Critical Noir: Game Done Changed
By Mark Anthony Neal, Special to AOL BlackVoices
Last year, black Harvard University professor Martin Kilson offered a stinging critique of the so-called hip-hop intellectuals suggesting that “Clearly, something quite awful has gone wrong in the intellectual character of the new advocates of hip-hop culture.” Less than a month after Kilson’s diatribe was published by ‘The Black Commentator,’ noted black author Hugh Pearson wrote an op-ed suggesting that the study of hip-hop had no place in American universities and colleges. Kilson, Pearson and others like John McWhorter, who Bakari Kitwana would later call “Rip Van Winkles,” are attempting to stave off what they perceive as an assault on the Ivory Tower by hip-hop culture.
Indeed, a year later, many are celebrating the recent publication of ground-breaking collections like ‘And It Don’t Stop: The Best American Hip-Hop Journalism of the Last 25 Years’ and ‘That’s the Joint!: The Hip-Hop Studies Reader.’ But the real revolution occurred a decade ago when three books were published -- Michael Eric Dyson’s ‘Reflecting Black,’ Tricia Rose’s ‘Black Noise’ and Robin D.G. Kelley’s ‘Race Rebels’ -- that legitimized the study of hip-hop and black popular culture in the academy.
Michael Eric Dyson had been an award-winning journalist before the publication of ‘Reflecting Black: African-American Cultural Criticism’ in May 1993. Quite a few of the essays in ‘Reflecting Black’ previously appeared in publications such as Z magazine, Tikkun, The Nation, Emerge magazine and The New York Times. The remarkable range of journals that Dyson’s early writings appear in are only matched by the incredible range of subjects that he covers throughout ‘Reflecting Black,’ including Spike Lee, Michael Jordan, the African-American sermonic tradition, Christian faith in American society, Afrocentrism, critical race theory and of course hip-hop. ‘Reflecting Black’ is a tour de force of interdisciplinary criticism and scholarship. As Robin D.G. Kelley noted in his review of ‘Reflecting Black’ for The Nation, Dyson is “able to see the diversity and hybridity of African-American culture, its gender, sexual and class dimensions, its jewels and thorns.” More than a decade after that review, Kelley reflects that he “loved Michael’s boldness as well as his political acumen and sense of humor.”
Tricia Rose’s 1989 doctoral thesis -- the foundation for ‘Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America -- is widely accepted as the first dissertation written on the subject of hip-hop. As Rose writes in the book’s introduction: “Most of the faculty [at Brown University] thought it was quirky… [W]hat worried them was that rap would disappear before I finished my research,” and “I wouldn’t have enough material to write about.” Of course hip-hop has become a global phenomenon and Rose’s ‘Black Noise’ is still viewed as the definitive scholarly statement on the culture. According to Dyson, ‘Black Noise’ is a “thorough, nuanced, intelligent, empathetic and critical work that loves its subject enough to both tell its truth, and to tell it the truth. That’s an often difficult task to accomplish, but Rose does it with style and aplomb.” Kelley, who has known Rose since both were graduate students and read early drafts of the book, remembers that “Even in those early stages, it was totally groundbreaking. She completely revolutionized my thinking about popular culture and hip-hop, in particular, and she literally launched the field of critical hip-hop studies.”
Unlike Dyson and Rose, Kelley’s ‘Race Rebels: Culture, Politics and the Black Working Class’ was not his first book -- Kelley’s ‘Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists During the Great Depression’ was published in 1990. What both books share is Kelley’s unyielding commitment to provide portraits of the black poor, working class and black youth creating a world that is empowering and sustaining, such as the attempts of black youth in Birmingham, Ala., to democratize public transportation in the South a decade before Rosa Parks’ historic stand in Montgomery. In the book’s most important chapter, “The Riddle of the Zoot: Malcolm Little and Black Cultural Politics During World War II,” Kelley uses the life of a pre-Nation of Islam Malcolm X to explore the connections between black youth culture in the 1940s, be-bop and political resistance. The chapter may be singularly responsible for emboldening younger scholars to take serious the political connotations of so-called popular culture. Dyson notes that “Kelley’s corpus represents the most brilliant, progressive and comprehensive body of work done by a historian of black, working and diasporic peoples. His relentless, exhaustive scholarship is nothing short of breathtaking -- both in style and substance -- and his work yields fresh insight on nearly every page.”
Gil Scott-Heron, the legendary street poet and grandfather of hip-hop, once observed that the “Revolution Will Not Be Televised.” That may indeed be the case, but in the field of hip-hop studies, the revolution was published a decade ago.
Nov. 24, 2004