Rappers are the next politicians. 

                                                                           The kids are listening to us.

                                                                                                         (Nefertiti 157)

               Recent innovations in electronic communications have produced a truly global community where language is becoming increasingly homogenous.  Few medium reflect the phenomena of the global community more than popular music.  Heavily marketed by a powerful music industry, "pop" music blares over radios and televisions all over the world.  One particularly influential form of popular music known for its distinctive rhythms and African beats is rap.  From its Jamaican origins to its current position as the reigning dialect of hip-hop culture, rap has transformed the political discourse of urban Black America.

            Traditionally, the urban rhetoric of Black America was defined by sermons and speeches of preachers and civil rights leaders.  Over the past 20 years, a new language has emerged from the bitter, angry, and dispossessed lives of many economically deprived African-Americans, who feel themselves trapped between a dominant culture that ignores them and a middle class minority that tries to silence them.  This anger has found a voice in a subculture known as hip-hop and its signature music, rap.

            Actually, hip-hop and rap as cultural and musical types are not new.  The book, From Juba to Jive:   A Dictionary of African-American Slang, defines hip-hop as "rap subculture; a cultural form; a type of rap with a heavy rhythmic music

style thought"  (234).  Rap has changed meanings several times over the past 300 years. Its meaning has ranged from "to con, fool, flirt, tease, or taunt" to "false oath" (376-377).  The book further describes the present use of rap:  "Since the late forties, rap has meant to hold a conversation; a long, impressive, lyrical social or political monologue; conversation as a highly self-conscious art form.  At least among black speakers" (377).

            In her definitive book on rap music, Black Noise:  Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America, Tricia Rose looks at rap as "part of a culture in real historical time, a culture that must be contextualized" (back page).  Rose studied rap music both in its cultural and social contexts:

Rap music brings together a tangle of some of the most complex social, cultural, and political issues in contemporary American society[. . .]  Rap music is a black cultural expression that prioritizes black voices from the margins of urban America.  Rap music is a form of rhymed storytelling accompanied by highly rhythmic, electronically based music[. . .]  Rappers speak with the voice of personal experience, taking on the identity of the observer or narrator.  (Rose 3)

            However one chooses to define it, rap music has redefined language and political discourse in the Black urban community and in marginalized African

communities around the world.  Rap music connects the dispossessed through its own stylized language.  Thus it reflects the "social aspect of language, which is an

instrument of communication and influence on others" (Perelman, Olbrechts-Tyteca 1072) and functions in a communal manner:

All language is the language of a community, be this a community bound by biological ties or by the practice of a common discipline or technique.  The terms used, their meaning, their definition, can only be understood in the context of the habits, ways of thought, methods, external circumstances, and traditions known to the users of those terms.  (Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca 1071)

            The firestorm that accompanied the beginnings of rap music was not without merit.  Frequently, rap lyrics encourage violence against society and authorities and are often virulently misogynist—the police and Black women are usually the targets.  Some people posit that several generations have been inoculated with an attitude that goes beyond bemoaning a sense of disassociation.  They claim that rap music leads to various forms of antisocial behavior including violence and sexual promiscuity.

            The power of rap music's language cannot be underestimated.  Rapper

Ice-T's album "Cop Killer" fomented such a backlash from police around the country that some stores removed the album from its shelves and the record company canceled its contract with the rapper.  Rap music can be heard on virtually every soundtrack of a movie about urban life, and it binds together urban blacks from New York to California—and beyond.  A look at rap's history may provide clues about its power.

            Although many people believe that rap is an American phenomenon, Frank Owen concludes that "a history of hip hop would be incomplete without some reference to Jamaica and the influence of reggae sound systems" (37).  Owen recalls the hip-hop experience of Clive Campbell, aka DJ Kool Herc, one of rap's pioneers, in his Kingston neighborhood:

Campbell still vividly recalls his boyish excitement each month when sound system-operator King George rolled into his Kingston neighborhood in the mid-50s, wheeling humongous speakers in wooden carts through the streets of lower St. Andrew, a respectable, working-class community wedged between posh upper St. Andrew and Kingston where the rude boys dwelled.  (Owens 67)

            The event didn't stay local for long.  Soon, the rhythmic music was being played in Black American discos and other meeting places—surreptitiously at first, with cassettes recorded and passed around by local musicians.  It took the mainstream record market nearly ten years to notice rap, for obvious reasons:  rap's reputation, in a manner of speaking, preceded it.  Outrage over its blatantly sexist and often homophobic lyrics caused many radio stations to censure the music.  Music Television (MTV), America's primary disseminator of popular music,

featured no rap music videos until white suburban teenagers discovered rap in 1989 (Rose 8).  White parents rose up in protest, some of whom formed a group led by Tipper Gore, wife of then Senator Al Gore,  that successfully pushed to have labels placed on rap albums that contained sexually explicit and violent lyrics.

            Despite these restrictions, the political discourse of rap music continues to reshape the global community, challenging traditional beliefs about power and authority such as Michel Foucault's theories on rituals of discourse that sanction certain people to speak for the society:

Rituals define the qualifications which must be possessed by individuals who speak (and who must occupy such-and-such a position and formulate such-and-such a type of statement, in the play of a dialogue, of interrogation or recitation); it defines the gestures, behavior, circumstances, and the whole set of signs which must accompany discourse; finally, it fixes the supposed or imposed efficacy of the words, their effect on those to whom they are addressed, and the limits of their constraining value.  (1162)

Rap music thumbs its nose at these hide-bound beliefs about who is, and who gives, the authority in civilized society.

            Like most political movements, rap music became the political voice of urban Black America through a series of socioeconomic events.  The widening rift between the dominant culture and economically deprived Blacks that began in the

1980s, the declining confidence in Black leadership, and the growing Black underclass is thought by many to be the kindling for America's next urban conflagration.  Michael Dyson suggests that the role of the rapper on behalf of affected Black Americans is significant: 

For the past decade, rap artists—who as informal ethnographers of black youth culture translate the inarticulate suffering of poor

black masses into articulate anger—have warned of the genocidal consequences of ghetto life for poor blacks.  Their narratives [. . .] communicate the absurdity and desperation, the chronic hope-lessness, that festers inside the post industrial urban center (163).

            In the tradition of the signifying monkey expounded by Henry Louis Gates in his pioneering study of black rhetorical discourse, rap music functions as a type of "signifying," that is, verbal jousting, in that it "epitomizes all of the rhetorical play in the Black vernacular.  Its self-consciously open rhetorical status…functions as a kind of writing" (Gates 53).  Like other forms of Black rhetorical discourse, rap music also functions as an emotional release valve.  Hence, not surprisingly, rap lyrics often castigate all forms of authority in the dominant culture:  the government, the police, the educational system, and corporations. 

For centuries, Africans and African-Americans have used veiled criticism in the form of innocuous lyrics to vent their hatred of the oppressive, racist rule by Western society.  In the past, White people who heard the singing of slaves, maids,

or Pullman porters assumed that Black people were contented.  This perception, of course, was far from reality.  Rose cites the historical use of "[s]lave dances, blues

lyrics, Mardi Gras parades, Jamaican patios, and toasts [which signify] the pleasure and ingenuity of disguised criticism of the powerful" (99).  More than merely a

means of blowing off steam, Rose explains that these distinctive forms of Black criticism "produce communal bases of knowledge about social conditions,

communal interpretations of them and quite often serve as the cultural glue that fosters communal resistance" (100). 

Despite (and sometimes because of) America's dominant role in the world music market, rap music has in many respects become a worldwide cultural phenomenon.  Rose describes the international drawing power of rap:

rap [. . .] draws international audiences because it is a powerful conglomeration of voices from the margins of American society speaking about the terms of that position[. . .]  Rap music and hip-hop culture are cultural, political, and commercial forms, and for many young people they are the primary cultural, sonic, and linguistic windows on the world.  (19)

            In many urban American communities, rap and hip-hop have become the dominant forms of Black culture.  Many of the popular rappers are young, college-educated, middle-class Blacks who have adopted the persona of streetwise, poor urban males who live in gun- and drug-ridden neighborhoods.  Hip-hop's influence

on American college campuses is so powerful that many Black male students try to look as "hip" as possible and thus prove beyond a doubt that, economic status and

parental values notwithstanding, they are part of the hip-hop culture.  This cleaving of rap music into educated Black America has produced what Gates calls homo

rhetoricus Africanus, that is, beings who can "move freely between two discursive universes" (75).

            If there is one roadblock to rap music's becoming a fully legitimate form of urban political discourse, it is the misogynist nature of one particular form of rap known as "gangsta rap."  To counteract this view, a number of female rappers distinguish themselves as pro-women rappers.  In her review of rapper Queen Latifah's music video, "Ladies First," Robin Roberts states that the video "[. . .] is part of a continuum of  Afrocentric feminism promulgated by Alice Walker, Zora Neal Hurston, and other African-American women artists" (250).  The significance of rap music videos for women, in Roberts' view, is that they "offer [female rappers] the opportunity to underscore their feminist message by offering alternative, positive images of women that contradict stereotypical images of African-American women" (250).

            In her interviews with a number of female rappers, Rose discovered that, although many of them articulated pro-women stances, most of them strongly resent the term "feminist" because it refers to a movement that often benefits White women at Black women's expense.  Rose further acknowledges that attempts to

form "gender-based alliances across race, especially in a racist society, is a problematic move for black women.  This [also] may explain black women rappers'

hesitancy in being labeled feminists" (177).  Consequently, Black female rappers walk a cultural tightrope between supporting a black women's political agenda and

refraining from the anti-black male rhetoric that many believe is being used by the mainstream media to divide the Black community.

            Given music’s historical importance to the Black community, one would think that the words and images of rap music would reflect Black men and women facing together the twin ogres of racism and sexism.  After all, from the earliest antislavery protests through the civil rights movement, Black women have been highly visible in the struggle for equality.  Greg Tate sums up the problem and solution:  "We have never in our history had a movement that wasn't well populated with female leadership" (283). 

Even so, if rap music intends to become the definitive voice of political discourse in the Black urban community, it will need to reconcile its ambiguous reputation as the voice of all marginalized people on the one hand and an unquestionably phallocentric form of discourse on the other.  This dichotomy is not a unique one.  Rose notes that such contradictions exist in almost all forms of social protest in the African-American community. For example, she notes that:  "The blues has long been considered a musical form critical of dominant racial ideologies and a resistive culture space for African Americans under harsh racist conditions.  Yet, blues lyrics usually contain patriarchal and sexist ideas and presumptions" (104).

            Political discourse in a marginalized culture is profoundly important, and hip-hop culture and rap music are powerful forces that extend beyond the bounds of music lyrics.  Toni Morrison says "the best art is political;" however, she also cautions against the tendency to produce "harangue passing off as art" (497). 

Thus, if rap music intends to continue its reign as a genuine outlet for all disaffected and isolated people in the Black urban community, its proponents must be personally and politically committed to a more inclusive form of political discourse. 

Works Cited
Dyson, Michael.  Making Malcolm:  The Myth and Meaning of Malcolm X.    New York City:  Oxford University P, 1995.
Foucault, Michel.  "The Order of Discourse."  The Rhetorical Tradition:  Readings from Classical Times to the Present.  Eds. Patricia Bizzell and Bruce Herzberg.  New York City:  St. Martin's P, 1990.  1154-1164

Gates, Henry Louis.  The Signifying Monkey:  A Theory of African-American Literary Criticism.  New York City:  Oxford University P, 1988.

Major, Clarence. Ed. From Juba to Jive:  A Dictionary of African-American Slang. New York City:  Penguin Books, 1994.

Morrison, Toni.  "Rootedness:  The ancestor as Foundation."  The Women That I    Am:  The Literature and Culture of Contemporary Women of Color.  Ed. D. Soyini Madison.  New York Coity:  St. Martin's P, 1994.

Nefertiti.  Essence Magazine.  May 1995.  157.

Owen, Frank.  "Back in the days."  VIBE.  December/January 1995.  67.

Perelman, Chaim and Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca.  "The New Rhetoric." 
The Rhetorical Tradition:  Readings from Classical Times to the Present.  1168-1171.

Roberts, Robin.  "Ladies First:  Queen Latifah's Afrocentric Feminist Music 
Video."  African American Review.  2 (1994):  245-257.

Rose, Tricia.  Black Noise:  Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America. 
Hanover:  Wesleyan University P, 1994.

Tate, Greg.  Flyboy in the Buttermilk:  Essays on Contemporary America.  New York:  Fireside/Simon and Schuster, 1992.