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

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 by Maxwell Lewis Williams August 2020 © 2020 Maxwell Lewis Williams 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. iii 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 iv 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 v 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 vi 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. vii 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). 1 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.

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