Linguist and commentator John McWhorter brings his formidable analytical skills to bear on a subject some will think unworthy: hip-hop music and its fawning academic acolytes who exaggerate its revolutionary potential.
Because McWhorter has earned a reputation as a leading member of the small tribe of black conservative intellectuals, some readers may suspect that his new book is simply another screed against the putrid content and perverse, anti-social influences of hip-hop. It is not.
“This is not a book about whether hip-hop is good or not,” McWhorter writes. “I am not interested in devoting a whole book to telling people there is something ‘bad’ about the music they love, especially since I like a lot of it myself.” Nor is McWhorter “arguing that hip-hop causes violence or anything else associated with inner-city problems.” He doesn’t believe it does.
What he rails against is the notion that hip-hop is political in any meaningful way, rejecting the widespread notion of hip-hop fans such as Cheryl Fields, in her book “Rap Music and Street Consciousness,” that rap “is a powerful tool of dissuasion from social ills.” McWhorter disagrees. “Rap has never demonstrated anything of the sort,” he writes, insisting that the only powerful things about it are its beat and its volume. “Beat and volume, however, are not results,” and politics is about working for results.
Another of the “hip-hop intellectuals” who is a frequent target of McWhorter’s jibes is commentator Michael Eric Dyson, who has argued that hip-hop can “play a vital role in inspiring young folk to become politically astute” and that “it can help alter the mind-set of the masses; it can help create awareness of the need for social change; it can help dramatize injustice; and it can help articulate the disenchantment of significant segments of the citizenry.”
McWhorter is too kind to say that “the masses” went out of style about the time of the Nazi-Soviet pact, but he does say that “what Dyson means here by ‘politically astute’ is . . . indignantly leftist,” that in Dyson’s view “America is a profoundly racist society in which people’s concerns are ‘unheard,’ and what needs to happen is white people ‘finally listening.’ ” And, he adds, “I suspect that this idea of black people as ‘unheard’ is part of what makes people who think this way entertain the notion that hip-hop can be politically transformative.” After all, he notes, “the music is loud. It’s hard not to hear it.”
McWhorter’s central argument is that “hip-hop is all about the beat, but real world activism is all about the work.” There is nothing that “hip-hop music or hip-hop ‘culture’ has to offer black America in terms of political activism.” The only meaningful politics, he says, are “politics that have a chance of bearing fruit and that are designed to help people in the real world.”
Hip-hop politics, for McWhorter, is puerile, self-indulgent “posturing.” It “is not about forging a revolution. It is about sticking out its tongue.” It is “at heart all about acting up for its own sake . . . its true soul is rhetorical testosterone wielded for thrills” and the goal is “wonderful, raucous noise.” Hip-hop may be full of sound and fury, McWhorter argues, but it signifies nothing, at least nothing of any use politically.
Regarding police treatment of young black men, for example, McWhorter rejects what he regards as the typical message of Da Lench Mob’s “Guerillas in the Mist” and Ice Cube’s “AmeriKKKa’s Most Wanted” that “blacks need to, somehow, fight the police – or at least get back at them with attitude.”
But simply complaining to a beat “does not have a significant effect.” Criticizing Ice Cube’s “F – – – tha Police,” he drives that point home: ” ‘Cops hate us cops hate us cops hate us cops hate us cops hate us cops hate us cops hate us and we hate them’ is pretty crude as political statements go. It has nothing to do with creating the dawning of a new day for black people.” This statement, he notes, “is probably the most prominent ‘political’ one in rap music,” but it represents “a ‘politics’ that has nothing to do with doing something – or even suggesting what might be done. If this posturing is a ‘politics’ black America should be proud of,” he concludes, “then black America is accepting nothing as something, stasis as progress, gesture as action.”
McWhorter provides chapter and verse (or at least verse) of the same empty political posturing in hip-hop raps on a host of social issues. Take The Roots’ “False Media”: “If I can’t work to make it, I’ll rob and take it” because I’m “a monster y’all done created.” Rather than criticizing its violence, McWhorter responds by quoting statistics proving work is available to those who want it and adds, “their views do not move us forward. Apprised of what they tell us, we are not in a position to help people. We are simply informed that, well, ‘Sheeeeittt!’ “
On hip-hop treatment of education, he quotes Dead Prez’s “They Schools” on “Let’s Get Free” – “All my high school teachers can suck my d – – – / Telling me white man lies, straight bulls – – -!” – and Pete Rock’s and C.L. Smooth’s line from “Anger in the Nation” on “Mecca and the Soul Brother” that ” ‘library’ broken down is ‘lies buried’ ” and television is “tell-a-lie vision.” McWhorter, of course, abhors the rejection of learning implicit in these messages and notes that they cannot be the basis of any successful political movement.
I admire McWhorter’s conception of politics as constructive social action, not self-promoting posturing, but I fear he underestimates the political power of pure rhetoric, untethered to concrete plans and programs. Consider, for example, the success of Sen. Barack Obama and his lyrically delivered but programmatically vague promise of “Change,” accompanied by a shouting chorus of “Yes We Can!”
Vibe magazine has already turned Obama into hip-hip icon “B-Rock,” and the stodgily liberal American Prospect as early as last spring anointed Obama “the first hip-hop presidential candidate,” gushing that “Obama has positioned himself as the straight-talking community organizer who wants to rise above politics and accomplish real change in the way this country operates. Is it any wonder that hip-hoppers like Common and Talib Kweli have come out in full force for him?”
No, it isn’t.
John Rosenberg blogs on race and related issues at discriminations.us
All About the Beat
Why Hip-Hop Can’t Save Black America
by John McWhorter
Gotham Books