Boston Globe columnist Alex Beam fell asleep in 1986 and woke up a few days ago offended by academia’s sudden interest in Hip-hop:
The first rap-ademic was Henry Louis Gates Jr., then at Duke, now at Harvard, who provided expert testimony at the 1990 obscenity trial of rappers 2 Live Crew. Florida had tried to block distribution of the Crew’s hit album “As Nasty as They Want to Be.’’ The song titles can’t be printed here, but here is a sampling of their work — inexplicably overlooked by the editors of Yale’s rap anthology:
I [deleted] all the girls and make them cry I’m like a dog in heat, a freak without warning I have an appetite for sex, ’cause me so horny.
This kind of art criticism is really tedious. Judging Hip hop by Me So Horny or Jay-Z by the number of curse words in four bars is like saying we should ignore Shakespeare because of all the bawdy jokes, or reducing the entire canon of American film to the sex scene in Watchmen. Let Chaucer into the classroom, and the kiddies will all be running around trying to swive miller’s daughters, old black rams will tup white ewes, and Lorde knows what else.
But hey, if Beam were just another prude complaining about the hippity hop, he probably wouldn’t be worth mentioning. In discussing Grandmaster Caz correcting the Yale Anthology of Rap, we get closer to the actual problem:
Not surprisingly, Caz found errors in Yale’s version of his famous 1981 rap battle with the Fantastic Five. At one point in the text, Yale renders “And baby I want your address’’ as “And you’ll be so impressed.’’
More errors: Yale: “Like Reggie Joe on the seven-oh.’’ Caz: “Like Crazy Joe on the seven-oh.’’ The reference, Caz told Slate, “is to a South Bronx beat cop known as Crazy Joe, who patrolled 170th Street . . . a well-known figure in South Bronx street lore.’’
I’m glad we cleared that up.
Oh. Beam doesn’t actually dislike Hip hop because of its profanity or gender politics, he just can’t understand why anyone thinks it’s culturally valuable. Because even when it’s the content itself doesn’t offend his sensibilities, it’s actually still just about people who don’t matter.
Of course, every couple of years a few million people around the world eagerly await Jigga’s thoughts on life, art and politics, which is give or take just a little bit more than read Alex Beam’s Vanity Fair blog about squash that sounds super awesome and exciting. It does strike me as somewhat outrageous that academics are spending so much time studying the most dominant phenomenon in American popular culture over the past thirty years instead of devoting their efforts to writing about a sport that ranks in somewhere below competitive Pogs in popularity.
In the late 1990s, two California newspapers, the San Jose Mercury News and the Los Angeles Times, helped feed a conspiracy theory that the CIA had introduced crack cocaine into the state’s inner cities to keep African-Americans down.
No need! Rap and hip-hop, with their celebration of ignorance, gangster-ism — sorry, gangsta-ism — and violence against women are doing the job just fine. Forget the CIA. Rap moguls like Jay-Z and the businessman known as Diddy or P. Diddy (real name: Sean Combs) have got this one covered.
Is the idea that Hip-hop “keeps black people down” any less dumb than the idea that crack was a conspiracy, or is it just that more people say it?
