Gibbs Magazine
Urban Rhetoric and Power of Language
Deborah Dessaso
12.19.05
Republished
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.
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
Gates,
Henry Louis. The
Signifying Monkey: A Theory
of African-American
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."
Roberts,
Robin. "Ladies First:
Queen Latifah's Afrocentric Feminist Music
Rose,
Tricia. Black Noise:
Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary
Hanover: Wesleyan University
P, 1994.
Tate,
Greg. Flyboy in the
Buttermilk: Essays on
Contemporary America. New
York: Fireside/Simon and
Schuster, 1992.
