed to approaching neo-bohemian rap’s hybridizing aesthetic from a grounded perspective, rooted in real-world politics, I nonetheless maintain that aesthetics can and do have real significance for understanding the global ontology of Blackness. By analyzing tangible, hybridizing musical processes and understanding them as locally and globally situated social practices, I aim to develop a non-essentialist model for linking sound to racial (de)formation and political action. What is needed now, then, is a closer consideration of how exactly these deconstructive aesthetic processes function in relation to race.

3) Deconstructing U.S. Racial Authenticity Politics

The challenge that neo-bohemian rap poses to hip-hop’s established aesthetic categories takes on a broader significance when we consider how such groupings draw on and reproduce rigid, overlapping notions of “hip-hop authenticity” and “racial authenticity” in hip-hop culture, the Black public sphere, and the broader U.S. social and scholarly imaginary. Attempts to delineate these forms of hip-hop authenticity reproduce harmful social hierarchies, ethnically absolutist conceptions of Blackness, and hegemonic, anti-Black ideologies. Furthermore, such competing claims to cultural and racial authenticity fail to account for their own mutability and multidirectionality. Most relevant to my study are the ways in which jazz/bohemian rappers have based their own counter-authenticity claims upon an elitist and ahistorical critique of the supposedly inauthentic transgressions of gangsta rap. Responding to this history of bourgeois bohemianism, neo-bohemian rappers challenge the reductive notions of in/authenticity at its core by bringing together gangsta and bohemian sensibilities as frequently conflicting but fundamentally unified elements within a complex and expansive continuum of Black expression. As Kendrick Lamar puts it in “Ab-Soul’s Outro,” from his debut studio album, Section.80 (2011):

“See a lot of y’all don't understand Kendrick Lamar because you wonder how I could talk about money, hoes, clothes, God, and history all in the same sentence. You know what all them things have in common? Only half of the truth, if you tell it.”

Here, Kendrick describes his ability to reconcile commonplace markers of both gangsta and conscious rap. The implication is that, like hip-hop’s aesthetics, Kendrick’s Blackness cannot be reduced to any such totalizing definition. Both aesthetic ideals mark an incomplete view of

Blackness (only half of the truth, if you tell it), missing the complexity and fluidity of his sense of self, which absorbs and exceeds both positionalities. Such hybridizing gestures intervene in Western ways of knowing, compartmentalizing, and colonizing Blackness. In this way, Kendrick produces a fluid space of cultural and racial authenticity in which ostensibly conflicting personas come together to mutually reinforce their legitimacy and undermine ideas about any essential, authentic identity. Yet this progressive racial project remains incomplete; as the above example makes clear, conceptions of authenticity in neo-bohemian hip-hop and other hip cultural forms remain limited by their dependence upon, and reproduction of, (Black) masculinity and the forms of violence that help to structure it, such as misogyny.

Indeed, given their deep entanglements in ideals of Black masculinity, and opposition to

Black femininity, the questions of cultural and racial authenticity at the core of my project frequently overlap with broader questions of gender as they pertain to Blackness. On the one hand, as a study at once of hip-hop, a specific hip-hop collective comprising four Black men, and a distinctly male- centric broader cultural history (that of hipness), the dissertation does depend on the tacit centering and privileging of Black masculinity, and does not attempt to dive deeply into questions of femininity. My point here is that both the theorization that I set out to do, and the cultural-historical interventions that I set out to make, would be necessarily and drastically altered by a close engagement with the role of Black women within them. It is only possible to fully reflect on the ways that the topic of the dissertation chafes against — and indeed would be transformed by — any

attempt to work women into it, after having wrestled with its more fundamental questions. As such,

I return to this question in the postscript, where I also gesture toward the sorts of different answers

I might have arrived at by allowing it to reframe the project from the outset. On the other hand, I also do not heavily thematize or foreground masculinity, or questions of gender more broadly, within the dissertation. Rather, my focus is on developing existing understandings of Blackness as a position within a structure of antagonisms, in the process of which I engage secondarily with questions about gender.

In adopting this position, I follow the lead of Black feminist theorists who argue that existing categories of gender and sex falter in the face of anti-Blackness, which reshapes the Slave’s relationship with such cultural designations. Most famously, in her landmark study of race and gender in the United States, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe,” Hortense Spillers theorizes the violence of the Middle Passage as producing a fundamental distinction between liberated and captive subject positions, which turns on the distinction between the “body,” as becomes available only to the former, and the “flesh,” to which the latter remains consigned through its denial of personhood.

The flesh, here, constitutes a “zero degree of social conceptualization,” as “the captive body reduces to a thing.” Through this mutilating process, this captive body is severed “from its motive will, its active desire,” at once hypersexualized and (“in stunning contradiction”) desubjectified. The flesh of the Slave must be understood ontologically, failing (unlike the body) to “escape concealment under the brush of discourse, or the reflexes of iconography,” of which the subject positions female and male become representative. Indeed, “under these conditions, we lose at least gender difference in the outcome,” as the flesh comes to signify “a territory of cultural and political maneuver, not at all

gender-related, gender-specific” (Spillers 1987, 65–67). It is from this perspective that I claim to address Blackness first, and gender only secondarily.42

That being said, to imagine that ontological violence strips Blackness of gender entirely is to miss Spillers’s point. More accurately, Spillers invites us to dig into the ways that the reontologization of Blackness during slavery necessitates and gives rise to new, radical understandings of gender. As Saidiya Hartman clarifies, “it is important that [the ontological violence inflicted upon the Slave] not be understood as dispossessing the enslaved of female gender, but in terms of differential production of gendered identity or, more specifically, the adequacy or meaning of gender in this context. Therefore, what is at stake here is not maintaining gender as an identitarian category but rather examining gender formation in relation to property relations, the sexual economy of slavery, and the calculation of injury” (Hartman 1997, 97). In this sense, it is precisely by eschewing normative conceptions of gender in favor of a focus on Blackness that we can gain new understandings of gender by way of the flesh.

Throughout the dissertation, then, Black Hippy’s reconceptualization of the terms of Black life does emerge as also reconfiguring Black masculinity and its relationship to Black femininity. In particular, I address engagements with the racialized and gendered performances of sexuality through which Black Hippy carves out those new forms of Black life. In doing so, I offer up neo- bohemian hip-hop’s aesthetics of Black life as working, if incompletely and imperfectly so, toward the sort of queer futurity that Spillers imagines in her groundbreaking essay. As will become clear, my claim is not that neo-bohemian rappers are entirely successful in legitimizing all forms of

Blackness. Rather, I argue that the hip aesthetic that they perform carries the potential for a radically inclusive and capacious understanding of Blackness as complex and unending.

42 As Wilderson puts it, “‘Savage,’ Human, and Slave should be theorized in the way we theorize worker and capitalist as positions first and as identities second, or as we theorize capitalism as a paradigm rather than as an experience — that is, before they take on national origin or gendered specificity” (2010, 24).

In making this latter claim, I further intend to intervene in binary compartmentalizations of

Blackness as either pathological or pure. Epitomized by the competing ideas about Blackness at the core of both White bohemianism (with its romantic racism) and Black bohemianism (with its sanitizing responses to this racism), each of these categories has proven similarly harmful in their attempts to constrain Blackness within a narrow politics of racial representation. Tracing the ways that neo-bohemian rappers have refused to either blindly accept constructions of Black pathology, or reactively purify them, my dissertation instead foregrounds radical attempts by these artists to embrace Blackness in all of its complexity. Expanding on Darieck Scott’s (2010) theoretical affirmation of sexual abjection (as sexual freedom) and its escape from masculinist, heterosexist notions of authentic Blackness, I reorient his theory toward the broader set of “abject” practices entailed in certain claims to racial and hip-hop authenticity. Specifically, I examine how neo- bohemian rappers eschew the bourgeois racial politics of jazz/bohemian hip-hop by embracing, rather than positioning themselves in opposition to, the aesthetic and cultural markers of commercial rap styles. In this way, I argue, neo-bohemian rappers model new conceptions of

Blackness free from both racist notions of essential Black pathology and Black bourgeois codes of respectability. Their capacity to do so depends crucially on their reclamation of the Afro-modernist origins of Black hipness. This brings me to my fourth and final argument.

4) Rethinking Black Existence in an Anti-Black World

As I have suggested, Black Hippy’s deconstruction of dominant ideas about racial authenticity is inextricable from the project of reconceptualizing the terms of Black life. Indeed, as well as producing the conditions of possibility for such a conceptualization, neo-bohemian rappers further offer their own images of Black existence in an anti-Black world. Responding to traditional notions of hipness centering on ideals of counterculturalism, as well as the vast body of scholarship

that posits the unique capacity of music to sound Black political struggle for self-determination (see, for example, Gilroy 1993; Moten 2003; Collins 2006; Monson 2007; Sullivan 2011; Rabaka 2013;

Redmond 2013), I argue that understanding neo-bohemian hip-hop’s radical hip aesthetic requires thinking past these reflexive claims to social-cultural resistance.

In his 1961 essay “The Black Boy Looks at the White Boy,” a critical riposte to Norman

Mailer’s seminal, 1957 study of hipsterism, “The White Negro,” James Baldwin incisively captures the intersecting limits of White counterculturalism and Black cultural resistance narratives. Primarily,

Baldwin’s essay is concerned with critiquing the stylized nature of the White hipster’s politics of social refusal, as modeled around a fetishistic, romanticized image of Black social outsiderism:

“I am afraid that most of the white people I have ever known impressed me as being in the grip of a weird nostalgia, dreaming of a vanished state of security and order, against which dream, unfailingly and unconsciously, they tested and very often lost their lives. It is a terrible thing to say, but I am afraid that for a very long time the troubles of white people failed to impress me as being real trouble” (Baldwin 1998, 270).

In turn, if Baldwin’s essay chronicles his encounter with “those moments when Blackness inspires

White emancipatory dreams,” then it equally captures “how it feels to suddenly realize the impossibility of the inverse” (Wilderson 2010, 11). As Baldwin puts it, “there is a difference, though, between Norman and myself in that I think he still imagines that he has something to save, whereas

I have never had anything to lose” (1998, 270). Indeed, as I have argued, where the White hipster’s aspirational claim to social outsiderism depends upon reproducing and appropriating myths about

Black deviance, Black people have lacked the prerequisite insider social position from which to launch a politics of counterculturalism (see note 24). As such, when Baldwin describes the difference between Mailer and himself, he also captures a deeper ontological truth about the structure of U.S. antagonisms that intrinsically excludes Blackness from the countercultural project of hipness, normatively conceived. In this sense, narratives about Black cultural resistance fail to account for the overwhelming force through which Blackness is made to exist outside of civil society and thus

beyond the pale of resistance as a form of civic protest. In understanding, and grasping the possibility of more efficaciously navigating, this fundamental tension, it is helpful to turn once again to Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man — the figure who typifies the originary, radical form of hipness that

I view Black Hippy as reclaiming.43

Throughout the novel, the eponymous condition of invisibility suffered by Ellison’s narrator positions him as a figure susceptible to unaccountable and unwarranted acts of violence, the dissipation of social ties, and a generalized social disregard. In other words, his invisibility signals his

“social death,” or dehumanization and exclusion from civil society. Black studies scholars have theorized the centrality of such a condition to a Black ontology emerging in the wake of slavery (see

Spillers 1987; Hartman 1997; Wilderson 2010; Sexton 2011; Sharpe 2016; Anonymous 2017).

Departing from sociologist Orlando Patterson’s (1982) original concept of social death — which he defines as the ontological dehumanization of entire social groups as produced by slavery — these scholars argue that post-slave societies in fact maintain their coherence precisely through opposition to the Black’s/Slave’s ontology as non-human.44 And it is precisely this structure that explains

Baldwin’s sense of the exclusion of Blackness from the project of White hipness. As Frank

Wilderson puts it:

“It seems to me that the psychic dimension of a [White] proletariat who ‘stands in precisely the same relationship’ to other members of civil society due to their intramural exchange in mutual, possessive possibilities, the ability to own either a piece of Black flesh or a loaf of white bread or both, is where we must begin to understand the founding antagonism between the something Mailer has to save and the nothing Baldwin has to lose” (Wilderson 2010, 13).

43 For another take on the relationship between Black Hippy’s aesthetic and Ellison’s Invisible Man, see Winters (2020, 212–213). 44 From this perspective, we must reject movements for resistance against and social reform of post-slave societies as implicitly interested in the preservation of these very societies (Anonymous 2017, 11). Instead, understanding Black life requires the affirmation of social death and anti-Blackness (Sexton 2011; R.L. 2013), and liberation from this can come only after the complete destruction of the existing relationality between Blackness and humanity — that is, after the end of the world.

Perhaps surprisingly, in describing his condition of invisibility to the reader, Ellison’s narrator declares that “I am not complaining, nor am I protesting either,” a remark that commentators have treated as indicative of Ellison’s own bourgeois assimilationism (Ellison 1995, 3; see Vogler 1970, 64; Walling 1973, 120).45 Defined ontologically by his invisibility, the Invisible Man instead models the irreducible structural centrality of Black social death to the world as we know it.

And yet, he also radically exceeds his eponymous condition. Through his aforementioned obsession with and dependency upon light, the Invisible Man speaks to the possibility of working through, even while affirming, this condition, and thus finding a way of being in the world in spite of and alongside it. As the Invisible Man puts it, “I myself, after existing some twenty years, did not become alive until I discovered my invisibility” (Ellison 1995, 7).46 And Black studies scholars have similarly pushed back against theories of Blackness that give up at the point of social death. Rather, they have attempted to imagine alternative forms of Black “social life” emerging in the face of global anti-

Blackness and social death (see Sexton 2011; Moten 2013; Weheliye 2014).

As I explore throughout the dissertation, such projects are not without their limits.47 Most pertinently to my project, they frequently rely on a conflation of aesthetic and social processes, as in utopian ideas about the transcendent power of Black music to produce Black life, or the very notion of hipness as an “aesthetic of music and the self.” In developing my own take on Black sociomusicality, I draw closely on recent musicological interventions into this undercomplicated relationship (see Skinner 2015; Steingo 2016; Appert 2018; Okiji 2018), to work back toward the

45 As William Walling describes, while the novel is saturated throughout with scenes of protest, of which the Invisible Man is often at the center, “Invisible Man still suggests, inescapably through its ending, that any form of direct protest is inappropriate for the situation of its narrator” (Walling 1973, 133). 46 Indeed, Mailer would himself appear to have recognized this fundamental element of radical hipness, describing the White hipster’s appropriation of Blackness as signaling the fact of being able to “remain in life only by engaging death” (Mailer 1957, ¶II). The way that radical hipness straddles Whiteness and Blackness here, inviting the former into the realm of the latter, speaks to Moten and Harney’s revelation of Blackness as something “that can be taken on by anyone willing to relinquish claims on the world” (Okiji 2018, 53; see Harney and Moten 2015, 83). 47 For a staunch critique of even these minimally redemptive narratives that instead doubles down on the fundamental tenets of social death discourse, see Warren (2018).

possibility of placing aesthetic and social domains in a more critical dialogue with one another.

Pressing on, and digging into, Ford’s formulation of hipness as an aesthetic of music and the self, I break its constitutive elements apart in the process of reconstructing the pathways through which the aesthetics of neo-bohemian rap music (its beats and flow styles) and the aesthetics of the neo- bohemian self (as a set of lived postures) come to relate to one another. In doing so, I argue that neo-bohemian rappers both aesthetically theorize and socially model the terms of Black existence as taking shape in the hybridizing “zon[e] of indistinction” between social death and social life.48

Finally, while scholars like Spillers, Hartman, and Wilderson have focused largely on anti-

Blackness in the U.S. context, this racial structure might also be said to operate on a global level (see

Wilderson 2010, 3; Wilderson, Spatzek, and von Gleich 2016, 8, 17). Indeed, by drawing comparisons between neo-bohemian hip-hop and other African diasporic musics from the United

States, Mali, South Africa, and Senegal, I show how the potential of hipness for navigating anti-

Blackness extends throughout, even while facilitating new understandings of, the African diaspora.49

Existing theories of the diaspora can be broken down into two main schools of thought. The first,

“Africanist” school conceives of diasporic culture as the product of (more or less literally conceived) retentions from — or continuities with — an African homeland (see Herskovits 1990; Holloway

1990; Maultsby 1990; Apter 1991; Mintz and Price 1992; Okpewho, Boyce Davies, and Mazrui, eds.

1999; Walker, ed. 2001; Wilson 2001; Levine 2007; Okpewho and Nzegwu, eds. 2009). The second,

“Atlanticist” school rejects this nationalistic paradigm and instead theorizes a decentered yet integrated “Black Atlantic” culture existing in the throes of the Atlantic ocean (see Mercer 1987;

Gates 1988; Mercer 1988; Gilroy 1991; 1993). Despite the historical tension between these schools

48 On “zones of indistinction” vis-à-vis normative social “genres” (of, for example, the human), see Weheliye (2014, 2). In theorizing Blackness itself as a “major zon[e] of indistinction,” Weheliye describes it as “a vital (nonlegal) state of exception in the domain of modern humanity” (2014, 87). 49 Scholarship on African diasporic musics that informs my theorization of this aesthetic of existence includes Skinner (2015); Crawley (2016); Steingo (2016); Meintjes (2017); and Appert (2018).

of thought, however, these ways of thinking the diaspora are ultimately unified by a theoretical determinism that overdetermines the relationships between individual Black cultures and romanticizes their potential for political resistance (Edwards 2003; Pinto 2013; Appert 2016a;

2016b).

In contrast, I use hipness as a framework for thinking the diaspora together from the ground up in a nonessentialist mode that instead foregrounds the resonances between distinct experiences of global anti-Blackness, including mass incarceration and gratuitous police violence in the post- slave United States, necropolitical structures of governmentality in contemporary Mali, postcolonial urban marginalization in Senegal, and the dehumanizing violence of post-apartheid South Africa.

More specifically, this framework foregrounds the comparable aesthetic routes to freedom that musicians functioning within these anti-Black contexts carve out in the space between social death and social life.50 Clearly, my conception of this resonant aesthetic space relates closely to my reformulation of hipness in terms of cultural hybridity. In this sense, contrary to dominant characterizations of both hipness and hybridity as counter-hegemonic cultural forces, neo-bohemian hip-hop reflects a privileged, transnational mode of artistic expression that serves not as an aesthetic of re-sistance, but rather as a temporally and spatially resonating aesthetic of ex-istence. This brings me to the dissertation’s central theoretical claim. Responding to the historical evasiveness of this unwieldy aesthetic, I argue that understanding neo-bohemian hip-hop requires a new theory of hipness as an “African diasporic aesthetic of existence.”

50 Similarly, in his own challenge to existing ideas about diasporic connection, David F. García nonetheless holds on to the African origins of Black music and dance, while rehistoricizing the logic of this origin narrative, “revealing it to have been not so much a construct as to have involved individuated affects and desires taken up into the assemblage of modern living” (2017, 19).

Chapter Outline

The following four chapters each focus on a different member of Black Hippy, exploring in detail each member’s specific claim to hipness to offer a variety of perspectives on the aesthetics of existence in neo-bohemian hip-hop. At the same time, these chapter divisions quickly emerge as unstable, with the dissertation’s cast members slipping in and out of the broader narrative, frequently emerging to help shed light on issues discussed outside of their respective chapters.

Approaching the project’s narrative structure in this way allows me to present Black Hippy’s broadly unified project of neo-bohemianism, while engaging this project from a variety of contrasting standpoints. Furthermore, throughout the dissertation, I place the musical and existential aesthetics of neo-bohemian hip-hop in close dialogue with related musical practices from the United States,

Mali, Senegal, and South Africa. In this way, I work toward a new, relational theory of diasporic existence that centers the resonances between global experiences of anti-Blackness, as made manifest through disparate musical performances.

Beginning with the most legibly hip member of Black Hippy, Chapter One first traces Ab-

Soul’s multi-layered affinity with jazz/bohemian hip-hop, before exploring how he offsets this connection by performing it through and against his competing embrace of gangsta rap. I argue that, by producing a hybridizing, hip cultural space in between these discursively opposed rap genres,

Soul exemplifies the existential value of neo-bohemian hip-hop as an Afro-modernist alternative to both White hipness and Black bohemianism, and their inadvertent complicity in what he calls the mainstream neoliberal “Control System.” In the process, this chapter models a number of new routes to the aesthetic and social analysis of rap music while preparing the discursive interventions to come in the following chapters.

Next, departing from Soul’s relatively clear (if disruptive) claim to hipness, Chapters Two and Three turn to Jay Rock’s and ScHoolboy Q’s more contested interventions into this cultural

history. Taking these respective interventions as entry points into radical hipness, each chapter describes a distinctive, hip musical practice through which Black Hippy collectively channels exceptionally devalued forms of Blackness — and specifically forms of Blackness excluded from the realm of hipness — to locate ways of being in between the polarizing, racialized constraints of the

Control System. In Chapter Two, I examine Black Hippy’s shared reimagining of the hip-hop

“cypher” as a tool for musically theorizing the terms of Black life, alongside Jay Rock’s more personal reclamation of the “hustler” as an erased historical figure of hipness. In doing so, I challenge longstanding definitions of hip-hop performance practices such as the freestyle and the cypher, as well as ideas about their relationship to other African diasporic cultural practices, while offering a new, music-driven perspective on the fugitive terms of Black existence. Meanwhile,

Chapter Three explores Black Hippy’s practice of appropriating flow styles from existing songs while writing new lyrics over the top of them. By inspecting this palimpsestic performance practice through the lens of ScHoolboy Q’s extra-bodily self-positioning as an oxymoronic “groovy gangsta,”

I challenge existing ideas about Black embodiment in an anti-Black context, while theorizing the connection between this and other African diasporic musical practices as one rooted in the ontological specificities of the flesh.

Finally, Chapter Four presents Kendrick Lamar’s personal brand of neo-bohemian hip-hop as the cumulation of Black Hippy’s musical reclamation of hipness. Wedded fully to neither the objectionable hustler/gangsta figures represented by Jay Rock and ScHoolboy Q, nor the bohemian lineage to which Ab-Soul lays claim, Kendrick is uniquely positioned to bring the dissertation’s preceding chapters together into a holistic closing image of neo-bohemian hip-hop’s hip aesthetic.

Exemplifying Kendrick’s supreme brand of Afro-modernism is the wide range of performing voices through which he has crossed hip-hop subgenres with ease and subsequently come to position himself at the forefront of the culture as a whole. Challenging recent, anti-essentialist claims about

the impossibility of the Black voice, I present Kendrick Lamar’s many voices as in fact signaling a sonic ontology of Blackness, which culminates in the radical existential figure of the “Black Lip

Bastard.” Exploring this figure gives rise to a final turn away from conventional definitions of hipness as a countercultural aesthetic of re-sistance. Instead, taking my cue from the grass-roots social movement “HiiiPoWeR,” as made famous by Kendrick’s song of the same name, I make a case for rethinking hipness as a Black aesthetic of ex-istence. As I suggest in the postscript, the result is only one window into neo-bohemian hip-hop as a radical new hip-hop genre, long needed counterimage of hipness, and route to rethinking existence in the African diaspora.

CHAPTER ONE

“Welcome to the Control System”: Being and Becoming a Black Hippy

The music video to Ab-Soul’s 2011 single, “Gone Insane,” opens with the rapper sitting cross-legged in a field, wrists resting upon his knees as he meditates in the shadow of a tree.1 A filter effect isolates the psychedelic yellows and greens that swirl around the deep black of his unwieldy curls. Suddenly, the camera’s steady rightward pan speeds up, jolting the viewer into an entirely new setting. Now standing, dressed in a RIF.LA sweatshirt, black shades, and a fitted cap, Soul dances and raps in the midst of an engulfing black backdrop. The video proceeds to flick between these disparate settings even while elements from the former seep into the latter. Hip-hop Soul repurposes gang signs to convey his “out-there” allegiance to the all-seeing “third eye.” He bops and shuffles under the gaze of a kaleidoscope lens and waves a gun around while the image trails hallucinogenically behind. The glowing body in the field encroaches uneasily upon its own, displaced shadow. When the chorus finally lands, Soul explains the cause of this striking bodily overlay:

“I feel like Jimi Hendrix I feel like Kurt Cobain I feel like John Lennon … gone insane.”

The threads that connect the superstar subjects of Soul’s signifyin’ are shared mental health problems and untimely deaths. And yet, Soul’s invocation of these three specific figures also suggests another point of overlap: that of the long, interracial history of hipness.

Despite the apparent ease with which Soul invokes his connection to these hip figures, the

“Gone Insane” video highlights the contradictions underlying such comparisons. Similarly, while

Lennon rests comfortably as a posthumous icon of the flower power generation, Hendrix’s own

1 On March 24, 2020, this video could be accessed via Top Dawg Entertainment’s YouTube page: https://youtu.be/sGOhHA2gR0M.

such status is far more complicated. For Black Power activists of the 1960s, his pandering to White audiences marked him as a racial sell-out. Meanwhile, his hypersexualized on-stage persona invited critiques of neo-minstrelsy (Gilroy 1993, 93–94). From these overlapping perspectives, rather than becoming a Black Hippy, Hendrix merely served as fodder for the racist stereotypes at the core of

White hipness. Entering into this representational quagmire, it’s unsurprising that Soul has begun to feel like three different people — still less surprising that he has gone insane. Standing there rapping alongside ScHoolboy Q — his gang-banging labelmate — Soul, like Jimi, has to work to reconcile his bohemian sensibilities to his Blackness.

In this chapter, I examine the music of Ab-Soul — the member of Black Hippy who most obviously embodies this fraught label — as it exemplifies neo-bohemian hip-hop’s disruptive engagement with hipness. Understanding this engagement requires not only interrogating Soul’s complicated affinity with White hipness and its fetishistic consumption of Black stereotypes, but also thinking about his music in the context of neo-bohemian rap’s more immediate connection to the similarly constraining tradition of bourgeois Black bohemianism. By placing Ab-Soul alongside

Kendrick Lamar as the two members of Black Hippy who engage most directly with jazz/bohemian rap’s musical aesthetic, I show how the pair have positioned themselves to deconstruct the conservative ideology that the earlier genre represents.2 Indeed, despite Soul’s close connection to

White hipness and Black bohemianism, his struggle to become a hippy while holding on to his

Blackness entails a fundamental departure from both.

2 While Ab-Soul is the collective’s most obvious hippy, Kendrick also performs a close connection to jazz/bohemian rap (a connection that audiences and commentators reproduce in their reception of him). In this sense, two split pairings can be discerned within Black Hippy: Soul and Kendrick align more closely with jazz/bohemian rap, while commentators more often figure Jay Rock and ScHoolboy Q as the collective’s resident gangta rappers. As such, while this chapter focuses on Ab-Soul’s deconstruction of jazz/bohemian rap’s bourgeois bohemianism, Kendrick enriches the discussion throughout. Similarly, while Chapter Four focuses on Kendrick’s reconfiguration of hipness as an African diasporic aesthetic of existence, Soul returns as an important counterpart. Meanwhile, in the middle two chapters, Jay Rock and ScHoolboy Q serve to develop some intermediate logics on the path from Afro-modernism to the aesthetics of existence.

I begin the chapter by unpacking Soul’s striking connection to historical practices of hipness by both White hipsters and Black bohemians. By establishing this connection, I argue, Soul negotiates an authenticating space for himself within hip-hop culture, while taking care not to alienate those excepted Black communities (the gangsters and other symbols of Black excess) that such hip performances usually exploit or exclude. Building on this latter claim, part two examines how the forms of capital imbued in Soul’s positionality facilitate a democratizing intervention into conventional performances of hipness as a countercultural, high-art aesthetic. Focusing on the role of sound here, I show how Soul and Kendrick turn hipness on itself, returning to the musical style of jazz/bohemian rap while expanding on it in a way that produces a hybridizing, deconstructive space in between, amongst other things, mainstream and alternative, commercial and high-art hip- hop aesthetics. Finally, having established this difference between Soul and Kendrick on the one hand, and their jazz/bohemian forebears on the other, I consider the implications of neo-bohemian rap’s hybridizing aesthetic for imagining alternatives to the organizing social-cultural categories of

Western modernity that conventional performances of hipness both depend upon and sustain.

Resolving the tensions and constraints that characterize existing countercultural projects, I argue that neo-bohemian hip-hop opens a route toward alternative, Afro-modernist ways of being (and becoming) (a Black Hippy).

“I look more like a hippy than all of them”: Situating Ab-Soul

In a 2012 interview for Complex, Herbert Anthony Stevens IV, better known as Ab-Soul, discusses the years leading up to and following his recruitment into contemporary hip-hop supergroup, Black Hippy. Situating himself in relation to the collective’s other members, Soul describes his relatively affluent upbringing in the suburbs of Carson, California, where he grew familiar with the Black musical canon while working in his family’s record store. His own musical

career, he suggests, took off after friend and producer Sounwave (Mark Spears) introduced him to the Carson-based, independent record label Top Dawg Entertainment (TDE), founded in 2004 by

CEO Anthony “Top Dawg” Tiffith (Ahmed 2012c). By the time Soul joined the label in 2006, Top

Dawg had already signed Compton-born, future rap superstar Kendrick Lamar and Bounty Hunter

Blood Jay Rock (Johnny Reed McKinzie Jr.), from the Nickerson Gardens Projects in the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles. Following the addition of South Central Hoover Crip ScHoolboy Q

(Quincy Matthew Hanley) to the TDE roster in 2009, these four artists came together to form Black

Hippy, the flagship collective that would put TDE firmly on the map.

As the name Black Hippy suggests, members of the collective are unified through their shared engagements with hipness. Nonetheless, they perform hipness in different ways, to different extents, and, oftentimes, with different motivations. A case in point, in this section, I argue that Ab-

Soul primarily uses hipness to overcome issues of cultural (in)authenticity arising from his suburban upbringing and distance from “the street.” This practice constitutes a unique point of connection between Soul and the older generation of jazz/bohemian rappers who use hipness to redefine hip- hop authenticity on their own terms. This connection, however, is not absolute. In jazz/bohemian rap, such hip performances are rooted in a misappropriation of bebop as an imagined marker of high art status, culminating in a superficial and elitist pose with harmful consequences for the marginalized Black communities against which these artists have positioned themselves. By contrast,

Ab-Soul’s own engagement with jazz/bohemian rap’s alternative aesthetic is mediated through a far closer and more historical connection to bebop’s democratizing, Afro-modernist aesthetic.

Reclaiming Hip-Hop Authenticity

The close musical connection between jazz/bohemian rap and neo-bohemian rap emerges most obviously along two lines: their shared propensity for jazz-influenced beats, and their

remarkably similar flow (rapped delivery) styles.3 The first point of comparison is immediately evident in the myriad “jazz codes” — from saxophone and acoustic bass sounds to extended harmonies — that pervade albums like A Tribe Called Quest’s Beats, Rhymes and Life (1996) and

Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp a Butterfly (2015).4 The second claim, though, calls for some clarification.

To be precise, neo-bohemian rappers draw on the same, distinctive mixture of “sung” and

“percussion-effusive” rhythmic flow styles that Adam Krims attributes to jazz/bohemian rap (Krims

2000, 67–68). Ab-Soul’s featured verse in Kendrick Lamar (then K-Dot) and Jay Rock’s “Enjoy

Life” (2007) is exemplary.

From the outset, Soul’s phrasing resembles the sung rhythmic flow style, comprising repeated end rhymes that land predictably on beat four and fall into regular couplets. Meanwhile, he intersperses these end rhymes with mid-line landings that more immediately signal percussion- effusive flow (Example 1.1). Indeed, while effusive flow styles tend to “spill over the rhythmic boundaries of the meter,” the percussion-effusive style often shares in the rhythmic and metrical regularity of sung flow. For Krims, “what marks it out are the focused points of staccato and pointed articulation, often followed by brief caesuras that punctuate the musical texture and subdivide regular rhythmic units,” as is the case in Soul’s verse (Krims 2000, 48–54, 65–70).5 In its production of this stylistic slippage, Soul’s delivery uncannily recalls the sung/percussion-effusive flow style of A Tribe Called Quest’s Q-Tip. In fact, Tip’s opening verse in “Push It Along” (1990)

3 While existing studies (see Rose 1994; Walser 1995; Krims 2000; Kautny 2015) conceive of flow primarily in rhythmic terms, the rich nexus that I observe between hip-hop and performances of hipness reveals the possibility and value of a broader definition that accounts for various, deeply intertwined aspects of vocal delivery more generally. 4 On “jazz codes,” see Williams (2013, 54–64). 5 To understand this subtle difference between the sung and percussion-effusive rhythmic flow styles, it’s helpful to compare the opening two lines of Soul’s verse from “Enjoy Life” with the opening two lines of Run-DMC’s “It’s Tricky” (1986). Where, in the latter, the flow follows a clear end-line caesura pattern (a characteristic of the sung rhythmic style heard in party rap), the double time effect in “Enjoy Life” means that we hear Soul’s verse as comprising not only end-, but also mid-line caesuras (shifting it into the percussion-effusive style).

uses an almost identical metrical pattern (Example 1.2).6 The fact that “Enjoy Life” takes its beat from Tribe’s “Electric Relaxation” (1993) emphasizes this connection.

Example 1.1. K-Dot and Jay Rock, “Enjoy Life,” feat. Ab-Soul, verse 3, measures 1–2 Beat: (4) 1 2 3 4

Ab-Soul: (I’m still re-) flectin’ on the death o’ mission of the better

1 2 3 4 Only when it’s necce- ssary if it’s ever

Example 1.2. A Tribe Called Quest, “Push It Along,” verse 1, measures 1–2

Beat: 1 2 3 4 Q-Tip: Q-Tip is my title, I don’t think that it’s vital for

1 2 3 4 Me to be your idol, but dig this re- cital

Next, in measure five, Soul switches up his delivery with a shift toward the sharp, “off-beat attacks” and “counter-metric gestures” that typify more idiomatic uses of percussion-effusive flow.

In so doing, he frustrates the regularity of the preceding pattern by placing stresses on beats one

(“hip”) and four (“fed”), and between beats two and three (“fuck”), creating a sudden moment of increased syncopation (Example 1.3). Again, Soul’s delivery here evokes the flow style of Q-Tip, whose own tendency to infuse sung rhythms with sudden moments of heightened, percussion- effusive irregularity is illustrated in “Keeping It Moving” (1996) (see Krims 2000, 50–51, 67).

6 For a similar analysis of “Push It Along,” see Kautny (2015, 104–105).

Example 1.3. K-Dot and Jay Rock, “Enjoy Life,” feat. Ab-Soul, verse 3, measure 5

Beat: 1 2 3 4 Ab-Soul: Hip-hop forever, fuck ‘em and whoever fed ‘em

Notably, Krims groups the sung and percussion-effusive rhythmic styles together as “the more ‘musical’ […] manners of MCing,” in contrast to “those closer to ‘natural’ speech,” such as the

“speech-effusive” rhythmic style that characterizes jazz/bohemian rap’s “golden age” contemporaries, such as KRS-One, Rakim, and LL Cool J, whom artists and audiences alike continue to hold up as models of hip-hop’s authentic heyday (see Krims 2000, 48–54). In combination with their jazz-influenced beats, then, this distinctive flow style unifies jazz/bohemian and neo-bohemian rap, while and by marking them as distinct from other hip-hop styles. In particular, it demarcates rappers like Ab-Soul as working against mainstream hip-hop narratives of authenticity, which center upon a connection to the street (as opposed to the suburbs), and an embodiment of masculine hardness (as opposed to feminine softness) (see McLeod 1999, 142–143).

By Ab-Soul’s own admission, his suburban upbringing makes him the member of Black

Hippy most distanced from these traditional, social-locational and gender-sexual markers of hip-hop authenticity (Ahmed 2012c). And this distance is something that he shares with groups like De La

Soul, whose members grew up in the suburbs of Long Island, away from the burning South Bronx tenements and Brooklyn and Queens housing projects where hip-hop took shape (Krims 2000, 68–

70). (This de-authenticating positionality stands in contrast to that of Kendrick, who grew up in

Compton, California, the veritable home of gangsta rap.) From this perspective, Soul’s construction of his own sense of self in relation to artists like De La Soul, Jimi Hendrix, and John Lennon signals more than an unlikely assortment of trans-historical affinities; it also signals Soul’s place within a

complex genealogy of hip performances that imbues him with a powerful, alternative source of cultural authenticity.

In her book Club Cultures (1995), cultural sociologist Sarah Thornton speaks to the productive, authenticating capacity of hipness. Expanding upon Pierre Bourdieu’s ideas about systems of cultural classification, and specifically his theorization of the different forms of capital implicated in these systems, Thornton theorizes hipness as an additional type of “subcultural capital” that “confers status on its owner in the eyes of the relevant beholder” (Thornton 1995, 11). Within hip-hop culture, this idealized “relevant beholder” comprises the fans, artists, and critics who sustain powerful myths about hip-hop’s origins as an oppositional Black subculture. Performances of hipness, here, thus align with another core set of authenticating tropes within hip-hop culture that privilege the “underground” over the “commercial” and the “old school” over the “mainstream.”

These tropes have both functioned alongside and, in some instances, served to overwrite gangsta rap’s characteristic focus on the streets and hard masculinity. The result of this shift is what musicologist J. Griffith Rollefson (2017, 7) calls a “good hip-hop/bad hip-hop” binary, through which artists, fans, and commentators discursively elevate alternative rap styles like jazz/bohemian rap over their inauthentic commercial cousins.7

As the institutionalization of this binary evinces, hipness provides rappers with a historical source of cultural authority that has the capacity to interrupt normative hip-hop authenticity markers. It follows that, if Soul is the member of Black Hippy most distanced from gangsta rap’s privileged form of masculine hardness, then he is also the member who most purposefully foregrounds legible performances of hipness. As he puts it in a section from the aforementioned

Complex interview on “Being the Mascot of Black Hippy”:

7 This hip-hop binary represents more fundamentally what Isaac Julien and Kobena Mercer (1996, 456) critique as a “‘positive/negative’ image polarity” constructed between Black cultures.

“In essence, I look more like a hippy than all of them. So that’s basically what that stems from. I could have sat next to John Lennon and talked about it. I think he was a big part of that whole rebellious people movement in that particular time period. I think I more represent that hippy-ish thing. And I'm cool with that” (Ahmed 2012c).

Of course, Soul’s very staging of a comparison between himself and an archetypical “hippy” suggests an unresolved tension here — the same (racialized) tension that is dramatized in the “Gone

Insane” video and signaled by the requisite premodifier in Black Hippy (see Introduction). In fact, while Soul’s appearance and philosophy might recall White hippies like John Lennon, this connection cannot overwrite the specific, historical ideas about cultural authority tied up in Black bohemianism that both Ab-Soul and jazz/bohemian rappers have made use of in reclaiming hip-hop authenticity.

One of the most revealing markers of this work is Ab-Soul’s self-imposed nickname, the

“Abstract Asshole” — an alias that invites comparison with A Tribe Called Quest frontman Q-Tip, who goes by the title “The Abstract.” This shared moniker signals a core stylistic trait that Ab-Soul shares with jazz/bohemian rappers in his propensity for abstract intellectualism.8 And this sort of intellectual posturing is a defining feature of conventional performances of hipness. For instance, literary critic Anatole Broyard’s 1948 essay “A Portrait of the Hipster” describes an archetypical

Black jazz musician who defines himself through an “a priori” knowledge that allows him to see through the illusory norms of mainstream society, providing him with an “indefinable authority” that subverts his subjugated social status. A route to “somewhereness” in a world that would relegate him to the realm of “nowhere,” this a priorism manifests most obviously as “one of the basic ingredients” of the hipster’s characteristic, signifyin’ “jive talk” (Broyard 2010; see also Saul

2003, 44).

8 Of course, Soul’s addition of the modifier, “Asshole,” further inflects this association, a point to which I return below.

Self-consciously political and brimming with pointed social commentary, Ab-Soul’s music could easily be mistaken for taking the hipster’s a priorism as an aspirational goal. At the same time, this sort of hip performance has not gone unchallenged. For Broyard himself, the “indefinable authority” of the hip pose is indefinable precisely because it’s an illusion: a delusory form of escapism that ultimately has no bearing on reality. And nowhere is this truer, for Broyard, than in bebop’s self-consciously abstruse musical aesthetic (Broyard 2010). As Scott Saul puts it, “judged according to either [personal or societal constructions of] authenticity, Broyard’s hipster was a failure. […] The bebop dodge, in Broyard’s mind, kept the hipster from truly confronting the racial stereotypes that he objected to; he had removed the minstrel mask but could get no true self-image because he had entered a world of abstraction, a house of mirrors” (Saul 2003, 53). In other words, in a damning display of style over substance, the form of transcendent, a priori knowledge at the core of the bebop musician’s style offered no transformative critical analysis of racism, and failed to extricate him from structures of racial violence.

Broyard’s critique would seem to extend naturally to the abstract a priorism of not only jazz/bohemian rappers, with their stylized attempts at self-elevation, but also Ab-Soul. Indeed, as I show in the next section, the close musical connection between jazz/bohemian and neo-bohemian rap grows in large part out of their comparable claims to bebop. However, while jazz/bohemian rappers draw upon prevailing ideas about bebop as an archetypical display of hip counterculturalism,

Black Hippy’s own musical style speaks to a very different engagement with both bebop and hipness. By revealing the instability of jazz/bohemian rap’s particular claim to bebop, I instead position neo-bohemian rap’s musical aesthetic as a reclamation of the deconstructive, Afro- modernist origins of hipness. This difference accounts for the radical, democratizing potential of

Soul’s own hip aesthetic, allowing him to overcome the limits of conventional performances of hipness — and Black bohemianism in particular.

Re(dis)covering Bebop: The Limits of Hip Authenticity

If jazz/bohemian rappers and neo-bohemian rappers share in an aesthetic distance from mainstream and commercial rap styles, the symbolic uses to which they put this distance diverge at a fundamental level. In jazz/bohemian rap, this distinctive musical aesthetic signals the alternative, countercultural positionality conventionally associated with hipness. And it does so, moreover, while and by facilitating the genre’s aesthetic claims to bebop — the cultural moment that Broyard critiques as epitomizing this illusory stance.9 The most frequently-cited instance of such a claim occurs on A Tribe Called Quest’s “Excursions,” from The Low End Theory (1991). Rapping over a bass line sampled from Art Blakey and the Jazz Messenger’s “A Chant for Bu” (1973), Q-Tip recites the following famous lines:

“Back in the days when I was a teenager, be- -fore I had status and before I had a pager You could find The Abstract listening to hip-hop, my Pops used to say it reminded him of bebop.”

Through this performative revelation of bebop’s and hip-hop’s intergenerational ties, Tip reverse engineers an origin story for his own prominent musical connection to jazz. The suggestion is that, while most rappers have missed the close bond between bebop and hip-hop, his music (and jazz/bohemian rap in general) uncovers and restores this overlooked connection.10 Through this powerful rhetorical move, Tip elevates “hip-hop” by connecting it to (an idea of) bebop, while simultaneously converting the very term “hip-hop” into an exclusionary cypher for his own “high art” brand of the music.

9 On jazz/bohemian rap’s connection to jazz, and bebop in particular, see Krims (2000, 65–70); Perchard (2011, 283– 295); Rabaka (2012, 99–165); Williams (2013, 47–72). Indeed, we might understand the double time, syncopated sound of sung/percussion-effusive flow as a hip-hop equivalent of bebop’s distinctive sound (see note 5). 10 Q-Tip wouldn’t be alone in believing this. For a similar claim about hip-hop’s general “amnesia” with regard to its indebtedness to jazz, and “jazz rap” as an exception to this, see Rabaka (2012, 99–165).

Above all else, it is this musical connection that serves as the basis for jazz/bohemian rap’s claims to hipness. As musicologist Justin Williams describes, jazz/bohemian rappers have participated in wider attempts since the 1980s to construct bebop as a form of high art — or

“America’s classical music” (Williams 2013, 47–72; see Taylor 1986; Brown 2002). In turn, they have used their imagined connection to jazz to elevate their own music as an alternative, high-art genre that functions in opposition to mainstream and commercial styles. This project, however, has not been as successful as Q-Tip might imagine. As Williams describes, the “jazz codes” upon which jazz/bohemian rappers draw share only a vague association with jazz (vaguer still with bebop), and indeed frequently derive more directly from funk and soul (Williams 2013, 47–49, 52–64). Moreover, the hip, elevated cultural associations that jazz/bohemian rappers attribute to these codes are similarly distorted. As I describe in the Introduction, ideas about bebop as an inherently countercultural, high art form overlook the competing, commercial aspirations of bebop’s practitioners that nuance and complicate such narratives (see DeVeaux 1997, 12–17, 168–171; Szalay

2012, 23). In this sense, the specific image of bebop upon which Black bohemians like Q-Tip have based their own hip aesthetic, and which Broyard critiques as an illusory attempt to evade mainstream society’s dragnet of racial stereotypes (“the bebop dodge”), is an incomplete one at best.

Indeed, expanding on Broyard’s critique, others have argued that, far from being — as

Broyard supposes — abstracted from mainstream society, performances of hipness on both sides of the color line have inadvertently, and all too materially, engaged in its insidious racial logics.11 As Saul describes, “by the end of the 1960s, ‘hip’ had moved from a form of African-American and

11 Cultural commentators since the 1970s have extended Broyard’s critique of the Black jazz musician across racial lines, describing what they perceive as the purely symbolic nature of all hip performances. In this view, hipsters and their chroniclers alike mistake stylized, ironic gestures for real world politics and miss counterculturalism’s transformation into an increasingly mainstream sensibility. For critiques of hipness as style over substance, see McCann and Szalay (2005); Szalay (2012); Hill (2017). For a summary of and pushback against these critiques, see Konstantinou (2016, 33–34). I engage more closely with Konstantinou’s pushback in the Introduction.

bohemian dissent to become the very language of the advertising world” (Saul 2003, 32; see also

Frank 1997). In the years that followed, hipness would become deeply intertwined with the encroaching market logics of neoliberalism, not only failing to provide a revolutionary response to oppressive mainstream social structures, but ultimately reproducing them. Following Michel

Foucault’s conception of neoliberalism as “a form of governance in which people effectively govern themselves,” art historian Wes Hill goes so far as to describe the contemporary hipster as an exemplary Foucauldian “entrepreneur of the self” (Hill 2017, 100–103; see Foucault 1980; 2008).

Somewhat paradoxically, this reality has given rise to the notion that it is in fact mainstream cultural forms like gangsta rap that have presented more radical, structural critiques of society. For instance, engaging Stuart Hall’s ideas about Black popular culture and ethnicity, Eithne Quinn responds to the Black elite’s myopic critiques of gangsta rap and flawed self-uplift narratives by suggesting that, in the early 1990s, it was in fact gangsta rap that displayed the more critical apprehension of violent mainstream social structures (Quinn 2000, 195–216; see Hall 1992; 1996b).

Relatedly, musicologist David Clarke argues that, by reveling in and refusing to apologize for its own

“obscenity,” gangsta rap might be said to occupy one pole in a democratizing dialectic that acknowledges and preserves high and low culture designations while voiding them of a priori power differentials through a radical, pluralist affirmation of each pole in its own right (Clarke 2007, 36).

Both of these perspectives on gangsta rap, however, are limited in the form of organic social critique that they read into the music.

Beginning with Clarke, if the “strong relativism” that generates his dialectic might allow low, popular culture to exist, democratically, on its own terms, alongside high culture, then his underdeveloped racial analysis mystifies the irreconcilability of Black culture (as something that is always at once inside and outside of Western society) to the “democratic antagonism” that he

theorizes (see Clarke 2007, 15–17, 40).12 Despite (and indeed through) nods to Public Enemy, gangsta rap, Chuck Berry, Little Richard, and the postcolonial theory of Satya Mohanty and Kofi

Agawu, Clarke’s broad-based attempt at reimagining the high/low culture dialectic ultimately fails to account for the unique positionality of Black culture in the West. His ideological challenge to postmodernism and cultural pluralism is rooted in a desire to hold on to the questions of modernity

— and specifically ones about humanity, alienation, and exploitation — which, in his mind, “if anything […] have become more urgent in our new century” (Clarke 2007, 5, 14). This perspective betrays an allegiance to a Eurocentric conception of Humanism and modernity based upon White

(Master/Settler) concerns (i.e. the so-called “antagonisms” at the core of class/labor exploitation and the extant cultural hierarchies that they sustain). But questions about alienation and exploitation mystify the ontological experience of the Slave (see Wilderson 2010, 14).

Indeed, following Saidiya Hartman (1997), Frank Wilderson shows that “political ontology, as imagined though Humanism, can only produce discourse that has as its foundation alienation and exploitation as a grammar of suffering, when what is needed (for the Black, who is always already a

Slave) is an ensemble of ontological questions that has as its foundation accumulation and fungibility as a grammar of suffering” (2010, 55). As such, what Clarke (following Žižek) calls antagonisms,

Wilderson (following Hartman) downgrades to the level of conflicts (the very social-critical level that

Clarke hopes to escape in the first place) (Clarke 2007, 29; Wilderson 2010, 2–3). Clarke’s call for a

“productive adversariality” through which to “hold on to your own position while registering its own negation by the position of the other” (2007, 40) ignores the unidirectionality of this process when it plays out between Master and Slave. His call for “self-reflexivity on all sides” (2007, 16) obscures the impossibility of the cultural democracy in service of which such gestures would

12 On the inside/outside dynamic of Black culture in the West, see Gilroy (1993, 29); Goosman (1997, 81); Weheliye (2005, 5).

function. While Clarke implies that Public Enemy (or Chuck Berry, or Little Richard) might just as easily stand in for his chosen example of low culture (Elvis) (2007, 6, 29), and while he acknowledges that race “might” complicate such a substitution (2007, 22), the Whiteness of his model is less incidental than it is constitutive; conversely, substituting in Public Enemy (or, better yet, a gangsta rapper) might have brought him closer to solving his core dilemma — “how are we to live, to act, to be, in our contemporary world?” (2007, 6) — by forcing him to come up with answers that are accountable to (anti-)Blackness.

In her own answer to Clarke’s question, Quinn does center gangsta rap. However, even while

Quinn stresses the vitality of gangsta rap’s aesthetic relative to that of jazz/bohemian rap, she acknowledges that the music to which she refers (N.W.A’s trailblazing gangsta rap) nonetheless remained — like Clarke’s analysis — “deeply implicated in the structures it exposed,” while possessing its own narrow conceptions of racial authenticity (Quinn 2000, 212). Indeed, contrary to ideas about hip-hop as a subversive Black counterpublic, rap music has long served as a mechanism for rearticulating and revalorizing mainstream neoliberal ideology within what political scientist

Lester Spence calls the Black parallel public. In Spence’s analysis, this work plays out most obviously through the symmetry between neoliberalism’s ethical privileging of hard work and hip-hop’s enduring valorization of the “hustler” figure — arguably epitomized by gangsta rap’s iconicized drug dealers. The result is a semi-discrete and ideological permeable biopolitical system that Spence calls

“crack governmentality” (Spence 2011, 27, 38; see also Spence 2016), which, in its claims to reconcilability with the social mainstream, is unable to sustain a radical social critique — hence, the subtitle of Spence’s book, “the limits of hip-hop and black politics.”

In fact, Spence further refines his definition of crack governmentality through reference to another group of rappers, working somewhere in between gangsta rap and jazz/bohemian rap — what he, following Imani Perry, terms “argumentative realists,” offering Public Enemy as his main

example — who have worked to question the hustler’s claims to mainstream reformability while redefining the parallel public of crack governmentality on their own terms (Spence 2011, 46–53; see also Perry 2004, 97). In musicologist Justin Burton’s interpretation, “argumentative realists perform

[…] as experts on the urban communities they come from, but instead of valorizing the drug game as entrepreneurial […] they […] critique the systemic problems that lead to the criminalization of black men and the unfairness of the US justice system. This critique often incorporates a post-race component (though Spence doesn’t use this term) that recommends individual solutions to institutionalized problems” (Burton 2017, 60). In this view, the case of argumentative realist rap clarifies the limits of gangsta rap’s transformative political potential, even while containing its own political limitations — namely, a post-racial politics.

Pace Burton, however, post-racialism is far from the first term that comes to mind when thinking about artists like Public Enemy (perhaps explaining why Spence himself eschews the term); if argumentative realists naively push for self-uplift in the face of institutional racism, they regularly do so in a way that nonetheless foregrounds the problems of race and racism in the United States.13

The real limitation of argumentative realist rap, then, is that its engagement in neoliberal uplift ideology functions squarely in line with (and offers no meaningful critique of) the biopolitics of crack governmentality, even while being excluded from the same civil society of other biopoliticized subjects.

In contrast, speaking more closely to Burton’s charge of post-racialism is jazz/bohemian rap, whose representatives certainly do engage in the sort of post-racial self-uplift ideology that he describes, bringing us back to the political limitations of jazz/bohemian rap and the hipster as an entrepreneur of the self. When groups like De La Soul critique gangsta rappers for reproducing

13 Thanks are due to Ben Piekut for pointing out this oversight and thereby sharpening the distinction that I make between argumentative realist and jazz/bohemian rap.

stereotypes about Black pathology, they reject altogether the biopolitical formation of crack governmentality and its underworld appeals to mainstream neoliberal ethics. Instead, their reproduction of post-race self-uplift ideology occurs exclusively through their countercultural hip pose (an updated version of what Broyard calls the “bebop dodge”), which ostensibly allows them, unlike their thug counterparts, to thrive within (or parallel to) mainstream society.

Expanding on Burton, then, we might think of jazz/bohemian rap as producing another parallel public entirely. Indeed, Burton himself alludes to this possibility, arguing that when “that post-race component [that he locates in argumentative realist rap] is amplified […] argumentative realist rappers […] coalesce into a black parallel public that runs counter to crack governmentality”

(2017, 60). Modifying this formulation slightly in light of the above, I would argue that what Burton is really observing here is not the work of argumentative realist rappers at all (who remain firmly within crack governmentality), but rather that of jazz/bohemian rappers (who performatively reject the mainstream neoliberal ethos that seeps into this biopolitics). And this double-edged, insider/outsider dynamic is nothing other than the story of Black bohemianism writ large. As I describe in the Introduction, while White hipsters appropriate Black outsiderness in order to renegotiate their place within mainstream society, Black bohemians possess no such a priori access to the mainstream. As such, their attempts to launch a hip, countercultural critique from within their

Black parallel public inevitably collapse into a reification of traditional, conservative Black political ideals and their appeals to the White mainstream (the paradox of Black bohemianism). And the

White mainstream has accepted these appeals with open arms, leaving jazz/bohemian rappers on the winning side of the good hip-hop/bad hip-hop binary.

Given his close connection to jazz/bohemian rap and emphatic claims to hipness, it is unsurprising that, in the contemporary moment, Ab-Soul has brought the post-race parallel public to its extremes. This cumulative work is most evident in Control System (2012), his pointed, album-length

critique of mainstream society’s invasive practices of hyper-surveillance, through which process citizens become “chattel” of the State and a source of massive revenue for society’s most powerful.

On the tellingly titled “Pineal Gland” (a reference to the all-seeing so-called “third eye”), Soul conceives of this system in the distinctly self-effacing terms of post-racialism: “we in a space where matter don’t matter, just/ Spirit molecules and geometric patterns.” Such sentiments exemplify the politics of postracialism (wherein race indeed ceases to matter) while, in the context of a song thematizing the third eye, wedding this politics to the exclusionary, elevated, and self-elevating language of hipness. Indeed, this sort of language frequently serves as a vehicle for Soul’s claim to a heightened, a priori awareness of the Control System: “Two words for you, brother: control system.

Simple as that. Everything that is mandatory in this country is a control system […] I just think I’m one of the people that’s kind of aware of that” (Hunte 2012). Again, this performative apprehension of the Control System resonates closely with post-race ideology: by invoking ideas about human ownership, Soul conflates technologies of subjectivity and subjection, painting Whites and Blacks as experiencing governmentality in the same ways.14 Only the hipster — with his ability to see through its governing technologies — remains free.

That being said, if Soul is neo-bohemian rap’s self-professed hippy-in-residence, Burton shows that today’s hip-hop audiences and commentators have more commonly valorized Kendrick

Lamar as heir to the “good hip-hop” tradition of conscious (and more specifically, I would add, jazz/bohemian) rap. Indeed, in Burton’s view, it is specifically Kendrick who amplifies what he views as argumentative realism’s post-racialism into a new, counter-parallel public, citing Kendrick’s myopic critiques of so-called “black on black crime” in songs like “The Blacker the Berry” (2015).

As Burton puts it, while, at the end of the song, Kendrick appears to critique his own hypocritical participation in street violence, “he isn’t calling himself a hypocrite; he’s standing in for a certain

14 On the difference between technologies of subjectivity and technologies of subjection, see Spence (2011, 24–28).

kind of blackness and calling that hypocritical” (2017, 53–62). Here, the argumentative realist’s social critique slips into a politics of self-uplift wherein, once again, race and racism do not matter.

Rendering this post-race politics fully explicit on 2017’s “YAH.,” Kendrick raps: “I’m an Israelite, don’t call me Black no more, that/ word is only a color; it ain’t facts no more.” As Kendrick moves to erase Blackness entirely, he gives rise to a parallel public and mode of reformability entirely separate from crack governmentality — one that, with Kendrick, “hinges entirely on his post-race politics” (Burton 2017, 60–61).

On the surface, then, Soul’s and Kendrick’s post-race hip politics fail to account for the violence with which Blackness is made to exist en masse in ways that do matter. At the same time, however, a yet unexplored difference exists between these artists and their jazz/bohemian forebears.

And, as is suggested by the label neo-bohemian, this difference is best understood in relation to the contrasting claims that these groups of artists make to hipness as an aesthetic, and more specifically the contrasting claims that they make to bebop as the point of crystallization for this aesthetic.

Indeed, if jazz/bohemian rap’s post-race parallel public grows directly out of a (mis)appropriation of bebop’s hip pose, then neo-bohemian rappers have marked their difference from jazz/bohemian rap through a far more substantive aesthetic engagement with bebop and the jazz styles that grew out of it. In grasping this difference, then, we need to take a closer look at the musical relationship between jazz/bohemian and neo-bohemian rap as they relate to bebop.

Perhaps the most obvious point of divergence, here, is in the way that the two groups of artists use their voices within jazz-coded musical settings. Where jazz/bohemian rappers simply approximate the “rhythms of […] instrumental playing” (Krims 2000, 67), members of Black Hippy fully embed their vocal lines into ensemblic textures in which the rapping voice plays a fundamentally instrumental role. In their interludes and outros, this entrenchment reaches such an extreme that other stylistic aspects derived from jazz/bohemian flow disappear, leaving in their wake

a striking vocal instrumentality indebted to bebop and its musical descendants. The music of John

Coltrane in particular comes to mind.

A notable example is “Ab-Soul’s Outro,” from Kendrick Lamar’s debut studio album

Section.80 (2011), which hardly sounds like a rap song at all.15 The song opens with a cymbal crash that settles quickly into a swung ride pattern — a percussive texture that solidified with the emergence of bebop in which the ride cymbal maintains the beat’s pulse amidst sporadic bass drum

“bombs.”16 A modal saxophone riff soon enters the mix, followed by extended keyboard harmonies.

From the outset, then, producer Terrace Martin begins to build on the generic and decontextualized jazz codes heard in jazz/bohemian rap by locating the song specifically within the post-bebop sound world of the mid-1960s. Ab-Soul then develops this generic reference in a manner entirely unheard in jazz/bohemian rap by modelling his extended, rapped free verse upon a small-combo texture rooted in the bebop idiom in which he takes on the role of soloist improvising over a typical rhythm section. By delivering his rhymes through an alternation of abrasively fast, staccato streams of syllables with sudden moments of motivic clarity, Soul skillfully executes a hip-hop versioning of a bebop horn solo.

In this way, Soul’s flow style comes to align far more closely with bebop than anything heard in jazz/bohemian rap. In the next section, I will show how this striking musical connection points toward a conception of hipness that exists in tension with the unstable, elitist ideals at the core of jazz art ideology and Black bohemianism. Encapsulating this disruptive process is musicologist

Guthrie P. Ramsey, Jr.’s theorization of the bebop sound as a form of Afro-modernism (Ramsey

2003, 96–130). While Ramsey does not use the word hipness specifically, his theory of Afro-

15 Other good examples include “Kendrick Lamar’s Interlude” from Ab-Soul’s third studio album, These Days… (2014), and Kendrick Lamar’s “For Free? (Interlude)” from To Pimp a Butterfly. 16 Tellingly, Eric Lott theorizes this development in drumming technique as an example of hip musical expression (Lott 1988, 600–601).

modernism as a set of African American, hybridizing cultural responses to the experience of modernity is almost identical to Ford’s description of the early origins of hipness.17 Ramsey’s description even aligns with the a priorism that Ford (following Broyard) pinpoints at the core of hip expression. In Ramsey’s words, bebop’s “complexity and the mental challenge it required became ‘signs of reason,’ signs of mental and creative prowess” in a world that would otherwise deny such signs of life in the midst of Blackness (Ramsey 2003, 108; see Ford 2013, 76–77). But

Ramsey also shows how bebop went beyond this function in a way that later appropriations of its hip aesthetic have obscured. By blurring the lines between the emergent musical categories of “art,”

“pop,” and “folk,” bebop did not merely evade Western modernity; rather, it served to deconstruct the latter’s organizing cultural-epistemological categories upon which dominant ideas about hipness as a form of authoritative countercultural critique depend (Ramsey 2003, 96–130).

In what follows, I examine neo-bohemian rap’s own Afro-modernist aesthetic in order to reveal how, if Soul and Kendrick bring the post-race parallel public to its extremes, then they also bring it to its limits. Indeed, despite the urgency with which Burton critiques Kendrick’s post-race multiracialism, he is careful to limit such critiques to Kendrick’s reception and lyrics. And he readily invites that Kendrick’s musical aesthetic might well exceed this conservative ideology (Burton 2017,

49). Picking up where Burton leaves off, I show exactly how Kendrick and Ab-Soul do this work in both their music and lyrics. If Kendrick has not been above levelling post-racial critiques at the “kind of blackness” represented by the gangster/hustler, then elsewhere he has staked a lyrical, musical, and above all ethical affirmation of this figure. Similarly, while Ab-Soul has desperately sought an alternative source of hip-hop authenticity, he has repeatedly refused to allow this to take place at the expense of gangsta rappers. In this sense, Soul’s deeply racialized critique of the forces of

17 As I discuss in the Introduction, Ford himself gestures briefly toward this connection between hipness and Afro- modernism, before dismissing it in favor of a regrettably whitewashed genealogy of hip responses to modernity (see Ford 2013, 25–26).

governmentality reflects his (and Black Hippy’s) production of a more critical form of hipness that exceeds Foucauldian analyses of the hipster as an entrepreneur of the self. If the neoliberal individualism of hipness and the conservativism of Black bohemianism coalesce into a multilayered post-racialism that works at the expense of disempowered communities, then Soul and Kendrick rework these sensibilities into more fluid and democratic aesthetic forms.

Beats, Rhymes and Life (Revisited): Neo-bohemian Rap’s Afro-modernist Aesthetic

What does it mean to talk about neo-bohemian rap’s musical aesthetic as Afro-modern? Up to now, I have considered the political limits of jazz/bohemian rap’s claims to hipness, while observing that gangsta rap too has historically failed to provide a radical alternative to mainstream society.18 In other words, contrary to Clarke’s ideas about gangsta rap’s generation of a strong relativism that voids high/low cultural designations of their a priori power differentials, the opposition between jazz/bohemian rap and gangsta rap more accurately produces what Dick

Hebdige calls a “frozen dialectic” between high and low art — “a dialectic which beyond a certain point […] is incapable of renewal, trapped, as it is, within its own history, imprisoned within its own irreducible antinomies” (1979, 69–70). It is Black Hippy’s Afro-modernist aesthetic that points to the possibility of thawing this dialectic.

On first glance, neo-bohemian rap’s close musical connection to jazz/bohemian rap suggests a mutual participation in the same, hip parallel public. However, working alongside, in tension with, and in excess of their own post-race politics, Soul and Kendrick have simultaneously carved out social-cultural space for the gangsta rappers and other excepted figures in opposition to which Black bohemians have historically claimed their social status. It is in this sense that neo-bohemian rap’s

18 As I will discuss, however, other scholars have shown how more recent commercial hip-hop genres (particularly “trap”) have offered more radical alternatives to Western liberal humanism (see Burton 2017; McCarthy 2018).

deconstructive musical style comes to align with bebop’s own Afro-modernist aesthetic. The result is a fluid and capacious conception of hip-hop authenticity that works in (the) excess(es) of both mainstream rap’s violent masculinism and alternative rap’s bourgeois patriarchalism.

Importantly, neo-bohemian rappers do not generate this inbetween space simply by performing both high-art and commercial aesthetics. To do so would simply reproduce the very hierarchical cultural divisions that flounder in the face of Afro-modernism. Rather, in this section, I argue that neo-bohemian rappers nuance their apparent connection to jazz/bohemian rap’s high-art aesthetic by infecting it with the lowly aesthetic trappings of commercial rap: first, through their embrace of singing and its association with cultural inauthenticity; and second, through their engagement in the maligned practice of creative drug use. These practices not only grow out of and deform jazz/bohemian rap’s own musical style but, as Afro-modernist stylistic markers, correspond closely with bebop’s own musical expressions of hipness. Through the dynamics of musical reproduction and disruption vis-à-vis jazz/bohemian rap, and musical return vis-à-vis bebop, neo- bohemian rappers hold on to the symbolic capital of hipness, while repurposing (or reclaiming) its authority for the radical affirmation of mainstream and commercial rap styles. In the process, they interrupt longstanding critiques of the hipster’s conflation of stylized expressive modes with “real- world” politics and clarify the enduring value of the cultural and the symbolic for understanding social-political action.

Melodic Flow and the Embrace of Singing

Characteristic of neo-bohemian rap’s hybridizing flow style is its unlikely embrace of the catchy, tune-driven sound of much contemporary commercial rap. On this point, hip-hop’s always unstable and shifting authenticity discourses have centered less on the tension between conscious and gangsta rap, and more on the tension between hip-hop’s broad-based privileging of strong Black

masculinity (see above) and the sense that singing marks a departure from this (see James 2011).19

Nonetheless, the ways that hip-hop practitioners and audiences have positioned singing (or positioned themselves in opposition to it) have tended to reify the divide between self-serious artists committed to hip-hop’s underground origins and organic politics on the one hand, and inauthentic sell-outs producing music for mass consumption in mainstream and commercial markets on the other. It is this constraining cultural work, and jazz/bohemian rap’s participation in it in particular, to which neo-bohemian rap provides a democratizing response.

Most obviously, neo-bohemian rap commonly features sung choruses of the sort typically associated with mainstream and commercial hip-hop. Compare, for example, the cruising hooks common to Ab-Soul’s “Feelin Us” (2014) and Drake’s “In My Feelings” (2018). More revealing, however, is the way that this tendency toward singing even seeps into neo-bohemian rappers’ rapped flow styles, which feature a pronounced melodic component. Consider Ab-Soul’s delivery of the following two lines from verse one of “Bohemian Grove” (2012):

“No religion, I’m just so explicit I coexist in places you would never know existed.”

The last four syllables of each line form a repeated motif comprising a syncopated stress on the third syllable followed by a downward melodic leap for the fourth (“so ex-pli-¯cit” and “know ex-ist-

¯ed”). The same descending figure then returns two lines later, this time in a higher register:

19 Outside of Robin James’s (2011) discussion of the feminization and de-authentication of autotuned singing (in which she focuses more on autotune that singing itself), this tension between authenticity and singing has gone largely unremarked in scholarship on hip-hop. Indeed, in her own discussion of singing as a marker of inauthenticity in Senegalese hip-hop, Catherine Appert distinguishes this idea from “practitioner and scholarly discussions of realness or authenticity in [U.S.] hip hop,” arguing that the latter have been restricted to ideas about “lyrical content, social positioning, or political engagement, to the exclusion of musical concerns” (2015, 760). However, I argue that this tension does arise more explicitly in hip-hop performance practice. As such, while my own critique of jazz/bohemian rap affirms Appert’s argument about U.S. hip-hop’s privileging of non-musical markers of authenticity, situating the genre in relation to neo-bohemian rap and other contemporary styles suggests that musical concerns (and indeed ideas about singing) have also figured in U.S. hip-hop’s authenticity discourses. Speaking at once to the presence and multidirectionality of such authenticity claims, in his 2015 diss track, “Back To Back,” Drake ingeniously turns this marker on its head through a self-aware reference to his own status as a mainstream, singer-rapper: “Yeah, you getting bodied by a singing nigga.”

“[Upward registral shift] Soul-o he-re Take a photo like a four-seat-¯er.”

This melodic style of rapping further compares with Drake’s own melodic flow style in the opening verse to “In My Feelings.” By interweaving such glib displays of musicality into his use of the sung/percussion-effusive flow style, Soul brings the esoteric, jazz-tinged musicality of jazz/bohemian rap into contact with the gaudy underbelly of mainstream hip-hop.

In fact, speaking to the heightened “musicality” that Krims attributes to the sung/percussion-effusive flow style, both jazz/bohemian rap and neo-bohemian rap display a sense of melodiousness that unfolds asymptotically to singing. However, where I view neo-bohemian rappers as productively channeling this inbetween musical space into a hybridizing zone of ambivalence, jazz/bohemian rappers have more often used it as a proximate site from which to launch critiques at the perceived commerciality of singing, while shoring up their own alternative, high-art status. For instance, describing Q-Tip’s flow style, Krims observes that “he walks a fine line between rapping and singing, and pitch is seldom far in the background” (Krims 2000, 67).20 The sense of pitch here is latent at best, and Krims makes sure to point out that jazz/bohemian rappers stop short of actual singing. Where they do shift away from rapped flow and into a more appreciably sung mode, he says, a pointedly hip “ethos of playful irony” characterizes their “gleefully out-of- tune” intonations, conspicuously separating them from the polished singing heard in commercial rap

(Krims 2000, 66). In this way, jazz/bohemian rappers seize on the self-elevating function that irony serves within legible performances of hip counterculturalism.

20 Importantly, Krims’s reference to singing here should be understood as separate from his definition of the “‘sung’ rhythmic” flow style (see above), which refers to a manner of rapping conceived solely in rhythmic terms and attributed to a variety of rap genres. Indeed, hip-hop scholars who work on flow continue to insist that vocal melody does not feature within this, as they view it, fundamentally rhythmic phenomenon, and instead refer only to “pitch accents” and “pitch contours” in their analyses (see Manabe 2006, 1–2, 7; Adams 2015, 123).

Tellingly, proponents of jazz art ideology have read similar practices into the work of bebop musicians and their progeny. Phil Ford, for instance, identifies a specific form of hip musical expression in jazz, which he calls “ironic reduction.” Taking as his starting point the jazz-era hipster’s distinctive style of greeting (characterized by the substitution of brushing palms for more normative handshaking), Ford follows Broyard in describing how this “hip deformation” of an ordinary gesture constituted an “ironic abstraction” that communicated the hipster’s characteristic a priorism. In turn, Ford traces a number of musical counterparts to this hip gesture — as in Miles

Davis’s minimalistic allusions to the normative, 32-bar (aaba) song form that bebop musicians used to structure their own compositions. Ford describes how, in its “par[ing] away all but the most minimally differentiating musical information” from its contrasting sections, Davis’s “So What”

(1959) constitutes a “hip deformation of the hoary aaba phrase form” (Ford 2013, 63–69). In this way of thinking, if the hip greeting served to distance the hipster from mainstream society, then

Davis’s hip playing served to distance him from mainstream musical forms.

In turn, if this is the image of bebop upon which jazz/bohemian rappers model their own hip rejection of the mainstream, then their ironized singing might similarly be understood as an oppositional, self-elevating “ironic reduction” of the pop-style singing heard in commercial rap. As I have argued, however, such stylized acts of irony undermine legible forms of hip expression by masquerading as liberatory political practice while reifying constraining cultural-aesthetic divides that are alternately pathologizing (in the case of White hipness) or elitist (in the case of Black bohemianism). Moreover, the image of bebop upon which Ford’s theory of ironic reduction turns

(and which jazz/bohemian rappers reproduce) is at odds with the deconstructive logics of Afro- modernism, which exceed rigid cultural binaries and frustrate narrow, oppositional constructions of cultural in/authenticity. Jazz/bohemian rap’s hip aesthetic, then, emerges once again as rooted in a

misappropriation of bebop that neo-bohemian rappers, in their disruptive engagement with this aesthetic, work to rectify.

In fact, on the surface, Krims’s description of jazz/bohemian rap’s ironized singing could equally be said to apply to Ab-Soul’s performatively careless warbling in the chorus to “Feelin Us.”21

However, if we are to understand neo-bohemian rap’s own relationship to bebop as based less upon some idealized counterculturalism, and more upon its Afro-modernist aesthetic, then it makes far less sense to view these artists’ own playfully ironic singing as distinguishing them from commercial rappers. Rather, this practice more accurately works to dramatize the dual dynamic through which their own musicality operates not only in relation to, but also in excess of that of jazz/bohemian rap.

Indeed, while neo-bohemian rappers rarely break out into full-fledged singing à la Drake, they do blur the line between rapping and singing far more expressively than jazz/bohemian rappers.22

Returning to “Bohemian Grove,” Ab-Soul’s highly melodic flow style signals a shift away from mere pitch and toward a melodiousness that goes far beyond jazz/bohemian flow, instead marking neo-bohemian rap’s move toward the hip-hop mainstream. As such, while jazz/bohemian rappers’ practices of ironic reduction serve to sustain the stylized and elitist pose that Broyard associates with bebop, examining this practice in neo-bohemian rap demands a very different interpretation. From this perspective, Davis’s ironic allusions to a popular song form arguably create no more distance from the musical mainstream than do Soul’s allusions to singing. Rather, from this

Afro-modernist perspective, Davis and Soul both work to affirm the place of diverse forms of Black expression within the United States while maintaining a productively ironic distance that grants them

21 For a still clearer example of this sort of ironic singing, consider the bizarre introduction to “Juice” (2013), by Black Hippy affiliate and fellow neo-bohemian rapper Chance The Rapper. 22 Indeed, in his 2016, feature-length interview with Rick Rubin for GQ Style, Kendrick implies that he would be open to producing an entirely sung album (Editors of GQ Style 2016).

the authority to do so. In this way, neo-bohemian rappers reclaim the exclusionary function that irony serves within legible hip practice and redeploy it to more inclusive and empowering ends.

Indeed, Soul explicitly speaks to the possibility of this sort of cultural and aesthetic fluidity in the face of rigid, culturally-determined genre delineations:

“It surprises me that a guy like Drake can blend Rap and R&B […] in a way that is okay, when in Rap, that could be soft. If he did one more extra R&B song, he would be soft. He was able to come up with something innovative and make it big. Something new. Something refreshing. Not to say that he was the first singing rapper or something like that, but he’s definitely one of the biggest artists in the game right now” (Hunte 2012).

Evidently, Soul remains aware of the threat to which a rapper subjects their authenticity when bringing singing into hip-hop. But rather than condemning Drake or attempting to distance himself from this practice, he praises how Drake has been able to do this while remaining (relatively) unscathed in terms of his standing within hip-hop culture. In turn, through his own flow style, Soul refuses to reify the lines between mainstream and alternative, commercial and high-art styles.

Instead, he harnesses the subcultural capital of hipness (here, marked by a performative, ironized play on singing) in order to make a claim about the fundamental instability and, moreover, reconcilability of these styles as part of a fluid continuum of Black cultural expression.

The ironic reduction of commercial rap’s singing practices, then, constitutes one way that neo-bohemian rappers have departed from jazz/bohemian rap. Of course, this difference ultimately grows out of a striking musical similarity, and the difference between the two genres’ approaches to singing is largely one of context and perspective. But, as I have argued, it is exactly this underlying connection between jazz/bohemian and neo-bohemian rap that makes possible the latter’s restorative project vis-à-vis hipness as an aesthetic. And, at other times, neo-bohemian rap’s divergence from jazz/bohemian rap is more absolute. This bring us to the next musical practice that characterizes neo-bohemian rap’s Afro-modernist aesthetic.

Creative Drug Use

Perhaps the clearest point of divergence between jazz/bohemian rappers and neo-bohemian rappers comprises their competing views on drug use, and specifically its commonplace association with Black musical creativity. These conflicting ideas in fact play a central role in how both groups of artists position themselves within hip-hop culture. Indeed, it is arguably in their rejection of drug use that jazz/bohemian rappers’ critique of mainstream and commercial rap styles becomes most explicit. In “Phony Rappers” (1996), Tribe’s Phife Dawg distances himself from a prospective battle rap opponent (who stands in, here, for mainstream gangsta rappers) by undermining the latter’s topical references to and creative dependency upon drugs:

“(He said a) rhyme about his .45 and his nickel bags of weed, that’s When I proceeded to give him what he needed, talking ‘bout ‘I need a Phillie right before I get loose,’ poor ex- -cuse, money, please, I get loose off of orange juice.”

Similarly, in “Eye Patch” (1993), De La Soul’s Pos levels his own critique at drug use more generally:

“(I be the) in, ‘cause the brother holdin’ glocks is out, I be the In, ‘cause the pusher runnin’ blocks is out, I be the In, ‘cause the kid smokin’ weed, shootin’ seed, which leads to a Girl’s stomach being ‘bout half a ton is out.”

Through sentiments such as these, jazz/bohemian rappers have constructed their alternative aesthetic in direct opposition to the inauthentic transgressions of mainstream and commercial hip- hop, as epitomized by the infamously “laiiid-baaack” stoner aesthetic of Snoop Dogg in “Gin and

Juice” (1993).23 Such attempts at self-elevation typify the conservative project of Black bohemianism, with its search for a provisional insider position against which to then push back toward an ostensibly “countercultural,” outsider stance.

23 References to drug use as a creative force continue to characterize contemporary commercial hip-hop, and particularly trap, with albums like Future’s DS2 (Dirty Sprite 2) (2015) revolving around the consumption of lean. From the other side of the debate, gangsta rappers like N.W.A. have highlighted the posturing and hypocrisy underling critiques of drug use in hip-hop. For instance, in “Express Yourself” (1988), Dr. Dre raps “some say no to drugs and take a stand, but/ after the show, they go looking for the dope man.”

Once again, jazz/bohemian rap’s bourgeois musical practice, here, has a revealing parallel in misguided ideas about bebop as an elevated, anti-commercial art form. Exemplifying such ideas is ethnomusicologist Ingrid Monson’s influential essay, “The Problem with White Hipness,” in which she challenges commonplace assumptions about bebop performance practice, and specifically the idea that desirable sounds and “musical creativity” in bebop are “generated” through heroin use.

Citing Charlie Parker’s denial of any such influence upon his playing, Monson situates this idea alongside a broader set of stereotypes concerning socially-transgressive Black masculinity (as ostensibly embodied by bebop musicians) that constitute the false foundation of “white hipness” (as epitomized by the Beat generation bohemians of the 1950s) (Monson 1995, 396–422). In this instance, we see how the lofty ideals at the core of jazz art ideology can even align with bebop musicians’ own self-representations. And once again, jazz/bohemian rap’s hip rejection of the mainstream draws on these deeply historical and influential sublimations of bebop, by practitioners and commentators alike.

The issue with this sort of defensive reasoning, however, is that Parker did of course play on drugs. As such, his protestations were “less than convincing; the more ragged he was, the more they

[his followers] associated raggedness with his art” (Leland 2004, 264). While the idea that the bebop musician’s drug use symbolizes a cultural manifestation of inherently pathological Blackness does reflect one form of racist ideology, to reactively sublimate Blackness as fundamentally pure is to similarly deny Black people complex humanity. Indeed, in their patronizing rebuke of gangsta rappers for playing into harmful stereotypes about Black people, jazz/bohemian rappers recall the accusations of neo-minstrelsy that African American audiences of the 1960s levelled at Jimi Hendrix

(see above).24 Such attacks rely on morally-absolutist claims about drug use while eliding the very real

24 For discussions of neo-minstrelsy in commercial hip-hop, see LaGrone (2000); Taylor and Austen (2012, 225–257).

experiences of trauma that compel drug use within marginalized communities in the first place.25 As such, in attempting to minimize the place of transgressive elements within Black culture, the ostensibly liberating project of Black bohemianism in fact reproduces its own, sanitized, but equally constraining ideas about “authentic” Blackness.

By contrast, neo-bohemian rappers embrace — or, better, stake a refusal to refuse (see

Sharpe 2012) — creative drug use, openly reveling in the role that drugs and stimulants such as marijuana, Adderall, and lean play in shaping their vocal sounds and delivery styles.26 In this way, they not only affirm the transgressive excesses of commercial hip-hop, but they do so in a way that aligns more closely with bebop as an originary moment of hip expression than jazz/bohemian rap ever has. A case in point, in “Pass the Blunt” (2010), Ab-Soul revels so intensely in the sonically transformative properties of drugs as to render denials of their impact on Parker’s playing almost untenable. Instead, the listener is compelled to enter the hybridizing space of Black hipness.

The relationship between drugs and sound initially surfaces in the beat’s trippy, descending synthesizer glissandos and reverberating drums. It is as though we are hearing the beat through the cloudy ears of Ab-Soul, who is “high as a motherfuckin’ satellite” as he raps over it. This effect crystallizes in the stretched-out sample of Luniz’s “I Got 5 On It” (1995), which drifts in and out of focus during the bridge into verse two. The bebop comparison, however, arises specifically in the way that Soul uses drugs to shape his vocal delivery. His voice possesses a lazy, narcotic-laced slur and the sharply articulated flow style from “Enjoy Life” becomes a stoned drawl, turning monosyllabic words such as “dour” into rising inversions of the underlying synthesizer glissandos.

25 On drug use as a coping mechanism in hip-hop, see Adeyemi (2015). 26 Most explicitly, Danny Brown, a neo-bohemian artist closely affiliated with Black Hippy, attributes his trademark, high-pitched, nasal vocal sound directly to his use of Adderall (Ahmed 2012a). Speaking to this affiliation, the early 2010s saw rumors swirling of Black Hippy’s interest in bringing on Danny Brown as a member, or at least producing a collaborative album with him (see Ortiz 2013; Tardio 2013). Chance The Rapper’s slurred rasp in “Juice,” from the tellingly named Acid Rap (2013), is another good example of the druggy voice in neo-bohemian hip-hop.

By thus allowing drugs to infect the flow style that he shares with jazz/bohemian rap, Soul not only affirms a central aspect of commercial rap’s maligned aesthetic; he also uses this component to deform jazz/bohemian rap’s claims to aesthetic elevation. In this way, he reclaims the symbolic capital of jazz/bohemian rap’s hip, alternative aesthetic and redirects it to more representationally democratizing ends, in which all forms of Blackness exist on equal terms.

From this perspective, we can see how Soul’s own hip performance transcends the elitist and stylized abstraction of the Black bohemian — what Broyard calls the “bebop dodge.” If Soul replicates jazz/bohemian rap’s high-art aesthetic, he does so in a way that equally revels in the excesses of commercial rap. Similarly, if he engages in the “a priori” pose of the hipster, he simultaneously infuses this pose with the very pathologizing imagery that Black bohemians so defensively refuse. Returning to Soul’s alias, the “Abstract Asshole,” it should be noted that this title not only draws on Q-Tip’s own self-elevating moniker, “The Abstract,” but also resignifies it into an abject, hybridizing, oxymoronic representation of self.27 The result is a democratizing brand of a priorism through which Soul holds on to the “indefinable authority” that this stance confers while deploying it to more democratic ends. As Soul puts it: “I got these guys over here that know about the pineal gland [third eye] and they are like, ‘Yo, that’s crazy that you would do a song about the pineal gland.’ And then you got the guys on the complete other side that say, ‘That shit is just hard.

What’s a pineal gland?’” (Ahmed 2012c).

Finally, then, if jazz/bohemian rap’s critique of gangsta rap aligns with older critiques of

Black hippies like Hendrix, then neo-bohemian rap’s democratizing project has a similarly transhistorical reach. Indeed, the trippy, psychedelic character of “Pass the Blunt” clearly foreshadows the later “Gone Insane” video with which I opened this chapter, in which Soul

27 Similarly, in “Terrorist Threats” (2012), Soul rejects markers of formal, institutionalized education, confronting the listener with the threat to “pee on your PhD or your AA.” Clearly, Soul’s claims to abstract intellectualism, then, do not align with normative understandings of what this might look like.

struggles to reconcile his hip sensibility to his Blackness while looking to Hendrix as a model. More immediately, Ab-Soul’s “Black Lip Bastard (Remix)” (2012) directly connects the affirmation of creative drug use to his own, more sympathetic reading of Hendrix. The song opens with the distinctive sound of Kendrick Lamar coughing up marijuana smoke, sputtering breathlessly through a darkly paranoid trip that leads to the same precarious position as Soul and Jimi before him:

“Black lip bastard, pass me your password, so I can hack inside your brain, see I too have gone insane.”

For all three artists, it seems that it is exactly their attempts to reconcile their hip sensibilities with their Blackness that has driven them insane. This dark realization provides a far deeper insight into

Black creative drug use than jazz/bohemian rap’s self-interested repudiations allow. By affirming the druggy hip-hop voice, Soul and Kendrick embrace not only gangsta rap, but also other embattled expressions of Black hipness. Through this hybridizing project, neo-bohemian rappers expand the boundaries of hipness, working across time and space to reimagine what it might mean to be a Black

Hippy.

Afro-modernism in(between) the Control System

Having explored neo-bohemian hip-hop’s Afro-modernist musical aesthetic more closely, we’re now in a better position to understand Ab-Soul’s radical critique of mainstream society, both on Control System and beyond. The inability of either jazz/bohemian rap or gangsta rap to generate a truly alternative, liberating space of Black existence within an antagonistic social structure reflects an additional tension that goes beyond that of high versus low art. Namely, this failure is further symptomatic of the fact that Blackness, in all its forms, is always at once inside and outside of mainstream society (Gilroy 1993, 29; Goosman 1997, 81; Weheliye 2005, 5). Indeed, Black studies scholars have long understood that Western civil society maintains its coherence precisely through the exclusion of Blackness (see Hartman 1997; Wright 2003; Wilderson 2010). In this sense, the

class-based dialectic between high and low art overlaps with another set of dialectics, at the core of

U.S. society, between non-Black and Black, Human and non-human, social life and social death.

By grappling with this racial antagonism, neo-bohemian rap’s deconstructive hip aesthetic points toward a new way of conceptualizing Black existence in a world that would make an oxymoron of this pairing. In this closing section, I show how, in its own, deep accountability to

Blackness, neo-bohemian rap’s deconstruction of the tensions between mainstream versus alternative, commercial versus high-art styles, extends also to the humanist (Eurocentric, masculinist) dialectics of which these tensions are in part symptomatic. Finally, returning to my formulation of hipness as a rigorous Black metaphysics encompassing, amongst other things, Afro- modernism and double consciousness, I theorize neo-bohemian rap as an insurgent cultural force that opens up a productively hybridizing aesthetic, cultural, and existential space in(between) the

Control System.

Deforming Dialectics, Becoming Black

The broad claim of this dissertation is that neo-bohemian rap’s capacity to newly conceptualize the terms of Black life in an anti-Black world boils down to its reclamation of hipness as an African diasporic aesthetic of existence. In the tension that it creates with Western dialectics, then, this aesthetic would seem to fit neatly within the “twentieth-century intellectual tradition of

African diasporic counterdiscourses of Black subjectivity” that Michelle Wright (2003, 3) understands as in fact “creating identity in the African diaspora.” Describing influential attempts at reclaiming Black subjectivity by W. E. B. Du Bois, Aimé Césaire, Léopold Senghor, and Frantz

Fanon, Wright presents these authors as unified in their varied challenges to Western constructions of the human as dialectically opposed to Blackness. In turn, she critiques these anti-racist attempts at reclaiming Black subjectivity as ultimately reproducing the dialectical, heteropatriarchal Othering of

women. Wright’s solution to this gendered power imbalance is to introduce a dialogic component to her theory in which Black women necessarily reshape the dialectics of Black masculine subjectivity along the lines of gender and sexuality (2003, 1–182).28

Revealingly, Black Hippy’s own, hip counterdiscourse of Black subjectivity at times falls into the exact trap that Wright describes. For example, in “Track Two,” from Ab-Soul’s album-length, eponymous critique of the Control System, Soul imagines that it is exactly his inclusive a priorism that provides Black people with a route through this hazardous biopolitical maze (a route, that is, to finding freedom within violent structures):

“Welcome to the Control System, I’m Stimulating the hoes and educating my niggas, I Wiggle through potholes, my destination is vivid To the end of the road I’m driven, y’all trippin’.”

In line with Wright’s critique, Soul’s democratizing practice here (like those of Du Bois, Césaire,

Senghor, and Fanon before him) functions exactly at the expense of Black women. It would seem that Soul intends only for Black men to gain access to the rewards of his radical pedagogy, while leaving women behind, in apparent awe of his (intellectual? sexual?) brilliance. As Wright reveals, such acts of dialectical synthesis again produce Black women as the Other against which Black men alone can glimpse the possibilities of subjectivity.

At the same time, however, such critiques cannot fully account for Ab-Soul’s engagement with the Control System, whose radicality, as I have argued, also goes beyond existing Black counterdiscourses. Despite the value of Wright’s theory for understanding Black hipness — and the limits of Soul’s own hip aesthetic — my critique of jazz/bohemian rap shows that the dialectics of

28 Thus, while Clarke calls for a turn from dialogism to dialectics (see above), Wright models how Blackness, in its losing position within Western dialectics, demands exactly the opposite. Likewise, Fumi Okiji argues that Black subjectivity (double consciousness) and its relationship to mainstream society cannot be understood as a dialectic in the Hegelian sense of the term. Instead, it is better understood in terms of what Nahum Chandler (via Jacques Derrida) calls “desedimentation” (Okiji 2018, 107n39; see Chandler 2014).

Black masculinity have involved the Othering not only of Black women, but also of historically marginal and excepted Black communities more broadly. In contrast, I argue, neo-bohemian rappers generate an aesthetic of existence that affirms but exceeds these dialectics, and thus need not work at the expense of any excepted Black community — even while it at times obviously does. In this sense,

Afro-modernism does not simply redirect while sustaining Western dialectics. Rather, it constitutes the conditions of possibility for the radical affirmation and refusal of them. Indeed, troubling the preceding reading of “Track Two,” Soul elsewhere explicitly rejects this exact critique, extending his radical a priorism to women while displacing their dialectical Othering onto mainstream society.

In “Portishead in the Morning / / / HER World,” from his fourth studio album, Do What

Thou Wilt. (2016), Soul addresses this gender critique head on. Referring back to Control System, he describes how:

“My goal was to hip the hitters to glitches in the system Do we really wanna go to heaven? Ain’t no bitches mentioned And I ain’t a sexist, I enlighten sisters too And, oh yeah, it’s ‘Bohemian Grove,’ baby, not groove.”

Here, Soul reaffirms the function of his hip a priorism before extending this via a somewhat perfunctory gesture of gender inclusivity. More revealing, however, is the way that he redirects accusations of sexism back onto mainstream society by reminding us that the easily misread title of the album’s third track, “Bohemian Grove,” in fact references an elite, private gentleman’s club and bastion of violent hegemonic patriarchy. That audiences commonly mistake the song’s title for

“Bohemian Groove” speaks to the ways that powerful forms of structural violence go (and are made to go) unnoticed in mainstream society, while and by being deflected onto ostensibly hermetic cultural forms. By mockingly alerting his audience to their oversight, here, Soul wags a finger at them for continuing to scapegoat hip-hop as the primary source of misogyny and sexism in the present, while ignoring (and indeed distracting from) the more powerful and deep-rooted forms of sexual and gender violence that structure U.S. society. In other words, Soul stresses that it is society

that dialectically Others women, while suggesting that his own counterdiscourse might be capable of exceeding such dichotomies.

Of course, hip-hop feminists have long critiqued society’s treatment of rap music as a scapegoat for broader social ills (see Crenshaw 1997, 255–263; Perry 2004, 120–121; Neal 2005, 21–

28, 127–149; Rose 2008, 149–165). And Soul’s attempts to align himself with these critiques ring hollow in light of his music’s otherwise prevalent misogyny. What Soul’s analysis in “Portishead in the Morning” misses is that, in the same way that his audience overwhelmingly reads the word

“Groove” over and against the intended title of “Bohemian Grove,” his music likewise does the work of misogyny regardless of his intent or “goal” to uncover flaws in the social structure. Indeed, following his performative engagement, in “Portishead in the Morning,” with both feminist critiques and defenses of hip-hop, Soul suddenly and violently extricates himself from these discourses altogether. After beginning to interpolate a sing-songy chant from “Bohemian Grove” (“One time for women…/ Two times for the…”), he swaps the original “ladies” out for “BITCHES” — an unexpected substitution, screamed and distorted for added discomfort. In relation to the preceding lines, it’s hard not to hear this gesture as a mocking claim to an a priori, heightened understanding that, in Soul’s mind, takes him beyond the reproach of mainstream society.

At the same time, however, this at once ironic and extremely visceral performance of misogyny might be heard not only as empowered and arrogant, but also as reflecting a more precarious sense of (Black) self. Through his emphatic delivery of the word “bitches” — a distinctly hip-hop misogynistic utterance — Soul leaves the listener to apprehend that even his most strained expressions of misogyny might be said to be incapable of doing the same harm as the sexual violence that comes so naturally to mainstream society. As Perry observes, Black men’s own lack of access to power in an anti-Black social structure limits the conceptual applicability of patriarchy to performances of Black masculinity, including misogyny. Instead, such performances are better

understood as responses to historical experiences of emasculation and powerlessness (Perry 2004,

117–127). From this perspective, Soul does not simply use his understanding of misogyny to position himself above reproach for participating in it; rather, his very engagement in misogyny allows him to position himself as ontologically cordoned off from the power to fully wield it to its intended effect

(that is, patriarchally).

Arguably, then, while Soul’s expressions of misogyny must be understood as violent and oppositional attacks on women, they might concurrently be understood as deconstructive critiques of the violent dialectics at the Control System’s core. By reveling in the excesses of hip-hop (here, misogyny), Soul reveals the futility of such transgressions as conventionally understood. That is, through his engagement in misogyny, he dramatizes the impossibility of claiming Black masculinity in the West through the dialectical othering of Black femininity. In this sense, Soul gestures to a space beyond the dual dialectics underlying Wright’s tradition of African diasporic counterdiscourses by instead alluding to a way of knowing Black subjectivity that need not and in fact cannot rest upon the reproduction of a dialectical (female) Other. He takes the critical force of gangsta rap’s displays of obscenity as theorized by Clarke, and channels this force into a deconstruction of the very dialectic between high and low styles that Clarke thinks these displays serve, in their original context, to structure. What’s left is a clear view of the pernicious antagonism of anti-Blackness that lurks beneath.

In turn, by affirming this irreducible antagonism, Soul simultaneously highlights the need to find a way of living that goes beyond denial.29 In doing so, he imagines a more democratic mode of,

29 As “informal theorist” R.L. (2013) puts it, “affirmation of blackness proves to be impossible without simultaneously affirming the violence that structures black subjectivity itself.” Similarly, Jared Sexton describes how Fanon’s radical move is that he “fully accepts the definition of himself as pathological as it is imposed by a world that knows itself through that imposition, rather than remaining in a reactive stance that insists on the (temporal, moral, etc.) heterogeneity between a self and an imago originating in culture. Though it may appear counterintuitive, or rather because it is counterintuitive, this acceptance or affirmation is active; it is a willing or willingness, in other words, to pay whatever social costs accrue to being black, to inhabiting blackness, to living a black social life under the shadow of social death. This is not an accommodation to the dictates of the antiblack world. The affirmation of blackness, which is

to borrow from Wright, “being and becoming [a] Black [Hippy].” In closing, I consider how this work culminates in the multilayered Black metaphysics that I outlined in the Introduction, and which I call hipness. This metaphysics allows us to think beyond the societal Control System that legible forms of Black bohemianism so uncritically sustain, and better account for the ontological condition of Blackness in an anti-Black world.

Hipness and/as Black Metaphysics

So, what does all of this tell us about the competing models of hipness at the core of this chapter? As Ab-Soul’s affirmation (and refusal) of Western aesthetic and humanist dialectics makes clear, any current attempt to conceptualize Black ways of being (or ways of being Black) must do so within a hopelessly violent and irreformably anti-Black global structure. It follows that such a project must exceed the resistance narratives at the core of legible hip performances. For instance, jazz/bohemian rap’s own performances of hipness center upon two forms of resistance: first, these artists performatively resist commercial rap from within their hip parallel public in order to make a claim about their own reformability to the neoliberal mainstream; and second, they conflate this rejection of commercial rap with a broader anti-mainstream resistant ethos and marker of what Ford calls the “countercultural idea” at the core of hipness writ large (Ford 2013, 77).

Through this conflation, jazz/bohemian rappers emulate what Robin James describes as the

White hipster’s “attempts to situate himself as ‘of’ but not ‘in’ mainstream white culture” (see James

2009, ¶1). They simply do so through the sublimation, rather than pathologizing appropriation, of

Black masculinity. What such resistance projects miss is the irreconcilable tension between the mainstream of the Black parallel public (i.e. gangsta rap), and the mainstream against which the

to say an affirmation of pathological being, is a refusal to distance oneself from blackness in a valorization of minor differences that bring one closer to health, to life, or to sociality” (Sexton 2011, 27).

White hipster reacts (i.e. mainstream society). Stuart Goosman describes this tension as “the ever- present conundrum present in African-American expression: the conflation — some would say double-ness — of the marginal and the mainstream” (1997, 81).30 To distance oneself from the always already marginal hip-hop mainstream, then, is not to achieve mastery over the U.S. social mainstream at all.

Such paradoxical attempts at self-uplift date back to Du Bois’s early, uncritical theory of double consciousness, in which he envisioned the transcendence of the veil (structural racism) through education — a task that he entrusted to the Black model minority or “Talented Tenth”.31 By engaging at once in (1) a self-elevating claim to belonging within the hegemonic social mainstream by way of (2) an in-group claim to racial authenticity, jazz/bohemian rappers become representatives of what Mark Anthony Neal calls the “New Talented Tenth” (2005, 3–16). And by failing to affirm

(that is, by attempting to negate) the structural power of the veil as an ontologizing force, jazz/bohemian rappers idealistically overlook the impossibility of the former claim, and the cooptability of the latter.

Indeed, it is exactly this limp, stylized critique of society to which Broyard’s “Portrait of the

Hipster” so despairingly responds. Broyard’s own solution, however, emerges as similarly limited here. Hill describes how “Broyard essentially asks the black hipster to fit into society, to not play to the caricature, and to let one’s racial differences be revealed as merely skin deep rather than accentuated through their aesthetic choices” (Hill 2017, 54). But, as Ab-Soul teaches us, Blackness has never been merely skin deep. Contrary to the liberal, anti-racist politics of identity that attempt

30 Alexander Weheliye likewise captures this tension when he asks, “how does blackness operate paradoxically as both central to and outside of Western modernity?” (2005, 5). 31 Historian Kevin Gaines (1996, 9) affirms that the “inner conflicts” at the core of Black bourgeois uplift ideology exemplify Du Bois’s theory of double consciousness. While he never clarifies this as “uncritical” double consciousness, to use the terminology of George Ciccariello-Maher (2009, 373, 384), this qualifier is implicit in his critique of this elitist ideology.

to delimit Blackness as simply a matter of skin color, phenotype, or even culture, Blackness more accurately arises from violent and irreducible processes of racialization (Saucier 2015, 1–10).

Blackness, then, is not simply a floating signifier to be claimed or disavowed at either a personal or epistemological-discursive level.32 Rather, through these processes of racialization, Blackness comes to occupy an ontological position within the set of antagonistic structures that constitute U.S. and global society. As such, to paraphrase sociologist P. Khalil Saucier, the problem with existing ideas about Black bohemianism (and Black sensibilities more broadly) is that they “are not fully accountable to blackness” (see Saucier 2015, 2).33

In contrast, neo-bohemian rap’s Afro-modernist musical aesthetic is predicated precisely upon an accountability to ontological Blackness. By reveling equally in the highs and lows of Black existence, Soul and Kendrick transcend the bourgeois idealism of jazz/bohemian rap. Eschewing such impossible attempts to transcend the veil, they instead seek to find life within (that is, in between) its structures. In the process, they invert James’s description of the White hipster’s “of but not in” self-positioning and instead arrive at Du Bois’s later, more critical conception of double consciousness, understood by Paul Gilroy as the experience of being “in but not necessarily of the modern, western world” (Gilroy 1993, 29–30). This subtle difference explains how neo-bohemian rappers disrupt the association of double consciousness with the Black elite/intelligentsia (see

Gaines 1996, 9) and reclaim it as an empowering and inclusive tool for apprehending and navigating

32 On race as a “floating signifier,” see Hall (1997). In his book Against Race: Imagining Political Culture Beyond the Color Line (2000; published in the United Kingdom as Between Camps: Natures, Cultures and the Allure of Race) Hall’s former student, Paul Gilroy, exemplifies the epistemological-discursive disavowal of race as a mere “floating signifier” in his own attempt to “deontologize race,” or “unhinge race from its ontological foundation” (Saucier 2015, 97n3; see Gilroy 2000). This move signals a regrettable departure from Gilroy’s earlier work, where he more aptly theorizes Blackness from the “anti-anti-essentialist” perspective that Wright also observes in her first level of (masculinist) African diasporic counterdicourses (see Gilroy 1993, 99–103; Wright 2003, 1–2). In formulating this earlier stance, Gilroy challenged uncritical (purist and essentialist) attempts to ontologize Blackness, while nonetheless allowing for Blackness as a “racialised subjectivity.” By contrast, in his later work, he outlines his new commitment to moving beyond the possibility of a Black ontology/racialized subjectivity altogether. On this turn in Gilroy’s intellectual trajectory see Allen and Jobson (2016, 142). For a lengthy critique of Gilroy’s later work, see Moten (2017, 293n3–295). 33 Saucier’s own study of Blackness is exceptional in its additive use of hip-hop to think through the Afro-pessimist theories of Wilderson and Sexton.

the racist knowledge structures that have produced and restricted access to full Humanity and existence.

From this perspective, when Soul welcomes us to the Control System, the prospect begins to seem a little less bleak, and there is a clear sense in which Soul extends this invitation on his own terms. In doing so, he exceeds critiques of the hipster rooted in Foucauldian biopolitics, whose

Eurocentric conception of the human emerges as incapable of fully accounting for Blackness (see

Weheliye 2014; Johnson and Lubin 2017; Osuna 2017; Sojoyner 2017).34 By forwarding a musical aesthetic capable of accommodating Blackness in all of its complexity, Soul begins to thaw the frozen dialectic between alternative versus mainstream, high art versus commercial, jazz/bohemian versus gangsta, good versus bad hip-hop. This isn’t to say that Ab-Soul is alone in doing this work.

For instance, recent commentators have grown particularly interested in the aesthetics of “trap” music as a route to such alternative categories of the human (Burton 2017; McCarthy 2018).

However, in decidedly queuing up Kendrick and Black Hippy on this existential playlist, I argue that neo-bohemian rappers perform the aesthetics of existence at a deeper, transhistorical, intercultural, and diasporic level than is heard elsewhere. Both Spence and Burton caution against such invocations of “temporal [and, by extension, material and spatial] parallelism” as precluding the formulation of new political strategies geared toward the specificities of a particular context (Spence

2011, 11; Burton 2017, 51). But, as I begin to outline in the Introduction, in its production of an always contextualized and relationally (rather than essentially) occurring Black metaphysics, hipness provides a rigorous framework in which temporal, material, and spatial parallels can and do resonate

34 For instance, Weheliye uses Black feminist theory to critique Foucauldian biopolitics as based on an incomplete conception of humanity, rooted in Western liberal ideals. In this sense, Foucault’s social critique is incomplete exactly because it treats “biopolitics as a modality of analysis that supersedes or sidelines race” (Weheliye 2014, 5). Weheliye’s response is to turn to the Black feminist tradition of Sylvia Wynter and Hortense Spillers in order to excavate the alternative, liberating genres of human that exist in “the flesh” — a vestibular space, emerging alongside the ontology of Blackness, in between neoliberal subjectivization and freedom from this (Weheliye 2014, 2–3, 12).

together, to deeply productive political ends.35 To reappropriate Moten’s description of Ralph

Ellison’s Invisible Man (the urtext, in my view, of radical hipness), hipness is “something like a channeling — in and through history — of something more fundamental than the mark of locality” (Moten

2003, 67, emphasis mine). And, for Moten, that “something” is exactly “the structures and æffects of race” (2003, 67).

By eschewing a stylized, performative transcendence of the mainstream “society of control,” in favor of a racialized, structural critique of it, neo-bohemian hip-hop mobilizes the corruptive force of Blackness to disrupt systems of governmentality. In their performances of hipness, neo-bohemian rappers seek neither to distance themselves from nor to ingratiate themselves to mainstream society.

Both of these hip and neoliberal moves work at the expense of pathologizable and exceptionable

Others, and both moves are always already pre-empted by neoliberalism’s governing technologies.

Rather, by affirming the ontology of Blackness as mainstream society’s structural Other — the

Absence through to which to know Presence; the Nowhere through which to get Somewhere; the anti-Human through which to become Human — and deciding to find life within this position, rather than through an individualized transcendence of it, these artists poison the water supply. They infect and undo the Control System neither from within nor without, but rather from some place in between.

35 In making this claim about hipness, I take my cue in part from Weheliye, who understands racial terror and racialization not in terms of the exceptional or the comparable, but rather in terms of the relational (2014, 37). David F. García serves as another important interlocutor here. Akin to Burton and Spence, he argues that “modernity’s orderings of historical time, space, and race” have prevented disparate Black musics from “occupying the same historical place in the modern world.” But, by historicizing disparate responses to modernity, he also reimagines the possibilities of diasporic connection as playing out along individuated (and relational) lines (2017, 6–7, 19).

CHAPTER TWO

Hood Tales of Hipness: Black Hippies on the Run

“Black Hippy,” the penultimate track on Jay Rock’s 2010 mixtape, From Hood Tales to the

Cover of XXL, opens with Kendrick Lamar ominously pronouncing the impending hip-hop takeover that his crew have long had in the works: “Let ‘em die, dead, Black Hippy.” “We don’t give a fuck,”

Jay Rock affirms, a sentiment quickly seconded with a “hell na” from Kendrick. Or is it Ab-Soul now? It sort of sounds like him. And the voice does seem to come from a different place in the mix.

It’s hard to tell. But that’s sort of the point. As Kendrick (for sure, this time) puts it: “this conglomerate so cool, Rock, we could freeze L.A.” Of course, the conglomerate to which Kendrick refers is none other than the song’s eponymous Black Hippy collective, and as the first verse kicks in, the interchangeability of its members becomes a driving aesthetic force.

As it turns out, “Black Hippy” (elsewhere titled “Zip That Chop That”) features all four members of the collective alternating four-measure verses in close dialogue. Starting things off,

Kendrick’s opening four measures revolve around a syncopated, four-syllable, sixteenth note motif interwoven amongst non-motivic material. Next, immediately following Kendrick’s last line,

ScHoolboy Q enters and repeats this motif over the same rhyme sound that Kendrick used.

Moreover, he does not wait for a new measure to begin, as might be expected, but instead jumps right in on the last beat of Kendrick’s fourth measure. The resultant effect is of one rapper’s voice transforming almost imperceptibly into that of the next. The same pattern continues with Jay Rock’s and Ab-Soul’s respective entries, before the latter segues smoothly into the first chorus:

Verse 1 “[Kendrick Lamar] Ring the alarm or wake to a bomb, you ain’t a Rapper, you Elton John holding your john, I got a Ton of croutons in the Louis Vuitton, that’s big Bread, the chickens are flying flocks when I cal’m, [ScHoolboy Q] Paul and

Masson, half-drunk, stuck in a po’m, lighting Matches underwater while embracin’ the storm, I’m Cool and I’m calm, laid back, smokin’ a farm, sockin’ The shit outta niggas ‘til I’m breakin’ ma arm, [Jay Rock] up in

My zone, two blunts, cup o’ Patron, forty- -five on me shoot you if you fuck with me wrong, no Homo, pause … that’s your life and it’s Gon’ flatline you don’t put your life in a song, [Ab-Soul] I never

Drove a faaast caaar, I almost ran over Tracy Chapman, she said, “drive slow,” I said, “fuck off,” Ab- Soul, what’s up, y’all, other than ya subpar? A- -bove all, I’m a heaven gate above all.

Chorus (Fuckin’ crazy) And every time we in the stu’, [ScHoolboy Q] we Cook that, chop that, (what’s that?) that’s crack.”

[underlined = shared, sixteenth note motif]

In this chapter, I argue that the aesthetic of interchangeability at the core of songs like

“Black Hippy” is best understood in relation to the way that these songs simultaneously engage and deform the “cypher” (also spelled “cipher,” “cypha,” and “cipha”), an informal hip-hop performance practice in which groups of rappers stand in a circle and take turns “freestyling” over a beat.1 While the episodic, turn-taking format of the song clearly evokes the form of the cypher (with the collective even at times adopting a circle formation in the music video),2 an obvious tension exists between the pre-composed, studio-recorded “Black Hippy,” and the informal, improvisatory practice to which it alludes.3 Conventionally performed in casual settings (outside houses, in parks,

1 For conventional accounts of the cypher, see Rickford and Rickford (2000, 87–88); Alim (2006); Spady, Alim, and Meghelli (2006); Bramwell (2015, 14–15); Hisama (2016, 254–255); Lee (2016, 19, 73–124, 166, 230–232). While the word “freestyle,” here, can refer to rhymes made up on the spot (or “off the dome”), the term frequently signifies a more loosely-defined improvisatory ethos, as for instance in the ability to draw upon pre-written rhymes with ease and fluidity in different social and musical contexts. This take on freestyle is contrary to attempts to tie more relaxed definitions of improvisation exclusively to the past while setting these definitions against a purist understanding of the term’s contemporary usage (see Edwards 2009, 181–182; Hisama 2016, 250–251). I would contend that culture doesn’t work on such totalizing and static terms. 2 On March 24, 2020, this video could be accessed via Top Dawg Entertainment’s YouTube page: https://youtu.be/oRY1k6aSE0g. 3 On the tension between pre-composed and improvised rapping, see Hisama (2016, 250–251).

out back during underground hip-hop events), Black Hippy’s aestheticized engagement with the cypher (occurring less conventionally, as Ab-Soul points out, “in the stu’[dio]”) has far reaching consequences for understanding both African diasporic cultural practice and hipness as an African diasporic aesthetic of existence.

In unpacking its dual dynamic of engagement and deformation vis-à-vis the cypher, I group

“Black Hippy” together with other songs like it as exemplars of a distinctive, recurring feature of the eponymous collective’s oeuvre: what I call their “cypher tracks.” I argue that, in producing a hybridizing space between the crafted arrangements of the studio and the informal, improvisatory street cypher, the cypher track becomes a liminal space in between (or for) musical practice and (or as) social theorizing. This space complicates existing ideas about the relationship between Black aesthetics and Black social life, in which the former frequently comes to stand in for the latter. In particular, it nuances habitual claims, within music studies and Black studies alike, about music’s capacity to do the lived work of resisting structural racial violence.

This erroneous conflation of the aesthetic and the social, I argue, stems primarily from the failure of practitioners of music studies and Black studies alike to engage each other on their own terms. In contrast, by placing these disciplines in closer dialogue, I show how, while Black music cannot do the existential work of Blackness, neo-bohemian hip-hop does theorize the terms on which that lived work might play out. I use the word “theory” in this context to refer to a conceptualizing of life that takes place — in an Adornian sense, by way of critical theorist Fumi

Okiji — through aesthetics.4 In this way, picking up where Chapter One left off, I reveal the central

4 As Okiji puts it, by way of Adorno, “through its material, music must give clear form to the problems assigned to it by this material [that of the musical tradition] which is itself never purely natural material, but rather a social and historical product; solutions offered by music in this process stand equal to theories” (Okiji 2018, 36, square brackets in the original; see Adorno 2002, 393).

role of Black Hippy’s cypher tracks in the collective’s reclamation of hipness as a radical Black metaphysics, or an aesthetics of Black life.

In historicizing this relationship between hip musical expression and Black metaphysics, I begin by framing Jay Rock’s distinctive approach to hipness in relation to two overlooked (real and fictional) figures of Black hip expression at mid-century: the young Malcolm Little (later Malcolm X) and Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (presented in the Introduction and Chapter One as an exemplar of radical Black hipness). Zooming in on Jay Rock, here, I argue that his close relationship to these hip figures invites a conceptual expansion of “hipness” to incorporate the economic, aesthetic, and existential practice of “hustling.” Indeed, it is exactly by recentering and reconciling mid-century performances of hipness and hustling that Rock allows us to understand Black Hippy’s cypher tracks as sites for reconceptualizing the terms of Black life.

Next, turning to the cypher track specifically, I examine the difference between the conventional hip-hop cypher and Black Hippy’s own take on it, arguing that it is in the spatial, representational, and ethical gap between the two that the collective’s radical theorization of Black social life emerges. By presenting hipness as a framework for rethinking the relationship between music and life, I offer an alternative to both the conflation and dichotomizing of these categories. In doing so, I reconceptualize “the break” as a space for theorizing the terms of Black existence.

Finally, building on this historical and analytical work, I consider the broader significances of the cypher track for rethinking existence throughout the African diaspora. Having problematized idealistic frameworks for Black life as aesthetic practice, I work in proximity to such frameworks to in turn deconstruct overly-pessimistic claims about the impossibility of diaspora. Arguing against the individualistic, countercultural language of legible hipness, I explore how the cypher track’s

“underground” hip aesthetic resonates across time and space with related practices of hipness and hustling from Malcolm X in Harlem to music-makers in Mali. The result is a new approach to

diaspora conceived not in the utopian and essentialist terms of cultural connectivity, but rather in relation to resonant experiences of ontological Blackness. To better understand the distinctive, hip quality of Black Hippy’s cypher tracks, however, it is necessary to first cycle back around to Jay

Rock.

From Hood Tales to the Cover of XXL: A Story of Hipness and Hustling

2011 was a big year for Black Hippy. The auspicious, back-to-back releases of ScHoolboy

Q’s Setbacks, Ab-Soul’s Longterm Mentality, Kendrick Lamar’s Section.80, and Jay Rock’s Follow Me

Home signaled the onset of major label co-signs, sell-out tours, and unprecedented forms of critical acclaim for rap music writ large.5 Neo-bohemian hip-hop’s cultural revolution had begun. For Jay

Rock — a Bounty Hunter Blood from Watts, California — however, the journey to the top was already long underway. Since signing to Top Dawg Entertainment (which would become Black

Hippy’s home label) back in 2005, Rock (born Johnny Reed McKinzie Jr.) had gone on to release a series of mixtapes establishing his gangsta credentials while developing collaborative ties with

Kendrick (then K.Dot) and Ab-Soul. At the peak of this transitional period, prior to his breakthrough studio album, were two final mixtapes, both dropping in 2010: From Hood Tales to the

Cover of XXL and Black Friday. Resisting the myopic uplift narratives of self-proclaimed “out-the- hood” rappers from JL to Drake, these records made clear that Rock’s quickly rising star as a Black

Hippy wouldn’t dent his commitment to life in the U.S. underground economy. Significantly, From

Hood Tales also includes one of the first tracks to bring all members of the Black Hippy collective, freshly solidified with TDE’s 2009 signing of ScHoolboy Q, together on wax: “Black Hippy.”

5 Most notably, in 2018, Kendrick Lamar would become the first pop star (let alone rapper) to earn the Pulitzer Prize for music.

Centering Jay Rock’s own, idiosyncratic uplift narrative as it unfolded alongside the solidification of Black Hippy, this section explores the particularities of Rock’s challenge to conventional understandings of hipness. As I describe in the Introduction, despite the crystallization of hipness in post-war, urban Black communities, the concept gained wider discursive currency with the appropriative performances of White hipsters and the defensive sublimations of Black bohemians. In contrast, Jay Rock’s gangsta aesthetic shares a far closer relationship with early, overlooked forms of hipness as an African American response to the experience of urban modernity. In tracing this connection, I position Jay Rock alongside two mid-century hip figures:

Malcolm Little and the eponymous narrator of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man. I show how, working together across time and space, Malcolm, the Invisible Man, and Jay Rock have engaged in an overlapping set of “underground” expressive practices that existing studies of hipness have largely ignored.

The hip nexus that I trace here differs markedly from the one that I explored in Chapter

One, which places Ab-Soul in dialogue with bohemian figures like John Lennon, Jimi Hendrix, and

De La Soul. Indeed, if Ab-Soul is the member of Black Hippy who aligns most closely with, even while exceeding, legible forms of hipness (and particularly Black bohemianism), Jay Rock is arguably the collective’s least obvious hippy. As Top Dawg Entertainment’s resident gangsta rapper, Rock in fact occupies the very position in opposition to which groups like De La Soul and A Tribe Called

Quest have modeled their Black bohemianism.6 Similarly, the idea of Malcolm as hipster would seem to run up against his better-known image as a one-time Harlemite pimp and drug dealer turned pious black nationalist leader, while scholars continue to read the Invisible Man’s own underground

6 As I will show in Chapter Three, this position aligns Rock most closely with ScHoolboy Q. This pairing works against that of Ab-Soul and Kendrick Lamar, as explored in Chapters One and Four.

existentialism against the backdrop of the more legible hipster figure of Rinehart (see Konstantinou

2016, 49–76; see Introduction).

Expanding on my discussion of Ab-Soul, then, this section explores how Rock further deforms conventional understandings of hipness by reconciling this aesthetic with the underground economic, aesthetic, and existential practice of “hustling.” In making this claim, I simultaneously point toward an alternate conception of the hustler that challenges depictions of this figure from within both mainstream society and the Black public sphere. In this sense, where Ab-Soul performs the radical inclusivity of neo-bohemian hip-hop’s hip aesthetic through his embrace of gangsta rap,

Jay Rock brings truth to this claim from the other side, insisting that his own uncompromising gangsta aesthetic is entirely concordant with his claim to being a Black Hippy.

Jay Rock and the Afro-modernist Origins of Hipness

The opening skit on From Hood Tales comprises an excerpt from the “Los Angeles,

California” episode of Ross Kemp on Gangs — a voyeuristic, VICE-style documentary coming out of the United Kingdom between 2004 and 2009. While an LAPD deputy decodes the dress-codes and gang signs of the infamous “Bloods” street gang, the skit segues into the mixtape’s first song.

Eschewing the jazzy instrumentals and Afro-centric imagery that will pervade later releases by labelmates Kendrick Lamar and Ab-Soul, “Real Bloods” sounds as gangsta as the title suggests.

Opening with a comped piano accompaniment, the beat sounds like an upbeat, major-mode version of Dr. Dre’s West Coast anthem “Still D.R.E.” (1999). Meanwhile, the trademark producer tag of

Brooklyn’s DJ Whoo Kid (closely associated with the early-2000s, Queens-based rap group, G-Unit) echoes across the track. Foreshadowing the Blood “Soo Woo” gang call to come later in the track,

Whoo Kid’s sonic stamp brings East Coast reality rap crashing into contact with West Coast gangsta. Gunshot sound effects enter the mix as Rock delivers a coded account of his Blood

credentials. As the listener scrambles to decrypt Jack Rock’s message, they experience first-hand the symbiosis of the LAPD deputy’s attempt to capture gang life in the preceding skit, and Rock’s ongoing attempts to evade this.

Indeed, if “Real Bloods” musically situates Rock within an inter-coast lineage of mainstream gangsta rap, then other songs on his 2010 mixtapes showcase the hybridizing musical practices — characteristic of neo-bohemian hip-hop — that he uses to evade such representational ensnaring. A good example is “No Joke,” from Black Friday. At its core, “No Joke” presents unrelenting thug life verses over a chilling minor-mode theme. In the chorus, however, Jay Rock, the “small time hustler,” comes into contact with Ab-Soul, the long-haired hippy, literally embodying him in the music video as Rock mimes along to Soul’s playful, acousmatic singing.7

Indeed, despite the gangsta leanings of “No Joke,” the musicality of Rock’s flow more immediately recalls the “sung/percussion-effusive” style that I describe as a shared, defining trait of jazz/bohemian and neo-bohemian rap (see Chapter One). To begin the track, Rock’s flow is characterized by the end rhyme pattern typical of the sung rhythmic style (Example 2.1). As the verse progresses, though, he increasingly interposes the scattered caesuras, emphasized by internal rhymes and off-beat attacks, idiomatic of the percussion-effusive style (Example 2.2). The result is at times reminiscent of Ab-Soul’s verse in “Enjoy Life” (see Chapter One). Without the same jazzy beat (which “Enjoy Life” borrows from A Tribe Called Quest’s “Electric Relaxation”), however, the distinctiveness of this flow style is easy to miss. More commonly heard in alternative rap, Rock’s own use of the sung/percussion effusive flow style instead gains its significance through its juxtaposition against the commercialized, violent imagery of gangsta rap. This hybridizing effect

7 On March 24, 2020, this video could be accessed via GorillaFlix’s YouTube page: https://youtu.be/Um5T1CLkx6Q. I elaborate on the significance of Soul’s playful singing style in Chapter One.

reaches an apex in Rock’s playful use of silence (in the form of an extended mid-line caesura) to signify the otherwise serious lyrical imagery of his enemy’s stopped heart (Example 2.2).8

Example 2.1. Jay Rock, “No Joke,” feat. Ab-Soul, verse 1, measures 1–2

Beat: 1 2 3 4 Jay Rock Stocks risin’ fertilisin’ neighborhoods with butter, butter

1 2 3 4 Black steel, no mask, no tags, gutter, gutter

Example 2.2. Jay Rock, “No Joke,” feat. Ab-Soul, verse 1, measures 4–7 Beat: 1 2 3 4 Jay Rock Grab my strap, kiss my mother, bust back, duck for cover

1 2 3 4 Hit the bounty, straight hunter, main line, speak your mind

1 2 3 4 Where you from? Take your time, busta nigga, no response

1 2 3 4 Rest a hater, respirator, *[sound of no response flatlining respirator]

In “No Joke,” then, Jay Rock develops his ongoing project of musically reconciling his hustler origins with an emergent hip (hybridizing, Afro-modernist) sensibility. In the process, he taps

8 Rock borrows this rhetorical gesture from his four measures in verse one of “Black Hippy.” *In the re-released version of “No Joke” on Follow Me Home, the beat fills in Rock’s staged silence here with the sound of a flatlining respirator, as indicated in Example 2.2.

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his own, specific hip lineage, operating outside of the traditions of White and Black bohemianism.

This lineage dates back to the moment that scholars generally agree upon as that in which hipness first crystallized into a discernible aesthetic: namely, the onset of the Second Great Migration in the

1940s, at which time African Americans began to develop cultural responses to new experiences of modernity in Northern urban centers, and particularly New York City. Despite this scholarly consensus, studies of hipness have failed to interrogate this moment in depth, focusing instead on later forms of hip expression following its cooptation and derailment by White hipsters and Black bohemians. Where commentators do explore this moment as an origin point for hipness, they usually do so in relation to bebop musicians (see Monson 1994, 397–398; Saul 2003, 29–96; Leland

2004, 111–136; Ford 2013, 25). By contrast, on the evening of October 14, 2014, Rock took to

Twitter to position himself alongside a less obvious model of hip expression, writing “I am Malcolm

X” (Jay Rock 2014).

Despite the lack of space granted it in scholarly discussions of hipness, The Autobiography of

Malcolm X, coauthored by Alex Haley and based on a series of in-depth interviews with the black nationalist icon, is perhaps the most important historical account of the African American encounter with urban modernity in the 1940s.9 Through Haley’s rich and cinematic depiction of Malcolm

Little’s early life, prior to his conversion to the Nation of Islam, we bear witness to the emergent hip sensibility that accompanied his move from the rural Midwest to urban Boston and Harlem. From this perspective, Malcolm’s fashionable, conked hair style and flamboyant “zoot suits” (also popular amongst bebop musicians) mark a transformation from country rube to modern city-slicker. As the dominant narrative of his life goes, it is at this time that Malcolm, the flamboyant hipster, slips into a

9 Indeed, this lack of coverage speaks exactly to the ways that existing studies of hipness tend to brush over this seminal moment of hip expression.

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life of criminality and “hustling” in the underground economies of pimping and drug dealing (Haley

1996; see also Marable 2011).

By contrast, in a chapter from Race Rebels titled “The Riddle of the Zoot: Malcolm Little and

Black Cultural Politics During World War II,” historian Robin D. G. Kelley challenges this narrative, as reproduced by Malcolm himself, of Malcolm’s supposed “downward descent from hipster to hustler to criminal.” Situating this declension narrative within the bebop-infused moment of wartime

New York, Kelley describes it as “literary construction” that obscures the overlap between, and radical political potential of, Malcolm’s hipster and hustler personas. In contrast, Kelley presents these personas as “underground” routes to a radical reconceptualization of Black existence outside of the norms of mainstream Western society and Black bourgeois integrationism (Kelley 1996, 161–

181). The unified politics of refusal that emerges from Kelley’s reconciliation of Malcolm’s hustler and hipster personas is pointedly different from the privileged and aspirational claims to social insiderism the characterize White and Black bohemianisms respectively. Instead, Malcolm’s example points toward an alternative, underground way of carving out Black existence in an antagonistic social context.

Working his own way through the declension myths usually told about figures like Malcolm,

Rock far more self-consciously asserts the reconcilability of the hustler and the hipster in the synchronic present than Malcolm ever did.10 In doing so, he points toward a fluid conception of

Blackness that works to undermine jazz/bohemian rap’s oppositional critique of gangsta rap (see

Chapter One). What’s more, he does so in a way that further confounds jazz/bohemian rap’s ahistorical claims to bebop as a countercultural art form, and which aligns more closely with bebop’s radical deconstruction of both high/low cultural hierarchies (see Piekut 2017) and mainstream

10 As Kelley (1996, 162) points out, post-conversion Malcolm preferred to distance himself from his earlier years, which he condemned as an extended misstep in the face of state violence.

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versus underground ways of being in the world.11 It is this deconstructive practice that Guthrie P.

Ramsey, Jr. refers to in pinpointing bebop as a form of Afro-modernism: as, that is, an African

American cultural response to modern, urban existence, with a hybridizing impact upon Western cultural categories (Ramsey 2003, 96–97). For obvious reasons, Rock’s connection to Malcolm speaks to the close relationship between Black hipness and Black liberation politics — a point to which I return in Chapter Four. Of more pressing concern here, however, is Rock’s symbolic capacity as a hustler to not only steal hipness away from White hipsters and Black bohemians, but moreover to steal life away from a society that would deny him access to it.

Rethinking the Hustler

While jazz/bohemian rappers have attempted to cultivate their authoritative claims to hipness through an opposition to gangsta rap and its involvement in the U.S. underground economy, Jay Rock’s invocation of Malcolm X supports a competing narrative about the underground hustler figure as historically embodying the radical, originary potential of hipness as a

Black aesthetic of being. This counter-historical work goes beyond the hip-hop parallel public’s myopic valorization of the hustler as a neoliberal symbol of individual accumulation won through an ethos of hard work (see Chapter One). Jay Rock’s embodiment of the hustler figure turns not upon its reformability to mainstream, neoliberal society, but rather upon its ontological excess: its abject state and Afro-modernist deconstruction of mainstream norms; what Kelley describes as Malcolm’s and his contemporaries’ “refus[al] to be good proletarians” (1994, 163).

Writing in the Negro Quarterly and elsewhere at the very moment in which the hip aesthetic was unfolding in young, urban Black communities, Ralph Ellison (still one of the most insightful

11 Indeed, many bebop musicians might similarly be said to have reconciled the hustler and hipster paradigms through their jive talking, zoot suit wearing, gun toting, knife wielding displays of excess. For a revealing portrait of this reconciliation, see Reig with Berger (1990).

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commentators on modern U.S. race relations) presciently hypothesized the radical existential potential to be found in expressive practices of refusal, despite his ongoing reservations about both the hipster’s politics of style and the hustler’s criminality: “Much in Negro life remains a mystery; perhaps the zoot suit conceals profound political meaning; perhaps the symmetrical frenzy of the

Lindy Hop conceals clues to great potential power — if only Negro leaders would solve this riddle”

(Ellison 1943, 300–301; see also Ellison 1995, 294–302; McCann 2011). A few years later, these ideas would take new shape in Ellison’s rich account of modern, African American life, and what I describe in Chapter One as the urtext of radical hipness: Invisible Man. Most obviously, Ellison presents the slippage between the grounded violence of the hustler and the stylized escape of the hipster in the actions of his narrator, who, at the beginning of the novel, recounts violently attacking a person following a racist encounter, and later finds himself mistaken for the mythologized hipster figure of Rinehart. In this way, Ellison begins to formulate some firmer answers to his ponderings from the previous decade concerning how exactly the hustler/hipster figure resolves the tension between Blackness and existence in an oppressive social context.

The most significant attempt at such a resolution comes in the novel’s prologue, in which the narrator describes lighting up his dark subterranean hole and, by extension, his eponymous condition of invisibility. In revealing how this condition opens the Invisible Man up to racialized experiences of violence and civic exclusion, Ellison’s analysis invites comparison with scholarly accounts of the ways in which the racial structures of post-slave societies such as the United States have rendered Blackness “socially dead,” or ontologically dehumanized and excluded from civil society (see Patterson 1982; Hartman 1997; Wilderson 2010).12 Scholars of social death argue that any meaningful theory of Black existence must first affirm this condition, or risk succumbing to an idealized and non-actualizable politics of resistance in the face of overwhelming structural violence

12 For more on the comparison between social death and invisibility, see Moten (2003, 63–84).

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(Sexton 2011; R.L. 2013). And this is exactly what the Invisible Man does in his affirmation of, and location of life within, his abject state and the dark, underground hole that constitutes an extension of this:

In this way, if invisibility works as an allegory for social death, then “light” works as an allegory for the search for social life within and in excess of social death, following its radical affirmation.

It is this form of negotiated liveliness that I place at the core of my rethinking of hipness as a rigorous Black metaphysics and African diasporic aesthetic of existence. This metaphysics brings

Ellison’s invocations of invisibility and light to bear upon the hybridizing processes at the core of

African diasporic culture. On the one hand, the Invisible Man’s attempts at lighting up his invisibility can be understood as an Afro-modernist engagement with an alienating, Northern urban environment. Here, the hybridizing work of Afro-modernism produces a gap between abject and empowered, pathological and pure, deathly and lively forms of existence. In turn, this practice aligns with W. E. B. Du Bois’s own, seminal theory of hybridity, which he calls double consciousness. And it aligns, moreover, not with Du Bois’s early, uncritical view of double consciousness as a mode of transcending the veil, but rather with his later, more radical conception of double consciousness as a mode finally of affirming and finding life within the veil (see Introduction).13

Finally, the Invisible Man’s example invites us to extend this metaphysics to include the economic, aesthetic, and existential aesthetic of “hustling,” (re)defined in Afro-modernist terms, rather than on the neoliberal terms of the Black parallel public. In a very literal sense, the Invisible

Man gains his Afro-modernist, double conscious ability to light up his invisibility from his hustle:

13 On this difference in Du Bois’s shifting conceptions of double consciousness, see Ciccariello-Maher (2009).

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from stealing light from the city’s power grid to light up his underground home. Further still, this lived hustle finds a conceptual analogue in music, through which the Invisible Man gains access to the hybridizing space in which radical hipness emerges: in the break(s), that underground, musical space wherein dwells the aesthetics of the Black radical tradition and a route toward reconceptualizing the terms on which Blackness exists in excess of mainstream society (Moten 2003;

Harney and Moten 2013). Indeed, in the same breath as the Invisible Man introduces his photic dependence, he links his siphoning off of the city’s resources to music, comparing his treasured beams of light to the beams of sound emanating from Louis Armstrong’s trumpet. And it is precisely these beams of sound that allow the Invisible Man to “slip into the breaks and look around” (Ellison 1995, 8).

Returning now, then, to the cypher tracks with which I opened this chapter, I examine the distinctive, musical way in which Jay Rock, an exemplary hustler/hipster figure of the contemporary moment, himself slips into the breaks, expanding upon the Invisible Man’s experiences of them along the way. Responding to more recent, theoretical attempts at engaging with invisibility and light

(or, on these theoreticians’ own terms, social death and social life), I argue that Rock’s (and, more broadly, Black Hippy’s) production of the breaks reconfigures the relationship between ontological

(social dying and living) and aesthetic (rapping in the cypher, improvising) processes within this hybridizing space. The breaks emerge, here, as a radical space of existential theorizing that cannot tolerate undemocratic, totalizing conceptions of racial authenticity, and moreover one that works under and through, rather than in denial of, violent social structures.

Black Hippies on the Run: The Aesthetics of Black Social Life

From Malcolm Little and the Invisible Man to Jay Rock, old and new histories of hipness have repeatedly erased its most radical representatives, and those who have most creatively

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reimagined the possibility of Black humanity in a world predicated upon its denial. Turning, now, to the contemporary moment, this section uses Rock’s doubly marginal position within Black Hippy to explore how exactly the collective’s music might be said to constitute an aesthetics of Black existence. Most revealing, here, are Black Hippy’s trademark cypher tracks — group performances in which all members of the collective seize upon shared musical motifs and take turns embellishing them in a rendering of hip-hop improvisation, or freestyle.14 I argue that the distinctive character of these tracks makes them rich sites for theorizing the reality of Black social life as lived in the hustler’s underground, fugitive exhaustion of social death. In making this claim, I approach recent work in Black studies from a musicological perspective to describe how Black Hippy’s cypher tracks reconceptualize the terms of Black social life from the ground up.

I begin by tracing existing ideas about the cypher as a cultural site of political resistance and diasporic community formation. Such ideas, I suggest, exist in tension with Black Hippy’s own cypher tracks, whose shared musical motifs more accurately reflect an aesthetics of disidentification and erasure. In turn, from this less idealistic standpoint, I show how the collective uses group improvisation to affirm and exhaust these shared motifs, theorizing the possibility of doing the same to the violently racialized condition of social death that they represent. In this way, I present the cypher as musically theorizing the fugitive terms of Black life.

Next, taking a step back from the preceding analysis, I consider how my reading of the cypher track contributes to broader scholarly conversations about the relationship between the aesthetic and the social. By setting influential ideas about Black metaphysics in dialogue with recent musicological debates about sociomusicality, I raise questions about the scholarly treatment of Black musical aesthetics as capable of doing the work of Black life. Instead, in advocating for a clearer

14 As I will explain, I use the terms “freestyle” and “improvisatory” loosely here, as is often the case amongst hip-hop practitioners, to refer to performances that are not necessarily “freestyled” or “improvised,” but which allude to being so, and occur in historically improvisatory contexts, such as the cypher (see note 1).

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separation between “the break,” as a space for musical theorizing, and “the undercommons,” as a space for insurgent Black life, I present hipness as a mode for translating between these domains, thereby refusing to either conflate the two or negate the relationship between them.

Finally, in dramatizing this move between the break and the undercommons, I return to the cypher track as a hip musical practice to reveal how exactly Black Hippy’s aesthetic theorizing can be said to translate into lived manifestations of Blackness-as-fugitivity. I then gesture briefly toward the broader significance, beyond neo-bohemian hip-hop, of this lived, ethical stance. Doing so prepares the final section of the chapter, in which I challenge broadly accepted but underproblematized claims about liveliness and cultural connectivity throughout the African diaspora, and explore how

Black Hippy’s fugitive aesthetics of existence resonate, through the cypher, on a global scale.

Black Hippy’s Fugitive Musicality

Since hip-hop’s emergence in the late 1970s from dance parties in the South Bronx, practitioners and audiences have imagined its fundamental connection to other African diasporic oral and musical traditions (Cobb 2007, 13–39; Fernandes and Stanyek 2007; Osumare 2007; Charry ed. 2012). Often, these narratives have referred to specific cultural practices, as in myths about hip- hop’s outgrowth from West African griot traditions (see Dyson 1993, 3; Toop 2000, 19; Keyes 2004,

17–38; Banks 2010, 240–241; Tang 2012), or its more tangible ties to Caribbean toasting and sound system cultures (see Hebdige 1987, 125; Gilroy 1993, 33–34; Chang 2005, 67–85; Bramwell 2015, 6).

A recurring focal point in these stories about hip-hop’s diasporic origins is the perceived special relationship between the ring shout — an African-derived, slave-era religious practice involving group singing and dancing in a circle formation — and the cypher.15 Samuel A. Floyd, Jr. describes

15 On the connection between the cypher and the ring shout, see Rickford and Rickford (2000, 87); Alim (2006, 97–100); Bramwell (2015, 7–8). For extended discussions of the ring shout, see Stuckey (1987, 3–97); Floyd, Jr. (1991).

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the ring shout as encompassing “all of the defining elements of black music,” from “call-and- response devices” to “musical individuality within collectivity” (Floyd, Jr. 1991, 267–268). In turn, rap artists like Black Hippy have ostensibly rearticulated these same musical characteristics in a syncretic cultural context to produce a new but fundamentally related cultural practice.

Now, listening side-by-side to a performance of a hip-hop cypher and a performance of a ring shout, the aesthetic connection between the two is arguably not as immediate as prevailing discourse would suggest. Indeed, claims about diasporic connection do not so much reflect some perceived aesthetic immediacy as they do deeper-rooted ideas about the supposedly unifying character traits of African diasporic musics — and especially their characteristic sociality.16

Accordingly, scholars regard the hip-hop cypher and the ring shout, like other Black musics, as mutual sites of community formation and counter-hegemonic resistance in oppressive social contexts.17 Invoking both of these processes, Richard Bramwell describes how “the appropriation of the ring shout in London’s [rap scenes] may meet very different needs to those expressed in the slaves’ song and dance, but the adaptation of the slave circle into cyphers [… suggests] the enduring value of this cultural form in its role in producing collective identification and providing resources of hope in postcolonial London” (2015, 8, 72; emphasis mine). What we’re left with is an image of interconnected, resistant communities produced through globally-circulating Black aesthetic practices.

I will return to and complicate these ideas about diasporic connectivity in the next section.

For now, however, returning to the analysis of “Black Hippy” with which I opened this chapter, it is

16 A huge amount of old and more recent scholarship on African music has taken its inherent sociality for granted. For classic arguments that laid the foundations for these claims, see Merriam (1959; 1964); Nketia (1974); Bebey (1975); Chernoff (1979). 17 On the ring shout and the cypher as sites of resistance and/or community formation, see Rickford and Rickford (2000, 87); Alim (2006, 100); Bramwell (2015, 14–15); Lee (2016, 90–97). On the resistant properties of African diasporic cultures, see Gilroy (1993); Neal (1999); Pough (2004). Note that, while scholars who make these claims do often account for competition and conflict also, they explicitly subsume these traits under a broader rubric of communalism. Examples of this tendency include Chernoff (1979, 30–37); Bramwell (2015, 14–15; 18–19); and Lee (2016, 99–124).

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important to note the signal difference that exists between the conventional, improvisatory cypher practice that scholars like Bramwell observe and Black Hippy’s own, pre-composed, aestheticized cypher tracks. I view this difference as growing primarily out of the collective’s spatial displacement of the cypher. Working in between the crafted arrangements of the studio and the casual, improvisatory space of the street cypher, Black Hippy’s cypher tracks pose a fundamental challenge to conventional readings of the cypher as a creative assertion of resistant, communal Black life.

Indeed, as I describe in my opening discussion of “Black Hippy,” the collective does not simply engage in the cypher’s characteristic style of informal group improvisation. Rather, through their studied aestheticization of the form, members of the collective stage a virtuosic rendering of improvisation over a shared musical motif. The resultant effect, whereby each rapper’s voice seems to transform imperceptibly into that of the next, works to amplify the interpersonal confusion introduced at the beginning of the song. In this sense, viewing “Black Hippy” as a site of collective identification and existence becomes only one possibility. Indeed, I argue that the song functions more obviously as a site of disidentification and erasure.

Supporting this claim, Black Hippy’s use of shared motifs here evokes the violently racialized condition of anonymity and exchangeability (both conditions captured under the broader rubric of invisibility) that Ellison locates at the core of Black ontology. These specific manifestations of racial invisibility bring new substance to the condition that Saidiya Hartman terms fungibility to describe the endemic replaceability and interchangeability of Black bodies following their commodification under slavery (Hartman 1997, 21). In this view, “the slave experiences their ‘slaveness’ ontologically, […] not as an oppressed subject, who experiences exploitation and alienation, but as an object of accumulation and fungibility (exchangeability)” (Anonymous 2017, 8; see Wilderson 2010, 55).18

18 In this sense, Black Hippy’s polished versioning of the cypher’s informal performance practice disrupts not only conventional understandings of the cypher, but also of the tension between composition and improvisation more broadly. Contrary to scholarly and practitioner readings of improvisation as a route to freedom from both aesthetic and

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At the same time, however, it would be misleading to overstate the uniformity — and fungibility — of the verses in these songs. Quite the contrary, in revealing moments of dissent, members of the collective work against the rest of the track to distinguish their own verses from those of their peers. And they do so by momentarily reifying the gap between their use of shared motivic material and their staged rendering of collective improvisation upon it. Consider, for instance, the heightened improvisatory style that characterizes Ab-Soul’s use of the four-syllable motif from

“Black Hippy.” While structuring his four measures around the same motif as the previous verses,

Soul also deforms it through rhythmic augmentation (on “faaast caaar”) and interpolation (“She said,

‘drive slow,’ I said, ‘fuck off’”).

Another good example of the dynamics of the cypher track arises in “Vice City,” from Jay

Rock’s second studio album, 90059 (2015). Like “Black Hippy,” this cypher track centers on a shared motif that unifies verses by all members of the collective. First heard in Kendrick’s opening chorus, establishing its precedence in the song, this extended motif unfolds over two-measure iterations, comprising a syncopated, three-note figure repeated three times and culminating in a cadence on beat four of each second measure. The cadence itself comprises two eighth-note articulations, on beat four and its upbeat (Example 2.3).19 Following this opening chorus, each member of Black Hippy raps sixteen measure verses grounded in this underlying motivic pattern, creating the same effect of interpersonal fluidity heard in “Black Hippy.” At the same time, their uses of the motif vary in a performatively improvised manner, signified, for example, by Jay Rock’s

existential constraints, the intrinsic, compositional underpinning of Black Hippy’s group improvisation in fact dramatizes the overwhelming ontological reality of Black social death. For accounts and critiques of ideas about improvisation as freedom, see Monson (2007, 4–5); Goldman (2010); Kazanjian (2016); Muyumba (2016). 19 My analysis and musical examples for “Vice City” simplify the complex rhythms of the MCs’ flow patterns by reducing them to their basic, underlying rhythmic structures. Doing so reveals the lower-level motivic patterns audible against the surface-level rhythms.

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rhythmic augmentation of the cadence, which he converts into two quarter notes, landing on beats three and four (Example 2.4).

Example 2.3. Jay Rock, “Vice City,” feat. Black Hippy, chorus 1, measures 1–4

Example 2.4. Jay Rock, “Vice City,” feat. Black Hippy, verse 1, measures 13–16, and verse 2, measures 1–4

At times, such variations reach an improvisatory extreme, as is exemplified in Ab-Soul’s verse (Example 2.5). Here, Soul both embraces and deforms the shared motivic figure to striking effect. He begins by replacing its opening syncopations with strict eighth and quarter notes, while

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retaining the original cadential structure. Next, in measure five, he adopts the syncopated pattern exactly, but interrupts it after just one half-measure iteration with a hypermetrically displaced cadence. Finally, in measure six, he frustrates the motif entirely, beginning with an unprecedented downbeat rest. This pause matches Soul’s lyrics, as he stages a moment of “spontaneous” contemplation in the middle of his verse, before going on to once again provide the expected cadence on beat four.20

Example 2.5. Jay Rock, “Vice City,” feat. Black Hippy, verse 3, measures 1–6

So, through rhythmic variation and rhetorical device in “Black Hippy” and “Vice City,” Soul both revels in and exceeds the shared motifs that characterize each song. In this way, he disrupts the aesthetics of disidentification and erasure that inhere within the motif by imbuing it with a trace of

20 Soul’s performance here constitutes a rich example of what James Webster (2007, 175–176) calls “improvisatory rhetoric,” corresponding to both Webster’s example of an artist “seeming to ‘lose [his] way,’” and to “the unexpected subversion of an apparently stable formal type” (here, the motivic pattern that Kendrick establishes in his opening chorus). Indeed, in this context, we come to recognise that the “cadence” at measure 5 is not a cadence at all. Instead, Soul invokes a classical rhetorical device, described by Johann Nicolaus Forkel in his Allgemeine Geschichte der Musik, vol. 1 (1788) as “ellipsis.” Indeed, Soul’s deployment of this device almost exactly matches Forkel’s description of one of the means through which it arises: “When a phrase that has […] been growing more and more lively leads toward a cadence, but, instead of reaching it, as one would have expected on the basis of the foregoing course […] breaks off.” Johann Nicolaus Forkel, Allgemeine Geschichte der Musik, vol. 1 (1788), trans. Danuta Mirka (personal correspondence), § 112.

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character and vitality. Indeed, if Black Hippy’s use of shared motifs evokes the condition of fungibility, then these heightened moments of staged improvisation speak to the possibility of finding life within (while never fully overcoming) this symptom of Black social death. As such, if

Black Hippy’s motivic dramatization of personal interchangeability invites comparison with Ellison on invisibility (and Hartman on fungibility), then these heightened moments of improvisation more obviously analogize the forces through which the Invisible Man gains mastery over this state of invisibility and finds life within it — namely, the beams of “light” with which he illuminates his underground home and discovers his invisibility. In other words, Soul signals both the necessity of affirming his fungibility, and the possibility of working through this condition.21

This claim invites theoretical analogy with what Fred Moten calls “fugitivity.” Moten describes fugitivity as “a movement of […] stolen life,” or a mode of living defined by the

“exhaustion” of Black life’s impossibility (Moten 2008, 179; 2013, 738). Indeed, if fungibility exists at the core of the Slave’s ontology then, as C. Riley Snorton has shown in relation to slave narratives, it is fungible flesh itself that becomes “a mode for fugitive action” (Snorton 2017, 12).22 Similarly, the shared musical motifs that govern Black Hippy’s cypher tracks signify the capacity of fungible material itself to exhaust the ontological conditions of fungibility and social death. In this way, Black

21 It should be noted, however, that this dynamic does not necessarily signal a tension between shared motifs on the one hand, and individual improvisation on the other. As Fumi Okiji shows, by way of Craig Hansen Werner, the liberal category of the individual lacks applicability to Blackness, whose sorry exclusion from civil society extends also to the more pernicious elements of said society, such as social fragmentation and individuation (Okiji 2018, 12; see Werner 1994, 191). This observation relates closely to my discussion, in Chapter One, of the inapplicability to Blackness of Western humanist frameworks such as alienation and exploitation. Instead, then, given the fungible mechanisms of the cypher, this dynamic is arguably better understood as operating between shared motifs and collective improvisation upon them. In this way, Black Hippy dramatizes how the lived negotiation of fungibility remains distinct from the individuation of normative liberal humanism. For Moten, this shift from the individual to the collective corresponds to a shift from “poems” to “poetry.” In Black vernacular, it’s the shift from “Thom” to “Thom’n’em” (Moten 2018). In the hip-hop context (as I was reminded by an informal conversation that I overheard at the 2018 Annual Meeting of the Pop Conference at the Museum of Pop Culture), it’s DMX on the “Intro” to It’s Dark and Hell Is Hot (1998) when he says, “that’s my mans’n’em.” 22 Specifically, building on Spillers’s theory of the flesh as a “zero degree of social conceptualization” that disrupts conventional gender categories (Spillers 1987, 97), Snorton argues that “the recurrence of ‘cross-dressing’ and cross- gender modes of escape in fugitive-slave narratives engenders a way of seeing fungible flesh as a mode for fugitive action” (Snorton 2017, 12).

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Hippy’s cypher tracks become spaces for theorizing fugitivity as a conditional lived modality in the present. As I will argue, these tracks also gesture beyond such theorizing, working in tandem with a closely related, lived ethics of fugitivity. In working toward these lived dimensions of fugitivity, however it is necessary to first examine how the cypher track intervenes in broader scholarly ideas about the relationship between aesthetic and social processes.

Rethinking the Break

If the members of Black Hippy use their cypher tracks to theorize the fugitive terms of

Black life, then they aren’t the first to do this musical-theoretical work. Indeed, fugitivity is central to

Moten’s conception of the musical aesthetics of the Black radical tradition and that ongoing, underground space of refusal that he calls “the break.” It is in and through this space that Moten himself theorizes enslavement and the musical, improvisatory search for life as “the performative essence of Blackness” (Moten 2003, 16). And, at the core of Moten’s theory of this fugitive, improvisatory action, is the understanding that it does not signal the attainment of full social life (or the overcoming of social death). Recall that light only allows the Invisible Man to discover his invisibility; even while he lives, he still lives in an underground hole. In other words, fugitivity cannot be understood outside of social death, but it does allow us to account for the “social life all up in that social death” (Bey 2016; see also Moten 2013).

At the same time, despite the overlap with Moten’s ideas that I observe here, my view of

Black Hippy’s cypher tracks also fundamentally diverges from Moten’s own ideas about fugitivity, most notably in that I do not perceive these tracks as capable of doing the work of Black life (even if on the conditional terms of the break). Rather, in bringing musicological debates to bear upon such ideals, my interest in the relationship between Black aesthetics and Black metaphysics revolves around a more abstract claim. Speaking to the tension that I observe within this relationship is the

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pause-giving, opening sentence to Moten’s seminal study of the break: “The history of blackness is testament to the fact that objects can and do resist” (2003, 1). It seems that this opening gambit has weighed on Moten since. For instance, in the preface to Black and Blur, which picks up from In the

Break fifteen years later, Moten defers this sentiment, even while affirming it: “I suffered, and continue to suffer, over the first sentence [of In the Break], which I can’t repeat because it was meant to be second. I can only tell you what the first sentence was supposed to be: ‘Performance is the resistance of the object’” (2017, vii). Moten’s later work clarifies his project as being an attempt “at a particular kind of failure” — namely, to pin down, and thus work up to the intractability of,

Blackness (2077, vii). Nonetheless, across this timespan, he remains committed to Black aesthetics

(and improvisation in particular) as that moving, always existing, and always uncapturable space (the break) in which Blackness emerges, radically and resistantly.

But, as recent and ongoing debates in musicology would suggest, it is not clear that music (or aesthetics more generally) can in fact “resist.” Not that musicologists haven’t historically attempted to make such claims. In his recent study of South African kwaito, ethnomusicologist Gavin Steingo describes the limits of the (by then aging) New Musicology of the 1990s and its attempts to pin down the social functions of music — as in essentializing claims about “music as an affirmation of social identity” (2016, 8, 224n12). Steingo’s response is to separate aesthetics and sociality altogether.

Through ethnographic study of musical practice in Soweto, he takes a materialist approach to the ways in which music, as an apolitical force, literally signifies distance and freedom from political violence and oppressive lived realities. Here, music’s social function emerges not so much in its musical aesthetics as in the personal and collective ways in which it is practiced, beyond the political scope of the state.23 Responding to a similar set of issues in music studies, ethnomusicologist

23 I elaborate on the details of Steingo’s study and its relationship to my theorization of neo-bohemian hip-hop in Chapter Four.

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Catherine Appert pursues the overlooked and too-easily dismissed forms of knowledge tied up in memory and myths of Senegalese hip-hop. Foregrounding musical form itself as a site for local, global, and diasporic knowledge production (part of what she calls “hip hop time”), Appert develops an ethnographically rich, grounded analysis of hip-hop’s social function that exists in excess of its representational content. In this view, “verbal and musical texts [emerge] from the purposeful weaving together of utterances into recognizable forms that both comment on and dialogically produce social realities” (Appert 2018, 17–18; see also Bakhtin 1986; Barber 2007). Again, here, music per se does not do the work of social life (specifically, the ontological position that antagonistically structures social death) or provide a way of being in the world, so much as it articulates the practices of mythmaking and remembering through which people really do construct their lives.

Engaging these interventions into sociomusicality from the perspective of Black Hippy’s cypher tracks, the grounds upon which Moten makes his claims about the aesthetics of the Black radical tradition begin to feel a little less tenable. One way of viewing Moten’s argument is through his overlapping schemata of Blackness-as-improvisation (Moten 2003, 16) and “Blackness-as- fugitivity” (Moten 2017, 71). While each schema seemingly makes sense on its own, the pivot move required in connecting the two into a musical aesthetics of Black life — the notion of improvisation- as-fugitivity — depends upon a conflation of the aesthetic and the social, which raises (and fails to answer) the question of how musical improvisation can do the work of Blackness.24 As Benjamin

Piekut puts it, from this perspective, “telling a story in sound about the truth of the self is the same as telling a lie. To improvise is to lie, or to tell the truth about a lie, or to expose the lie of the true self” (Piekut 2018, 88). And it is the political limits of this “appeal to consolatory expressive solace”

24 In other words, if B == I and B == F, then it should also be true that I == F. Indeed, Moten (2018) has gestured toward this claim: “Improvisation is how we make no way out of a way. Improvisation is how we make nothing out of something.” And others have articulated it more explicitly (see Harney and Moten 2013, 7).

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in an anti-Black context that drives Okiji to move away from any attempt to prove that “black life is necessarily an artistic undertaking,” and toward the more tenable assertion — following Adorno’s sense that “autonomous works of art” are able to “provide a kind of social critique” — that “black expressive work cannot but help shed light on black life’s (im)possibilities” (Okiji 2018, 4, 31,

111n20).25

Similarly complicated, from this perspective, is the work of Moten’s close interlocutor Frank

Wilderson (2010), who argues from a more nihilistic perspective that Black, White, and Red aesthetics ultimately reveal nothing more than the impossibility of Black life in the anti-Black context of the United States. Indeed, Wilderson even extends this analysis beyond the U.S. context, describing the resultant abnegation of Black cultural structures such as, amongst other things, diaspora (Wilderson, Spatzek, and von Gleich 2016, 8, 17). Despite his apparent separation of the aesthetic and the social here, however, his refusal to consider the ways that Black aesthetics might theorize out of the Black existential condition in fact paradoxically produces an absolute relationship between the two. His argument that film’s “nonnarrative, or cinematic, strategies” (lighting, camera angles, sound) speak only to the fundamental truth of his structural analysis (see Wilderson 2010, 5,

25) ultimately constitutes the other side of Moten’s claim that aesthetics produce and negotiate these same structures. In other words, Wilderson’s argument depends upon the same conflation of the aesthetic and the social as Moten’s. In the process, it misses the radical potential of Black aesthetics to newly theorize, in the break, the terms on which Black life is lived.

25 In reaching this view, Okiji builds on Adorno’s limited understanding of jazz but nonetheless astute critique of jazz criticism, which Adorno argues misrepresents the music as a route to individual freedom and democracy. By juxtaposing Adorno’s more generous view of so-called autonomous (European art) music’s radical capacity for social critique against his ignorance of jazz music and Afro-modernity — while enriching the latter with a closer focus on jazz’s creative practices — Okiji turns Adorno’s ideas on themselves in order to show how they might help us to understand jazz as itself a form of social critique. In doing so, she traces her own route beyond utopian ideas about individualism and democracy, which lack applicability to Blackness, in order to argue that “jazz work is also able to present a prototype for alternative forms of social organization” (Okiji 2018, 32).

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In this sense, I don’t see the value of thinking about Black Hippy’s combination of shared motifs with heightened moments of improvisation upon them as performing the fugitive exhaustion of a fungible existence. But neither do I think about this musical dynamic as having no efficacy whatsoever vis-à-vis imagining routes to Black freedom. Rather, building on Steingo’s and Appert’s more detached treatments of musical aesthetics, I am interested in how Black Hippy use this practice to theorize the reality of Black life as lived in the exhaustion of social death. From this perspective, the break must constitute not the authentic aesthetic space of Black radical practice, but rather a space of Black radical aesthetic theorizing.26 If to make this claim is to reify the gap between theory and practice, then I hope it is to avoid what I view as a more serious problem: that invocations of marginalized people’s capacity to resist might add up to little more than a lullaby to which powerful people can sleep at night, secure in the knowledge that the oppressed can take care of themselves.

These culture-as-resistance narratives let powerful communities off the hook for the task of ending an overwhelmingly violent social structure.27 Why should Black people do this work? And why should they be capable of it, beyond claims of a mythical strength residing in the shapeless resilience of Black culture? More than this, though, I hope that making this claim about the break is also to

26 It should be noted that, in his own engagement with In The Break, J. Griffith Rollefson centers what he views as “Moten’s insistence that black music is scholarship” (2017, 10). As he puts it elsewhere: for Moten, “black artistic performance holds the potential of expressing an imminent critique of Western rationality and its systems of meaning from an embodied position […] Thus, Moten argues that the black radical aesthetic has become the critical — the artistic has become the scholarly — through its very existence and resistance” (2008, 105–107, emphasis mine). The difference, here, from my own claim about musical aesthetics as theory centers on the ideas about embodiment and resistance at the core of Rollefson’s reading of Moten. In this view, music only does theory as a byproduct of its doing the lived (embodied) work of Blackness (namely, resistance). By contrast, it remains unclear to me how music can be said to do that work of Blackness — in which sense, Rollefson inadvertently affirms my critique of Moten. Instead, I continue to insist on the need to separate the aesthetic and the social, before exploring how they shed light on one another. 27 Hartman describes this sort of self-serving discursive sleight-of-hand as an obscene “attempt to make the narrative of defeat into an opportunity for celebration, the desire to look at the ravages and the brutality of the last few centuries, but to still find a way to feel good about ourselves (Hartman and Wilderson 2003, 185, emphasis mine). As Okiji puts it, “the modeling of authorized, world-appropriate ‘human’ life for black bodies is a profitable, forever-in-demand pursuit and one that tends to the safekeeping of the hegemon” (Okiji 2018, 52), or “the preservation of society” (Anonymous 2017, 11). From an Afro-pessimist standpoint, “any appeal to consolatory expressive solace falls short of the required vigilance toward complicity. Leaning on the redemptive qualities of black expression as a way to soften the harsh reality of societal impotence only assists the ‘diffusion of terror’ — black life being dispossessed even of its own enjoyment” (Okiji 2018, 111n20; see also Hartman 1997, 4).

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speak to the generative potential of theorizing to imagine the possibilities of Black life. Indeed, rather than reifying theory and practice as fundamentally separate domains, my intention is to reconceptualize the relationship between the two. And this is where hipness reenters the conversation.

Even while I draw closely, throughout the dissertation, on Phil Ford’s definition of hipness as “equally an aesthetic of music and the self” (2013, 77), I also expand on this definition by stressing the need to separate these domains out before attempting to set them in dialogue, or else to risk conflating them. In doing so, I differentiate between “the break,” as a musical space, and what

Fred Moten and Stefano Harney (2013) call “the undercommons.” A radical existential space that brings insurgent Black life to bear upon civil society, I read the undercommons as the lived equivalent to the aesthetic space of the break, as analogized by the Invisible Man’s underground space of radical, fugitive, hip existence.28 Indeed, clarifying this difference between the break and the undercommons, recall that, while Louis Armstrong’s music allows the Invisible Man to slip into the breaks and apprehend the violent conditions of his life, this music serves only as an analogue to the narrator’s lived, material practice of stealing the light with which to illuminate his underground hole

— his own route into the undercommons. Put differently, if the break is a space for Black aesthetic theorizing, then the undercommons is the space to put that theory into practice. And hipness — and, for the purposes of this chapter, the cypher track as a form of hip expression — emerges as a space for translating between the two, giving rise to a shift from the musical theorizing of Blackness- as-fugitivity, to the fugitive aesthetics of existence.29

28 I elaborate on the undercommons and its relationship to Invisible Man in the Introduction. 29 As will become clear in part three, this is one sense in which my theory of hipness as an African diasporic aesthetic of existence relates to Brent Hayes Edwards’s understanding of diaspora as set of “practices” to which “translation” is central (see Edwards 2003, 7, 9, 11).

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The Fugitive Aesthetics of Existence

In his 1950 essay, “Portrait of the Inauthentic Negro,” Anatole Broyard builds on his earlier critique of the hipster’s stylized, “a priori” pose (see Chapter One) by describing practices of racial romanticization and self-minstrelization as “avenues of flight” that characterize the futility of Black political resistance. Doubling down on his arguments from “Portrait of the Hipster,” published two years prior, Broyard instead suggests individual responsibility and self-uplift as the route beyond the veil (Broyard 1950; see Broyard 2010). In the hip-hop context, these ideals find a revealing counterpart in the recording studio as a mythologized symbol of not only polished musical craft, but also the “hustle” as conceptualized within the Black parallel public — that is, as an ethos of hard work and hard-won success (see Chapter One). This mythology emerges in stories about rappers not leaving the studio for days on end, sleeping on mattresses on the floor, surrounded by boxes of take- out.

As I argue in Chapter One, this conception of Black uplift possesses a rootedness in mainstream neoliberalism that saps it of any radical political potential. In contrast, even in conventional hip-hop terms, successful participation in the cypher revolves less around notions of hard work, and more around loosely defined but distinctly hip-hop notions of craft, and specifically improvisation (see notes 1 and 14). While ideals of hard work necessarily permeate all neoliberal contexts to some degree, within the informal (if competitive) space of the cypher, these ethical ideals emerge as subordinate to ephemeral and unprofitable (if also hard won) aesthetic ones. In their aestheticized cypher tracks, Black Hippy exaggerate and deepen this spatial, aesthetic, and ethical divide between the studio and cypher, to meditate on the potentially radical forms of existence that emerge when you step out into the spaces in between. Through this form of meditation, the cypher track’s aesthetic theorizing emerges as rooted in a lived ethics of the hustle more closely related to the anti-proletarian form of refusal practiced by early Black hipsters like Malcolm Little.

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This ethics is perhaps most vividly captured in Ab-Soul’s 2016 song, “Beat the Case,” where he musically dwells on the fugitive ethics requires to negotiate the afterlives of slavery. Reminding us that Black people have long been running from something more than musical representation, Soul here rearticulates Hartman’s deeply historicized theory of fungibility and social death for a hip-hop audience:

“All I do is beat the case All I do is beat the case All I do is beat it, beat it, Beat it, beat it like a runaway slave.”

In this passage, Soul sleekly elides his own experience of evading incorporation into the prison industrial complex (in hip-hop slang, beating the case) with the image of a slave fleeing (beating it) from the plantation. This multi-layered image of Blackness-as-fugitivity resonates deeply across time and space, connecting transatlantic slavery (the origin point for Black social death) to its present-day afterlives.30 Contrary to Broyard’s dismissiveness, by engaging this hustler sensibility, Soul, like the

Invisible Man before him, embraces “flight” (or fugitivity; that imperative to “beat it!”) as a supremely authentic mode of Black existence. A negation of mainstream neoliberal proletarianism,

Broyard’s reproduction of this ideology from within the Black parallel public, and rappers’ reproduction of this ideology from within “the stu’,” Soul’s invocation of flight unabashedly affirms the veil even while staking a commitment to outrunning it. As when the Invisible Man discovers his invisibility through light siphoned off from the city’s electrical grid, Soul captures the possibility of exhausting his fungible ontology in the real world.

Such practices entail a rethinking of not only the hustler, but also those other, subaltern modalities gobbled up by White hipsters and Black bohemians and regurgitated as sacrifices to the shrine of neoliberal humanism. These modalities comprise what Richard Iton, in In Search of The

30 On the continuities between slavery and the prison industrial complex, see Blackmon (2008); Alexander (2010).

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Black Fantastic, calls “minor-key sensibilities generated from the experiences of the underground, the vagabond, and those constituencies marked as deviant” (2008, 16, emphasis mine) — all buzzwords

(mis)appropriated by the legible hipster, and thereby stripped of their radical potential. By imagining the possibility of reclaiming these modalities, Black Hippy raps the ungovernability of the fugitive

(see Johnson and Lubin 2017, 17; Quan 2017). The collective reconverts the symbolism of hip style into a radical aesthetic theory and existential practice with broad significance for rethinking existence in the African diaspora.

What, then, of the globality of Black Hippy’s rap on existentialism? Again, the Invisible Man as an icon of radical hipness guides us here. Returning to the novel’s prologue, having recounted the sensation of slipping into the breaks, descending into the musical depths of Louis Armstrong’s trumpet and pausing to look around as time slows down, the narrator describes a sudden increase in tempo. This increase is accompanied by the onset of an underground religious sermon on “the

‘Blackness of Blackness.’” A rapid call and response ensues between the preacher and the congregation, steadily increasing in intensity. As the tempo reaches a swell, Armstrong’s trumpet suddenly breaks back through into the mix before, just as quickly, a tom-tom drum enters to drown it back out. Just as the noise becomes too much to bear, the Invisible Man describes “ascending hastily from this underworld of sound to hear Louis Armstrong innocently asking, What did I do/ To be so black/ And blue?” (Ellison 1995, 9–12). And so it is, underground, in the break, against the backdrop of the Black church, that Armstrong’s trumpet meets its diasporic cousin, and the Invisible

Man shines his light a little further afield.

And here it is, too, I argue, that Black Hippy’s cypher tracks extend their analytic gaze. In the next section, I consider how these tracks, as vehicles for aesthetic theorizing, relate to other hip musical expressions from the diaspora. Importantly, I argue that this relationship troubles conventional ideas about transcendental diasporic connection. But, I also show how it belies claims

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(epitomized by Wilderson) that an ontology of social death must negate the possibility of diaspora altogether. Rather, following the case of the Invisible Man, I argue that diasporic relationality plays out on an experiential frequency best theorized through the breaks. As Hortense Spillers puts it in her own reading of Invisible Man, “the call and response rhythm of the black church service entangles with a dramatization of unlocalized generational conflict” (Spillers 1977, 60, emphasis mine). Spillers conjures, here, an image of fraught heritage and tense cultural exchange overdetermined by an anti-

Black context. And indeed, the overwhelming musical montage that accompanies the Invisible

Man’s descent into the breaks confounds conventional narratives of harmonious Black musical interconnection. In what follows, I argue that it is hipness — something, following Moten (2003, 67) on Blackness, “more fundamental than the mark of locality” — that provides a better route to understanding how unbearable experiences of dying and living can be said to resonate across time and space.

Globalizing Hipness: Rethinking Diasporic Cultural Connectivity

In the previous section, I outlined commonplace narratives about hip-hop’s diasporic origins as these structure more specific ideas about the related roles of the ring shout and the cypher in producing and maintaining resistant African diasporic communities. In turn, I showed how the hybridizing aesthetic of Black Hippy’s cypher tracks challenges these ideas about Black culture, while instead theorizing a fugitive aesthetics of existence, emerging in the spaces in between the studio and the street, the compositional and the improvisational, the deathly and the lively. Building on this work, this section reconsiders Black Hippy’s cypher tracks from a broader, African diasporic perspective, while and by exploring how these tracks highlight the fundamental issue with conceptualizing any Black music in relation to an underlying aesthetics and ethics of resistant communalism. Working through this claim, I examine how the radical Black metaphysics that Black

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Hippy theorizes comes to resonate outside of the United States, giving rise to a new understanding of diaspora that better accounts for the globality of anti-Blackness.

I begin by exploring how, in addition to converting the cypher into a formalized, aestheticized practice that resists conventional understandings of the form, Black Hippy’s cypher tracks also challenge conventional discursive claims about the cypher’s diasporic cultural significances. In particular, these tracks reveal the need to move beyond both top-down, globalized models of diasporic connectivity and the pair of social-aesthetic fallacies (regarding political resistance and social cohesion) that help to sustain them. In turn, by setting Black Hippy’s cypher tracks in dialogue with comparable African diasporic musical practices in Senegal and Mali, I work toward a more critical approach to the aesthetics of social life and the possibility of cultural connectivity within the African diaspora. On the one hand, this means interrogating utopic and essentialist ideas about the transcendental connections that inhere between diasporic cultures. On the other, it means exploding overly pessimistic ideas about the absolute impossibility of diaspora in the face of social death. Striking a middle ground between these perspectives, I use my rethinking of hipness to argue that the in fact lively relationship between African diasporic musical practices is best understood not in terms of cultural connectivity, but rather in terms of “ontological resonance.”

Rethinking the Cypher

In The Black Atlantic, Paul Gilroy provocatively asks, “how can rap be discussed as if it sprang intact from the entrails of the blues? […] [W]hat is it about black America’s writing elite which means that they need to claim this diasporic cultural form in such an assertively nationalist way?” (1993, 34). Instead, Gilroy insists that hip-hop must be understood as taking shape in transit, in the spaces in between Africa, Europe, and the Americas. Gilroy’s post-nationalist stance here

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precludes and exceeds ideas about transnational cultural connectivity per se. However, his comments nonetheless signal a scholarly commitment — enduring to the present day — to hip- hop’s relationship with other African diasporic cultural practices.

As I have shown, such ideas are encapsulated in claims about the close aesthetic and ethical connection between the slave-era ring shout and the hip-hop cypher as mutual sites of political resistance and community formation. In contrast, by forcing us to reckon with the realities of Black social life as attainable only through social death, Black Hippy’s cypher tracks not only exceed existing definitions of the cypher; they also raise a more fundamental question about the pair of social-aesthetic ideals, concerning Black sociality and resistance, at the core of existing theories of

African diasporic culture. Specifically, Black Hippy’s cypher tracks invite us to musically meditate on the question: what does it mean to talk about Black Culture as sites of resistance and community formation in a world predicated upon the exclusion of Blackness from civil society?

This question goes beyond observations (themselves damning) that such social commonality frameworks, and the resistance narratives in which they’re entangled, reflect constraining, masculinist conceptions of diaspora (see Pinto 2013, 6; Burton 2017, 52). Rather, at a more fundamental level, it suggests that the association of African diasporic cultures with resistance and community formation is not only utopic, but impossible.31 From this perspective, these ideals contribute to a totalizing conception of diaspora that overdetermines the appearance of cultural continuity across time and space, while obfuscating the violent social structures that preclude these very continuities in the first place.32

31 As Wilderson puts it, “what is […] problematic about the word diaspora, when applied to Blacks, is its grammatical coupling with a possessive pronoun ‘their’ — ‘their homeland,’ or ‘their original homeland.’ The viability of such phrases falters in the face of Africa because the word ‘Africa’ is a shorthand for technologies of force that rob possessive pronouns and place names of their integrity […] Blacks, in other words, cannot claim their bodies, cannot claim their families, cannot claim their cities, cannot claim their countries, they cannot lay claim to a personal pronoun […] Africa is a place of non-community” (Wilderson, Spatzek, and von Gleich 2016, 8, 17). 32 For additional critiques of top-down, theoretically determinist conceptions of the diaspora, see Edwards (2003); Pinto (2013); Appert (2016a).

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This deterministic conception of diaspora grows directly out of the very ideas about the determinate relationship between Black aesthetics and Black social life that I have critiqued in this chapter. The other side of this view is, of course, the notion that Black culture has no relation to

Black life whatsoever, leading to a dystopian image in which ideas about diasporic connection become altogether untenable (see note 31). In contrast, by refusing such acts of conflation, Black

Hippy’s cypher tracks gesture toward a middle ground between these perspectives, and a more critical approach to diaspora. Taking the impossibility of Black social life as a starting point, the issue with existing theories of African diasporic cultural connectivity emerges as their dependence upon the transcendence of, rather than reckoning with, this impossibility.

So, in light of songs like “Black Hippy” and “Vice City,” how are we to better understand the cypher? Questions of social function and intention aside, Black Hippy’s motivic sharing clearly works to dramatize the relationship between its members. The question becomes whether we are to continue to read such dramatizations as impossible, resistant productions of community, or to interpret them as theorizations of an ontological — fungible — reality. The prevailing discursive tendency toward the former is understandable, as the cypher’s affect is overwhelmingly one of empowerment and liveliness. And indeed, my attempts at nuancing this optimistic interpretation of the cypher are equally predicated on working through and past Wilderson’s utterly hopeless take on diasporic (im)possibility. However, what I am suggesting is the need to understand the cypher’s perceived lively affect as arising less from any resistant production of community, and more from the radical fact of finding social life within a grammar of suffering defined by fungibility and social death.

Finally, it is worth reiterating that the radical conception of Black social life that I am listening into Black Hippy’s cypher tracks is intrinsically wed to the U.S. social context. At the same time, if scholars like Wilderson have imagined the globality of anti-Blackness as a consequence of

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colonialism, I would counter that Black Hippy’s aesthetic theorizing in and through anti-Blackness might have a similarly global reach. Namely, I argue that the ontological structure that I theorize into

(and out of) Black Hippy’s music provides a foundation for rethinking the relationships between distinct engagements, from throughout the diaspora, with global experiences of anti-Blackness — and thus, for rethinking diasporic connectivity itself. Indeed, postcolonial theorist Achille Mbembe understands African diasporic musics more broadly as analogizing the temporality of Black social life that I have traced in this chapter, describing how “a proper critique [of the postcolony] requires us first to dwell in the chaos of the night in order precisely to better break through into the dazzling light of the day” (Mbembe 2015). In closing, I build on this assertion to argue that the ontological structure theorized in Black Hippy’s music — that is, the dualistic affirmation of a life lived through death — provides the impetus for a more tenable conception of cultural connectivity in the African diaspora.

Toward a Theory of Diaspora as Ontological Resonance

As described, Black Hippy is not unique in its use of the cypher track to aesthetically theorize the fact of Blackness-as-fugitivity. Returning to the moment of hipness’s crystallization as an African American response to urban modernity, there is a strong comparison to be made between Black Hippy’s stylized improvisation over precomposed, shared material, and the comparable practices of bebop musicians. At the core of bebop’s musical form is the juxtaposition of a pre-composed theme, or “head,” stated in joint monophony at the beginning of a piece, and collective improvisation upon this over a succession of solo “choruses.” The bebop convention of stating the head at the beginning of a song compares with Kendrick Lamar’s statement of the shared motif at the beginning of “Vice City,” before Black Hippy’s collective exhaustion of it. By the same token, when Charlie Parker takes off on a solo, there’s no chance of mistaken identity; he exhausts

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the head and any possibility that it has of capturing and making him interchangeable with his jazz combo partners. In this way, both bebop and the cypher track emerge as privileged sites for aesthetic theorizing vis-à-vis comparable lived (and non-lived) experiences. In both cases, the alternation of shared material with collective improvisation upon it can be understood as imagining the possibility of finding social life within a grammar of suffering defined by fungibility and social death. And, given the global reshaping of Black ontology for the post-slave era, this would seem to be a more meaningful way of reading commonalities between Black aesthetic practices across space and time.

Extending the bebop comparison, another particularly revealing example of this relationship between shared motifs and improvisation upon them arises in Malian kora music. In Bamako Sounds:

The Afropolitan Ethics of Malian Music, Ryan Skinner describes kora music’s basic structure as comprising a repeating accompanying figure (“kunben”) working against melodic elaboration

(“folikan”) over the top of this. Tellingly, Skinner rejects attempts at knowing this musical practice through conventional diaspora frameworks. Instead, he understands the relationship between the kunben and the folikan as exemplifying what he calls the “Afropolitan” ethics of traditional and contemporary Malian musics. Here, the term Afropolitanism refers to a “positioning of the self” that rests at the intersection of “collectively oriented morality” and “individually modeled ethics,” and which signals the imbrication of the local and global (Skinner 2015, 1, 4, 77–106). The implications of Skinner’s critical approach to music and social life in Mali are twofold.

On the one hand, it is in striking this balance between collectivity and individuality, locality and globality, that Skinner moves beyond both top-down, globalized models of diasporic connectivity and the pair of social-aesthetic fallacies that help to sustain them. First, by theorizing music production in Bamako as a dialogic negotiation between the state and the self, Skinner shows

Malian music to be neither inherently resistant nor helplessly passive. Instead, building on Mbembe’s

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(2001) theory of the conviviality of postcolonial power relations, he argues that the music is better understood in terms of cultural coherence in the face of geopolitical violence (Skinner 2015, 155–179).

Second, by accounting for the individual agency of African people, Skinner shows how Malian musicians necessarily transcend constructions of innate African social cohesion in order to make a living in a globalized marketplace. Moreover, he stresses the “existential risk” that these musicians face in refusing local moral imperatives (Skinner 2015, 47–76).

On the other hand, in developing his theory of Afropolitanism, Skinner forwards his own critique of the conflation of aesthetic and social processes in studies of African diasporic musics.

Instead, he works toward a more grounded conception of what he calls “sociomusical experience” to signify “the way social practices of musical expression, audition, and interpretation produce a perceived space of value-inflected affective states” (Skinner 2015, 80). This way of thinking sociomusical experience in Mali speaks to the possibility of extending my reconceptualization of hipness back out to its imagined West African origins, while simultaneously rethinking this origin myth.33 Indeed, if I argue that radical hipness in the contemporary moment has centered upon the rejection of neoliberal humanism in an anti-Black context, then Malian musicians are deeply implicated in this process.

From this perspective, totalizing claims about Africa as a “place of non-community”

(Wilderson, Spatzek, and von Gleich 2016, 17) have the result of freezing it in postcolonial time, voiding continental Africans specifically (as well as Blacks more broadly) of the capacity to work through and exhaust this condition, and thus participate in the contemporary diaspora.34 By contrast, for Skinner, a key example of sociomusical experience in Bamako is the musician’s ethical claim to an individualized position in a global market, as cast against the constraining imperatives of localized

33 On the West African origins of hipness, see Walker (2001, 7, 10–13); Leland (2004, 5–6). 34 On Africa’s overlooked role in the contemporary diaspora, see Okpewho, Boyce Davies, and Mazrui, eds. (1999); Okpewho and Nzegwu, eds. (2009); Walker, ed. (2001).

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moral codes. Such a claim is, at its core, a negotiation of “the ‘necropolitics’ of globalized governmentality” (Skinner 2015, 31). Following Mbembe, necropolitics here refers to “new and unique forms of social existence in which vast populations are subjected to conditions of life conferring upon them the status of living dead” (Skinner 2015, 158; see Mbembe 2003, 40).

Clearly, then, Skinner’s ideas about sociomusical experience align closely with my reading of

Black Hippy’s cypher tracks, giving rise to the same hesitancies vis-à-vis totalizing ideas about both the inherent sociality of Black culture and the absolute impossibility of Black social life. And it is from this sort of sociomusical overlap that, I argue, we might derive a more meaningful understanding of African diasporic cultural connectivity than can be achieved through appeals to, or absolute rejections of, aesthetic and cultural continuity. From this perspective, my claim about hip- hop’s aesthetic relationship to traditional Malian music is no more capable of sustaining top-down conceptions of diaspora than are ideas about hip-hop’s outgrowth from the ring shout. In particular, in view of the social-cultural contexts of the United States and West Africa, claims about the inherent and unifying sociality of African diasporic musics must fail.

This claim is informed by ethnomusicologist Catherine Appert’s work on Senegalese hip- hop, and specifically her critique of the origin narrative that began to solidify with the bourgeoning discursive commitment to hip-hop’s diasporic roots and routes. Appert shows how, for Senegalese rappers, the relationships between disparate hip-hop cultures cannot be fully understood in terms of either “historical diasporic or aesthetic connections” (Appert 2016a, 255, emphasis mine).35 Instead, she argues that the relationships between hip-hop cultures must be understood in terms of what she calls the “experiential transatlantic resonance” between ongoing experiences of urban marginalization, from Senegal to the United States (Appert 2016a, 255). Similarly, Malian music’s

35 Appert’s main example of such ostensible connections centers on the widely circulating myths (and contestations of these) about hip-hop’s outgrowth from West African griot traditions (Appert 2016a).

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sociomusical relationship to necropolitics resonates closely with Black Hippy’s cypher tracks as musical-theoretical analogues to the lived reality of Blackness-as-fugitivity.

As such, I would suggest that the sort of “experiential resonance” that Appert describes might be understood as deriving from an ontological resonance, codified through the structural positions of global populations who share the status of the “living dead,” or more precisely who gain life through the exhaustion of social death. In its rejection of the essentialist image of a shared Black subjectivity that unifies disparate “diasporic” populations on the one hand, and refusal to slip into a reactionary anti-essentialism in which the diaspora dissolves into an amorphous pluralism on the other, this concept of ontological resonance points, to quote Gilroy, “toward an anti-anti-essentialism that sees racialised subjectivity as the product of the social practices that supposedly derive from it” (Gilroy

1993, 102). The concept further evokes Emily J. Lordi’s use of the term “Black resonance” to describe the comparable expressive techniques that women singers and Black writers developed in the mid-twentieth century in response to similar challenges and to achieve similar aims. In Lordi’s own interdisciplinary project, “because resonance, as a concept, signals relationships that are not causal or inevitable but are nevertheless there, it invites us to tease music and writing apart so as to realign them in fresh ways” (Lordi 2013, 6). Likewise, my conception of ontological resonance signals relationships between far-flung ways of being in the world that are not essential, but rather structural, inviting us to realign them, along with our understandings of diasporic connection.

In this sense, from West Africa to African America, Black Culture might best be understood as unified not by any transcendental historical or aesthetic connection, but rather by comparable responses to comparable experiences of dying and living under a racial structure that emerged with transatlantic slavery but continues to shape and unify Black experiences globally. In this sense, diasporic relationality plays out on an experiential frequency best understood as theorized in the

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breaks and resonating, ontologically, through the undercommons. And hipness, as an aesthetic equally of music and the self, becomes the cypher for translating between the two.

In making this shift from diasporic connection to ontological resonance, I do not intend to question the similarities and connections that obviously inhere between African diasporic cultural forms. Rather, my aim is to point out what we obscure when we misuse such connections in service of abstracted, top-down claims about cultural connectivity. Similarly, I do not seek to disempower or dehumanize African diasporic populations, but rather to demystify hasty and utopic claims to such an empowered humanity that distract from their own conditions of impossibility. Finally, I do not mean to claim that music either produces or resolves these violent conditions. Precisely the opposite, I argue that thinking about music on such confusing terms obscures its more tangible ability to illuminate lived grammars of suffering that exist prior to and in excess of any ring shout or cypher. The result, then, is not a rejection of the diaspora, but a model for an organic, ground-up theory of African diasporic cultural connection that not only allows for, but is in fact predicated upon, the aesthetics of Black social life, or the fact of being a Black Hippy on the run.

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CHAPTER THREE

“Rather Two-Step With Ya”: Groovy Q’s (Dis)embodied Hipness

Given the naturalistic allusion in its title, it seems fitting that ScHoolboy Q’s “Birds & The

Beez” (2011) struggles at first to sprout forth from its fuzzy, two-measure instrumental pod.

Clunking repeatedly through a mechanical 6/8 melody, the beat sounds dull and lifeless. Then, after eight failed starts, Q drops in on the instrumental with a skillfully stilted, off-beat delivery, using rests and accents to emphasize beats 2 and 3, and 5 and 6 (Example 3.1). The music blossoms. The

ScHoolboy gets his groove back. For a listener familiar with the gangsta/reality rap popular on the

East Coast in the 2000s, the distinctly un-hip-hop compound meter of “Birds & The Beez” might call to mind Nashville-born, New York-transplant Young Buck’s “Black Gloves” (2004).1 Indeed, from the outset, ScHoolboy Q’s verses center upon the same, weak-beat accentual pattern as Buck’s

(Example 3.2). ScHoolboy Q, Birds & The Beez Example 3.1. ScHoolboy Q, “Birds & The Beez,” feat. Kendrick Lamar, verse 1, measures 1–4

ScHoolboy Q      Straight to the block, to the hood, to a spot,                3

co caine to a rock, deuce deuce in a sock               

1 While Young Buck is from the U.S. South, his star rose as a member of New York City based rap group G-Unit. As I describe in the Introduction, reality rap constitutes an important source for neo-bohemian rap.

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Young Buck, Black Gloves Example 3.2. Young Buck, “Black Gloves,” verse 1, measures 1–4

Young Buck  Walk through a nig ga block, two Glocks, two Tecs, two 2 3s                 3

give a nig ga what he real ly want when bitch nig gas don't want beef                  

This musical connection becomes clearer still in measures 9 and 10 of Q’s opening verse when he adopts the same monosyllabic stresses that Buck uses to punctuate his own weak-beat accents

(Example 3.3). “Birds & The Beez” emerges as a sort of musical palimpsest on “Black Gloves” as Q raps new lyrics over Buck’s old ones, while the trace of the originals remains in Q’s preservation of

Buck’s flow pattern. Indeed, add to these musical coincidences Q’s interpolation of lyrical snippets from “Black Gloves” — the first line of both songs features a reference to the “block,” and both rappers later shout “fuck that, I(’m) […]” — and it begins to seem as though Q may have actually had Buck’s song in mind when crafting “Birds & The Beez.”

ScHoolboy Q, Birds & The Beez Example 3.3. ScHoolboy Q, “Birds & The Beez,” feat. Kendrick Lamar, verse 1, measures 9–10

9 ScHoolboy Q  No job, no bail, no fam, no mail              

Supporting and nuancing this claim, the arrival of Q’s hook suggests that he is in fact thematizing this sort of musical intertextuality. Dividing his melodically-descending vocal line evenly across the 6/8 measure, with one syllable to a beat and stresses on beats 1 and 4 (Example 3.4), Q’s delivery now vividly recalls another hip-hop rarity written in 6/8 time: Kanye West’s “Spaceship”

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(also 2004), featuring GLC and Consequence. The clearest point of comparison here arises in measures 25–28 of GLC’s featured verse (Example 3.5), though a rhythmically embellished version of this flow pattern (albeit lacking the same distinctive melodic contour) also occurs in measures 5–8 and 17–20 of Kanye’s verse (Example 3.6).

ScHoolboy Q, Birds & The Beez Example 3.4. ScHoolboy Q, “Birds & The Beez,” feat. Kendrick Lamar, hook 1, measures 1–4

ScHoolboy Q Tired of the same old shit, nig gas they fak in' it,           3

nig gas out here liv in' foul, bet ter yet they fla g rant               

Kanye West, Spaceship Example 3.5. Kanye West, “Spaceship,” feat. GLC and Consequence, verse 2, measures 25–28

GLC Hope to see Fred die G, Yu sef G, love my G,           27

 Rol ly G, police watch me smoke my weed, count my Gs             

Kanye West, Spaceship Example 3.6. Kanye West, “Spaceship,” feat. GLC and Consequence, verse 1, measures 5–8

5 Kanye West

Let's go back, back to the Gap, look at my check, was n't no scratch,                  7

 so if I stole, was n't my fault, yeah I stole, nev er got caught

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Meanwhile, in his own featured verse on “Birds & The Beez,” Kendrick Lamar develops another flow pattern borrowed from a different passage from “Spaceship” altogether. In doing so, he also provides a performative counterpart to Q’s earlier lyrical interpolations of “Black Gloves.” The lines

“gotta make time, gotta get a grind, gotta push the line, HGC” in Kendrick’s verse (Example 3.7) comprise an obvious reference to GLC’s own lyrics in “Spaceship”: “gotta get mine, gotta take mine, got a Tec-9, reach my prime” (Example 3.8). The connection between the two songs is abundantly clear.

ScHoolboy Q, Birds & The Beez Example 3.7. ScHoolboy Q, “Birds & The Beez,” feat. Kendrick Lamar, verse 3, measures 27–28

Kendrick Lamar Got ta make time, got ta get a grind, got ta pushthe line, H G C                   

ScHoolboy Q, Birds & The Beez Example 3.8. Kanye West, “Spaceship,” feat. GLC and Consequence, verse 2, measures 10–11

GLC Got ta get mine, got ta take mine, got a Tec 9, reach my prime                 

Reflecting on “Birds & The Beez” as a whole, there’s something jarring about its joint sounding of the echoes of country gangsta Young Buck and Northern urbanites Kanye West and

GLC. This incongruity stems, in part, from the history of hip-hop’s bohemian contingent — to which Kanye is at least distally related — critiquing, and positioning themselves in opposition to, gangsta rap. Standing in stark contrast to Kanye’s own hip positionality, Young Buck released “Black

Gloves” on an album titled Straight Outta Ca$hville, signifying his proximity to the South (specifically

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Nashville, Tennessee) and a space long excluded from the realm of hipness.2 Furthermore, the album title’s reference to N.W.A.’s iconic, 1988 album Straight Outta Compton signals an affinity with a classic form of hypermasculinity far removed from what Robin James has described as Kanye’s

“postmillennial Black hipness,” which James critiques as “the appropriation, by black men, of stereotypical white gay masculinity and/or non-American, non-white femininity” (James 2011). And yet, “Birds & The Beez” comprises more than a mere mashup of conflicting sonic memories.

Rather, as I will argue in this chapter, it constitutes a hybridizing musical space, produced through

Q’s intertextual musical practice, in which competing racial signifiers are deconstructed, recontextualized, and ultimately recombined as part of a common racialized ontology.

The distinctive act of musical homage at the core of “Birds & The Beez” represents another of neo-bohemian hip-hop’s hip musical practices (alongside the cypher track): what I call the “flow palimpsest,” in which members of Black Hippy mimic flow patterns from existing songs while writing new lyrics over the top of them. In this way, the collective performs an aesthetic and ethical affinity with diverse and divergent artists, appropriating their sounds, styles, and ways of being before spitting them back out as if they were their own. Intensifying the already referential nature of hip-hop beats and flows, Black Hippy thus uses the flow palimpsest to reach across time and space, dramatizing the Afro-modernist existential theorizing of neo-bohemian hip-hop. In the same way that Jay Rock’s hustler persona provided a window into the fugitive aesthetics of the cypher track, the flow palimpsest is best understood in relation to Q’s own, distinctive approach to hipness.

Indeed, given his ambiguous and often-contradictory position within both hip-hop and hip culture, the scholastic Black Hippy himself serves as a particularly rich conduit for this meeting of Black music and life.

2 The history of hipness is deeply tied up in the historical migration of African Americans out of the rural South and into the urban North (see Kelley 1996, 162; Leland 2004, 12–13; Ford 2013, 24, 64, 76).

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By centering the interpersonal and bodily resonances of the flow palimpsest, while relating these to the ScHoolboy’s revealing “Groovy Q” alias, this chapter examines the distinctive contributions of Q’s Afro-modernist musical practice to my ongoing disentanglement of the contradictions and complexities underlying hipness as an African diasporic aesthetic of existence. In

Chapter One, I showed how, by combining both jazz/bohemian and gangsta rap aesthetics, the legibly hip Ab-Soul lays claim to the subcultural capital of hipness while refusing to do so through opposition to hipness’s illegible others. Meanwhile, Chapter Two showed how, by musically reclaiming the origins of hipness as a metaphysics of Black life carved out through the exhaustion of social death, the illegibly hip Jay Rock carves out space for himself within neo-bohemian hip-hop.

Here, I broaden the distinctly sonic focus of the preceding chapters to show how, by testing the possibilities and limits of embodiment (of other rappers’ styles and experiences, of hipness, of

Blackness itself), ScHoolboy Q actively incorporates into neo-bohemianism forms of Blackness exterior to himself and which are usually excluded from the realm of hipness. By challenging mainstream assumptions about the intrinsic congruity between Blackness and the body (the conditions of possibility for the post-racial claim that “race is only skin deep”), I argue, neo- bohemian rappers like Q thus open a route to more expansive conceptions of being.

In making this claim, I take as my point of departure ScHoolboy Q’s explicitly articulated theory of groove as an Afro-modernist aesthetics and ethics that deconstructs reified divides between, amongst other things, the hippy and the gangsta. Here, “aesthetics” refers to specific, hybridizing musical responses to the experience of Western modernity, while “ethics” refers to the ways of being upon which these aesthetic practices shed light. Focusing on the flow palimpsest as one such aesthetic practice, I explore how Q’s theory reveals the racial limits of Western musicological and philosophical understandings of groove as the product of embodied musical experience, while opening up a new, hip mode of mediating between the aesthetic and the social. In this sense, Q’s

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theory of groove emerges as an idiosyncratic outgrowth of neo-bohemian hip-hop’s musical theorizing, as explored at length in Chapter Two.

Next, in exploring how Q in turn refigures the relationship between Blackness, groove, and the body, part two broadens my focus on hip-hop beats and flow for a moment to instead focus on the historical connection between hipness and dance. Examining Q’s danced theorizing through the lens of embodied groove serves as a foil here for what scholars like Hortense Spillers, Frank

Wilderson, and Ashon T. Crawley have shown to be the relative epistemological irrelevance of embodiment (and the body) to individual and collective experiences of Blackness. Instead, I argue that Q’s theory of groove is better understood as a mode for engaging relationally with the racialized ontology signified by what Spillers calls the “flesh” — a conceptual precursor to the “body” tied to the ontological dehumanization of the Slave.

Finally, in part three, I set Q’s groovy dancing and rapping together in closer dialogue to unpack his aesthetic theorization of the more generative, existential potential of the flesh.

Examining, in turn, related musical practices from throughout the diaspora, I consider the interconnected roles of hipness and the flesh in producing African diasporic existence. To begin, however, it’s necessary to unpack in more detail the rich contradictions underlying Q’s theory of groove.

ScHoolboy Q’s Theory of Groove

In 2009, Quincy Matthew Hanley, better known by his performing name, ScHoolboy Q, as well as variations on this such as Groovy Q and Groovy Tony, became the last rapper to join Top

Dawg Entertainment before the founding of Black Hippy. Born and raised in South Central Los

Angeles, Q came to rapping late, splitting his early years between formal education, football, and gang-banging — at once opening and closing doors to a potential Division II college career.

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Describing his aptitude in the classroom, Q recounts that “all the homies called me Sc[H]oolboy

[…] My name’s Quincy, so I stick to Sc[H]oolboy Q” (Ahmed 2012b). The capitalized H in

ScHoolboy signals the multiple, often-conflicting social and cosmic positions with which Q identifies: his membership in the HiiiPoWeR movement (see Chapter Four); his status as a hippy;3 his affiliation with the Hoover Crips street gang; and heaven and hell themselves (ScHoolboy Q

2011). Meanwhile, in Q’s usage, the word “groovy,” common to both of his best known alter-egos, captures all of the contradictions written into the word “ScHoolboy,” as well as the possibility of resolving these. As I will discuss, Q uses the word groove pointedly and thoughtfully, and his conception of the term both embraces and exceeds existing definitions, musical and social. In this section, then, I explore how groove might be said to do the deconstructive political work that I attribute to it, while engaging and expanding the aesthetics of Afro-modernism.

I begin by exploring ScHoolboy Q’s distinctive relationship with hipness as a means of negotiating the multiple tensions that crosscut his personal sense of self — mostly notably, his status as at once a hippy and a gangsta. Q’s resolution of these tensions, I argue, rests upon his personal theory of groove as an Afro-modernist aesthetics and ethics that both engages and expands conventional understandings of hipness.4 Whereas Western musicologists and philosophers have understood groove as the product of embodied musical experience, I show how Q primarily conceptualizes groove as a lived and musical process of appropriating and reconciling contradictory and discursively opposed forms of Blackness.

3 It is notable, for understanding ScHoolboy Q’s place in the cultural genealogy that this dissertation traces, that commentators have alternately dubbed jazz/bohemian rap “backpack rap” and “college-boy rap” (see Krims 2000, 65; Williams 2013, 71). 4 In this sense, if in Chapter Two hipness served as the means for translating between the break and the undercommons, then here groove (as Q’s personal route into hipness) serves as the means for translating between the aesthetic and ethical dimensions of Afro-modernism.

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In demonstrating this difference, I describe a musical exemplar of Q’s idiosyncratic theory of groove: the “flow palimpsest.” In Q’s hands, this practice involves appropriating the musical styles of divergent and discursively opposed artists, and situating them in close, performative proximity.

Delving into the aesthetics and ethics of the flow palimpsest prepares my exploration, in part two, of the ways in which this practice backs up onto ideas about groove as an embodied, musical phenomenon, even while opening up deeper questions, at the core of this chapter, about the very possibility of the Black body (and indeed embodiment) in an anti-Black context.

Oxymoron: Groovy Gangstas and Black Hippies

ScHoolboy Q’s discography resembles a catalogue of tensions. Rifling through the early titles

— ScHoolboy Turned Hustla (2008), Gangsta & Soul (2009), Habits & Contradictions (2012) — a dichotomous instability emerges as always underlying the laid-back South Centralite’s outer confidence. And none of this changed with the widely lauded arrival of his 2014, major label studio debut. Revealingly titled Oxymoron, Q’s breakthrough record is as central to this dissertation as Ab-

Soul’s Control System (Chapter One) or Jay Rock’s From Hood Tales to the Cover of XXL (Chapter Two).

Indeed, its title stands alone in its ability to index the fundamental contradiction that unifies all of the project’s main cast members: the fact of being a Black Hippy. Going beyond this, however, Q uses the record to explore — and, as I will argue, resolve — some of the additional oxymorons wrapped up in this fraught label.

In the first instance, ScHoolboy Q is (or at least at one time was) at once a doting father and a gang banger — the former a trait that flies in the face of stereotypes about Black men generally, let alone criminalized ones. Q’s infant daughter, Joy, features throughout his oeuvre, both through fond lyrical references (a highlight is the pride with which he claims, on 2012’s “There He Go,” to have

“got my daughter swaggin’ like her motherfuckin’ daddy though”) and through frequent audio and

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video recordings of Joy herself.5 Most viscerally, this dualism is brought crashing into reality on

“Gangsta,” the first track on Oxymoron, which opens with the sound of Joy gurgling “fuck rap, my daddy a gangsta” before transitioning directly into the first hook:

“Gangsta, gangsta, gangsta/ Gangsta, gangsta, gangsta, we/ Gangsta, gangsta, gangsta/ Gangsta, gangsta, gangsta, G/ Gangsta, gangsta, gangsta/ Gangsta, gangsta, gangsta, groove/ Gangsta, gangsta, gangsta/ Gangsta, gangsta, gangsta, Q.”

From the outset of Oxymoron, then, Q paints himself as an oxymoronic figure, even while he casts doubt upon the essentializing ideas about Black personhood at the core of this image. In the process, he introduces another layer to this blurry self-portrait when he juxtaposes the refrain,

“gangsta, gangsta, gangsta,” against the single word, “groove.” This unlikely pairing recurs throughout the song and, as we shall see, throughout Q’s oeuvre. But it is not until track three

(Oxymoron’s lead single, “Collard Greens”), on which Q dubs himself a “groovy gangsta with an attitude,” that he begins to unpack this relationship more explicitly.

Most immediately, the video to “Collard Greens” connects Q’s use of the word groove to the hippie counterculture of the 1960s. An obvious counterpart to the “Gone Insane” video with which I opened my discussion of Ab-Soul in Chapter One, Q’s video opens with similar psychedelic imagery as he moves his body under kaleidoscopic lens distortions repeatedly filtered through tie dye tints (Figure 3.1).6 Such imagery most famously meets the concept of groove in Mike Myers’s farcical hippy-spy character, Austin Powers, and his trademark slogan, “groovy baby.” Indeed, in an interview with SSENSE, Q himself explicitly equates “groove” with the hippy movement:

“Where I come from, the Hoovers, we say ‘What’s up, groove?’ Like, you groovy? You straight and you cool? And this is a way of me repping where I come from […] The tie dye,

5 As Q put it in a 2014 interview with Hot 97, “the oxymoron in this album is that I’m doing all this bad to do good for my daughter […] That’s why I’m robbin’. That’s why I’m stealing. That’s why I done shot you, and got on, and took your car. Whatever it is that I’m talking about in my album negative, it’s always for a good cause, for my daughter” (quoted in Baker 2018, 245). 6 On March 24, 2020, this video could be accessed via ScHoolboy Q’s YouTube page: https://youtu.be/_L2vJEb6lVE.

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when you hear and you see tie dye you think of hippy, groovy, the 70s. Groovy shit. It’s like, that’s what I identify with in my hood” (Licursi n.d.)

And yet, examining the video more closely reveals that the seventies (or sixties) counterculture aesthetic does not sit with Q quite as neatly as first appears. Extending the comparison with Soul’s “Gone Insane,” Q’s presence in “Collard Greens” is never entirely given over to the surrounding flower power imagery. Rocking a gold chain, black shades, and fisherman hat against a swirling backdrop of blues, yellows, and greens, Q signals the same juxtaposition of hip-hop and hippie expressive markers, and raises similar questions about the relationship between hipness and Blackness as they circulate in hip-hop contexts. Adding another, African-diasporic layer to this tension, it is in fact one of Q’s trademark dashikis that provides the source material for much of the hippie iconography seen throughout the video (Figure 3.1). Just as the viewer begins to apprehend that maybe there’s something a little “off” about Q’s fusing of bling culture with an avowedly countercultural ethos, or his use of Black culture to signify a historically privileged, romanticized claim to an outsider social stance, the video confirms their suspicions, flashing

#Oxymoron across the screen as the psychedelic camera effects continue to literally split Q in two

(Figure 3.2).

Figure 3.1. Still from the music video for ScHoolboy Q, “Collard Greens,” [00:05]

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Figure 3.2. Still from the music video for ScHoolboy Q, “Collard Greens,” [01:18]

As was the case with Ab-Soul, then, Q’s seemingly assured claims to being a hippy are far from straightforward. Indeed, I argue that the fundamental conflict at the core of Oxymoron comprises Q’s status as at once a hippy and a gangsta. Furthermore, it is precisely Q’s conception of groove that allows him to mediate between and reconcile the two. As he puts it in a 2014 interview with Noisey, titled “Schoolboy Q: Return of the Gangster”:

“I’m from Hoover [Street]. We say groove where I come from, you know? It’s part gang- banging and it’s part me, because I feel like I am a hippy in real life and I am a groovy-ass nigga, you know what I’m saying?” (Noisey 2014, [06:27–06:39]).7

Immediately apparent is the connection to Jay Rock’s own reconciliation of the discursively opposed

“hustler” and “hipster” personas that he nonetheless experiences so synchronically. As I described in Chapter Two, Rock’s existential means and ends here revolve around his (re)appropriation of hipness as a form of Afro-modernism — as, that is, a hybridizing, Black cultural response to the experience of urban modernity. Similarly, I argue that Q’s signification of the oxymoronic intersection between (or Afro-modernist deconstruction of) the gangsta and the hippy is rooted

7 On March 24, 2020, this video could be accessed via Noisey’s YouTube page: https://youtu.be/jmq2kYdNRys.

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exactly in his grooviness. If Q’s distinctly racialized, ethical theory of groove aligns closely with Jay

Rock’s own Afro-modernist practice, however, it marks a pronounced challenge to conventional, universalizing ideas about groove as a musical phenomenon.

That’s not to say that Q’s music isn’t groovy. Returning to “Collard Greens,” the beat revolves around an insistent bass line consisting of steady quarter and eighth notes and functioning as a constant undercurrent to the song’s otherwise frequent textural changes (Example 3.9).

Meanwhile, the distinguishing musical feature of the song is the way that Q and featured guest artist

Kendrick Lamar both vocally mirror this bass line in their respective rapped verses and hooks

(Example 3.10).

ScHoolboy Q, Collard Green (F#m)

Example 3.9. ScHoolboy Q, “Collard Greens,” feat. Kendrick Lamar, intro, measures 1–4

Bass line                         ScHoolboy Q, Collard Greens (F#m)

Example 3.10. ScHoolboy Q, “Collard Greens,” feat. Kendrick Lamar, chorus 1, measures 1–8

ScHoolboy Q

    Oh, lux ur y, chi di ching ching, could buy an y thing, cop that,                   Bass line                        

   Oh, col lardgreens, Three de grees low, make it hot for me, drop that                 

                    

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Tellingly, the way that the two Black Hippies take turns riding the thumping bass line, literally moving their vocal cords in time with the beat, evokes musician and philosopher Tiger Roholt’s description of groove as a form of “embodied” knowledge that is grasped by “moving with music’s pulse” (2014, 86). For Roholt, groove is best understood as the experience of rhythmic nuances in music that remain, in their complete form, outside of our intellectual and even auditory grasp, and which instead only come to us completely through our bodily engagement with them. Indeed, this understanding of groove as the product of an embodied musical experience is representative of dominant thought on groove amongst Western philosophers (see Iyer 2002; Witek 2017; Hosken

2018). And “Collard Greens” clearly speaks to this understanding…

… to an extent. But this conception of groove as embodied knowledge is incapable of fully accounting for Q’s own, ethical take on the term. Closer to Q’s double perspective on groove is that of musicologists Charles Keil and Steven Feld. In their collection of essays and dialogues, Music

Grooves, the authors discuss how “groovy experiences” might be said to function at not only the level of the musical, but also of the social — as, for instance, musicians from Papua New Guinea to

African America can be said to be “grooving in and on their world” or “grooving on reality” (1994,

14, 19, 23). As Feld puts it “the connotations of ‘groove’ reach every aspect of the sexual, the social, all the ultimate things people can do together, and the duality of the physical form and the ephemeral experience” (1994, 23). At the same time, however, Keil and Feld never explain exactly how groove functions on this social level, and ultimately reduce ostensibly social expressions of groove to fundamentally musical phenomena. After Keil’s pushback that “when I try to think of what the groove represents, or of what’s behind the groove, I don’t think there is anything behind it.

I think it is what it is, that the groove is the ultimate thing,” Feld accepts that perhaps it is after all just “music [that] is many things, some nominal, some verbal, at the same or different times, in the same or different places” (1994, 24).

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More generatively, in differentiating between (1) the process of how music grooves (as a verb) and (2) the materiality of music grooves (as a noun) — a differentiation captured in the duality of the collection’s title, Music Grooves — Keil and Feld’s study gestures toward the ontological possibility of

“groove” as a thing in and of itself (1994, 22–24). In a similar vein, musicologist Mark Abel goes to still greater lengths to pin down the specific ontological material of both “groove” — as “a way of organizing the temporal aspect of music” — and the “groove music” of which it is constitutive.

Expanding on Keil and Feld’s efforts, Abel’s ontological approach here allows him to extend his discussion to the social-historical significance of groove as “musical” time by exploring, for instance, its potential to enact a critique of Western conceptions of “social” time (Abel 2014, 1–2).

With this historical materialist approach to groove, Abel responds directly to the issue I outlined in Chapter Two regarding ideas about music’s ability to effect social change — namely, that these tend toward the conflation of the aesthetic and the social. Indeed, foreshadowing Gavin

Steingo’s aforementioned critique of the New Musicology (Steingo 2016, 88; see Chapter Two), Abel directly critiques Susan McClary’s own ideas about music’s social functions on precisely these terms.

Developing his own response to the question of how musical grooves can do social work, he instead theorizes them in Adornian terms as constitutive of the contemporary social context, and thus capable of commenting upon this context while reimagining alternative futures for it (Abel 2014,

10–12).

The issue with applying this theory to Q’s own music, however, arises in how Abel imagines such work as signifying a universal musical practice:

“It is my contention that ‘groove’, as both continuation and departure from the temporal procedures of Western music in the ‘common practice era’, has […] established itself during the twentieth century as ‘convention’ for the vast majority of music heard daily in the West, and increasingly across the world. The uncovering of the unconscious meaning of this musical temporality through an exploration of its connection with contemporary temporality more generally, can tell us something about both groove music and the nature of the society that produces it” (2014, 11).

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In its fundamental assumption of a homogeneous social-musical experience, Abel’s theory of groove juts up against Q’s own conception of the term as indexing, on multiple levels, an oxymoronic sense of self arising from violent processes of racialization — and specifically from his attempts at being at once Black and a hippy. Clearly, the particular, racialized terms on which Q defines groove defy subsumption under Abel’s broad, universalizing definition.

Abel thus falls into the same trap as another Marxist musicologist (discussed in Chapter

One), David Clarke, whose own universalizing critique of cultural hierarchies relies on the Marxist existential frameworks of alienation and exploitation, and misses that the ontology of Blackness is instead better understood in terms of accumulation and fungibility (see Chapter One).8 Indeed, in much the same way that Clarke postulates (without taking the time to explore) that Public Enemy could be swapped in for his discussion of Elvis, Abel commends himself for excluding Stevie

Wonder, James Brown, and Earth, Wind & Fire from his discussion in an attempt to dispel myths about the Blackness of groove and instead reveal its “conventionality” (a term that he borrows from

McClary) in the contemporary moment (Abel 2014, 12–13). But, as I argue is the case with Public

Enemy in Clarke’s usage, substituting in Stevie Wonder or James Brown might have revealed the racialized limits of Abel’s post-race conception of groove. Indeed, under Abel’s model, any attempt to use groove (as “musical time”) as a challenge to the Western conception of “social time” must necessarily function on the same insider, privileged, and always-already coopted terms of White hipness — which, as I have shown, have always been unavailable to Black people.

By contrast, as I will show, ScHoolboy Q’s conception of groove works in an Afro- modernist vein to both disrupt and imagine alternatives to Western cultural-epistemological categories. And it does so most obviously through an idiosyncratic (though far from unique) practice wherein his ethical conception of groove manifests itself in musical terms: what I call the “flow

8 Tellingly, Keil and Feld explicitly critique the idea of taking Marxist analytical approaches to music grooves (1994, 19).

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palimpsest.” I use this term to refer to a musical technique in which rappers mimic the flow styles of other artists while changing the original lyrics. And I understand Q’s use of the flow palimpsest as a distinctly groovy undertaking. Significantly, however, rather than being a product of embodied musical experience, groove here becomes a musical process of appropriating and reconciling contradictory and discursively opposed forms of Blackness.

In framing this deconstructive and democratizing work, I return to the dichotomous relationship with which I opened this chapter, between Southern gangsta rapper, Young Buck, and

Chicago-affiliated, postmillennial Black hipster, Kanye West. Retracing the overlapping authenticity discourses that structure existing organizational rubrics for both hip-hop and hipness, I show how

Northern and bohemian rappers have mobilized the same myths about what hipness is and is not, in order to stake their own claims to authenticity through opposition not only to gangsta rap (a theme that I have already covered at length) but also Southern hip-hop. In contrast, exploring ScHoolboy

Q’s own conception of hipness or, more accurately, groove, reveals how he disrupts such constraining claims to authenticity by laying claim to legible hipness even while embracing these pathologized forms of Blackness. Moreover, in invoking questions of interpersonal appropriation, this analysis prepares my closer discussion, in parts two and three, of questions of embodiment and the body as they pertain to Black life globally.

Flow Palimpsests as Hip Expression Between the U.S. North and South

Throughout this dissertation, I locate a core historical point of reference for neo-bohemian hip-hop in 1980s/1990s conscious and jazz/bohemian rap, and specifically these artists’ construction of their music in opposition to commercial strains of hip-hop — particularly gangsta rap. These rappers critiqued such commercial styles as selling out to a racist market and, in the process, reproducing ideas about Black pathology. In turn, by the early 2000s, the hip-hop

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mainstream had found a new home base amongst Southern artists, whose own variation of gangsta rap, known as “trap,” continues to enjoy huge success in the hands of contemporary rappers like

Gucci Mane, Future, Young Thug, Migos, and Travis Scott. Exemplified by Young Thug and Travis

Scott’s “pick up the phone” (2016), featuring Migos’s own Quavo, trap’s distinctive, rapid-fire hi- hats and enticingly slurred vocal lines delivered in relentless triplet patterns have come to dominate the contemporary hip-hop soundscape. Nonetheless, the deeply-rooted binaries of alternative versus mainstream and high-art versus commercial hip-hop explain why trap remains open to the same critiques of inauthenticity as gangsta rap, despite, and indeed because of, its widespread popularity

(see Burton 2017, 68; Vaught and Bradley 2017, 16–21). In fact, in recent years, this opposition to commercial rap styles has developed into wholesale hip-hop rejections of trap’s very musical aesthetic, which comes to stand in for its broader ethical degeneracy.

Exemplifying such critiques is West Coast rap artist Hopsin’s 2015 trap parody, “No

Words,” in which he performs an exaggerated version of trap’s slurred vocal style, commonly referred to via the pejorative “mumble rap,” as a marker of the music’s cultural insufficiency.

Clarifying his critical intent, here, in the song’s spoken introduction Hopsin says:

“Man, rap today fuckin’ sucks bad, I don’t give a fuck what anybody says. These fools ain’t spittin’ no type of dope shit. But that’s not even the bad part; they’re not even saying words anymore! They just got a hard-ass fuckin’ beat to trick dumb-asses like you to think you like this shit.”

Notably, Hopsin’s attack on trap rappers for “not even saying words anymore” reflects an assumption at the core of ideas about commercial rap’s inauthenticity — namely, that the music departs from hip-hop’s supposed originary and authentic role as a form of organic Black political critique (see Introduction). And, in the contemporary moment, it is Southern hip-hop that alternative rappers have pinpointed as the primary evil perpetuating this disruptive cultural practice.

More than simply extending the conscious-gangsta divide across the proverbial Mason-

Dixon line, constructions of Southern rap’s inauthenticity also depend upon and reproduce myths

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about the U.S. South specifically. As Riché Richardson puts it, by way of Houston A. Baker Jr. and

Dana D. Nelson, “the South is often perceived as ‘America’s abjected regional other’” (Richardson

2007, 8–9; see Baker and Nelson 2001, 236). In the hip-hop context more specifically, Erich Nunn argues that the North’s rejection of the South stems from a perceived opposition here between city and country (Nunn 2015, 173–180). In this way of thinking, constructions of hip-hop authenticity

“remain inextricably tied to performances of particular forms of African American masculinity rooted in the urban spaces in which the music originated” (Nunn 2015, 9–10). By contrast, the U.S. social imagination has broadly coded the South as rural, invoking a range of stereotypes that allow

Northern rappers — including, notably, the maligned gangsta rappers of an earlier generation — to critique their Southern counterparts as culturally backward and lacking in craft (Westhoff 2011, 1–

18; Nunn 2015, 173–180). Indeed, in a 2014 segment on Snoop Dogg’s Double G News Network web series GGN, the iconic gangsta rapper and Long Beach Crip himself takes shots at the slurred, triplet flow style of trap artists like Future and Migos, displacing jazz/bohemian critiques of his own inauthenticity onto them, even while reproducing the elitist aesthetic terms on which such critiques have historically played out.9

Clearly, there is a pronounced irony to a 1990s West Coast gangsta rapper critiquing contemporary Southern hip-hop on similar terms in which jazz/bohemian rappers once dismissed his own music. However, if (as I suggest in the Introduction) the discourse surrounding hipness has played a major (albeit underexplored) role in the cultural logics through which commercial styles of hip-hop have come to be undervalued, then it should be further noted that cultural commentators have continued to understand the crystallization of hipness as an African American response to life outside of the rural South (see Kelley 1996, 162; Leland 2004, 12–13; Ford 2013, 24, 64, 76). As

9 On March 24, 2020, this video could be accessed via JimmyNikricket’s YouTube page: https://youtu.be/g0OdmRtuQew.

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such, there is a sense in which hipness has in fact always remained open (if unevenly so) to commercial artists, so long as they make their claims to it through opposition to the South.

In contrast, I argue that, by rethinking hipness in a way that foregrounds the deconstructive,

Afro-modernist aesthetics of neo-bohemian hip-hop, members of Black Hippy move beyond the harmful cultural binaries that hip-hop’s various authenticating projects — from jazz/bohemian rap’s critique of West Coast gangsta rap, to West Coast gangsta’s critique of Southern trap — have helped to structure.

My ongoing reformulation of hipness as a transhistorical, transnational form of Afro- modernism, then, has particular relevance for challenging hip-hop’s North-South divide, which must itself be understood as deeply rooted in this association of hipness with the urban North exclusively.

As Richardson points out, this outlook undervalues the vitality of the country, and obscures how the

South is “increasingly urban in its own right” (2007, 16). In this way of thinking, even when the

South is invoked as a site of racial authenticity, it’s done so only as a repository for “tradition” that freezes the region in time and place. By contrast, in excavating what he calls the “Southern ritual grounds of Afro-modernism,” Jürgen E. Grandt shows how, given the experiences of “geographical and sociocultural dislocation” that precede it, Afro-modernist expression transcends the rigidities of place-based politics, ultimately facilitating the separation of the self from place (Grandt 2009, 4–6).

Taking Grandt’s suggestion as a point of departure, in what follows, I aim to reconcile the legacy of

Black bohemianism in hip-hop culture with the aesthetics of Afro-modernism. In doing so, I describe a radically democratizing form of hip expression between the alternative and the mainstream, the city and the country, the North and the South.

***

Unlike Hopsin and Snoop Dogg (amongst many others), ScHoolboy Q and the rest of the

Black Hippy roster have refused to model their own claims to hip-hop authenticity upon a rejection

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of the South. In more active terms, members of the collective have in fact structured their own understandings of what it means to be a Black Hippy around something akin to what Christina

Sharpe (2012) calls a “refus[al] to refuse” such pathologized forms of Blackness. And they have done so most consistently through the range of hip, Afro-modernist musical practices that characterize their collective output. In Chapter Two, for example, I discussed the generative hip tension that Jay Rock excavates between motivic expressions of social death and improvisations of social life upon these. Here, I turn my focus to another such act of musical theorization: the flow palimpsest.

Conventionally linked to literary theories of intertextuality (Kristeva 1980; Dillon 2007), the word palimpsest refers to a writing surface on which some original text has been erased and written over, while traces of the original text remain. In turn, music studies scholars have adapted the term to a variety of ends (see Duker 2013; Brown 2014; Daughtry 2017; Burns and Lacasse 2018). My own use of the word, however, draws most directly upon ethnomusicologist Catherine Appert’s musical theorization of hip-hop tracks as “aural palimpsests,” or intertextual sites for the meeting of local and global memory within and between African diasporic hip-hop cultures (2012, 27, 58–61).

Building on Appert, I use the term flow palimpsest to refer to an intertextual musical practice in which rappers affirm connections to other artists by mimicking flow patterns from existing songs while writing over the original lyrics.

Indeed, we have already witnessed multiple flow palimpsests in this chapter, in my opening discussion of ScHoolboy Q’s “Birds & The Beez.” Another illustrative example can be found at the end of Ab-Soul’s 2014 song, “Feelin’ Us.” Here, Soul closely imitates the rhythmic and melodic contours of Chief Keef’s flow in the chorus to his 2012 song “Love Sosa,” while changing the lyrics such that they instead apply to himself:

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Chief Keef, “Love Sosa,” Chorus Ab-Soul, “Feelin’ Us,” Bridge

(These bitches love) (These bitches love) Sosa, O End or Solo, Del Amo to No end, fuckin’ with them SoHo, fuckin’ with them O boys, you gon’ get fucked Top Dawgs, you’ll just look like Over, […] they do it all for… Toto, they do it all for…

Clearly, then, as we’ve already seen with Kendrick’s verse in “Birds & The Beez,” the flow palimpsest isn’t exclusive to ScHoolboy Q’s musical practice. That being said, the bridge to “Feelin’

Us” draws so closely on “Love Sosa” that it might better be understood as a modified interpolation than as a palimpsest in the sense heard in Q’s “Birds & The Beez” (which comprises almost entirely different lyrics). Moreover, I argue that the radical existential potential of the flow palimpsest is best understood in relation to Q’s theory of groove as an Afro-modernist ethics and aesthetics.

Indeed, Q explicitly structures both his groovy ethical philosophy and his groovy musical practice around staging and resolving multiple existential and aesthetic tensions — most notably, between the hippy and the gangsta, but also between the U.S. North and South. And the palimpsests in “Birds & The Beez” play a central role within this Afro-modernist project, allowing Q to set in dialogue multiple, conflicting musical styles — for instance, between Northern postmillennial Black hipster, Kanye West, and Southern gangsta, Young Buck. Indeed, I view Q’s palimpsestic invocations of these figures as not merely incidental, nor purely aesthetic, but rather as signifying a politicized, ethical-aesthetic mode of affirmation that lies at the core of his conception of groove.

Supporting this claim, in a 2012 interview with Complex, Q explicitly lists Kanye West amongst his primary musical influences. While Buck doesn’t make the list, his G-Unit collaborator,

50 Cent, does (Ahmed 2012b). And Buck nonetheless serves as a recurring signifier of Black Hippy’s embrace of gangsta rap across the collective’s oeuvre, which includes frequent visual and musical references to the Tennessee native. For instance, a photograph of Q, used for the

ScHoolboyQVEVO user account on YouTube, appears to mimic the thugged-out portrait of Buck

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that appears in the artwork for the G-Unit Collector’s Edition of Straight Outta Ca$hville (Figures 3.3 and 3.4). With both artists rocking iced out grills displayed through menacing grins, the resemblance is striking. Along with the range of lyrical interpolations and musical samples that Q draws from

Buck’s music — see, for example, ScHoolboy Q’s “Freeway” (2008), which samples Young Buck and The Outlaws, “Driving Down the Freeway” (2007) — his invocations of Buck in “Birds & The

Beez” appear to be far more motivated than incidental.

Figure 3.3 (left). Profile picture from ScHoolboyQVEVO YouTube user account. Figure 3.4 (right).

Cover art to Young Buck, Straight Outta Ca$hville (G-Unit Collector’s Edition)

At the same time, Q never allows his performed connection to Buck, a figure situated firmly outside the realm of the alternative, to limit his own claims to hipness. As we saw in Chapter Two, unlike Black bohemians of an earlier (hip-hop) generation, the members of Black Hippy see no contradiction between their claims to the thug life and their claims to hipness. On the contrary, they go to great lengths to stage their reconciliation of the apparent tension between these ways of being.

Accordingly, while Q equally performs a connection to the postmillennial hip figure of Kanye West, he does so while explicitly signaling his unwillingness to renounce the thug life for the sake of his

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claims to hipness. Dramatizing this democratizing commitment is “Figg Get Da Money” (from, like

“Birds & The Beez,” Q’s 2011 album, Setbacks), which Q opens with an almost direct interpolation of Kanye’s “Get Em High,” before suddenly cutting himself off at the end of the second measure:

“(The flow) is in the pocket like wallets, I got the bounce like hy- -draulics, I can’t call it, I got the swerve like alco… Fuck that.”

It is telling that the Kanye lyrics that Q selects to signal his connection to the former, center upon delineating the forms of musical skill — even, groove — that bohemian rappers have disassociated from gangsta rappers. There’s no questioning Q’s hipness. Still more revealing, however, is the way that Q bases the sudden interruption to this Kanye reference upon the same “fuck that” that shores up the connection between “Birds & The Beez” and Young Buck’s “Black Gloves.” Moreover, Q follows this interruption with the jarringly thugged out proclamation from which “Figg Get Da

Money” takes its title, followed by a brief hood vignette, that stands in stark contrast to (even ambivalent repudiation of) his groovy invocation of Kanye:

“Figg get the money, shooting dice, what they hittin’ for? Hookers out to sell the pussy, money trade for intercourse Every corner: liquor store, laundromat, liquor store, Laundromat, liquor store, EBT accept ‘em more.”

Clearly, if Q relates to Ye as a groovy hippy, then this connection is always already tempered by his unwavering commitment to the street.

Such hybridizing and democratizing musical expressions align closely with Q’s ethical conception of groove as a means of reconciling the oxymoronic relationship between the gangsta and the hippy. More specifically, they point toward a radically democratizing form of hip expression between the alternative and the mainstream, the city and the country, the North and the South. In this sense, where Justin Williams (2018) theorizes the form of musical borrowing that I call the flow palimpsest as a performance of lineal affiliation, I view Black Hippy’s hybridizing flow palimpsests as in fact disrupting the constructed bohemian lineages that structure constraining claims to racial

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authenticity, while forwarding a more capacious and inclusive view of Blackness as fluid and unending.

In ScHoolboy Q’s mouth, the flow palimpsest clarifies the distance between Q’s specific, ethical-aesthetic theory of groove on the one hand, and broader Western philosophical conceptions of the term on the other. The delicate relationship between the musical and the existential in Q’s theory of groove emerges as better understood in relation to Alexander Weheliye’s study of the

“grooves of sonic Afro-modernity.” Weheliye uses the phrase sonic Afro-modernity to describe the ways that Black music inscribes the centrality of sonic Blackness and Black culture to Western modernity while simultaneously remixing Western modernity’s oppositional and dialectical

(re)production of Blackness (2005, 5–6). In turn, he uses “grooves” to refer to Black cultural engagements with the grooves of the phonograph record, and the range of technologically-mediated disjunctures that arise from these engagements, making possible the disruptive work of sonic Afro- modernity as it reimagines “competing notions of subjectivity, temporality, spatiality, and community” (2005, 16–17).

Taking Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man as an example, Weheliye argues that the phonographic grooves that enrapture the novel’s narrator primarily signal the circular, looping nature of sonic

Afro-modernity and a challenge to Western, linear conceptions of time. And yet, despite Weheliye’s claims about the broad social significances of the grooves of sonic Afro-modernity, his discussion of these grooves relates to Q’s own groovy musical performances only at an abstract level. While the concept of Afro-modernity arguably captures the salience of ScHoolboy Q’s musical practice more closely than Western philosophical theories of groove are able to, Weheliye’s sonic grooves lack any relationship to groove as an embodied musical phenomenon. By contrast, as I have already suggested in reference to “Collard Greens,” Q’s music is also undeniably groovy in this normative

(embodied) sense. There is a gap here that needs bridging.

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In shoring up, then, the relationship between groove, embodiment, and Afro-modernism, I locate a productive pivot point in philosopher Joshua M. Hall’s argument that the Invisible Man’s engagements with the phonograph’s grooves are, in fact, fundamentally of the body. Recounting the multiple forms of dance (including non-human, scene-setting dance; anonymous human dance; and dances involving a primary character) that structure the novel, Hall argues that, “given music’s intimate connection to dance for Ellison and the prominence of dance language and imagery in the novel, jazz dance could function as well as, if not better than, jazz music as Ellison’s regulative ideal for the U.S. novel” (Hall 2013, 57, 66–67).10 Similarly, in what follows, I argue that hip-hop dance functions as well as, if not better than, hip-hop music in getting at the relationship between Afro- modernism and groove in Q’s music. In particular, this relationship emerges through Q’s repeated, explicit thematizations of his own dancing body, through which he engages in a long and tightly knit history of Black, hip, danced expression.

Rather Two-Step With Ya: Rethinking Blackness and Embodiment

So far, I have outlined ScHoolboy Q’s theory of groove as a way of imagining and occupying the spaces in between, amongst other things, the figures of the hippy and the gangsta. In doing so, I have presented the flow palimpsest as a musical manifestation of this groovy aesthetics and ethics as it strains against existing theories of groove as the product of embodied musical engagement. And yet, as I have also shown, it is misleading to imagine that Q’s music operates an entirely different definition of groove. Rather, throughout his musical output, Q engages conventional definitions of groove as a form of embodied musical experience, even while revealing the inability of such

10 The regulative ideal to which Hall refers here is Ellison’s conception of the novel as an instrument for reimagining American democracy. While this function is in itself an enterprise that could be understood through the language of Afro-modernity, I am here primarily concerned with the ways that dance functions to carve out the sort of radical hip subjectivity that I have been tracing across time through the connections between bebop, the Invisible Man, and neo- bohemian hip-hop.

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definitions to fully account for the realities of Black life and cultural expression in an anti-Black context.

In working toward such accountability, and specifically in better understanding the complicated role of embodiment within Q’s theory of groove, I begin this section by turning to the long history of dance as a form of Black hip expression. Exploring how Q’s use of dance parallels his use of the flow palimpsest to appropriate and reconcile discursively opposed images of

Blackness, I reveal his own complicated relationship to normative understandings of groove as the product of embodied musical experience. The tensions intrinsic to this relationship become particularly clear in the second sub-section, where I use my discussion of dance to reflect more closely upon the flow palimpsest itself.

Where I have, until now, described the flow palimpsest as a mode of appropriating Blackness, placing it in dialogue with Q’s dancing invites us to think of it instead as a mode of embodying competing forms of Blackness, even while revealing the conceptual limits of “embodiment” in this context.11 In other words, even while Q’s deconstruction of the reified tensions between conflicting

Black performances manifests itself through apparent forms of embodiment, this very process itself reveals the need for alternative frameworks that are more accountable to Blackness as an ontology signifying dehumanization and (corporeal) denial. Q’s use of the flow palimpsest shows how moments of racialized interconnection necessarily exist not in the human body, but rather in the posthuman site of the flesh.

Dancing Hipness, Embodying Groove

Thinking back to my earlier discussion of “Collard Greens,” if the way that ScHoolboy Q and Kendrick Lamar vocally mimic the song’s bass line evokes Roholt’s definition of groove as

11 On “appropriating” Blackness as “embodying” Blackness, see Johnson (2003, 15).

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“moving with music’s pulse,” then the song also engages this concept far more obviously through the central role of dance. Indeed, for Roholt, dance exemplifies the bodily practices through which we perceive and understand (even produce) groove — what he calls “a kind of movement in listening” (2014, 83–87). Similarly, cognitive scientist and Ghanaian drum practitioner W. Tecumseh

Fitch argues that “one of the central factors underlying groove — the capacity of certain types of music to compel movement — is its tendency to add energy on offbeats that coincide with particular movements in the dance” (2016, 5). From this perspective, Fitch argues that groove can only be fully understood in relation to dance.

Not only is dancing (by ScHoolboy Q and others) front and center in the video to “Collard

Greens,” but the compulsion to dance is built into the music. With the bass line and vocals working closely together against a simple drumbeat, the song itself occupies minimal rhythmic space, making ample room for the cross-rhythms of bodily expression. And yet, Q’s bodily engagement with/production of groove, here, also goes beyond the purely aesthetic functions described by scholars like Roholt and Fitch, to incorporate an explicitly racialized, ethical dimension. Indeed, to the extent that groove, for Q, signifies a mode of reconciling his gangsta credentials with his claims to being a hippy, I argue that dance is another key mode through which he carries out this Afro- modernist expressive work.12 In this way, Q taps his own sub-genealogy within the history of the radical form of hipness — as a Black metaphysics comprising Afro-modernism, light, double consciousness, the break, and (now) groove — that characterizes neo-bohemian hip-hop.13

As might be expected by now, this sub-genealogy has its crystallizing moment in the bebop era. I have already discussed how, by blurring the line between “commercial” and “serious” music, bebop musicians (pre-emptively) troubled both contemporaneous and post-facto misrepresentations

12 As Q put it in a Tweet from November 12, 2019: “NiggaHz forget I’m from Hoova… lol we tHe CRIPS THAT DANCE. Don’t play wit me” (ScHoolboy Q 2019). 13 This sub-genealogy serves as a parallel to the one that Jay Rock traces back to Malcolm X (see Chapter Two).

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of the music as a fundamentally countercultural, high art form — and, by extension, understandings of hipness grounded in these ideals. Of further significance, however, is the way that caricatures of bebop as an anti-commercial art form have generated and sustained ahistorical myths about the fundamental disconnect between bebop and dance — the idea, that is, that the onset of bebop marked the decline of jazz dance.14 This notion flies in the face of the popularity of bebop amongst young, African American dance audiences of the 1940s and 1950s (McQuirter 2001, 82–87; Wells

2019, 43).15 Moreover, it obscures the significance of dance for understanding the radical form of hipness that crystallized with bebop’s Afro-modernist aesthetic, exemplified here by its most common danced step: the lindy hop. As Ellison (whom I have by now established as, in my opinion, the most important chronicler of radical hipness) himself put it in an oft-quoted editorial comment,

“much in Negro life remains a mystery: […] perhaps the symmetrical frenzy of the Lindy Hop conceals clues to great potential power — if only Negro leaders would solve this riddle” (Ellison

1943, 300–301).16

Emerging from African American communities in Harlem in the 1920s and 1930s, the lindy hop is a social jazz dance deriving most immediately from the Charleston (alongside the foxtrot, the waltz, and other popular jazz steps like the cakewalk and the black bottom) but distinguished by its

“creating the first breakaway step, known as the Swing Out, whereby partners would separate for a moment for an opportunity to improvise” (Hancock 2013, 2, 11–16; see also Stearns and Stearns

1968, 329–333; Emery 1988, 234–235). Despite being most closely associated with swing, Marya

Annette McQuirter (2001, 83) and Christopher Wells (2019, 44–45) describe bebop dancers as

14 For studies that perpetuate this myth, see Stearns and Stearns (1968, 1); Stowe (1994, 209); Crease (1995, 207); Erenberg (1998, 239); Genné (2018, 22). For critiques of it, see McQuirter (2001, 82–83, 100n2); Hancock (2013, 13– 14); Wells (2019, 36–51). 15 For more on the disputed relationship between bebop and dance, see DeVeaux (1997, 168–171, 438–440); Porter (1999, 441–442). 16 Revealingly, and inviting comparison with my discussion of Jay Rock in Chapter Two, Marya Annette McQuirter examines the role of dance in Malcolm X’s transition “from country bumpkin to hipster” — a well-worn narrative that, following Kelley (see Chapter Two), McQuirter is careful to refine and nuance (2001, 87–95).

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adopting and deforming this dance — by dancing it at half time, for instance — to match the angular, double time grooves of bebop.

Speaking to the persistence of myths about bebop’s undanceability in the contemporary moment, Wells describes the psychosomatic dissonance arising from his own experience of dancing to jazz from the bebop era — an experience that he frames, tellingly, in relation to the music’s

“groove”:

“At the 2013 American Musicological Society annual meeting in Pittsburgh, a live band performed Ted Buehrer’s painstaking transcriptions of Mary Lou Williams’s compositions and arrangements. My friend Anna and I lindy hopped our way through Williams’s best charts from the 1920s and 30s […] About halfway through, the band took up ‘Scorpio’ from Williams’s Zodiac Suite, and I felt that groovy bassline throughout my legs and hips as delightful pockets of rhythmic dissonance invited me (and I presume also Anna, though I haven’t asked her) to keep dancing…but we didn’t. The music still felt ‘danceable,’ but we’d crossed from 1938 to 1944, and I felt a shift inside myself as I questioned whether letting my hips respond to that bassline would still be appropriate as the band crossed the ‘bebop moment’ — that early ’40s boundary separating jazz-as-pop from jazz-as-art” (Wells 2019, 36–37; emphasis mine).

It is significant that Wells’s hesitancy, here, regarding the pertinence of dancing to bebop (as an ostensibly high art form), juts up directly against his experience of the music’s “groovy bassline”

(which nonetheless compels him to dance). Following ScHoolboy Q, I suggest that it is exactly this danced experience of groove that dissolves such reified cultural-epistemological lines as that between

“jazz-as-pop” and “jazz-as-art,” and points to the possibility of experiencing such dissolutions in a fundamentally ethical manner.

Indeed, speaking more closely to the dance’s political potential, sociologist Black Hawk

Hancock describes the lindy hop in distinctly Afro-modernist terms as “an African American cultural practice […] forged as an alternative expression of identity against the context of overt and explicit white racism, segregation, and exploitation that defined the American landscape at the time”

(Hancock 2013, 3, 11–13; see also Gilroy 1993, 274; Mercer 1994, 431; Dinerstein 2003).17 The result

17 The limits of Hancock’s Afro-modernist conception of the lindy hop emerge, however, in his discussion of it as an intrinsically “hybrid” dance form (2013, 27). Hancock’s use of this term reproduces the sort of essentialist notions of

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is what Maya Stovall calls a “critical aesthetics of modernity” (2015, 10), emerging through dance and capable of grappling with Western discursive and physical emplacements of Blackness while generating new routes to freedom within these.18 Following the mainstream assimilation and ultimate decline of the lindy hop, the dance “mutated into other forms of partnered social dancing in African

American communities,” accompanying emergent forms of music like R&B and hip-hop (Hancock

2013, 14). Indeed, for Stovall, the aesthetics of the lindy hop “continue to inform modern, postmodern, and contemporary dance aesthetics today” (Stovall 2015, 2). We continue to see its influence in the music of ScHoolboy Q.

By far the most danceable song on Oxymoron, “Los Awesome” opens with a crashing synth introduction before quickly falling into a steady but ambivalent tempo: we hear the song in the quick double time of bebop, but it simultaneously invites a half-time dance à la McQuirter’s and Wells’s half-time lindy hop. Meanwhile, Q makes explicit the song’s connection to dance from the opening lyrics (given, here, in double time):

“(I’m a) groovy type nigga, rather/ Two-step with ya, pants/ Saggin’, rag draggin’, rather/ Gang bang with ya.”

Building on Q’s above-cited definitions of groove, his words here offer a more complete image of this sartorially-marked — whether in tie dye, sagging pants, or rags (colored fabrics signaling gang- affiliation) — hybridizing existential mode as expressed through dance. Specifically, Q singles out the two-step as his preferred mode of dancing groove.

In the hip-hop context, two-step refers most basically to a symmetrical dance step involving stepping sideways with one foot before bringing the other foot back to join it, followed by a

bounded and complete (here, White and Black) cultures coming into contact that I critique in the Introduction. By contrast, my conception of Afro-modernism turns on an understanding of hybridity as the deconstruction or blurring of the lines between such ostensibly stable cultural forms. 18 From another perspective, Danielle Robinson (2015) explores the centrality of Black culture to Western modernity through the lens of dance and/as African diasporic cultural practice.

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repetition back in the opposite direction. In practice, however, dancers frequently embellish the two- step to varying degrees of complexity, as memorably demonstrated by Ciara in the video to her 2004

RnB hit “1, 2 Step,” featuring Missy Elliott.19 If, for Stovall, it was Michael Jackson who most significantly developed the social-political expressive work of the lindy hop in the 1980s and 1990s

(Stovall 2015, 8–10), then Ciara’s dancing makes clear the King of Pop’s own influence upon the hip-hop two-step. More interestingly still, in the lyrics to the song, Ciara and Missy Elliott even wed the two-step to their own phenomenology of groove:

“(This beat is) Automatic, supersonic/ Hypnotic, funky fresh/ Work my body, so melodic/ This beat rolls right through my chest/ Everybody, ma and papi/ Came to party, grab somebody/ Work ya body, work ya body/ Let me see you 1, 2 step.”

By describing the corporeal demands that the music makes upon its performers, the song’s lyrics here align closely with Roholt’s theory of musical groove as — following French phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty on embodied perception — perceived through (rather than merely responded to via) bodily engagement (Roholt 2014, 4, 7–8, 91–100; see Merleau-Ponty

1962). In presenting groove on these terms, Roholt responds to the limits of more scientific, deterministic frameworks for rhythmic perception — and particularly those that attempt to tie these frameworks to processes of embodiment. He singles out, here, Vijay Iyer’s (2002) theory of groove as a form of “embodied cognition.” By failing to consider “the role of actual body movement in rhythm perception and apprehension,” Roholt argues, Iyer’s focus on the neurological and psychological perception of the specific musical nuances that ostensibly make up groove “does not offer, nor lay a foundation for, a truly active, embodied account of groove” (Roholt 2014, 88).

The more promising side to Iyer’s work, Roholt notes, is his observation regarding “possible bodily resonances between certain grooves and certain social behaviors” (Roholt 2014, 90). And it

19 On March 24, 2020, this video could be accessed via Ciara’s YouTube page: https://youtu.be/iBHNgV6_znU.

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would seem that it is exactly such resonances that Q offers up in his own groovy engagement with the two-step. Returning to “Los Awesome,” when Q says that he’d “rather two-step with ya,” the implication is that this is as opposed to the expected, violent and antagonistic protocols of gang life.

In the next breath, however, he contradicts this oppositional sentiment, conceding that, from a groovy metaphysical outlook, his two-stepping is always already deeply entangled with violence:

“rather gang bang with ya.” Doubling down on this tension, in the song’s pre-hook, Q delivers an onomatopoeic rendition of gunshots (“bla-tay bla-tay bla-tay bla bum”), which he describes as “the sound of the drum that Crips, that Bloods know.” Here, the thug life literally provides the soundtrack to danced groove. As Q puts it in an interview with HipHopDX, “Los Awesome” is, primarily, “gangsta shit. It ain’t one of them melodic muthafuckas like you about to fall in love. This some gang bangin’ shit. I needed to get that one out the way on my album. I needed something that the gang bangers could identify with. Not so much my core fans, more so the gang members”

(Hunte 2014).

In “Los Awesome,” then, Q juxtaposes two different understandings of what it means to be

“groovy”: first, a legible understanding tied to hipness, music, and dance; and second, a vernacular understanding that seamlessly interweaves the former imagery with that of the thug life. Moreover, by exploring and reconciling these apparently competing images of groove through dance, Q suggests the centrality of the body to understanding his oxymoronic ethical theory, which constitutes the way he literally moves through the world. In particular, if the lindy hop “was an ideal site for […] the survival mechanisms African Americans created to be embodied” (Stovall 2015, 6–7), then the two-step would appear to provide Q not only with a mode of perceiving (or producing) musical groove, but also with an ideal means of embodying his ethical conception of groove.20 In this sense,

20 Indeed, Sarah Thornton has similarly discussed the possibility of embodying hipness (which she defines as a form of “subcultural capital”) through dance (see Thornton 1995, 3, 11–12). Thornton’s conception of hipness, however, is of

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ScHoolboy Q’s danced theorizing brings us right up to Roholt’s vision of a truly active, embodied account of groove; the two-step marks a fundamental resonance between Q’s groovy, Afro- modernist ethics and aesthetics. As we will see, however, when faced with the disruptive presence of

Blackness, the relationship between groove and the body is far from secure.

Embodiment and the Flesh

If ScHoolboy Q’s danced engagements with groove compare to his flow palimpsests in their

Afro-modernist deconstruction of the space between competing forms of Blackness, they also extend this work by bringing it into contact with understandings of groove as an embodied musical aesthetic. Indeed, in this very sense, Q’s propensity for dance also sheds new light on the flow palimpsest in the explicit questions that it raises about the relationship between this groovy musical practice and the body. Above, I describe how Q reconceptualizes groove not as a product of embodied musical experience, but rather as a musical process of appropriating and reconciling contradictory and discursively opposed forms of Blackness. With his groovy dancing in mind, however, we might further reformulate this claim to argue that, through his use of flow palimpsests,

Q in fact places discursively opposed hip-hop personas in dialogue, while and by channeling these through his own groovy self. He appropriates conflicting experiences of Blackness and models their reconcilability within a single, Black, groovy body. Groove, here, becomes a musical process of embodying opposed forms of Blackness.

This claim aligns closely with Harvey Young’s argument, in Embodying Black Experience, that embodied Blackness constitutes a “phenomenal” process, through which ideas about the Black body are socially projected upon bodies racialized as Black and thus come to “constitute a relatable

the legible sort unattainable to figures like Q. By contrast, I argue that what Q appears to embody is, more accurately, groove.

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experience of the body” (Young 2010, 14). While such individualized experiences can never be exactly the same, he argues, common experiences of racial violence do give rise to similar, embodied

Black experiences. In turn, in developing this interpersonal dimension of his theory, Young draws on Merleau-Ponty’s notion that “a person can comprehend the perspective of another by situating the imagined vantage point of that other person within her own body” (Young 2010, 61; see

Merleau-Ponty 1969, 11). This perspective offers one way of accounting for “moments of experiential overlap” between individual, embodied Black experiences, even where one has not experienced a particular “racializing projection” firsthand (Young 2010, 5). The result is a conception of embodiment predicated on a sense of double consciousness — that is, on both

“societal and self-perception of the black body” (2010, 1, 13–14).21

Young’s conception of the interpersonal, self-perceiving dimension of embodied Black experience aligns closely with my description of the flow palimpsest, through which ScHoolboy Q

“comprehend[s] the perspective[s]” of other rappers exactly by situating their “vantage points” within his own body. At the same time, however, considering Young’s theory specifically in relation to the deep-rooted tension between opposed figures like Young Buck and Kanye West, one cannot help but notice how Young’s liberal humanist take on Black commonality chafes somewhat against the structural lens of racialization through which he theorizes it. As Hortense Spillers teaches us, in the latter way of thinking, Blackness emerges as not so much “of the body” — a human category created and guaranteed by the law — as “of the flesh” — a posthuman category signifying the ontological dehumanization of the Slave and made to exist outside of civil society (Spillers 1987, 65–

67; see Introduction). Recall Frank Wilderson’s still more pointed warning — for which he draws

21 Young’s conception of “phenomenal blackness” aligns closely with E. Patrick Johnson’s own ideas about the processes through which Black people “appropriate,” through performance, circulating ideas about Blackness. In particular, Young’s dual approach to both societal and self-perceived notions of the Black body compares well with Johnson’s observation of both a dialogic and dialectic relationship between Blackness and performance. In this view, Blackness is performed by individuals, but it also exists, structurally, outside of such performances (see Johnson 2003, 8).

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closely on Spillers — that “Blacks […] cannot claim their bodies” (Wilderson, Spatzek, and von

Gleich 2016, 8).22

In other words, the processes through which Blackness is related to the body should not be mistaken as additive, communal, and humanizing. Rather, they should be understood as the antagonistic result of the forms of violence through which Blackness is brought into being, in excess of the Human. The relationship between Blackness and the body, then, is arguably a negative, rather than a positive, one. Dwelling on the gap between the body and the flesh, moreover, troubles

Young’s description of embodied Black experiences as resistant political acts through which to

“challenge racializing projections” (Young 2010, 6). Such acts emerge as futile attempts at claiming humanity on the terms of a civil society that nonetheless continues to deny Black personhood.

Indeed, as we have seen, the productive, “repetition with a difference” that Young attributes to this unifying experience of embodiment (2010, 5) rarely plays out on neutral terms. A case in point, attempts to claim Black humanity by bohemian rappers have necessarily reproduced the denial of humanity for gangsta and Southern rappers. What does it mean to speak of embodying such abjectified forms of Blackness, when it is these very forms of Blackness that most immediately signify the denial of body through the gratuitous violence of slavery, mass incarceration, and police brutality?

This line of questioning brings us back to the fundamentally oxymoronic state of ScHoolboy

Q’s embattled existence. While Q’s engagement in the long history of danced hipness seems to align with Roholt’s claims about the centrality of embodiment to comprehending groove, such

22 More fully, Wilderson argues that “at every scale of abstraction, whether it’s the continental scale with the concept of ‘Africa,’ ratcheting down to the territory of the nation, ratcheting down to the territory of the community, the city, the filial territory of the domestic sphere, or even, as Hortense Spillers would say, ratcheting all the way down to the body, there is no scale of cartographic abstraction in which you could say that this cartography, this terrain, belongs to the person who inhabits it: even if the scale of abstraction is the body (Spillers) or the unconscious (Marriott). Blacks, in other words, cannot claim their bodies” (Wilderson, Spatzek, and von Gleich 2016, 8).

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phenomenologically-inflected notions of embodiment falter in the face of Q’s ontological Blackness.

Indeed, while Hall productively unpacks the ways that the Invisible Man links phonographic grooves to his body, by the end of the novel, the narrator describes himself as “being invisible and without substance, a disembodied voice, as it were” (Ellison 1995, 581).

Moving away from ideas about embodiment, then, we recognize that Q’s theory of groove is not of the body at all. Rather, in its affirmation of disavowed (even, following Richardson, Baker, and Nelson, abjectified), dehumanized forms of Blackness (namely, the gangsta and the Southern),

Q’s theory becomes one rooted in the flesh. By extension, in its appropriation of conflicting Black vantage points, the flow palimpsest does not enact the (impossible) embodiment of Blackness; rather, it engages the fleshly nature of groove.

It is from this perspective that such musical mimicry becomes more than a question of incidental imitation or mere homage, and instead begins to resemble a political project of racial affirmation and democratization. By refusing to refuse abjectified forms of Blackness, Q conjures an image of Black life as lived in and through the flesh. Indeed, if the flesh signifies a condition of social death, its posthuman quality also bears the potential for radical futures, “where humanness can be figured apart from ‘Man’” (Burton 2017, 34). By embracing the abject, “fleshy surplus”

(Weheliye 2014, 2) of gangsta and Southern Blackness, Q speaks exactly to a perceived experiential overlap with these maligned positionalities. But this overlap is one properly predicated on their common experiences of a racial structure that leaves no room for Black humanity. By revealing the reconcilability of these Black experiences with his hipness, Q offers up a theory of Black life that allow for Black-ness in all of its complexity and unendingness.

By shifting our analytical approach to groove away from the body and toward the flesh, we also gain a deeper insight into Ab-Soul’s aforementioned palimpsest on Chief Keef in “Feelin’ Us.”

Where Q uses multiple palimpsests in “Birds & The Beez” to bring two conflicting artists into

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tension, before reconciling them with his own hipness, Soul’s palimpsest instead works from the outset to bring his own hip-hop persona into dialogue with that of an artist positioned at the opposite end of the hip-hop authenticity spectrum. As described in Chapter One, Ab-Soul’s socially- conscious brand of hip-hop, in combination with his relatively affluent upbringing, would seem to align him with the elevated politics and aesthetics of jazz/bohemian rappers, for whom artists like

Chief Keef have served as prime self-authenticating fodder. Indeed, the Chicago drill genre that

Chief Keef popularized with songs like “Love Sosa” symbolizes all of the most maligned excesses of gangsta rap — comprising, in journalist Lucy Stehlik’s telling words, a “sonic cousin” of “southern- fried hip-hop and […] trap” (2012).

However, in combination with his public disavowals of the conscious rap moniker (Figure

1.1; see Ab-Soul 2011), and explicit affirmation of Chief Keef’s influence upon him (see Ahmed

2012c), Soul’s flow palimpsest provides a stark challenge to the elitist politics of jazz/bohemian rap.

By refusing to base his own, enlightened hip-hop persona upon a rejection of Chief Keef’s drill aesthetic, Soul, like Q, moves beyond Black bourgeois racial politics and instead opens a space for

Black existence that blurs the lines between the hippy and the gangsta. By inviting Keef into the realm of Black hipness, Soul too gestures toward groovy futures for Black existence outside of both mainstream society’s conception of the human, and myopic reproductions of this within the Black parallel public (see Chapter One). In the next section, I place music and dance in greater dialogue to more fully excavate the significance of groove for reimagining hipness as an African diasporic aesthetic of existence.

ScHoolboy Q, the Groovy Fugitive

Before turning my focus, for the remainder of this chapter, to the existentially generative side of ScHoolboy Q’s theory of groove, it will be useful to first zoom back out for a moment and

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consider the broader epistemological shifts engendered by the meeting point arrived at in the previous section between groove and the flesh. First, by disrupting existing frameworks for Black embodiment, and indeed the very concept of the Black body, Q’s theory of groove also troubles, by extension, ideas about the intrinsic associations of musical groove — narrowly conceived as the catchy, rhythmic dimensions of music — with such an imagined Black body.23 By revealing the conditions of impossibility for such essentializing myths (namely, the impossibility of the Black body), along with the utopic ideas to which they give rise about dancing and sounding Black freedom, Q reveals the need for more critical understandings of the radical existential potential of

Black music and dance.24

Second, if Q’s theory of groove displaces Blackness to the abjectified realm of the flesh, then it also troubles sanitized, liberal humanist imaginings of lived groove-iness — as a synonym for hipness — with countercultural Black bodies in the urban North. As Barbara Ching and Gerald W.

Creed describe, “postmodern social theory’s stable reference point has been the city; it unquestioningly posits an urbanized subject without considering the extent to which such a subject is constructed by its conceptual opposition to the rustic […] In much postmodern social theory, the country as a vital place simply doesn’t exist” (Ching and Creed 1997, 7; see also Richardson 2007,

16). In contrast, when ScHoolboy Q dances, raps, and philosophizes about groove, he incorporates into his definition of the word a reimagined sense of the country — as commonly associated with the South — as precisely a “vital place” for Black life. In doing so, he offers up himself as an answer to musicologist Justin Burton’s question, posed by way of Sylvia Wynter and Hortense Spillers:

23 For old and more recent ideas about the African origins and intrinsic Blackness of groove (sometimes explicit, sometimes framed in relation to broader ideas about rhythm), see Waterman (1948); Wilson (1974); Merriam (1981); Snead (1984); Floyd Jr. (1991); Keil and Feld (1994, 12); Frith (1998, 127–140); Brackett (2000, 108); Iyer (2002, 406). For critiques of this racialized understanding of groove and rhythm, see Agawu (2003); Abel (2014, 61–91). 24 For scholarship that imputes resistant potential to Black dance, see Browning (1995); King-Dorset (2008); Rucker (2008); Kringelbach (2013); Das (2017).

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“what sorts of flesh dance on these demonic grounds […] where humanness is fostered apart from

Man[?]” (Burton 2017, 34).

By reconciling these imperatives — to reimagine the radical function of Black music and dance, and to reimagine Black freedom beyond liberal definitions of the human — Q takes his theory of groove beyond the deconstructivist functions that I attributed to it in part one and begins to explore its more generative existential potential. In this closing section, I begin by arguing that this potential can be discerned in the meeting of music and dance in ScHoolboy Q’s music videos, through which he develops his own groovy perspective on fugitivity as the exhaustive pursuit of life in the face of Black social death (see Chapter Two). In turn, by examining how Q’s specific engagements with fugitivity extend back out to his use of the flow palimpsest, I dig into the distinctive interpersonal and, more specifically, relational dimensions of the flesh as an ontological site for the meeting of disparate enactments of Blackness. Examining a remarkably comparable musical practice in South Africa, that similarly turns on the meeting of music and dance, I explore the radical epistemological potential of the flesh for reimagining diasporic Blackness.

Dead Men Dancing

Some of the most striking examples of Q’s fleshly attempts at dancing out Black freedom occur in the music video to “JoHn Muir,” from Blank Face LP (2016).25 The video opens with a one- second snippet of a night-time shootout between four unidentified figures (one of whom is identifiable only by the gun spark seen through the mist), chaotically punctuated by three, framing blank screens. Then, as the third screen flashes “24 HRS EARLIER” in yellow writing, the drama jumps back to the night before. With the action unfolding now outside of a fast food joint, two men rob another pair at gunpoint before driving off into the darkness where they: bump into an

25 On March 24, 2020, this video could be accessed via ScHoolboy Q’s YouTube page: https://youtu.be/Iuq9XK6tojs.

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acquaintance outside of a convenience store and regale him with their story; catcall a group of women out of the car window (one of whom performs oral sex on one of the men); pull up on another parked car before shooting and robbing the occupant; and narrowly evade capture by the police. Night turns to day and scenes of the men driving around selling drugs now alternate with displays of police violence against members of the local community, which they witness from inside their car.

It is telling that Q’s lyrical narration of these densely layered and banalized displays of state and underground violence does not depict the action directly, but instead centers upon conjuring various images of movement, which overlap to varying degrees with the video’s goings on. In the first verse alone, Q describes himself variously as “bellin’26 through the motherfuckin’ street, y’all,”

“ridin’ in my motherfuckin’ Couple [de] Ville,” and “groovin’ with my motherfuckin’ locs still.”27

Indeed, along with the moving car, the most striking elements of the video that separate the protagonists from those upon whom they inflict violence, and from those having violence inflicted upon them by the police, are their moments of stylized movement, and, specifically, dance.28 About half way through the second verse [02:02 – 02:04], for instance, the men pull the car over on an empty street and one of them dances a two-step, pants saggin’ in a vivid callback to those iconic lines from “Los Awesome”: “(I’m a) groovy type nigga, rather/ two-step with ya, pants/ saggin’, rag draggin’, rather/ gang bang with ya.” Then, as the song transitions to the hook, the video cuts to a shot of one of the men’s arms hanging out the car window, bopping up and down to the music as they drive away into the dusk [02:26 – 02:28]. The beat shifts from the dark, grungy aesthetic that characterizes the verses to incorporate an uplifting saxophone riff and chorus. It becomes difficult

26 Bellin’: walking with a stylized swagger; a performance of confidence and comfort in the street. 27 Loc: a gang member. 28 The centrality of movement to Q’s ethics here aligns closely with Wilderson’s memoiric recollection of his experiences negotiating anti-Blackness between the United States and South Africa as instilling in him a constant sense of the need to be “on the move” (Wilderson 2015, 300–301).

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not to experience the two-step and the bopping arm as vibrant, groovy signs of escape against a backdrop of violence. As Q puts it himself in the second verse’s closing lines: “(Runnin’ from the)

CRASH unit29 like my name was State Farm, on my nigga’s/ Handlebars tryna get our groove on.”

Ultimately, of course, from either a pragmatic or a metaphysical perspective, it is inane to imagine such gestures of mobility as providing a means of truly outrunning death. Accordingly, as the uplifting musical passage that closes out the song grows in intensity, day turns to night again in the video and our lead pair stumble upon the men whom they robbed the night before. As the action comes full circle, we discover that the video’s opening snippet in fact depicted our protagonists being shot to death by the men they would go on to rob. Which is to say that they were, literally, from the video’s outset, always already dead men dancing. Importantly, as I elaborate in the next sub-section, this profoundly fleshly ontology is far from distinctive to the protagonists of

“JoHn Muir.” For instance, in the video to Flying Lotus’s “Until the Quiet Comes” (2012), Kahlil

Joseph similarly captures this state of deathly living in his depiction of a “murdered black man’s body danc[ing], bullet-ridden and bloodied, through [what Joseph reimagines as the] phantasmagoric playground” of the Nickerson Gardens projects in which Jay Rock grew up (see Bakare 2018).30 If dancing signifies a form of stolen life in the flesh, then, it certainly doesn’t signify life on normative terms. More accurately, it signifies a life lived in the exhaustion of social death.

This conditional form of life takes place through what Black studies scholars call fugitivity.

Recall my discussion, in Chapter Two, of Ab-Soul’s existential imperative to “beat the case” by moving one’s body “like a runaway slave.” When Q uses his featured verse on “Beat the Case” to insert his own groovy presence (“Groovy Tony with the moves”), he weds Soul’s fugitive flight from

29 CRASH: Community Resources Against Street Hoodlums, a special operations unit of the LAPD designed to target gangs. 30 On March 24, 2020, this video could be accessed via Warp Records’s YouTube page: https://youtu.be/- pVHC1DXQ7U.

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Black incarcerability directly to his fleshly dance moves. And, indeed, a number of scholars have linked fugitivity explicitly to dance. Joshua Hall, for instance, understands Black dance as both paralleling Frantz Fanon’s bleak analysis of the Black body in Black Skin, White Masks — a foundational text for studies of Black social death — and working, in a fugitive spirit, through

Fanon’s diagnosis by uncovering the epistemological “advantages” generated by experiences of oppression (Hall 2012, 275; see Fanon 2008).31 Hall’s anti-utopian aim here is to “tap into the constructive and affirmative values typically attributed to dance to find ways to better construct and affirm the lives of Black persons and communities under anti-Black racism” (Hall 2012, 285). As such, where he more problematically (following my above critique of embodiment theory) describes this parallel between dance and Black life as “suggest[ing] the possibility of affirmatively reunderstanding — or revalorizing — both Black embodiment and dance” (Hall 2012, 275), arguably what he really ends up describing is the role of dance in granting us more critical access to the flesh as a posthuman site of fugitive action.

In his own take on dance and fugitivity, Thomas F. DeFrantz more fully complicates the relationship between Blackness and the body, and particularly ideas about the Black body as a site of resistance. Instead, he suggests that it is in Black dance specifically where fugitivity plays out, even while erasing the Black body itself: “The fugitive black stays in motion, unable to stop, because stopping suggests an ability to resist the ever-changing tides of capital, empire, and subjugation. The fugitive black public cannot be seen; its visibility confirms a presence that is always already denied by white- controlled capital. Fugitive black vibrates, in the shadows without marking” (DeFrantz 2016, 717).

While DeFrantz’s take on danced fugitivity grapples more fully with the impossibility of the Black body, his conception of this form of corporeal erasure leads, more problematically, to his attempts

31 This two-pronged approach to affirming and exhausting social death aligns closely with the view of “informal theorist” R.L. (2013), who argues that “affirmation of blackness proves to be impossible without simultaneously affirming the violence that structures black subjectivity itself.”

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to tie fugitivity to an imagined post-Black future. In this sense, his theory lacks that affirmative quality of radical fugitivity through which Q, for instance, is able to affirm the Blackness of the

South and the gangsta. Indeed, Richardson links fugitivity — or, what she calls “insurgency” (2007,

148) — explicitly to Southern Blackness. With DeFrantz, by contrast, we lose not only the Black body, but also the flesh in all of its surplus vitality.

Better, then, is Marquis Bey’s take on the fugitivity of Black dance as emerging precisely through its physical exhaustion of social death. As he puts it:

“Blackness, we might tentatively say, signifies a proximity to social death (but there is still social life all up in that social death). Too, it is that fugitive movement, absconding with life it is not supposed to have, refusing fixity; it speaks to that insurgent sociality that perennially unfixes. Blackness dances in the underground, a dance that is itself a potent knowledge; it Crip Walks, Nae Naes (watch me whip, whip!), Lindy hops, Dougies, leans and rocks with it (what’s hannenin’!), and snaps its fingers in positional abjection but lived ebullience for the un- grammatizing of whiteness that Blackness augurs” (Bey 2016).

Expanding Bey’s list, I would add that it is exactly this “positional abjection but lived ebullience” that Q taps into in his thugged-out two-step, as described in “Los Awesome” and displayed in all of its fleshly glory in the “JoHn Muir” video. More specifically, when we understand the lindy hop and the two-step in terms of groove, we recognize that it’s not the Black body that dances, but “fugitive flesh” itself.32 Returning, finally, to my interventions into Young’s own interpersonal model for embodying Black experience, I close by unpacking the value of the flesh for understanding relational

Black experiences of this fugitive, “insurgent sociality.”

Grooving in the Diaspora

ScHoolboy Q’s theory of groove provides a model for reimagining Black life that accounts for the ontology of Blackness in an anti-Black world. But how does this relate to my theory of hipness as an African diasporic aesthetic of existence more broadly? Any answer to this question

32 On “fugitive flesh,” see Stanley (2011); Snorton (2017, 12).

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must go beyond essentializing myths about the supposed intrinsic grooviness (rhythmic compulsion) of Black music. Such an answer must also challenge existing dance scholarship that (much like the music scholarship I critiqued in Chapter Two) has continued to rely on ideas about African cultural retentions as producing and sustaining resistant Black communities throughout the diaspora.33 Such ideas falter in the face of a global racial structure that disrupts processes of Black self- and community-making and necessitates alternative ways of thinking Black life globally.

More pointedly, Q’s theory of groove complicates answers to this question that turn on ideas about the role of embodiment in producing interpersonal conceptions of Blackness. The phenomenologically-oriented claims about Black interconnectivity offered by scholars like Young lack applicability to the denied subjectivity of Blackness. By reframing this answer, however, away from the body and toward the flesh, we reach a schema for understanding interpersonal, transnational Black experiences that is more fully accountable to ontological Blackness. The result is the alternative framework for thinking diasporic connectivity that I call “ontological resonance” (see

Chapter Two). In expounding this point, I offer a final instance of musical groove, where the forms of danced fugitivity that I describe above in relation to “JoHn Muir” meet the rapped practice that I call the flow palimpsest, as well as other Black musical practices from throughout the diaspora.

Returning to the analysis of “Birds & The Beez” with which I opened this chapter, an especially revealing meeting point between the palimpsest and danced fugitivity occurs with the musical material at the onset of Kendrick Lamar’s featured verse. As the reader will recall,

ScHoolboy Q models the song’s hook around a flow palimpsest upon Kanye West’s “Spaceship”

(Example 3.11). Picking up right where Q leaves off, Kendrick constructs the opening measure of his verse around an exact rhythmic imitation — comprising six sixteenth notes followed by three eighth notes over the 6/8 meter — of Q’s closing measure. Then, for measure two, Kendrick breaks

33 On cultural retentions pertaining to African dance, see King-Dorset (2008); Rucker (2008).

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suddenly from this rhythmic motif to offer a measure of contrasting, improvised material, before returning to the motif for measure three. Measures four to six comprise a virtuosic improvisatory break in which Kendrick heightens the rhythmic tension by eschewing any regularity of rhyme or scansion (the way that he crosses the measure on “intelligent” is particularly jarring), before returning to a brief variation upon the motif to close measure six. Finally, measures seven and eight comprise a close imitation of the two corresponding measures that close out Q’s hook (Example

3.12).34

ScHoolboy Q, Birds & The Beez Example 3.11. ScHoolboy Q, “Birds & The Beez,” feat. Kendrick Lamar, hook 1, measures 1–8

ScHoolboy Q Tired of the same old shit, nig gas they fak in' it,           3

 nig gas out here liv in' foul, bet ter yet they fla g rant,

 kick these nig gas right up out the game, get these nig gas right up out my lane,

I just wan na do this fuck in' mus ic boy and leave this dope a lone and count my change                    

34 In transcription, the motifs and rhythms I describe here at times appear to fall away into a homogeneous mass of sixteenth notes. However, listening to the recording along with the transcription reveals the roles that rhyme, scansion, and musical/poetic meter play in both articulating motifs and creating rhythmic irregularity and tension.

179 ScHoolboy Q, Birds & The Beez

Example 3.12. ScHoolboy Q, “Birds & The Beez,” feat. Kendrick Lamar, verse 3, measures 1–8

Kendrick Lamar   Q, I wan na see you do your thing, en ter tain ment business  liv in' lime light, 3

 hop on every  track and move them trains, show these moth er fuck ers that you been tight'

 than they ev er been it's ev i dent you in tel li gent, but you can't es cape that life,

 and for you, my nig ga, I would sac ri fice my self to make it just to see you hold the mic

In this way, Kendrick applies to Q’s flow palimpsest the same internal structure of shared motifs and improvisation upon these that I described in Chapter Two as characteristic of Black

Hippy’s “cypher tracks.” The use of shared motifs in these cypher tracks signifies an aesthetics of disidentification and erasure congruent with the ontological condition of fungibility at the core of

Black social death. In turn, moments of improvisation upon these motifs signal the fugitive act of working through this condition. By bringing this dynamic to bear upon Q’s flow palimpsest — itself a marker of the fleshly ontology that Q shares with Kanye West — Kendrick produces a densely layered affirmation of fleshy fungibility, while speaking to the possibility of, in Bey’s words,

“absconding with life [Blackness] is not supposed to have.”35

From this perspective, we also gain a deeper insight into the democratizing musical moment from “Figg Get Da Money,” described above, where Q suddenly interrupts an ongoing palimpsest on Kanye’s “Get Em High” (“[…] I got the swerve like alco- Fuck that!”), before going on to offer

35 Tellingly, in a tweet from June 12, 2016, Q wrote that “I FREESTYLED ALL THA LYRICS 2 JOHN MUIR,” adding an additional, musical layer to the song’s fugitive aesthetics (ScHoolboy Q 2016).

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an unabashed affirmation of the thug life. On the one hand, Q uses the palimpsest to deconstruct

North/South, hippy/gangsta divides and reveal their shared relationship to the flesh. On the other hand, he builds into this work an aesthetic-theoretical engagement with the flesh’s more generative, fugitive ability to interrupt hegemonic representations of Blackness. And it is precisely this mode of accessing and mobilizing the insurgent potential of the flesh that, I argue, provides fertile ground for rethinking diasporic connectivity in terms of “ontological resonance.”

Consider the similarities, for example, with Louise Meintjes’s study of Zulu ngoma, a competitive form of song and dance practiced by male migrant laborers and emerging in the context of post-apartheid South Africa. A warrior dance performed in identification with ancient Zulu men returning home from battle, ngoma fuses dancing and singing, violence and play, to capture the

“spirit of the victorious warrior” (2017, 6). The singing is characterized by call-and-response textures between soloist and chorus, while the dance revolves around a variety of kicks and stamps that capture, amongst other things, the “isigqi” (power) of the warrior (2017, 5–10, 23, 46–50). Meintjes’s description of ngoma overlaps closely with my discussion of Q’s groovy aesthetics and ethics in at least two generative ways.

Most immediately, Meintjes’s account of ngoma’s aesthetic vitality aligns strikingly with my discussion of the dynamics of fugitivity in the flow palimpsest. As she describes, all three ngoma styles combine “choreographed group work and individual improvisation” (2017, 8). Of course, as I discussed in Chapter Two (while problematizing the dichotomy between the group and the individual), this texture characterizes a range of Black musical practices, from bebop and Malian kora music to Black Hippy’s cypher tracks. In focusing on its presence in ngoma, however, my intention is not to reproduce the essentialist ideas about African cultural retentions, or intrinsic aesthetic and ethical commonalities between disparate African diasporic cultural practices, that I critique in Chapter Two. Rather, what is more revealing is Meintjes’s description of this texture as

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working to affirm the forms of violence that continue to structure Zulu existence, while simultaneously carving out life and freedom within these.

As Meintjes puts it, ngoma offers “a way of being in the world,” but one birthed by a

“history of violent encounter” — specifically, apartheid (though this could be framed more broadly in relation to anti-Blackness) — giving rise to a “politics of dehumanization” that plays out through the violent control and marginalization of men’s bodies (2017, 1–2). Indeed, ngoma’s aesthetics have built into them engagements with, and attempts at working through, such experiences of violence.

On the one hand, the dancer’s raised-leg stamping and choreographed kicks — and their associations with isigqi — reenact the layered forms of violence that structure Zulu life, from masculinist stereotypes about the Zulu warrior, to the more recent history of apartheid violence which turned this image into a tool for dehumanization and exploitation. On the other hand, the forms of playful improvisation with which performers prepare their kicks — gentle bodily rolls, turning hands, playful somersaults (2017, 16–17, 29, 47–50) — allow ngoma performers to remediate such expressions while freeing up definitions of what it means to be a Zulu man.

In this way, “as an aesthetic that represents forcefulness and embodies forceful experiences, yet combines this with artful ambiguity and improvisational play, ngoma aesthetics offers a means to finesse the disruptions of violent politics” (2017, 18–19). Ngoma dancers take the very material used to dehumanize them, and remobilize it in pursuit of a reclaimed, mythical past and a new,

“undetermined future,” explored through play and improvisation (2017, 254–255). What Meintjes theorizes into ngoma, then, is in effect a form of danced fugitivity: an attempt at affirming the overwhelming reality of ontological terror, while working through this to locate alternative, insurgent forms of existence. In the same way that Q’s flow palimpsest accesses a hybridizing space between the North and the South, the hippy and the gangsta, ngoma performers access a hybridizing

“space/time between vulnerability and aspiration” (2017, 2), between violence and play. Ultimately,

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in both contexts, from neo-bohemian hip-hop to South African ngoma, music and dance work to produce a hybridizing space in between ontological life and death.

More troubling, here, is Meintjes’s emphasis on the role of embodiment — of the Zulu warrior; of experiences of violence; even of “groove” — within ngoma’s insurgent aesthetics. As she herself asks, “in these circumstances [of global brutality against and marginalization of African bodies], what does it mean to speak with a dancing body?” Her own answer, that “a dancer is not speechless if he holds some control over his own representation […], and if he is heard” (2017, 13), is not entirely satisfactory. The sort of identity politicking that this claim entails falters in the face of an anti-Black structure that forcefully robs the Slave of its body. What exactly is it that the ngoma dancer “represents” if he does not have access to his own body? And how might such bodily representation be said to function as speech?

This latter question brings us to the second point of overlap between Meintjes’s description of ngoma and ScHoolboy Q’s theory of groove, namely, the centrality to both of the relationship between dance and song, the body and the voice. If ngoma’s danced aesthetics work with and through experiences of ontological dehumanization, then this practice is intrinsically wed, also, to singing. As Meintjes puts it, “Zulu men’s body habitus, which is also a habitus of the voice, is cultivated playfully, socially, continuously through and around ngoma” (2017, 10). If ngoma is a history of Zulu insurgent struggle, then “it is a history sung with the feet, voiced by men on the move” (2017, 268). This slippage and the moments of “feelingful play” that it entails are central to another aspect of ngoma’s “expressive potential,” namely, its capacity to produce a “robust feelingful sociality” (2017, 16). It is, in other words, through dance and singing, as mutually interwoven activities, that ngoma performers lay claim to the “insurgent sociality” that Bey attributes to Blackness’s fugitive movement.

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In this sense, while this chapter has at times appeared to set up a dichotomy between dance and flow, the body and the voice, Meintjes’s conception of the sung and danced sociality of ngoma reveals the productively fluid interrelationship that in fact exists between the two. Indeed, in focusing on dance as a route into Q’s theory of groove, my intention has not been to suggest its separability from music, but rather to bring out its own specificities: to reveal what Meintjes calls the

“discrepancies and disjunctures” (2017, 15) between the body and voice, before bringing them back together into a complete, sung (or rapped) and danced theory of fugitivity in the flesh.

Going some way toward modeling this work, Meintjes presents the fugitive relationality between dance and the voice as growing out of another process of embodiment, this time enabled by the breath: “as vocalizing implicates breath, the internal vocal mechanisms, and supporting musculature, material instantiations of a sung or spoken voice are embodied in the course of vocalizing” (2017, 15). The body and the voice thus complicate each other, allowing Meintjes to recombine them in an “expanded creative and material resource” (2017, 15) for finessing the disruption of violent politics and generating new forms of insurgent sociality. Specifically, drawing, like Young, on Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of embodiment, she argues that “this intercorporeality […] and its inflection into the voice as intervocality […] blend the experience of the body-voice in motion with the organization of the ngoma collective as a competitive practice and brotherhood” (2017, 17).

As I have argued, however, such claims about shared, embodied experiences lack applicability to the Slave, which does not even have access to its own body, though it might appear to breathe. Meintjes’s model of sung and danced fugitivity is thus incomplete, as the question remains of what sort of self or sociality the ngoma singer-dancer represents in this context. By contrast, in

Blackpentecostal Breath: The Aesthetics of Possibility, Ashon T. Crawley offers a different take on Black breath that helps to clarify the radical existential potential of both ngoma dance-song and the flow

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palimpsest. Indeed, Crawley’s project of investigating alternative modes of existence that “disrupt” the brutality against and marginalization of “minoritarian persons” is strikingly similar to Meintjes’s own. But his problematization of the “body” along the way signals a telling theoretical divergence, and a greater theoretical accountability to (anti-)Blackness.

Drawing on Kelly Brown Douglas’s Black Bodies and the Black Church to meld his critique to the religious context, Crawley argues that “it is the antiblackness of white theological thought that renders black bodies lascivious […] ‘This body-denying/body-phobic culture [of the Black church] in large measure points to the impact of a “white gaze” upon the black church community’”

(Crawley 2016, 13; see Douglas 2012, 168). In turn, following Spillers, Crawley locates “otherwise possibilities” (2016, 6) of life within this anti-Black racial structure in the shift away from the body and toward the flesh, and specifically what he calls “breathing flesh” (2016, 59). For Crawley, the attempted interdiction of the Slave’s “capacity to breathe” has been foundational to modernity and

(the afterlives of) transatlantic slavery — an ongoing reality iconized by the dying words of Eric

Garner (2016, 1–6). Meanwhile, in their refusal of this interdiction, Blackpentecostalism’s aestheticized performances of breath and breathing — whooping; shouting; noise making; speaking in tongues — give rise to otherwise modes of social organization. Crawley’s theory of insurgent breath provides a radical alternative to both Young’s and Meintjes’s uses of Merleau-Ponty in imagining shared, embodied racial experiences. Instead, Blackpentecostal breath generates Black sociality precisely through the “performance and transference of breath” not as an embodiment of the voice, but rather as “the vivifying force enlivening and quickening flesh” (2016, 27). In other words, it is breath itself that unveils both the fugitive potential of the flesh, and its capacity for generating the “radical sociality” (2016, 40) necessary for rethinking diasporic connection in a way that is accountable to Blackness.

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It is with this paradigmatic account of the role of breath in Black musical production that we can best grasp the significance of ScHoolboy Q’s theory of groove for rethinking existence in the

African diaspora. When Q mimics the flow styles of Young Buck and Kanye West, we might think about this creative work in relation to the transference of breath and the enlivening of the flesh’s dormant insurgency. Similarly, when ngoma vocalizations implicate breath in Zulu warrior dance, they quicken the potential of the flesh for finessing the disruption of dehumanizing stereotypes and finding moments of playful liveliness within these. These disparate musical practices thus emerge as comparable responses to experiences of a global racial structure under which the body remains unattainable and Blackness is relegated to the realm of the flesh. The result is a window into the non-essentialist analytical mode for thinking together various forms of African diasporic musical expression that I call ontological resonance. From this perspective, as violence continues to inexorably structure the experience of Blackness, the aesthetics of existence emerge in the ways that we find freedom within such experiences: by breathing, dancing, and grooving in the diaspora.

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CHAPTER FOUR

From Hipness to HiiiPoWeR: The Aesthetics of Existence in the African Diaspora

In 2018, having long established his position at the forefront of hip-hop culture, Kendrick

Lamar became the first popular music artist to win the Pulitzer Prize for music. From amongst

Kendrick’s many strengths, numerous commentators have attributed his success and social import to the depth and range of his vocal craft (see Carreiro 2017; Clark 2017; Lappas 2018). A 2017 video by Genius, titled “Tracking the Many Voices of Kendrick Lamar,” captures this trend. The narrator opens the video with the assertion that “Kendrick Lamar is one of the greatest rappers of this generation. From his vivid lyrics to his dexterous flows, there’s a lot of reasons why Kendrick is considered one of the best. But one standout reason is the way he uses his voice.” An interpolated clip from another video — of a 2016 conversation between Kendrick and legendary hip-hop producer Rick Rubin, produced by GQ — immediately follows, as Kendrick affirms that, “I’ve always been heavy on vocal tone and the way you manipulate your voice, because different tones for me just gives off different expressions” (Genius 2017; see Editors of GQ Style 2016).

The remainder of the Genius video goes on to track Kendrick’s vocal diversity through his

“High-Pitched” or ScHoolboy Q-dubbed “Lord of the Rings” voice, as heard on “Institutionalized”

(2015); his “Go Time,” “Rough-Edged,” or “Gemini” voice from songs like “Backseat Freestyle”

(2012); his panic-driven “Delirium” voice, featured on “u” (2015); his pitched-down “Authority” voice from the intro and spoken break to “Fuck Your Ethnicity” (2011) and “King Kunta” (2015) respectively; his sexually-charged “Playeristic” voice from “For Free? (Interlude)” (2015); his desensitized “Numb” voice as heard on “PRIDE” (2017); and the “Rage” voice from his 2016 BET performance (see Genius 2017). As the narrator suggests, the list could easily go on. Bringing together conflicting personas, genres, and soundworlds, Kendrick makes blurry the rigid lines within

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which society continues to expect Black masculinity to fall. What remains clear, though, is that, for both Kendrick and his listeners, the rapper’s trademark multi-vocality lies at the core of his distinctive musical aesthetic.

In this chapter, I explore the cultural, historical, and above all racial significances of

Kendrick’s hip-hop vocality in order to reveal the role of his many voices in reclaiming hipness as an aesthetic of existence in the African diaspora. In Chapter One, I introduced Ab-Soul, the member of

Black Hippy with the closest ties to jazz/bohemian rap, who nonetheless updates the older genre’s bourgeois hip aesthetic with his refusal to construct his own (neo-)bohemian sensibility in opposition to gangsta rap. Meanwhile, Chapters Two and Three studied Jay Rock and ScHoolboy Q, the collective’s resident gangsta rappers, who proudly own this status while insisting upon its reconcilability with hipness, in the face of jazz/bohemian rap’s powerful claims to the contrary.

With this chapter’s focus on Kendrick Lamar, we arrive at the member of the collective who appears to occupy both sides of this divide at once, possessing clear ties to jazz/bohemian rap, while also finding himself at home in the gangsta tradition. As such, while Ab-Soul returns here as an important counterpart to exploring Kendrick’s reconfiguration of hipness as an African diasporic aesthetic of existence, some revealing differences emerge between their respective approaches to their own positions within this hip-hop polarity.

Most notably, as well as being the most well-known and successful member of Black Hippy

(and arguably contemporary hip-hop), Kendrick is also the member who most clearly and self- consciously performs the deconstructive aesthetic that makes neo-bohemian hip-hop such a compelling genre for reimagining the terms of Black life in the African diaspora. This performative work plays out on numerous levels, from the beats Kendrick raps over and the flow styles he uses to the ethics and politics that he articulates in his music. In the process, he offers up new answers to old questions about the (im)possibilities of Black life. At their richest, these means and ends of

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Kendrick’s radical hip aesthetic reach a meeting point in his striking vocality and the metaphysics that it models of the Black voice, and of Blackness itself. Understanding the significance of this rich point of convergence, however, requires situating it within the broader set of questions about hipness, hybridity, and African diasporic existence that drive the dissertation.

I begin the chapter by introducing Kendrick’s distinctive place within the cultural binary at the center of this dissertation between conscious (or jazz/bohemian) rap and gangsta rap, as well as the competing clams to racial authenticity (and Black humanity) that this binary helps to sustain.

Contrary to the wide body of cultural commentary that has positioned Kendrick firmly in relation to the former pole, as a conscious rapper, I argue that he in fact draws on lineages in both jazz/bohemian and gangsta rap, setting the two genres in dialogue and allowing them to infect and undo each other.

In part two, I build directly on my exploration of Kendrick’s deconstructive work here to reveal how it in turn gives rise to the other, more generative side of Black Hippy’s radical hip aesthetic. Namely, I theorize the trademark multivocality through which Kendrick so compellingly deconstructs the conscious/gangsta divide as in turn signaling an ontology of Blackness predicated on the exhaustion of Black social death. The result is what I call Kendrick’s “ontologically Black voice,” an exemplary tool for reconceptualizing the terms of Black life in an anti-Black world.

Finally, in part three, I extend my discussion of the ontologically Black voice to provide a broader consideration of the routes that it provides to a life lived through the exhaustion of social death. Focusing here on the multilayered, abject, vocally produced figure that Black Hippy members call the “Black Lip Bastard,” I explore how the collective reimagines the terms of Black life as taking place through the radical affirmation of (as opposed to stylized resistance to) the pathological quality of Blackness. In turn, by resituating this figure — and the aesthetic practice of self-abjectification that it signifies — within the broader flows of the African diaspora, I present Black Hippy’s radical

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affirmation of Blackness as fundamental to neo-bohemian hip-hop’s reclamation of hipness as an

African diasporic aesthetic of existence.

“I Know Street Shit, I Know Shit That’s Conscious, I Know Everything”: Kendrick Lamar’s

Hybridizing Black Metaphysics

When Kendrick Lamar’s highly anticipated fourth studio album, DAMN., dropped in the spring of 2017, fans showed particular interest in an unlikely encounter that he describes on the record’s closer, “DUCKWORTH.” As the song slowly picks up speed, Kendrick introduces us to

Anthony, another good kid stuck in a mad city (in this case Watts, California) who slipped into a life of street crime and one day robbed a Kentucky Fried Chicken spot located opposite the Nickerson

Gardens public housing project where he grew up.1 Ducky, the worker on shift at the time of the robbery, knew that Anthony had robbed the same branch previously, shooting a customer in the process. Understandably cautious, and so having long plied Anthony and his gang with free chicken to win their favor, Ducky made it through the robbery unscathed.

The twist that so readily captured the attention of Kendrick’s listeners comes with

Kendrick’s revelation of Ducky to be his father, and Anthony to be the very same Anthony “Top

Dawg” Tiffith — future CEO of Kendrick’s home record label, Top Dawg Entertainment — who we met in Chapter One. In the song’s closing thought, Kendrick brings into vivid relief the fatefulness of this meeting as it tipped the scales of his existence away from an almost disastrous upbringing and toward an explosively successful musical career:

“(Whoever) thought the greatest rapper would be from coincidence? Because if Anthony killed Ducky, Top Dawg could be servin’ life, while I grow Up without a father and die in a gunfi–”

1 A generation later, Kendrick’s Black Hippy affiliate Jay Rock would grow up in this same housing project.

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And yet, “DUCKWORTH.” has anything but a fairytale ending. Kendrick in fact never gets to finish his closing reflection, as the word “gunfight” is suddenly cut off by, ironically, the sound of a gunshot. What comes next is a sonic representation of the entire album being rapidly rewound, strategically slowed down and played forward again at points to bring out musical highlights, until we arrive back at DAMN.’s opener, “BLOOD.” At this point, Kendrick invites the listener to recognize the gunshot sound from the end of “DUCKWORTH.” as the same one heard at the end of “BLOOD.,” where he has already spun a fable of himself being shot, after all, by a blind woman in the street while trying to help her.2 Much has been made of the overt, theological dimensions of the overarching duality that “DUCKWORTH.,” and DAMN. as a whole, stage between life and death (see Linder 2017; Driscoll, Pinn, and Miller, eds. 2020).3 In this section, I turn toward the cultural and metaphysical implications of Kendrick’s engagement with this and other dualities for understanding both hip-hop culture and the terms of Black life in the African diaspora.

I begin by exploring Kendrick’s distinctive position within hip-hop culture, and particularly the binary between conscious and gangsta rap at the core of my study of neo-bohemian hip-hop.

Dominant depictions, within hip-hop commentary, of Kendrick as an archetypal conscious rapper have served variously as a mode of elevating his music (for those with enduring allegiances to the conscious tradition) or as a justification for critiquing his complicity in neoliberal and post-race ideologies that do harm to Black communities. Challenging both of these tendencies, I show how such narratives chafe against Kendrick’s biographical connection to the Los Angeles neighborhood of Compton, as well as competing discourses that tie him equally to the gangsta rap tradition. Next, building upon this claim, I argue that Kendrick is in fact better understood as occupying a

2 A striking parallel exists here with the music video to ScHoolboy Q’s “JoHn Muir” (2016), where a similar narrative arc shows the protagonists to have always been “dead men dancing” (see Chapter Three). 3 From the edited collection by Driscoll, Pinn, and Miller, all of the chapters in Part IV deal with the theological dimensions of DAMN. The book’s other sections explore themes of religiosity in each of Kendrick’s studio albums.

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deformative, Afro-modernist position within hip-hop culture, in between conscious and gangsta rap.

The hybridizing form of Black masculinity that Kendrick performs, in between conscious rap’s and gangsta rap’s competing claims to humanity, provides a final window into Black Hippy’s reclamation of the Afro-modernist origins of hipness. But it also prepares my pursuant exploration of the other side of this reclamation, wherein hipness emerges as an aesthetic of existence in the African diaspora.

Retracing Kendrick Lamar’s “Conscious Rapper Ancestry”

Born in 1987, Kendrick Lamar Duckworth was raised ten minutes down the road from the

Watts neighborhood where “DUCKWORTH.” unfolds, in Compton, California. A historically underserved, predominantly Black and Hispanic neighborhood, it was right around the time of

Kendrick’s birth that Compton became the veritable home of gangsta rap. And yet, where his local contemporaries, from The Game to YG, have more obviously taken up their hometown’s mantle,

Kendrick’s own connection to this seemingly obvious musical heritage is far from straightforward.

As is only typified on songs like “DUCKWORTH.,” Kendrick’s eerily contemplative approach to matters of life and death more readily reflects his own, iconic self-positioning as, like Top Dawg before him, a “good kid” in a “mad city.”4 And, as “DUCKWORTH.” captures so well, this persona is itself deeply rooted in complexly unfolding lines of familial and cultural lineage.5

Indeed, written commentary on Kendrick has widely positioned him as an archetypal conscious rapper, estranged from the gangsta rap environment into which he was born. In his article on “The Political Theory of Kendrick Lamar,” political scientist Marc Lynch (2015) connects the

4 James B. Haile, III (2018) theorizes Kendrick’s 2012 album, good kid, m.A.A.d city, as representative of the latter’s “autoethnographic method” (see also Peach 2020). By contrast, YG sets himself up the “bad kid” to Kendrick’s “good” (Markman 2013). 5 Indeed, for Dominik Hammer (2020), DAMN. as a whole is a fundamentally “genealogical” project, conceived on not only biological, but also sociopolitical, historical, and aesthetic terms.

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“politically charged lyrics and jazzy, funky beats” of 2015’s To Pimp a Butterfly to “the great albums of an earlier era of politically committed and musically diverse hip-hop,” listing Tupac, Nas, Public

Enemy, and The Roots as exemplars. Likewise, writer Mike “DJ” Pizzo (2015) credits Kendrick

(alongside J. Cole) with “reboot[ing] conscious rap.” And, even while acknowledging the complexities and contradictions inherent to Lamar’s hip-hop positionality, historian Juan M. Floyd-

Thomas similarly describes how “the most unwavering facet of Kendrick Lamar’s work has been his incisive commentary and musings on the cumulative impact that immoral and illicit acts have had on his generation,” while again centering the influence of Tupac here (Floyd-Thomas 2020, 71, 84–87).6

As musicologist Justin Burton observes, a core unifying factor of these narratives comprises their understanding of Kendrick in relation to a “conscious rapper ancestry” that, through the rhetoric of “temporal parallelism,” confers excellence upon Kendrick’s music in the present (Burton

2017, 51). In contrast to the unified discourse that he traces here, however, Burton’s own view of this genealogy is, as I describe in Chapter One, far from celebratory. For Burton, the conscious — or, more specifically, “argumentative realist” — rappers that these commentators connect to

Kendrick are unified in the way that they perform an insider understanding of the difficulties of street life while situating themselves as a model minority capable of rising above these difficulties and becoming reformable to mainstream society. By recommending “individual solutions to institutionalized problems,” they thus participate in the bourgeois history of uplift ideology and its neoliberal reverberations in the present (Burton 2017, 58–62).

And Kendrick would indeed seem to have at times been guilty of participating in this self- serving tradition. Consider, for instance, “Momma,” from his widely lauded (as conscious) rap album, To Pimp A Butterfly (2015), where he raps:

“(I know) everything, I know everything, know myself, I know

6 For more on Kendrick as conscious rapper or, in Burton’s words, “the paragon of hip hop politics” (Burton 2017, 47, 49), see Hopper (2012); Rys (2015); Blackburn (2016); Petridis (2016); Noire (2018).

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Morality, spirituality, good and bad health, I know Fatality might haunt ya, I know everything, I know Compton, I know street shit, I know shit that’s conscious, I know Everything […]”

Closely replicating the argumentative realist style that Burton critiques, Kendrick here seemingly attempts to bolster and validate his own claims to personal elevation (morality, spirituality, shit that’s conscious, and above all — in that holiest of hip-hop turns of phrase — “know[ledge of] (my)self”) by affirming his own understanding of the street — an understanding that implicitly transcends that of the gangstas it leaves behind.

In fact, Kendrick’s connection to conscious rap also goes beyond the tradition of argumentative realism, extending to the still more rarefied tradition of jazz/bohemian rap. As I argue in Chapter One, via Burton, rappers in this tradition — most notably members of the Native

Tongues collective, such as De La Soul and a Tribe Called Quest — look beyond the Black parallel public of gangsta rap and argumentative realist rap, instead using their alternative, high art aesthetic to lay claim to an entirely separate source of (hip) authenticity that turns primarily on a politics of post-racialism. Recall Kendrick’s damning pronouncement on 2017’s “YAH.”: “I’m an Israelite, don’t call me Black no more, that/ word is only a color; it ain’t facts no more.” For rappers in this tradition, the claim to social reformability emerges through their alternative, high art musical aesthetic, through which they oppose themselves to the pathological Blackness represented by mainstream and commercial hip-hop styles.

Consider, for instance, Kendrick’s 2017 single, “The Heart Part 4.” Rapping over jazzy drums and harmonies that would be well at home on a Native Tongue’s track, Kendrick presents himself as an interplanetary “hip-hop savior” — a claim historically rooted in conscious rap’s critique of gangsta rap’s degenerate aesthetic:

“Thirty millions later my future favors the legendary Status of a hip-hop rhyme savior, travel ‘round the Atlas in this spaceship, candy-coated, my day shift’s

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Been devoted to fuckin’ up bundles of paper.”

Of course, there is a contradiction built into this self-image from the outset — but it’s a contradiction that is entirely in keeping with jazz/bohemian rap’s self-serving, post-racial politics. By stressing his role in restoring the lyrical craft that commercial rappers have ostensibly stolen from hip-hop, while nonetheless celebrating his own accumulation of extreme wealth, Kendrick evokes what Richard Shusterman describes as the postmodern paradox of conscious rappers who “at once denigrate commercialism […] but nonetheless glorify their own commercial success, often even regarding it as indicative of their artistic power” (Shusterman 1991, 623). Embracing this history of self-righteous self-uplift, Kendrick models a form of Blackness that conscious rappers have long treated as eminently reformable to mainstream conceptions of the Human, even while reproducing the contradictions entailed in doing so.

From argumentative realism to jazz/bohemianism, then, Kendrick appears to be deeply connected to the conscious rap tradition and its oppositional claims to hip-hop authenticity. By extension, he appears just as deeply entangled in the oppositional and exclusionary claims to Black humanity that such authenticity politics help to structure. And yet, despite the urgency with which

Burton critiques the post-racial politics at the core of the conscious tradition, he nonetheless stresses the need to limit critiques of Kendrick to his reception and lyrics. Moreover, he invites the possibility that a deep “dive into Kendrick’s sound [… would yield] a fuller account of what work his music performs beyond the mainstream critique” (Burton 2017, 49).

Picking up on this invitation in Chapter One, I explored precisely how engaging more closely with the music and lyrics of both Kendrick and Ab-Soul (the other member of Black Hippy most readily tied to a conscious rapper ancestry) reveals the incompleteness of any view aligning them neatly with the conscious, or jazz/bohemian, rap tradition. Indeed, growing up in Compton, embedded in the structures of street life, Kendrick (unlike Soul) has always had access to the

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mainstream thug authenticity that emerged during the golden age of gangsta rap, begging the question of why he would perform an affinity with jazz/bohemian rap at all. Moreover, contrary to ideas about Kendrick’s “conscious rapper ancestry,” other commentators have instead tied him more closely to a West Coast gangsta rap ancestry, along with its own “storied lineage of influential rappers” (Bungert 2019; see also Baker 2018, 242–245).

As I explore in the next section, this overlapping lineage poses a problem for claims about

Kendrick as conscious rapper. Indeed, there’s arguably not much legibly “hip” about Kendrick’s music; where the radicality of Soul’s otherwise legible hipness turns on his deformation of the aesthetics of jazz/bohemian rap to make room for gangsta rappers, Kendrick might more accurately be said to perform these two lineages at once. At the same time, even while Kendrick does rap dual lineages in both jazz/bohemian and gangsta rap, he never simply combines the two. Rather, he sets these aesthetic traditions and their competing claims to racial authenticity (and Black humanity) in dialogue, allowing them to infect and undo one another in an Afro-modernist mode. In this way, he reveals the contradictions and complexities that make up each tradition, while imagining radical futures for Black existence in the spaces in between.

Sounding Black Masculinity In Between

Let’s return to “The Heart Part 4,” where Kendrick performs his contradictory ability to make bundles of cash while saving hip-hop from the cultural degeneracy of commercial rappers. As described, this performed contradiction is entirely in keeping with the aesthetics and ethics of jazz/bohemian rap. As the first verse develops, however, Kendrick digs further into this conflicted message, increasingly infecting and deforming his opening conscious persona with the trappings of a far less palatable form of Blackness:

“When I strategize my kid’s future, I ain’t sancti- -fied enough to say that I won’t shoot ya, I done vanda-

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-lized the industry full circuit, the earthiest slash Thirstiest nigga you know.”

By stressing how his hip-hop sanctification never rules out gun violence, and his earthy spirituality never quenches his thirst for commercial success, Kendrick revels in the tension that his embrace of hood imagery creates with his reception as a conscious rapper. Refusing to be pinned down on singular terms, Kendrick offers a far more fluid conception of what it means to make socially conscious rap.

Another striking example of this democratizing work occurs on Kendrick’s anthemic single

“DNA.” (2017), where he directly invokes the stylized knowledge claims from “Momma,” and rearticulates them into an affirmation of gangsta rap’s worldly excesses:

“(See, my) pedigree most definitely don’t Tolerate the front, shit I’ve Been through prolly offend you, this is Paula’s oldest son, I know Murder, conviction, burners, boosters, Burglars, ballers dead, redemption, Scholars, fathers dead with kids and I wish I was fed forgiveness […]”

Indeed, standing in stark contrast to the extended harmonies and jazz instrumentation on

“Momma,” the sound world of “DNA.” is unapologetically commercial, drawing on the rattling hi- hats, eerie synths, and subsonic bass lines of trap. In this sonic context, we hear Kendrick’s competing knowledge claims not as those of an informed outsider who has uplifted himself from a life of crime, but rather as the expressions of a contradictory figure situated firmly within the world of the gangsta. In other words, in structuring their own authenticity claims in opposition to gangsta rap, jazz/bohemian rappers present themselves as possessing a different, deeper understanding of the real intricacies of the street as a space for “street knowledge,” consciousness, and organic intellectualism. By contrast, when Kendrick says that he knows “everything,” he lays claim to this same form of consciousness while simultaneously aligning himself with gangsta rap on its own

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terms. From this perspective, if Kendrick occupies a place within conscious rap’s family tree, then it is at best an ill-fitting one, marked by ambivalence and a conflicting allegiance to gangsta rap.

At times, Kendrick’s ambivalence actually tips the scales in favor of gangsta rap, even while preventing him from ever landing firmly within this tradition. On “The Art of Peer Pressure”

(2012), for instance, he recounts a “true motherfucking story” that sees him rolling around with a gang, committing a robbery, and evading police capture. But he does so from a uniquely dualistic perspective, reflecting on his distance and alienation from the action in which he is, nonetheless, a willing participant. Rapping over classic G-funk synths, offset by subtle jazz/bohemian-style horn interjections and extended piano harmonies, the song offers a stark portrait of Kendrick’s split hip- hop loyalties:

“Smokin’ on the finest dope, ay-ay-ay- -ah, drinkin’ ‘til I can’t no mo’, ay-ay-ay- -ah, really I’m a sober soul, but I’m with the homies right now.”

Responding to such tendencies in Kendrick’s music to — in an inversion of the focus through which I theorize neo-bohemian hip-hop — return to and deform the stylistic trappings of gangsta rap,

Soren Baker suggests that, instead of Tupac or Nas, Kendrick might best be compared with

N.W.A’s Ice Cube as, in the words of rapper and television host Dee Barnes, the contemporary

“conscious of Compton, of gangster rap” (Baker 2018, 244). From this perspective, someone like

Barnes or Baker might argue that Kendrick is better understood as a “neo-” or, in Floyd-Thomas’s

(2020) coinage, “post-gangsta” rapper.

Whichever way you cut it, Kendrick’s music dramatically refuses the terms of hip-hop’s conscious/gangsta divide; rather than choose sides, Kendrick opts to situate himself somewhere in between the two. Indeed, as James Bungert (2019) puts it, “generally speaking, Lamar’s work resists categorization into any one hip hop genre (e.g., gangsta, conscious, trap, etc.).” Or, as Nima Etminan states in a 2011 interview with Kendrick for Dubcnn:

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“What I think is interesting about Top Dawg is that y’all blur the line between street and gangsta and the whole other side of it […] so you can’t really categorize it, so I think that’s also something that puts y’all over the top as far as being accessible to more people” (Etminan 2011, [5:15–5:45]).

Likewise, I argue that Kendrick’s music is better understood as radically blurring the line between conscious and gangsta rap, and by extension between the broader ideas about racial authenticity (and humanity), in which these categories are entangled. As Margarita Simon Guillory argues, in her revealingly titled chapter, “Can I Be Both?: Blackness and the Negotiation of Binary Categories in

Kendrick Lamar’s Section.80,” “for Lamar, […] acknowledging that these contradictions cannot be separated and do indeed coexist in […] a black body is how he conceptualizes blackness” (Guillory

2020, 29). In other words, by way of Stuart Hall, Kendrick raps “a mode of blackness that is not

‘singular but multiply constructed across different, often intersecting and antagonistic discourses, practices, and positions’” (Guillory 2020, 27; see Hall 1996a, 4).

In this way, Kendrick works toward his own reclamation of hipness as a hybridizing, Afro- modernist aesthetic between the alternative and mainstream, the high art and the commercial, the conscious and the gangsta. At the same time, however, the multiply deconstructive quality of

Kendrick’s music reflects only one side of neo-bohemian hip-hop’s radical hip aesthetic. Through a variety of hip musical practices, these artists also reimagine the terms of Black life as emerging in excess of these exploded categories. In the next section, I present just one of these practices: what has been dubbed “the many voices of Kendrick Lamar.”

Sonic Ontologies and the Many Voices of Kendrick Lamar

Having unpacked the dual dynamics of return and deformation through which Kendrick

Lamar positions his music squarely in between the opposed traditions of conscious and gangsta rap,

I return in this section to what is arguably the most recognizable, distinctive, and widely-remarked feature of Kendrick’s hybridizing aesthetic, with which I opened this chapter: his wide-ranging

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arsenal of performing voices. In doing so, however, I turn my focus toward the deeper significance of these voices for transitioning out of the deconstructive cultural space that they produce and into a more affirmative, fluid, and capacious model of Black life.

In working toward the metaphysical implications of these many voices, I begin by exploring the continuities between Kendrick’s deconstruction of hip-hop’s aesthetic and racial binaries, as described above, and music studies’ recent turn toward perception-based frameworks for racialized sound. I focus, here, on recent arguments in sound studies about the impossibility of the Black voice. In the process, I argue that the rejection of racial essentialism at the core of these overlapping musical projects not only constitutes an insufficient critique of global anti-Blackness, but also risks becoming a violent form of erasure in and of itself. In turn, I stress the need to move beyond these overlapping, aesthetic and discursive forms of deconstruction, and instead develop more active accounts of how Black artists vocally sound their ways into being in the face of inexorable structures of racial violence.

Next, in modeling such an account, I return to Kendrick’s single, “The Heart Part 4,” to explore his distinctive use of the voice in developing new images of Blackness. Tracing how

Kendrick uses his voice to bypass existing hip-hop claims to liberal humanism, I argue that not only does the Black voice exist, but that recognition of its presence is crucial to developing new, rigorous models of Black life in the contemporary United States.

From Sonic Blackness to Sonic Ontologies

In the challenge that it poses to essentialist and totalizing conceptions of Blackness and

Black music, Kendrick Lamar’s hip aesthetic reflects increasingly mainstream, liberal understandings of race as a cultural construction. More pertinently, this aesthetic aligns closely with recent, interdisciplinary scholarship that has sought to reorient essentialist understandings of music, sound,

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and performance as intrinsically raced, toward a new focus on the processes of listening and perception through which we come to hear music and sound as tied to specifically racialized bodies

(Eidsheim 2011; Ochoa Gautier 2014; Kheshti 2015; Stoever 2016). Responding to the same issues as Kendrick, these scholars extend old critiques of racial essentialism to other, poorly understood — and thus easily reified — concepts, such as the racialized voice.

Of particular relevance to this chapter, and the case study of radical hipness that it presents, is musicologist Nina Eidsheim’s work on timbre and vocality in African American music. Rejecting altogether the possibility of an essential Black voice, Eidsheim inverts conventional models of audition to argue that voice’s source is not the singer, but the listener. As such, there is no such thing as an essential Black voice (Eidsheim 2019, 9–14, 22–23). Where Eidsheim does allow for conditional forms of racialized vocal production, or slippages between the perceived and the material, she argues that these take place primarily in terms of “fulfilling [listener] expectations”

(2019, 13–14); of enculturation, conditioning, and entrainment (2019, 11, 29, 30–34); and even of strategic essentialism (2019, 32). Likewise, Alyssa Woods (2009) and Lauren Kajikawa (2015) place the reinforcement of cultural codes and listener expectations at the core of their own theories of the ways that hip-hop voices and beats can be said to “sound” racial identity.

Such perception-focused studies offer important interventions into essentialist myths about race and racialized sound. However, as I will show, the conceptual underpinnings of such arguments risk enacting their own forms of structural racial violence while, as Burton has argued, conjuring post-racial images of the future (Burton 2017, 71–73). Indeed if, for Eidsheim, the illusion of race persists only insofar as people continue to act it out sensorially, through hearing (2019, 63), then it follows that the problem of the color line is surmountable through a critique of the listener and the

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deconstruction of listening, through which processes of racialization come undone (2019, 89–90).

Once we cease to hear Blackness, it ceases to exist.7

But others would argue that Blackness has long existed prior to and in excess of ongoing acts of listening. Indeed, as I have returned to throughout this project, Black studies scholars theorize modern Western society after the transatlantic slave trade as predicated upon an anti-Black racial structure in which the White, Human subject gains its coherence through the oppositional dehumanization and objectification of Blackness (see Hartman 1997; Wilderson 2010; Sexton 2011;

Anonymous 2017). The result of this structure is an ontology of Blackness defined by its structural exclusion from civil society, or social death (see Introduction). And it is exactly this metaphysical byproduct that troubles understandings of racialization as something that can be undone through a mere perceptual shift.

In this sense, frameworks for understanding Black music that center the role of perception, arguably take a phenomenological approach to an ontological issue. And this oversight extends to sound studies more broadly. As Marcus Boon (2013) puts it, “an emphasis on the phenomenological rendering of the moment or event of sonic relationship forecloses a broader investigation of sonic ontology, because it ‘brackets’ […] considerations beyond that of the subject-object relationship. In both cases, the sonic thing in itself […] risks being lost.” By extension, I argue that an emphasis on phenomenological renderings of racialized sound pose the same risk to the Black voice. What’s more, even while such renderings seek to negate the possibility of a stable Black orality, they turn quietly on the assumption and naturalization of a stable White aurality. But, as Marie Thompson shows, far from being a “neutral process of mediation […], perception is a shared, social and co-constitutive process that shapes and is shaped by knower and known, perceiver and perceived” (Thompson

7 In Eidsheim’s view, “[…] the country as a whole is still acutely aware of race, acting it out sensorially […] and, more specifically, still hearing it […] The cure […] is deconstructing such listening” (Eidsheim 2019, 63, 89–90; see also Eidsheim 2011, 663–664).

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2017, 273). A case in point, I argue that claims about the impossibility of the Black voice obscure how White aurality qua White Humanity in fact structures itself in opposition to Blackness.

Phenomenological frameworks for racialized sound, then, constitute a form of historical sleight of hand through which anti-Black violence comes to fall on deaf ears.8

It is telling that Burton offers his own solution to this deafness issue in his study of trap music — that Southern hip-hop export that has gone global in recent years while snatching the commercial throne out from underneath gangsta rap. Describing the scary, alien sounds of trap’s booming bass lines and rattling hi-hats, Burton argues that trap does indeed “[pick] up recognizable and negatively stereotyped markers of hip hop blackness” (2017, 94). But, by exaggerating and leaning into these markers, it also crucially vibrates in excess of them, opening up new ways of being

Black beyond the realms of liberal humanism (2017, 94–100). In other words, trap takes perceptions of sonic Blackness and uses them as tools for resounding race on its own terms, bringing us closer to rediscovering Boon’s “the sonic thing itself.” And yet, this process of reorientation cannot account for something that necessarily exists prior to White listening, such as the Black voice.

Building on this work, then, I argue that grasping the metaphysical significance of Kendrick’s hip vocality requires altogether departing from ideas about perception, and instead asking what it would mean to imagine a hip-hop voice that is always already ontologically Black. In doing so, I turn back to Kendrick’s music, focusing on two, overlapping elements of his disruptive, Afro-modernist aesthetic: first, his multiplicity of performing voices, and, second, the way that he uses these voices to work past his deconstruction of hip-hop’s aesthetic divides. Examining how Kendrick thus

8 Brian Kane (2015) has in turn offered his own counter-critique of the ontological turn in sound studies. However, Kane’s critique depends upon the very ideas about the stability of White listening (what he calls “auditory culture”) that I, following Thompson, reject. In fact, it should be noted that Thompson is, like Kane, concerned with critiquing the ontological turn in sound studies (rather than, like me, the phenomenological one). But, more specifically, she levels her critique at the ontology of perception (vis-à-vis White aurality), rather than the ontology of sound per se — thus bringing Kane’s own critique to its limits. As such, it seems fair to extend Thompson’s critique to phenomenology itself; ultimately, the ontology that Thompson critiques is itself the prerequisite for this phenomenology.

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sounds his way into a radical mode of Black being, I move past the phenomenological bent of recent sound studies. Instead, I explore the conceptual significance of “sonic ontology” for developing new insights into music, Blackness, and the voice.

Kendrick Lamar and the Ontologically Black Voice

In what follows, I provide an extended analysis of Kendrick Lamar’s 2017 single “The Heart

Part 4” as a particularly revealing meeting point of radical Black hipness and the ontologically Black voice. As described, in this song, Kendrick performatively deconstructs the competing hip-hop responses to Western capitalism characteristic of conscious and gangsta rap. By now exploring the function of his voice in moving past this hybridizing work, I uncover a hip musical practice through which Kendrick imagines new forms of Black life. Specifically, I argue that, by letting his voice gradually transform over the song’s course, Kendrick dramatizes his move between and through these competing hip-hop positionalities and their equally impossible claims to Western liberal humanism. The result is a model of Black life conceived on the distinctly illegible terms of the ontologically Black voice. Recognizing this voice requires looking beyond the normative perception and reproduction of Blackness in and through vocal timbre. As I will show, the Black voice emerges instead as a distinctive restlessness and existential straining, which Kendrick enacts through not only variations in timbre, but also through his shifting rapped delivery style and vocal interaction with the beat. In grasping this vocal model of Black life, I work through “The Heart Part 4” in stages, starting with verse one and the opening hook.

As described, Kendrick opens the song with the sort of self-elevating sentiment that is typical of jazz/bohemian hip-hop, delivered over a fittingly jazz-tinged instrumental beat:

“Thirty millions later my future favors the legendary Status of a hip-hop rhyme savior, travel ‘round the Atlas in this spaceship, candy-coated, my day shift’s Been devoted to fuckin’ up bundles of paper.”

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Revisiting this musical moment with Kendrick’s voice in mind, however, it becomes noticeable that he also delivers these opening lines with the serene and stoic vocal affect typical of a jazz/bohemian rapper. By doing so, he sets the stage for the Afro-modernist performance to come, adding another layer to the pronounced ethical tension that unfolds, as his soft-spoken vocalizations begin to clash with the encroaching imagery of violence and excess:

“When I strategize my kid’s future, I ain’t sancti- -fied enough to say that I won’t shoot ya, I done vanda- -lized the industry full circuit, the earthiest slash Thirstiest nigga you know […]”

It is in this way that Kendrick begins to vocally gesture toward the instability of jazz/bohemian rap’s oppositional claims to hip-hop and humanistic purity.

With the arrival of verse two, this staged ethical decline takes on another, explicitly vocalized dimension. Jolting the listener out of the hook, Kendrick suddenly adopts a harder, more confrontational vocal timbre, painting a sonic portrait of Blackness that aligns more closely with gangsta rap. This affective disturbance is further dramatized by the song’s instrumental beat, which suddenly cuts out as though personally affronted. When it kicks back in, it has abandoned its opening jazz codes entirely, in favor of a booming bass line and wailing guitar riff reminiscent of the

G-funk beats of a bygone gangsta rap era:

“[Beat cuts out] ([…] my fans can’t wait for me to) [Beat cuts back in] Son ya punk ass and crush your whole lil’ shit, I’ll Big Pun ya punk ass, you a scared lil’ bitch Tip-toein’ around my name, nigga, you’re lame, and when I Get at you, homie, don’t you tell me you was just playin’.”

Over these first two sections, then, Kendrick does away with the supposedly irreconcilable tension between conscious and gangsta rap. In his mouth, the two styles intersect, engaging Western capitalism on similarly legible terms. Now, Kendrick is ready to take us to the realm of the unfamiliar. Indeed, no sooner has the listener adjusted to Kendrick’s first unexpected transition than the beat suddenly cuts out again:

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“Tip-toein’ around my name, nigga, you’re lame, and when I Get at you, homie, don’t you tell me you was just playin’ (‘Oh, I was just Playin’, K-Dot, c’mon, you know a nigga rock with you, bro.’)” [Beat cuts out]

Ringing out through the silence, Kendrick takes his quickly transforming voice to a new place altogether, adopting what commentators dub his “rage” or “Gemini” voice (Carreiro 2017; Genius

2017). Here, the previous remnants of sing-songy softness succumb entirely to a cold crispness.

And, when the beat kicks back in, it once again dramatizes this shift, stripping itself down to a rumbling bass line that mirrors Kendrick’s dark vocal energy. No longer categorizable as conscious or gangsta, Kendrick descends past the realm of legible hip-hop humanity. As he puts, “what you’re hearing now is a paranormal vibe”:

“(Shut the) fuck up, you sound like the last nigga I know [Beat cuts back in] Might end up like the last nigga I know Oh, you don’t wanna clash, nigga, I know I put my foot on the gas, head on the floor, hoppin’ Out before the vehicle crash, I’m on a roll, yellin’ One, two, three, four, five, I am The greatest rapper alive So damn great, motherfucker, I’ve died What you hearin’ now is a paranormal vibe.”

In fact, as the verse continues and echoing chimes and rattling hi-hats enter the mix, what actually confronts the listener is the unmistakable sound of trap. “Vibrating,” as Burton tells us,

“outside the proper channels of political discourse,” trap provides a fitting sonic backdrop for

Kendrick’s completion of his journey beyond legible hip-hop claims to humanity. Tellingly, this insurgent moment of illegible Blackness reaches a climax in Kendrick’s repetition of the song’s opening lines:

“[…] G Malone, big bro, kudos to him, I was Two Os from a M, tryna be big as Em Thirty millions later my future favors the legendary Status of a hip-hop rhyme savior.”

Hearing the same, capitalistic sentiment that opened the song articulated in a completely new sonic context clarifies the salience of Kendrick’s deconstructive vocality. The hip-hop claims to liberal

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humanism heard in conscious and gangsta rap, and the illegibility of Kendrick’s paranormal

Blackness, emerge as two sides of the same despised coin.

From this perspective, we gain yet another layer of insight into songs like “DNA.,” where

Kendrick’s Afro-modernist blurring of the line between conscious and gangsta rap again occurs over a trap beat (see above). Furthering this deconstructive work, “The Heart Part 4” moves past such aesthetic binaries altogether. By vocally dramatizing his personal degeneration beyond the realm of both conscious and gangsta rap, Kendrick makes manifest the shaky grounds on which any hip-hop claim to humanity is made in the context of anti-Blackness. In turn, he locates a more vital form of

Black liveliness beyond appeals to Western humanism. Consenting to look outside of civil society for available ways of being, Kendrick affirms the irreducibility of Black social death, while vocally performing the insurgent potential of Blackness to find life in spite of this.

Like Jay Rock and ScHoolboy Q before him, Kendrick’s counter-intuitive search for life here evokes Fred Moten’s theory of “fugitivity” as “a movement of […] stolen life,” or a mode of living defined by the exhaustion of Black life’s impossibility (Moten 2008, 179; 2013, 738). Indeed,

Kendrick’s vocal descent through multiple known forms of Blackness signifies a sonic ontology in which Blackness emerges as the exhaustive pursuit of life in a world predicated on the conditions of

Black social death.9 Or, if these conditions of non-being trouble appeals to ontology altogether, then

Kendrick’s voices might better be said to signify, paraphrasing Moten, a “sonic paraontology”. As

Thompson puts it: “Blackness is paraontological in that lived experiences of blackness both enact and escape the assignment of blackness to social death and non-being. This straining of blackness against itself disrupts and resists the ontological: it is; it is escaped and it is what escapes”

(Thompson 2017, 268).

9 For a similar reading of fugitivity in Kendrick’s musical aesthetic, see Winters (2020, 212–227).

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Finally, then, it is precisely in Kendrick’s performances of existential straining that I locate the Black voice. This is a voice constituted through what Adrienne Brown calls hip-hop’s

“ambient scenes of belonging, enduring, or expiring,” by which she means the underseen, undertheorized and, I would add, underheard hip-hop affects sounded through distinct vocal timbres and textures (see Brown 2018, n.p.). And it is a voice whose foundations account for its very inaudibility. I have already argued that, structurally, the Black voice must exist prior to the act of

White listening. But, as I have now shown, the Black voice also sounds on a frequency that exceeds this violent form of audition. In other words, Eidsheim is correct in arguing that we cannot hear the

Black voice (Eidsheim 2019, 3). But that’s not because the voice cannot be Black. Rather, it’s because the Black voice escapes any attempt at audibility, no matter how hard you listen.

From this perspective, the fact that we cannot hear the Black voice becomes the surest sign that it exists, anteriorly making possible White listening, even while exposing the latter as perpetually unequal to its task. By negating the Black voice, the focus on listening and perception in sound studies itself risks eliding how Black people sound their ways into being against violent racial structures. In contrast, by holding on to the possibility of a non-essentialist and yet irreducibly racialized ontology of the Black voice, we gain access to a complex Black humanity that turns precisely on the exhaustion of its own civic abnegation. And this, I argue, is the work of Black hipness.

Indeed, for Kendrick, it is precisely hipness as an aesthetic that allows him to reconcile and work through divergent and conflicting forms of Blackness, and thus model more capacious images of Black life. As Kendrick puts it in his aforementioned Dubcnn interview:

“Of course, we [the members of Black Hippy] all from L.A., right? Different parts of L.A. And we decided to come up with [the name] Black Hippy because it describes who we are when we come together, dig what I’m saying? So […] when you think of the word ‘hippy,’ you think of people that’s carefree and doing what they wanna do, and that’s how we look at the industry, how we look at ourselves coming toward the industry and all the politics around it. We wanna do what we want with our music. And that’s why we’re able to express

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ourselves on certain tracks and people’s receptive to it. And we put the word ‘Black’ in front of it, because [when you think of] a hippy, you think of a lot of bright colors. We took ‘Black’ and we placed it in front of that because we’re not just talking about a certain color [or set of colors, i.e. ‘bright colors’], we’re talking about all colors, and colors represent life, you know what I mean? It [Blackness] represents being happy, being sad, being angry, being mad, being depressed, being stressed. And that’s how our music feel, and we think Black represents that when you put it all in a pot. So, break it down and it comes together as Black Hippy” (Etminan 2011, [13:01–14:05]).

In other words, while the image of the carefree hippy captures the collective’s unified approach to the music industry, Kendrick views their individual and collective Blackness as crucially modifying the term’s traditional significations to capture a broader array of contradictory experiences (see also

Guillory 2020, 25). It is in this sense that Black hipness comes to signify a unifying space carved out in between conflicting experiences — or a sort of unity in difference.

And Kendrick’s ontologically Black voice exemplifies this work, troubling narratives of race and culture that depend on either the transcendence of structural violence or the erasure of Blackness itself. In particular, given the histories of Blackness that I have traced in this chapter, the ontologically Black voice (along with the cypher track and the flow palimpsest from Chapters Two and Three) collapses fetishistic conceptions of hip culture as an aesthetic of countercultural resistance. Instead, as I will show in the next section, by affirming structures of racial violence, while imagining new, fugitive forms of Blackness within these, neo-bohemian rappers like Kendrick

Lamar reclaim hipness as a radical Black aesthetic of ex-istence, emerging in the spaces in between.

“Our Life’s an Instrumental”: Hipness as an African Diasporic Aesthetic of Existence

If Kendrick Lamar’s ontologically Black voice exemplifies neo-bohemian hip-hop’s radical reimagining of Black life as an existential straining in the midst of social death, then it remains a distinctly narrow window into this metaphysics, offering at best an incomplete image of what it means to be a Black Hippy. In this closing section, I concern myself with fleshing out this image, while holding on to the particular significance of the ontologically Black voice for doing so. In the

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process, I excavate more fully that radically affirmative, life-imagining side of Black Hippy’s hip aesthetic, as well as its broader resonances for rethinking existence in the African diaspora.

I begin by exploring a significant yet underexplored element in the music of Kendrick

Lamar, and Black Hippy more broadly, that vividly thematizes the relationship between the voice

(and the organs that help to produce it) and the self: namely, the vocally-produced, abject figure of the “Black Lip Bastard.” In exploring how members of the collective variously appropriate this figure, I focus in particular on the specific symbol of the “Black Lips” in order to trace how

Kendrick’s ontologically Black voice connects to the bodily (or, better, fleshly) apparatus that would appear to produce it, but which are perhaps better understood as being produced by it. The Black

Lip Bastard figure emerges, here, as marking the cumulation of Black Hippy’s carving out of Black life on the terms imposed upon it by an anti-Black society.

I conclude by reflecting on the implications of the Black Lip Bastard for rethinking the terms of hipness as, in Phil Ford’s (2013, 77) formulation, “equally an aesthetic of music and the self.”

Setting neo-bohemian hip-hop’s embrace of pathological Blackness in dialogue with Gavin Steingo’s study of South African kwaito music’s studied ignorance of its own social political context, I explore how Black Hippy challenges performances and narratives of hipness as an aesthetic of countercultural re-sistance. Instead, through an analysis of Kendrick’s 2011 hit single, “HiiiPoWeR,”

I gesture one last time toward the collective’s reclamation of hipness as an African diasporic aesthetic of ex-istence. To begin, however, let’s turn to Black Hippy’s construction of the Black Lip

Bastard as it emerges from and expands upon the ontological significances of Kendrick Lamar’s many voices.

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Black Lip Bastards

Kendrick Lamar and Black Hippy most famously introduced audiences to the figure of the

“Black Lip Bastard” on the remix to a song of that title from Ab-Soul’s Control System (2012).

Reinvoking a racialized trope at the core of both White hipness and Black bohemianism (see

Chapter One), “Black Lip Bastard (Remix)” opens with the distinctive sound of Kendrick coughing up marijuana smoke over a sample of Donny Hathaway’s “A Song For You” (1971). It’s not until after he recovers from his coughing fit that he kicks off the song, still gravelly voiced from the smoke, rapping:

“Black Lip Bastard, pass me your password, so I can hack inside your brain, see I too have gone insane.”

With Kendrick’s reference here to the “Gone Insane” music video with which I opened Chapter

One, it becomes clear that, while it is Kendrick who opens the song, and Kendrick who performs with the ontologically Black voice, his use of the term Black Lip Bastard in fact refers to Ab-Soul.

Indeed, it was Soul who originally coined the term Black Lip Bastard as a nickname for the scarring on his lips resulting from his childhood affliction with Stevens-Johnson syndrome, which audiences have misattributed to his well-known penchant for weed-smoking (Ahmed 2012c).

Drawing on the rich slippages between blackness as a marker of medical pathology, the idea of blackening as a result of smoking, and racist constructions of racial Blackness as itself pathological,

Soul’s own musical deployments of the term link drug use to not only his visibly black lips, but also to his very sense of self as a Black Lip Bastard. For instance, in the original version of the song

(2012), Soul raps, “Black Lip Bastard, black shades, black shirt/ Puffing on a Black & Mild, I know my lungs blackened out.” Foreshadowing the significance of Kendrick’s druggy introduction to the song’s remix, Soul traces here an explicit link between smoking, the apparatus through which the voice is produced (not only his black lips, but his black lungs, too), and ontological Blackness.

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Between the original and remixed versions of the song, then, Kendrick and Soul capture a core point of intersection between the ontologically Black voice and the pursuit of new forms of

Black life: Black Hippy’s aesthetic thematization of drug use as central to their own, radical hip aesthetic. Clarifying this connection is the text that has structured my theorization of radical hipness throughout this project: Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man. As Ellison’s eponymous narrator recounts, regarding a stoned experience listening to Louis Armstrong:

“Once when I asked for a cigarette, some jokers gave me a reefer, which I lighted when I got home and sat listening to my phonograph. It was a strange evening. Invisibility, let me explain, gives one a slightly different sense of time, you’re never quite on the beat. Sometimes you’re ahead, sometimes behind. Instead of the swift and imperceptible flowing of time, you are aware of its nodes, those points where time stands still or from which it leaps ahead. And you slip into the breaks and look around” (Ellison 1995, 8).

For the Invisible Man, it is drugs, and specifically marijuana, that facilitate his access to the breaks, hipping him to the possibility of locating life within his invisibility. In turn, through their lived appropriations of the Black Lip Bastard figure, Kendrick and Soul reveal the capacity of drugs for bringing this possibility into lived fruition.

Indeed, even while Kendrick uses the term to address Ab-Soul, his own performance on

“Black Lip Bastard (Remix)” reveals how he too takes on this racialized sense of self. At the end of his opening four measures, Kendrick suddenly stops himself short with a rough hacking sound, as though his throat is still burning (“lead shower, Anna Pebble hour, bitch, stand the rai-”), and the aborted verse cuts away again to the sound of him coughing up more smoke. In this way, while

Kendrick’s lips (like his voice) cannot be empirically described as black in the same way that Soul’s can, he performs the same experience of Blackening arising from the smoke (or, more precisely, the smokey voice) that passes through them. Staking his own musical claim to the Black Lips, Kendrick combines drugs and the voice to reimagine himself as a Black Lip Bastard.

Kendrick’s and Soul’s shared use of the Black Lips symbol invokes the slippery relationship between Blackness and the body that I explored in Chapter Three, bringing us back to Hortense

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Spillers’s theory of the flesh. As described, Spillers uses this term to capture how, after slavery,

Blackness comes to exist not so much “of the body” — a human category created and guaranteed by the law — as “of the flesh” — a posthuman category signifying the ontological dehumanization of the Slave and made to exist outside of civil society, leading to what Alexander Weheliye refers to as “different genres of the human” (Spillers 1987, 65–67; Weheliye 2014, 2–3). Flesh, here, is not a literal term. For Weheliye in particular, the image of flesh is in fact useful precisely for its

“nonsubstantive substance,” or way of conceptualizing ontological Blackness in a way that exceeds the need for a subject or body of which to speak (Weheliye 2014, 44). Similarly, in my usage, the

Black Lips serves not as a marker of literal flesh, but as a symbol of the struggle to find Black life in a context of social death. In this sense, Kendrick Lamar’s ontologically Black voice can be understood as giving rise to a para-embodied sense of self, producing and sustaining the fleshly surplus of the Black Lips.

But how exactly can the Black Lips be said to give rise to new forms of Black life? For Black

Hippy, the answer would seem to turn on a yet unremarked component of this figure: the image of the Bastard. In its associations with impurity, any existential claim to this image suggests a shift away from legible humanity and toward alternative, repudiated ways of being. In this sense, when Soul calls himself a Black Lip Bastard, he brings both the medical pathology of his Stevens-Johnson syndrome and its performed connection to ideas about pathological Blackness to center stage, reveling in their shared distance from the normative. Recalling Kendrick’s ethical descent in “The

Heart Part 4,” Soul thus traces his own descent from the Abstract Asshole — a hybridizing persona signifying his deformation of hip a priorism (or abstraction) to make room for pathologized forms of

Blackness (hence, asshole) — from Chapter One, to the Black Lip Bastard — a sick, drug-fueled, flesh-dwelling, anti-Human figure. This abject figure signals an absolute embrace of pathologized forms of Blackness, and a commitment to finding life within them.

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In making this claim, I take my cue from Darieck Scott’s theory of “extravagant abjection,” a term that he uses precisely to describe acts of radical acceptance and embrace through which abject figures come to signal new forms of Black life. For Scott, such acts move beyond the normative location of Black empowerment in constraining models of masculinist resistance (as typified by the

Black Power Movement), by instead embracing the racialization of Blackness in terms of abjection. If

Black Power’s politics of resistance ultimately fail to overcome the ontological dehumanization of

Blackness, Scott’s politics of embrace (like Soul’s politics of affirmation) offer a route to a newly empowered existence.

The primary examples of extravagant abjection that Scott explores are literary depictions of non-normative sexuality, particularly homosexuality and experiences of sexual violence. In this way of thinking, if the cultural nationalism of the Black Power movement precludes the association of such imagery with authentic Blackness, then Scott locates within marginalized experiences of sexuality a paradoxical form of (sexual) freedom from such constraining ideals. As such, the process of “racialization-through-abjection” contains within itself a source of “counterintuitive power” that redefines both Black masculinity and Black Power (Scott 2010, 1–31, 270).

And, tellingly, sexuality is central to Black Hippy’s conception of the Black Lip Bastard.

Returning to Kendrick’s verse on “Black Lip Bastard (Remix),” he follows his second coughing fit by conjuring an image of himself as a psychopathic mass-murderer, followed by graphic depiction of his sexual fantasies:

“Look inside my parkin’ garage and see a collage, of every Person I despised since the moment I turned five Calculate my steps and strategically took my time, even Fallin’ off, I land on the ass of Nicki Minaj (so soft) Eat that pink pussy like it’s Friday Bust one, roam and reload, then smoke to Sade And somebody tell Rihanna too I need that vagina too (hey, baby).”

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Of course, it must be noted that Kendrick’s crass performance of masculinist sexuality, here, is anything but “non-normative.” His objectification of women is neither queer nor reflective of violence experienced; rather, it reflects precisely the sort of normative, itself-violent (misogynistic) masculinity that Scott disparagingly associates with the legible resistance politics of the Black Power movement, raising difficult questions about at whose expense Kendrick’s reimagining of the possibilities of Black life takes place.

Alongside this act of representational violence, however, and in light of the overlapping histories at the core of this dissertation, it is notable that the trope of hypersexuality that Kendrick invokes here has also been used to dehumanize and abjectify Black men. In particular, as Ingrid

Monson describes, stereotypes about transgressive, “pathological sexuality” occupy a central role in the fetishistic processes underlying White hipness (Monson 1995, 412).10 In turn, such racist tropes became a central concern in the reactive politics of rejection practiced by Black bohemians, leading to a politics of respectability that includes, for instance, chauvinism. In other words, this image of

Black male hypersexuality has been deeply entangled in the constraining, racist and conservative histories of hipness and bohemianism through which Blackness is made and refused as abject. And it is precisely against these histories that neo-bohemian hip-hop has taken shape.

In this sense, through his engagement with the trope of violent hypersexuality, Kendrick might in fact be said to approach Scott’s theory of abjection from another direction, through his embrace of (or, more specifically, refusal to refuse) what Frantz Fanon would call his

“wretchedness” (2008, 167). Indeed, Scott’s understanding of “abjection” draws closely upon

Fanon’s theory of wretchedness and the process of “sociogenesis” through which Blackness is socially constructed and psychologically internalized in terms of a humiliated, defeated (and, I would

10 For more on the dehumanizing association of hypersexuality with Black men, see hooks (2004, 67–70); Jackson (2006, 78–80); Scott (2010, 61).

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add, pathological) Other. Rejecting impossible calls to resist such processes, Scott instead locates a counter-intuitive form of power within another of Fanon’s metaphors: that of “muscle tension,” which Fanon uses to describe the “way in which the colonized knows and resists his historical subjugation.” Extending this work through reference to the psychoanalytic theories of Sartre, Lacan,

Merleau-Ponty, and Kristeva, Scott reimagines racialized bodies as possessing “powers in the midst of debility” (Scott 2010, 1–94; see Fanon 2008).

Pursuing this wider route into “extravagant abjection,” Kendrick’s willingness to lean into alternately fetishized and repudiated tropes of Black male hypersexuality emerges as exemplary of

Fanon’s muscle tension — of, that is, “knowing” the terms of Black subjection and overcoming it through radical acts of affirmation. And this engagement is deeply entangled in the abject figure of the Black Lip Bastard, as appropriated by various members of Black Hippy. From this perspective, we also gain a deeper understanding of Soul’s exaggerated expressions of misogyny, discussed in

Chapter One, which we might now recognize as part of his own extravagant performance of pathological Black masculinity — and particularly his claims to stereotypical Black virility. As he puts it in his verse on the “Black Lip Bastard” remix: “What can I say? I’m a Bastard with Black Lips, black/ Shirt, black shades, long black dick.”

The Black Lip Bastard’s pathological sexuality arguably reaches its apex in ScHoolboy Q’s verse on the remix, in the perverse image of his childish self performing a sexual act precisely with his Black Lips:

“Figg Side, black nine, black lips, smoke tiiiiiime Fuck this rap shit, I’m active Suckin’ on titties since I was eight Hoodie with my shades, I ain’t tryna be fake.”

Here, Q takes an image of Black hypersexuality and exaggerates it through a grotesque claim to his own youthful sexual precociousness. Through this striking embrace of the pathological, he clarifies the meeting point (and byproduct) of Scott’s “counterintuitive power” and Fanon’s politics of

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affirmation as the fact of Black life as carved out through social death. As is the case with Fanon,

Q’s own radicality here consists of way that he:

“fully accepts the definition of himself as pathological as it is imposed by a world that knows itself through that imposition, rather than remaining in a reactive stance that insists on the (temporal, moral, etc.) heterogeneity between a self and an imago originating in culture. Though it may appear counterintuitive, or rather because it is counterintuitive, this acceptance or affirmation is active; it is a willing or willingness, in other words, to pay whatever social costs accrue to being black, to inhabiting blackness, to living a black social life under the shadow of social death. This is not an accommodation to the dictates of the antiblack world. The affirmation of blackness, which is to say an affirmation of pathological being, is a refusal to distance oneself from blackness in a valorization of minor differences that bring one closer to health, to life, or to sociality” (Sexton 2011, 27).

While Jared Sexton refers here to Fanon specifically, the relevance of his description to Q is striking.

Through the embrace of his own pathology, Q transforms himself into a fully abject figure.

Indeed, taking his display of extravagant abjection still further, it should be noted that Q situates his performative affirmation of sexual pathology firmly within his broader project of affirming other pathologized images of Blackness (while and by incorporating them into the radical aesthetics of Black hipness) (see Chapter Three). Specifically, in staking his own personal claim to the symbolically pathological Black Lips — as maintained through his engagement in marijuana smoking — he simultaneously situates this symbol alongside strategic markers of the thug life. “Figg

Side” refers to the Hoover Crip Figueroa territory to which he lays claim, while “black nine” describes his gun. Even the way he elongates “smoke tiiiiiime” recalls the specifically recreational form of drug use thematized in gangsta rap (recall Snoop Dogg’s “laiiid-baaack” stoner aesthetic that

I referenced in Chapter One). Like Kendrick and Soul before him, Q thus appropriates the figure of the Black Lip Bastard to his own ends, radically affirming the possibility of a Black life carved out in and through the experience of abjection. Dwelling in this space, like the Invisible Man in his underground home, the Black Lip Bastard gestures toward the possibility of a Black life lived in and through social death, bringing us to the culmination of neo-bohemian hip-hop’s radical reclamation of hipness.

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Hipness as an African Diasporic Aesthetic of Existence

The Black Lip Bastard constitutes a Janus-faced figure within neo-bohemian hip-hop’s project of reclaiming hipness. On the one hand, this figure grows directly out of the racial stereotypes at the intersecting cores of White hipness and Black bohemianism. On the other, by gobbling up these stereotypes and regurgitating them in new and extreme forms, it turns away from hipness altogether, inhibiting the White hipster’s extractive attempts to debase his way out underneath the borders of the social mainstream, and cutting short the Black bohemian’s own lofty attempts to climb in over the top. As a result, understanding neo-bohemian hip-hop requires looking beyond conventional associations of hipness with stylized claims to countercultural resistance altogether, and instead developing a new understanding of the term that is accountable to ontological Blackness. In doing so, it is instructive to once again turn to the cultural flows of the

African diaspora, and specifically Gavin Steingo’s study South African kwaito.

While itself often mislabeled as a form of South African hip-hop, kwaito is in fact better understood through its shifting and ambivalent relationship to the four-on-the-floor, party-centric

U.S. house music of the 1980s. In unpacking this relationship, Steingo traces the development of kwaito, by South Africa’s urban Black youth, against the backdrop of apartheid’s end and the election of Nelson Mandela. In this context, kwaito became the music of the “post-struggle generation,” unfolding as it did alongside the fall of South African hope into the disenfranchisement of its youth in the contemporary moment. Accordingly, Steingo’s study centers on his challenge to hegemonic critiques (by politicians, journalists, and intellectuals) of kwaito’s failure to engage with political issues in South African society, as well as the simplistic assumptions about the political function of music upon which such critiques rest.

In supporting this challenge, Steingo points to the overlap between the South African elite’s critique of kwaito and the discursive limits of the New Musicology since the 1970s, which he depicts

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as failing to reconcile its (valid) rejection of music’s “aesthetic autonomy” with its inability to show what exactly music then does culturally and socially. As he puts it, “in their reticence and anxiousness about committing to any interpretation, such analyses touch upon a central truth: namely, that any determinate relationship between music and life is impossible. The problem […] is that most analysts do not acknowledge the logical conclusion of this underdetermination,” namely, that the significance of the relationship between music and society exists precisely in its “undecidability” (2016, 88–89, emphasis mine). From this perspective, Steingo argues that “if kwaito’s musicians and listeners ignore their conditions, they do so deliberately in order to invent another way of perceiving the world” (2016, vii).

Indeed, Steingo views this inventive project as the originating impulse for kwaito, describing the genre’s close connection to U.S. house music as resulting not from any romantic diasporic intimacy, but rather from musicians’ and consumers’ interest in “a distant sound bearing no relationship to the oppressive conditions of the apartheid period” (2016, 23). At the same time, however, he draws on the philosophy of Jacques Rancière to argue that “kwaito is less a form of escapism than an aesthetic practice of multiplying sensory reality and thus generating new possibilities in the midst of neoliberalism’s foreclosure of the future” (2016, vii–viii). By way of example, he describes how kwaito’s platforms of mediation (record labels, radio stations, television shows) help to produce the undecidable relationship between music and life, leading to alternate sensory realities (2016, 57–89); he traces how kwaito’s practices of circulation engender negotiations of precarity and risk, through which musical production becomes a site of experimentalism in search of an “otherwise” (2016, 90–123);11 and he discusses the (re)constructive effect of kwaito upon existing social spaces, such as the tavern, the outdoor party, and the automobile (2016, 188–212).

11 Steingo grounds his ideas about experimentalism in search of an otherwise in the work of Benjamin Piekut (2011).

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Steingo’s conception of kwaito’s potential to invent another way of perceiving the world as growing out of the undecidable relationship between music and society more broadly provides a valuable frame for understanding the social significance of neo-bohemian hip-hop’s own musical aesthetic. And yet, if kwaito only invents another way of perceiving the world, then neo-bohemian hip-hop expands upon kwaito in the way it also puts Black life back together within this world.

Indeed, for Steingo, kwaito’s fundamental turn away from society means that it “should not be understood as some kind of solidification of ethnic, national, or racial identities. On the contrary, as an arrangement of sensory experience, kwaito actually disrupt[s] the establishment of identities”

(2016, 51). By contrast, the music of Black Hippy is deeply tied up in the reconceptualization of social categories such as race, and specifically Blackness.

This difference, I argue, grows out of neo-bohemian hip-hop’s reclamation of hipness as

“equally an aesthetic of music and the self” (Ford 2013, 77), and therefore a means of mediating between the break (as a musical and theoretical space) and the undercommons (as a space for Black life). In this sense, neo-bohemian hip-hop provides a route beyond the representational issue that

Steingo locates in the New Musicology. Rather than affirming a negative, or “undecidable,” relationship between music and society, neo-bohemian hip-hop models a mode of navigating between the two. What emerges is a dialogic relationship between music and life, wherein each expands upon and sharpens the possibilities of the other. In closing, I return to Kendrick Lamar to present a final musical example wherein we glimpse precisely another way of being within the world, in the shift from hipness to what Kendrick calls “HiiiPoWeR.”

***

Kendrick engages most extensively with the concept of “HiiiPoWeR” in a song of that title from his first studio album, Section.80 (2011). But the term also predates Kendrick’s usage, more properly referring to a broad-based social movement coming out of Los Angeles and centering on

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well-rehearsed ideals of Black self-empowerment in the face of a destructive society. In fact, speaking once again to Kendrick’s enduring reception as a conscious rapper, his song does clearly wed the HiiiPoWeR movement, at least on a surface level, to the sort of explicitly resistant Black politics from which I have attempted to distance him. In the song’s spoken introduction, Kendrick implores his listeners to “stand for something or die in the morning”; the sung bridge features the late Alori Joh defiantly asserting that “every day we fight the system”; and references to Martin

Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, and Huey Newton saturate the verses, alongside calls for direct militant action. Through his various takes on what resistance can look like, Kendrick continues to blur the line between high and low, broadly conceived, but the song unquestionably invokes a variety of forms of resistant politics geared toward transforming the world in the present.

In light of such references, it is unsurprising that commentators have treated “HiiiPoWeR” as an anthem of Black political resistance, and even as marking the onset of a “new black power movement” (Lewis 2016; see also Livingston 2014; Guillory 2020, 33). Indeed, none of the song’s imagery would be out of place in a track by a conscious rap group like A Tribe Called Quest. But then again, neither would it be surprising to hear this imagery on a song by a gangsta rapper like Ice

Cube. And this slippage is sort of the point. As I have argued, one side of Kendrick’s cultural significance stems from the middle ground that he occupies so seamlessly between these opposed figures, revealing the constructedness of their opposition and the reality of their fundamental reconcilability within a fluid continuum of Black expression. Indeed, the “HiiiPoWeR” music video itself vividly captures this slippage when it suddenly cuts to a clip of Orson Welles describing

Shakespeare’s Macbeth as “a gangster with a conscience.”12 Revealingly, Welles’s coinage has since been applied to figures like Huey Newton (see Jenkins 2002), though it takes no great leaps of imagination to recognize that Kendrick invokes it here in reference to his own hip-hop sense of

12 On March 24, 2020, this video could be accessed via APLUSFILMZ’s YouTube page: https://youtu.be/-PXIbVNfj3s.

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self.13 As Guillory puts it in her own analysis of the song, “black subjectivity here is, in the words of

Anthony B. Pinn, ‘understood as complex in that it seeks to hold in tension many ontological possibilities, a way of existing in numerous spaces of identification as opposed to reified notions of identity that mark dehumanization’” (Guillory 2020, 35; see Pinn 2003, 158).

Following Guillory, I argue that, more than simply deconstructing hip-hop’s binaries,

Kendrick’s cultural significance further stems from the way that he steps beyond these binaries and their dehumanizing logics altogether, to instead imagine new ways of existing in an anti-Black global context. As such, while resistance is clearly a part of the message in “HiiiPoWeR,” it represents for

Kendrick only one space of identification. From a different angle, much of the imagery in

“HiiiPoWeR” in fact centers upon exploring the diasporic exigencies of Black life. For instance,

Samuel T. Livingston describes how Kendrick “uses discreet examples of Afro-Kemetic semeiotics to challenge his listeners to cultivate a life of the soul and mind that balances multiple competing agendas” (2014, 54). Livingston’s reading, here, closely recalls Du Bois’s theory of double consciousness as the hybridizing sense of self arising from the experience of being Black in the

West, even while rearticulating this influential concept to account for its global resonances. By way of example, Livingston lists Lamar’s repeated invocations of Africanist imagery, from hieroglyphs to the pyramids, presenting these as signs of both alienation from the U.S. cultural context, and a connection to an “alternate, othered, contextual source of meaning” (Livingston 2014, 54–55).

While Livingston does in fact view these diasporic invocations as tools of political resistance, to reflexively attribute transformative political potential to them is arguably to miss their full significance. There is no need, after all, to imagine that a connection to the pyramids is enough to undo the ontological consequences of transatlantic slavery. More productively, though, Livingston’s

13 Indeed, as I detail in other chapters, throughout his output, Kendrick explicitly celebrates his own unmatched ability to “do both” conscious and gangsta rap.

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analysis does shed light on the diaspora as a resource in animating Kendrick’s hybridizing musical aesthetic. In this view, Kendrick’s use of African symbols to mark his commitment to dwelling in a split sense of self is but another layer in his musical affirmation and exhaustion of Black social death.

Diaspora, here, emerges not as a utopic, third space of belonging, but a process of carving out life at the intersection, to paraphrase Stuart Hall, of multiple, “always-postponed” points of arrival (see

Chen 1996, 490).

True to form, Kendrick takes care to intimately unpack the role of music within this practice of diaspora, stressing that:

“(My issue isn’t) televised and you ain’t gotta tell the wise how to stay on Beat because our life’s an instrumental.”

As Kendrick raps the relationship between music and Black life, a group of Tunisian protestors jumping up and down to the song’s beat in the video, the inbetween space of HiiiPoWeR comes to the song’s fore. Through the imagery of the “beat” and the “instrumental,” music becomes the language for imagining a common way of existing between physical spaces, with and through globalized experiences of racial violence.

And yet, modifying this sentiment slightly, I would maintain that it is not the aesthetics of the instrumental itself through which diasporic existence takes place, but rather through their translation into the ethics of HiiiPoWeR. As Kendrick describes in a 2011 interview with The Come

Up Show, “HiiiPoWeR: […] that’s how we carry ourself in the streets, and just in the world, period.

HiiiPoWeR, it’s basically the simplest form of representing, just being above all the madness, above all the bullshit.”14 Of course, even while this sentiment stages a move away from resistance, an obvious critique still stands to be made of its seemingly transcendentalist, utopian tone. However,

14 On March 24, 2020, this video could be accessed via The Come Up Show’s YouTube page: https://youtu.be/lWTcT3fdgAc.

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hearing this statement coming from the lips of Kendrick the Black Lip Bastard, we’re compelled to grant it a competing interpretation, too.

With this abject figure in mind, it becomes harder to read Kendrick’s nuancing of resistance politics as giving way to a thin politics of transcendentalism. While he claims, here, to be “above all the madness,” we have seen time and again how he just as often performatively dwells in the space below it. While the political movement that he endorses lays claim to a place on “hiii,” we have watched him get there by way of the low. The tension that Kendrick holds here, as a Black Lip

Bastard in the midst of enlightenment, marks what Guillory describes as Kendrick’s ability to hold

“in tension categories of the sacred and the profane” (2020, 35). And it’s within this space of tension that Kendrick imagines a new way of being Black. In this sense, from hipness to HiiiPoWeR, from the Black Lips to the pyramids, Kendrick’s music is best understood as part of an African diasporic aesthetic of existence, sounding new ways of being that take shape at once underground, above all the madness, and in the spaces in between.

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POSTSCRIPT

Reflections on Hip-Hop, Music, and Black Studies

Right around the time that I was completing my dissertation proposal, a memorable interaction encouraged me as to the potential value of the project. Headed to dinner in downtown

Ithaca with a friend of mine and another friend of his, the latter told me he’d heard I was writing about rap music. He didn’t know much about rap, or listen to it often, but he did appreciate the more positive and political stuff, by groups like De La Soul and A Tribe Called Quest. An opinion

I’d come to associate with golden age stalwarts of an older generation, and one I was surprised to hear come from him, I recommitted myself to writing against it, and in defense of those ostensibly less positive and less political forms of hip-hop that his words implicitly wrote off. A similar exchange took place at a popular music conference where I was presenting some research for the dissertation. Here, a young audience member assertively challenged my straw man critique of bohemian hip-hop by informing me that not all of these rappers grew up in the suburbs. Initially bemused by being faced with yet another unexpected (and even stauncher) alignment with this, to my mind, obviously flawed hip-hop tradition, I made a note to unpack in my writing how class politicking plays out not only on economic, but also cultural-symbolic levels, in order to shore up my critique of racial conservatism.

A different kind of encouragement came from experiences over the past few years of sharing this research with my students. A young woman schooled her coursemates on how hip-hop’s early block parties made the music political long before “The Message” dropped. A jazz student being quickly interpolated into the neo-traditional vein that birthed bohemian hip-hop disclosed his growing critique of the Digable Planets records he knew and loved, and sense of trap’s posthuman potentialities. From whichever side they’ve come, such exchanges have assured me of both the need

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for and value of musicological (and especially musical analytical) engagements with questions pertaining to the terms of Black life in an anti-Black context, and the salience of hip-hop as a rich point of intersection for this work. In these closing thoughts, I offer some reflections on the relationship between hip-hop, musicology, and Black studies, as these have grown out of the dissertation’s overarching arguments and outcomes.

Above all, I have been concerned with theorizing the new hip-hop genre that I call neo- bohemian, a project that has in turn centered upon my multi-pronged retheorization of hipness as a musical aesthetic and way of being. My starting point here, and a recurring point of concern throughout the dissertation, has been the task of reclaiming the Afro-modernist origins of hipness.

In pursuing this task, I have developed a history of hipness that is accountable to both its diasporic flows and its crystallization with the emergence of bebop in the United States. At the same time, I have held on to ideas about hipness as part of a broader genealogy of cultural responses to modernity, while challenging the dominant discursive privileging of Whiteness here by foregrounding a more jagged history of competing and conflicting Black cultural expressions.

Indeed, throughout the dissertation, I have traced a number of sub-genealogies that do not always follow neat, linear progressions, but rather disrupt and interrupt each other in an Afro- modernist mode. Most notably, I have traced a cultural genealogy from bebop as a crystallizing point for hipness, through jazz/bohemian hip-hop’s misappropriation of bebop’s ostensibly high art counterculturalism, through neo-bohemian hip-hop’s reclamation of bebop’s Afro-modernist aesthetic. In Chapters One and Four in particular, I challenged undercomplicated narratives about the direct influence of alternative hip-hop from the 1990s upon its present-day counterparts, to show how Ab-Soul and Kendrick Lamar in fact deform early forms of hip-hop bohemianism.

Meanwhile, Chapter Two traced an alternate history of hipness rooted in the very underground figures (from Malcolm X through the Invisible Man to Jay Rock) against which Black bohemians

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have historically constructed their own identities, in the process deconstructing the power-laden polarization of hipness and hustling. Finally, Chapter Three looked back to bebop as a formative site for hip expression while tracing yet another sub-genealogy — this time of danced responses to urban modernity — and in the process reconciling hipness with other historically excluded categories, from the gangsta to the U.S. South.

The result is a disruptive and democratizing history of hipness emerging directly from my recentering of its Afro-modernist origins. In turn, returning to these origins has disrupted prevalent ideas about counterculturalism as a governing ethos for hipness. As I have explored, the well documented insider-outsider relationship of Blackness to the United States poses a fundamental challenge to such narratives. Most notably, if Black cultural expression is necessarily (that is, ontologically) launched from a place outside of civil society, then Black countercultural expression depends first upon the impossible attempt to negotiate an insider position to later repudiate. And, in the history of Black bohemianism, the attempted negotiation of such a position has come at the expense of other, excepted Black communities — most pertinently, mainstream rappers. In contrast, by exploring how neo-bohemian hip-hop recenters the aesthetics and politics of Afro-modernity, I have offered a counter-narrative of hipness that turns not on ideas about countercultural resistance to the mainstream, but rather the carving out of Black life in the face of an encroaching, antagonistic urban modernity.

In tracing this narrative, I have insisted upon a progressive view of hip-hop that looks beyond power-laden binaries such as alternative versus mainstream and high art versus commercial styles; beyond reified divides between conscious rap and gangsta rap, or “good” hip-hop and “bad” hip-hop; beyond the conservatism of Black bohemianism, and the discursive romanticization of bohemian hip-hop styles that align with Black Atlantic frameworks, which themselves turn on the pathologization of African American culture; and beyond rejections of the U.S. South and Southern

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hip-hop specifically. In turn, this set of interventions has also given rise to a more progressive view of race that resists totalizing conceptions of Blackness as either fundamentally pathological or pure while and by using concepts of fugitivity, the flesh, and abjection in order to move toward a more fluid and capacious understanding of racialized existence. At the same time, I have also cautioned against reactionary claims about the inherent political vibrancy of marginalized forms of Blackness and Black cultural expression. Instead, I have shown the radical political potential of neo-bohemian hip-hop to exist in its Afro-modernist deconstruction of these binaries, and capacity to imagine new, liberatory ways of being in between.

This brings us to the final aspect of my revisionist history of hipness, which concerns the relationship between hipness as a musical aesthetic and hipness as a way of being. On the one hand,

I have built on existing scholarship that treats hipness as a framework rich in potential for bringing together the musical and the social. On the other hand, by setting this view in dialogue with the history of Afro-modernist cultural expression, I have also revealed the need to finesse the relationship between these two categories. A recurring reference point throughout the dissertation has been Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, whom I have presented as the ur-figure of radical Black hipness — conceived of as a new way of being, in an Afro-modernist mode, in between — and for whom music is key to understanding life. Where existing ideas about hipness betray a conflation of the aesthetic and the social — an issue that persists in both of the disciplines (music studies and

Black studies) at the core of my project — the Invisible Man invites us to separate these categories out before considering how they intersect. After all, for the Invisible Man, music does not do the work of Black life so much as it sheds light upon his reality, allowing him to slip into the breaks, look around, and discover the new forms of life to be found within his condition of invisibility.

In developing this perspective on sociomusicality, I have built directly on recent work at the intersection of music studies and Black/Africana studies that explicitly thematizes this issue. I have

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drawn closely on Gavin Steingo’s (2016) intervention into the New Musicology’s determinate view of music’s social functions, for which he argues that the true significance of these functions arises from the inherently undecidable relationship between these categories. I have also engaged with

Catherine Appert’s (2018) ethnographic engagements with musical form, wherein music emerges as both commenting on and dialogically producing distinct social realities. Perhaps closest to my own view of hipness, though, is Fumi Okiji’s Adornian approach to jazz as social critique, in which she pivots away from the notion that “black life is necessarily an artistic undertaking,” and toward the more tenable assertion that “black expressive work cannot but help shed light on black life’s

(im)possibilities” (Okiji 2018, 4).

Building on this body of literature, in my project, hipness emerges not as a synchronic aesthetic of music and the self, but rather as a pivot point between the musical and the social. From an Afro-modernist perspective, the break becomes a space for musically theorizing the possibilities of Black life, the undercommons a space for living out these possibilities, and hipness a way of allowing the two to communicate with one another: a musical aesthetic that sheds light on alternate ways of being, and a way of referring to those very ways of being. The significance of neo-bohemian rap thus emerges in its ability to at once theorize and model new forms of Black life, rooted in the long, underground history of Black hipness.

Moreover, neo-bohemian rap does this work in a way that goes beyond other hip-hop styles, such as trap, which scholars have recently presented as offering radical alternatives to both conscious rap’s and gangsta rap’s imbrications in neoliberal ideology. As I argue in Chapter One, neo-bohemian rappers perform the aesthetics of existence at a deeper, transhistorical, intercultural, and diasporic level than is heard in already-radical genres like trap. Indeed, while some scholars caution against the decontextualizing (and depoliticizing) functions of such invocations of temporal, material, and spatial parallelism, I have argued that, in its production of an always contextualized and

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relationally (rather than essentially) occurring Black metaphysics, hipness provides a rigorous framework in which temporal, material, and spatial parallels can and do resonate together. In this way, I have advocated for a discursive shift toward the ways that diasporic Blackness is made to be in the world: as fugitive, as existing in the flesh, as extravagantly abject. This shift crystallizes in Jay

Rock’s reclamation of the hustler figure as one that moves beyond reformability to neoliberal structures — Spence’s (2011) critique of gangsta rap — and toward a more radical politics of excess and fugitivity. It resurfaces in the image of ScHoolboy Q’s fleshly dancing against and in excess of underground and state-sanctioned violence. And it reaches an apex in the abject figure of the Black

Lip Bastard, as made manifest by various members of the collective. And yet, the significance of neo-bohemian hip-hop doesn’t stop here. In the process of answering my project’s fundamental question of how to reconceptualize the terms of, and live out, Black life in an anti-Black context, my study of this radical genre gives rise to at least two sets of broader scholarly contributions.

First, looking inward to the project’s home discipline of musicology, I have offered insights into questions pertaining to the study of African diasporic musics — primarily, hip-hop — while and by bringing Black studies to bear upon the umbrella discipline of music studies. In addition to developing a new framework for social readings of rap music, my study of neo-bohemian hip-hop has also provided some more specific advances on existing analytical approaches to hip-hop’s musical aesthetics. Most extensively, I have developed Adam Krims’s influential framework for different types of rapped flow, offering a more sustained engagement with the “sung rhythmic” and

“percussion-effusive” flow types, as these coalesce in bohemian hip-hop styles, than his broader survey is able to provide. Theorizing neo-bohemian hip-hop has further necessitated developing a more capacious understanding of flow that includes melody and singing, creative drug use, vocal instrumentality, and even vocal timbre, all while interrogating the associations of these aesthetic categories with rigid ideas about racial authenticity. My analyses of Kendrick Lamar’s vocally-

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performed ethical descent in “The Heart Part 4” and the way that Kendrick and ScHoolboy Q vocally ride the bassline in “Collard Greens” further exemplified my project of refocusing the relationship of hip-hop flows to hip-hop beats. Analyzing the latter song in turn gave way to an extended exploration of hip-hop dance. Finally, I modelled new approaches to analyzing hip-hop by focusing on specific musical techniques, from ironic reduction to cypher tracks and flow palimpsests. My study of Black Hippy’s cypher tracks in particular facilitated a rethinking of a widely-discussed but still incompletely understood hip-hop performance practice. In all of these ways, my project has spoken to the possibility of a closer engagement with hip-hop’s musical aesthetics than has historically been the case in hip-hop studies.

In turn, looking beyond hip-hop specifically, my project has contributed to music and sound studies more broadly, while intervening in the Western theoretical and philosophical frameworks upon which they draw by holding these accountable to the ontological moorings of Blackness.

Indeed, despite the broad body of music studies literature that does focus on Black culture, close dialogue with Black studies remains lacking. As such, I have repeatedly tested the racial limits of

Eurocentric, and especially Marxist, analytical frameworks, particularly where scholars deploy these in universalizing terms. In Chapter One, I revealed the issues with David Clarke’s theory of cultural pluralism through which he attempts to deconstruct high/low cultural divides. By structuring his critique through the language of alienation and exploitation, I argued, he falls short in his attempts to speak equally to forms of White and Black cultural expression. In contrast, by working with and through experiences of fungibility and accumulation, neo-bohemian rappers emerge by the end of the dissertation as more effective democrats vis-à-vis Black culture. Also in Chapter One, I presented Foucauldian critiques of the hipster as an entrepreneur of the self as insufficient for grasping Ab-Soul’s racialized conception of the Control System. Again, by the end of the project, biopolitical frameworks emerge as incapable of accounting for social lives carved out through

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experiences of social death, while neo-bohemian rappers emerge as embedded more accurately in necropolitical structures of violence. My extended exploration of groove in Chapter Three posed a challenge to universalizing definitions of this concept within not only music studies, but also music- centered philosophy. Such scholarship emerged as relying on phenomenological theories of the body and bodily experience that lack applicability to Blackness, which is better understood in terms of the flesh. The same is true of my study of the Black voice in Chapter Four, which advocated for a move away from sound studies’ privileging of listening and perception frameworks by instead holding musicological investigation more accountable to racial ontology. This brings me to my next set of interventions.

The other side of my call to hold music studies more accountable to Blackness, is the benefit that a close engagement with musicology has for doing Black studies. Most fundamentally, my project has been shaped by Black studies debates about Black social life and death. While scholars working in the tradition of Fred Moten believe that Black music does the insurgent work of Black social life, scholars like Frank Wilderson have argued that aesthetics can do nothing more than shed light upon Black social life’s impossibility. Working from a musicological perspective, I have argued that these apparently oppositional arguments are in fact unified in their absolutist conceptions of the relationship between the musical and the social. In contrast, my theory of hipness has led me to a middle ground, in between the two, separating the aesthetic from the social while holding them in a rich and productive dialogue. Presenting hipness as a means of translating between the break and the undercommons, I have argued that neo-bohemian rappers both theorize the terms of Black life in an anti-Black context and model new ways of living these terms out.

This work has further revealed the limits of constructionist and anti-essentialist approaches to Blackness, as well as attempts to de-ontologize Blackness altogether in pursuit of pluralist, post-

Black futures. Instead, I have shown how neo-bohemian hip-hop’s aesthetic theorizing affirms how

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Blackness is violently made to exist in the world on an ontological level. Doing so has in turn driven my rethinking of ideas about transcendental diasporic connection, particularly as it is believed to structure and unify Black Atlantic cultural expressions. In my revisionist history of the cypher, its relationship to the ring shout, and Black Hippy’s use of it as a vehicle for theorizing metaphysical violence, I challenged ideas about the inherent sociality of African diasporic culture, as well as its assumed capacity for community formation and forms of political resistance. Finally, by tracing similarities in how responses to metaphysical violence also seep into the aesthetics of Malian kora music, Senegalese hip-hop, ngoma dance-song, South African kwaito, and music of the Black

Pentecostal church, I have argued for the need to reconceptualize diasporic connection in terms of comparable responses to experiences of ontological violence on a globalized scale, resulting in what

I call “ontological resonance.”

In these ways, my dissertation has made a number of broad scholarly contributions at the intersection of music studies and Black studies, in service of its broader aims of theorizing a new hip-hop genre and rethinking the terms of Black life in an anti-Black world. And yet, I can neither claim to have held music studies fully accountable to Blackness, nor fully resolved enduring issues in

Black studies through musicological method. Most pressingly, the question remains of who gets left behind in what I have presented as neo-bohemian hip-hop’s radical project of rethinking existence in the African diaspora. After all, many of the case studies that I have explored throughout the project are explicitly and extremely misogynistic, raising the question of how successful any revolutionary movement for Black freedom can be, when it leaves behind, and even takes place at the expense of, Black women.

As I suggested in the Introduction, given its simultaneous interventions into multiple, overlapping histories of distinctly male-centric cultural spheres — from hip-hop to hipness — my project would have been fundamentally altered by any attempt to deal seriously with the place of

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femininity within it. I further observed that Black studies scholars from Hortense Spillers to Saidiya

Hartman and Frank Wilderson have stressed that conventional notions of gender falter in the face of anti-Blackness, which reshapes the Slave’s relationship to such cultural designations. Following this line of thought, I chose to focus on answering the specific questions that I had about Black life on their own terms, with the intention of opening some doors to additional questions about racialized gender and sexuality along the way.

The final product is an inevitably incomplete reimagining of the terms of Black life in an anti-Black context. However, by repeatedly gesturing toward Afro-modernist futures in which the negotiation of the self need not take place at the expense of any excepted Black community, I hope to have moved us closer to such a reimagining than we previously were. Moving further will mean asking new questions. How do women fit into and reshape the cultural genealogy of neo-bohemian hip-hop, and the broader genealogy of hipness? What similarities can be observed in neo-bohemian rap made by men and women, and what are the differences? What new critiques of music studies and Black studies come to the surface when we gain what Spillers (1987, 80) calls “the insurgent ground as female social subject”? To answer these questions will require starting over and reclaiming my reclamation of hipness. For now, let me simply gesture toward some possible routes to doing so that would appear to work obviously within the analytical frameworks that I have developed, while acknowledging that pursuing these routes would inevitably, and productively, break these frameworks apart.

Indeed, although I structure my study of neo-bohemian hip-hop around Black Hippy, the genre label could equally apply to a much wider body of artists whose stars were rising around the same time as that of Black Hippy, and who have frequently collaborated with members of the collective. Passing references to Danny Brown and Chance The Rapper from Chapter One could be developed. Top Dawg Entertainment’s own SZA — who, while not a member of Black Hippy, also

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works closely with its members — is another obvious point of comparison, with her 2014 song

“HiiiJack,” for instance, marking her own engagement with the HiiiPoWeR movement (see Chapter

Four). The music of Jhené Aiko, tellingly referred to by cultural commentators as “PBR&B” — after the Pabst Blue Ribbon lager popular amongst U.S. hipsters — to connote its hip character (see

LeConte 2014), would appear to be a particularly good (and disruptive) fit. Aiko’s debut EP, Sail Out

(2013), exemplifies her close connection to neo-bohemian hip-hop, with songs featuring Kendrick

Lamar (“Stay Ready”) and Ab-Soul (“WTH”). Meanwhile, her hybridizing vocal delivery, exemplified on songs like “The Vapors,” demands a revisiting of my discussion of Soul’s melodic flow style from Chapter One, occupying what Steingo might call an undecidable position, somewhere between pop singing and rapped flow. Further still, and again recalling the work of Black

Hippy, she lyrically connects this distinctive vocal sound to marijuana use (hence, “the vapors”), while thematizing the drug’s liberatory potential: “You got me so high, up, up, and away we go/

Racin’ to the sky, I’m feelin’ unfadable.” Meanwhile, in an alternative reading of the song, such expressions transform into lustful expressions of desire for the song’s addressee, culminating in a drug-infused hypersexuality, encapsulated in the chorus by Aiko’s seductive repetition of the double entendre, “can I hit it again?”

Over time, a younger generation of artists has also taken up the neo-bohemian mantle.

Consider, for instance, the work of Vince Staples, a young, Long Beach-born rapper whose thug narratives, delivered through a highly musical flow style over experimental beats, strikingly recall the work of Kendrick Lamar (check out 2017’s “Yeah Right,” featuring Kendrick himself). Meanwhile, in 2015, Brooklyn’s Joey Bada$$ brought neo-bohemian style to the East Coast with his debut studio album, B4.Da.$$. Throughout, Joey uses sung/percussion-effusive flows to bring performances of hip apriorism crashing into contact with thug life affirmations in a manner

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strikingly reminiscent of Ab-Soul.1 On “Piece of Mind,” he makes the intercoastal connection to the

Black Hippy crew explicit with a shout out to the collective’s grooviest member: “(from Flat-)bush to Figg Side, I was a schoolboy, too, hoppin’/ Trains I just missed my cue [Q].” Finally, on “OMG”

(2017), Vic Mensa, a young (seemingly) conscious rapper from Chicago, with a close relationship to

Chance The Rapper, makes use of flow (and beat) palimpsests on Kanye West’s “Diamonds from

Sierra Leone (Remix)” (2005) and “Barry Bonds” (2007), to carve out a relationship not to neo- bohemian hip-hop, but rather to Kanye the postmillennial Black hipster, thus negotiating his own space within the Black bohemian tradition.

As each of these artists makes clear, the cultural genealogy of neo-bohemian hip-hop that I have traced in this dissertation remains open to expanding and reshaping. In closing, then, it seems fitting to return to what I have repeatedly figured as the most direct point of both influence and opposition through which neo-bohemian rappers have staked their claims to hipness — namely, the tradition of jazz/bohemian rap. Indeed, in capturing the radically democratizing and liberating potential of neo-bohemian hip-hop, I have been continuously critical of what I view as the relatively bourgeois, conservative aesthetics and politics at the core of its generic forebear. And yet, as Eithne

Quinn reminds us, “if the black bourgeoisie (along with many other mainstream commentators) has rebuked and scapegoated gangsta rappers as symbols of wider social problems, this same group has been at least as misrepresented and misused by gangsta artists,” meaning that “the force of gangsta’s

[and its defenders’] anti-middle-class, anti-assimilation invective nonetheless draws on new kinds of class identity, tension, and resentment” (Quinn 2000, 212–213). Likewise, Bryant K. Alexander counters the sort of critique that I have made of jazz/bohemian rap’s constraining racial politics by

1 Indeed, Joey Bada$$ worked closely with Ab-Soul on the former’s 2012 B-side, “Enter the Void,” where the two rappers discuss the third eye at length (see Chapter One). The pair later reprised this discussion on Ab-Soul’s “Tree of Life” (2014). In 2019, members of Joey’s own hip-hop collective, Beast Coast, released their debut studio album Escape From New York, on which “Left Hand” comprises, to my ears, an extended flow palimpsest on Ab-Soul’s “Terrorist Threats” (2012).

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stressing the need to develop more nuanced representations of so-called “boojie” Blackness, in order to avoid subjecting its exemplars to the same politics of constraint:

“The criteria that are used to evaluate and determine the charge of being boojie establish a trap for all black people in that they restrict the range of performing blackness to a limited space of what is socially, if not culturally, acceptable. For many black people such limitations actually threaten the possibility of their exploring the range of black performativity: What new and expansive ways could they perform themselves within their own skin? This is particularly challenging if the accusation of being boojie is reductively linked with educational attainment, where black people live, their social engagements, class distinctions, attitudes toward social issues and relational interactions with other black people, or the ways in which they speak and carry themselves in the world” (Alexander 2011, 309–310).

While I have attempted to limit my critique of jazz/bohemian rap to the harm that its aesthetics and politics do to less powerful Black communities, Bryant’s words encourage me to explore how neo- bohemian rap’s politics of Black liberation have extended back out to the bohemian tradition on which the new genre so directly draws.

In November of 2016, as I was working out the relationship between jazz/bohemian and neo-bohemian hip-hop, A Tribe Called Quest released their final album, an homage to the late Phife

Dawg, We Got It From Here… Thank You 4 Your Service. A striking display of the complex temporal disjunctions of Afro-modernity, the album works sonically to retrace the cultural genealogy of neo- bohemian hip-hop from the ground up, as the seminal jazz/bohemian rap crew return to their own nineties aesthetic and then themselves depart from it in light of what’s come since — which, indeed, must be understood as their own progeny. In the face of an encroaching populist white nationalism spearheaded by the impending incumbency of Donald Trump, Tribe appeared to return to and reconfigure their politics of racial authenticity to make room for a far broader array of Black experiences.

Focusing on the album’s opener, “The Space Program,” the song appears from the outset to rely on the same Afrocentric ludicities, black nationalist-inspired samples, and calls for social unity that permeated Tribe’s early output:

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“It’s time to go left and not right Gotta get it together forever Gotta get it together for brothers Gotta get it together for sisters.”

And yet, as the opening chorus develops, these recognizable jazz/bohemian features collide with a far more inclusive image of Blackness that includes structuralist — even Afro-pessimist — realism

(“for mothers and fathers and dead niggas”) and the embrace of abjection (“for non-conformists, one hitter quitters”), and which self-consciously places widely-maligned Black celebrities alongside revolutionary icons (“for Tyson types and Che figures”). The artists that once condemned “Phony

Rappers” who depend on drugs to write rhymes (see Chapter One) now brag about “drinkin’ Cisco” and “pourin’ Henny and Smirnoff.” Where they once eschewed crass commercialism, they’re now

“chillin’ with the gold microphone cords” and “grip[pin’ their] balls every time [they] stuntin’ on tour.” As Tribe invites its listeners to “move on to the stars,” the iconic bohemian rap group appears determined to see to it that, this time around, nobody gets left behind.

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