Arthur Schechter

Rose/AFRI800

2/26/12

I don’t have money, I don’t have cars All I got is the truth and a coupl’a bars. -SpaceGhostPurrp, Mystical Maze

White Ignorance, White Irony • Black Knowledge, Black Practice • Grandmaster Flash's Kitchen • Making, Production, Poiesis • Users and Re-Creativity • Innocent Subversions and Subversive Innocence • DJ Kool Herc, Local Agent of Universality, Love, and Music, and Other Militants of Truth • Understanding Fidelity to the Black American Music Event • Hip Hop Itself

The aim of this paper is relatively broad in scope, but it is concrete. The contents will have to

gradually reveal themselves but can be all understood as part and parcel of a rigorous ontological

investigation of Hip Hop as the most robust and meaningful expression of fidelity to the Black American

Music Event so far (whose nature I will also attempt establish, drawing on Alain Badiou and Michel de

Certeau to help establish a relatively non-polar discussion whose character is neither modern nor

postmodern).

I will begin this attempt to elucidate truth in the best way I know how, namely, with a negation, a

recognition of an untruth or an absurdity. In an interview where he ultimately highlights and ironically

extolls the vestigial reactionary and elitist strains of thought of the Frankfurt School (Theodore Adorno’s

musical elitism and penchant for Wagner in particular), British ultra-right gadfly Jonathan Bowden levels

some criticisms of Cultural Marxism which actually, standing alone, point to real shortcomings in the

melancholic project of theorizing a practical world. He also makes a very legitimate point that some

“intellectuals who wanted to use Marxism” would no doubt retain their preferences for bourgeois cultural

production, which indeed we see ultimately constrained Adorno to his acute disadvantage. The criticism

can be summarized in a joke Bowden recounts which was told to him, ironically, by “a

deconstructionist,” that, “the bourgeois goes into life with common sense, the Marxist with his theory.”

This quip could easily have issued from a frustrated 20th century black radical after a hypothetical

meeting with the out-of-touch Adorno. An interesting phenomenon here, is the objectively undeniable

irony permeating this discourse of thought/life which seems to have no origin, in that the rantings of a

rightist sarcastically quoting a postmodernist to disparage Marxists could actually constitute a legitimate

critique from a practical emancipatory point of view of the inadequacy of Western thought in general to

begin to understand practical (here, Black American) life. This seems to be the objective being of the

irony at issue; that is to say, what do Theodore Adorno’s theory, a deconstructionist’s joke, and a British

fascist’s personally inflected abstract notion of “everyday life” have in common? Their very distance

from Grandmaster Flash’s kitchen, precisely the practice of everyday life, perhaps above all Black

American life in the 20th century. Adorno’s abstractions which abstractly see “standardization” Adorno

305 as an aesthetic shortcoming simply do not meet practically with the real situation which has

characterized Black American musical expression (the “standard,” bar form of Jazz of course having its

origins in martial tradition, that is to say structures of repetition being already at the origin a misuse, a re-

appropriation of marching band music, a white-european form with marginal rhythmic/harmonic

sophistication but still commanding in respect, by Black Americans, gaining, most importantly, singular

and formative access to a recognized Western mode of cultural production, “music” as such, and practice

facilitating broader Black Expression).

Perhaps we would do best in this negation to recognize the perspectival incommensurability of the

Western narratives with alternate kinds of experience, expressions of “Other” truths, ultimately still

uniting voices as disparate as cultural Marxists and reactionaries, ideology here no longer functioning in

terms of what is said, but what is not. What is not said, but implicit here, I claim, is that Grandmaster

Flash’s kitchen is somehow still not a locus of meaning or knowledge despite what he would claim,

namely, that the practice of life by a given Black American will necessarily be a kind of knowing, and a

kind of access to truth which is systematically abnegated, just as systematically in thought as

ghettoization is a juridico-legal and market synthesis, systemic in its implementation. We have only to

tease apart the knot between metaphysics and subjectively determined value judgment in Adorno to see it

fall apart (one has simply to introduce the Deleuzian-Zizekian notion of repetition as true creation to

completely invert his schema). Similarly we have only to examine the various situations presented in our

clips, Grandmaster Flash making art, dancers dancing, DJ Kool Herc narrating the idiosyncratic rupture

of afro-caribbean musical methodology in the Bronx changing the face of Black American Music forever,

a simple discrete act of his which spurred incalculable inspiration, to understand that no existing set of

Western theoretical descriptions have flexible or critical enough definitions of things like value,

enjoyment, good, truth, beauty, etc. to properly narrate this. Adorno’s categories fail, moreover, when he

fails to see the positive, productive potential latent in the consumption of a product, and standardization

as a medium for developing a more elaborate and subtle, practical social language. Music and

expression, simply put, can never be completely hindered by the commodity form and indeed a sublime

notion “above” the commodity form totally negates the possibility of subaltern voices, whose lives are

little more, economically, than the constant circulation of commodities, as Marx submitted was

characteristic of life affairs more generally under capitalism itself.

To want to apply hermeneutic is still a quasi-bourgeois, scholarly desire which has its place, which

must, but also certainly can recognize its superfluity from the vantage point precisely of this Other. If the

American, Black Other is forced to create, if at all, in a space of exclusion (a consequence of the

metaphysical white man’s “property right to exclude”), that created meaning will necessarily exclude and

rupture from the dominant explicit conditions of possibility, from dominant definitions. This, however, is

not a space of alterity or negation, but an exclusion of nothing but untruth, a space of consequently

unrecognized being, ultimately of surplus knowledge. In this sense, the Pharcyde interview where words

don’t mean what they do in the dictionary cannot be characterized negatively in any way. Signifyin

knows precisely that words mean their dictionary definition that a white man wrote down in the

American Heritage Dictionary, as well as everything that a black man here, or anyone anywhere

conceivably, could make them out to mean; the full recognition of the situation as such is what accounts

for this dynamic mode of expression (Alim 534, 540). Suffice it to say that Grandmaster Flash does not

“need,” in anyway, to have anything said about him for him. It is rather precisely this need which

characterizes his ability to say anything at all. The technological bricolage of turntablism as an art form,

stolen electrical power, street performance; one has only to begin to catalog hip-hop’s various features to

see immediately those which arose out of necessity, and moreover, their unosbcured being as such. Hip

Hop, in its various modes and techniques of production ranging from the linguistic-technical to the

techno-literate, comprises modes of production whose revelatory character already contains statements of

an implicitly political nature, and therefore can’t help but tell the Truth of its own originary urgency.

They also, however, create and manage a surplus.

Creative means of production are precisely means of knowledge-production, truth-production, and

desiring production. The material imbalance of power in a society necessarily reflects itself in discourses

and differing truths, some of which must be hidden in order for the privileged ideological discourse to

speak, not to remain coherent I would claim, but quite literally to be able to continue to incessantly

speak, instead. Lived black experience must speak for itself; quote Michel de Certeau on the productive

activity of people socioeconomically destined to “consume;”

The "making" in question is a production, a poiesis—but a hidden one, because it is scattered over areas defined and occupied by systems of "production" (television, urban development, commerce, etc.), and because the steadily increasing expansion of these systems no longer leaves "consumers" any place in which they can indicate what they make or do with the products of these systems… The presence and circulation of a representation (taught by preachers, educators, and popularizers) tells us nothing about what it is for its users. (Certeau xiii-iv)

I would supplement this with the statement that the majority of what something is, is what it is for

its users, who are in this sense its unrecognized revisers, creators, and recreators. I would also contend

that what has happened with Hip Hop in many ways renders moot and completes de Certeau’s

investigation for him, and that it was quite literally the previously unthinkable; namely, the securing by

impoverished urban Blacks of a space in which they actually could “make or do [something] with the

products” allowed them and be recognized in this practice, precipitated an entirely new and revolutionary

way of relating to the Truth, where every personally productive impression upon the consumption of a

cultural product (a parent's record, a social narrative) can gain expression and rise to technical

formalism..

Questions of authenticity, origins, community, and definitions becomes here distinctly simplified.

The agonistic or surreptitious characterization of reuse as cultural production, uniquely facilitated be

sampling in hip hop, is an ideological reflex which is already malicious: Rose states, “Rap producers are

not so much deliberately working against the cultural logic of Western classical music as they are

working within and among distinctly black practices, articulating stylistic and compositional priorities

found in black cultures in the diaspora” (Rose 95-6). There is no transgression here, only retroactively

so, when one creates transgression by referring to what are necessarily older, unfitting truths, which have

been built and expanded upon. We are compelled to contemplate what Lipsitz has called America’s

“white problem,” in the sense that from the zero level of judgment we absolutely cannot raise one

strategy employed to express oneself over another. Taste and judgment, rather, reflect subjectivity in a

situation. When power is involved, taste and judgment might extoll something which by its nature limits

its formal content and reflexively justifies this exclusion. This reflexive justification of limited, elite

aesthetic conventions serves directly as subjective expression of a meta-physical crisis (“the white

problem”) whose situational and material expressions are those of systemic disenfranchisement of an

excluded other.

Hip Hop, then, is the aesthetic component to a metaphysical injunction to tell the whole truth,

which is at once wholly black and wholly situational, and wholly positive in content when subjectively

observed with fidelity. What Alim identifies as “multilayered totalizing expression” is the spontaneous

rupture of truth from material intersubjectivity, a kind of discursive, active inclusiveness which is not just

different from Traditional Western metrics of creative possibility, but generically more capable of

revealing truth to people, “meaning [residing] in the creation of a continuum beyond audience and

performer.” (Alim 540)

Alain Badiou’s philosophy of the event states that an event per se takes place in an indifferent

situation (for Black Americans in the 20th century and today systematic material disenfranchisement),

“situations… nothing more, in their being, than pure indifferent multiplicities,” whose “structure… does

not, in itself, deliver any truths.” “A truth,” Badiou continues, “is solely constituted by rupturing with the

order which supports it, never as an effect of that order.” (Badiou xii-iii)

That is to say, distinctly Black cultural practices met with bourgeois mass-cultural means of

production and systematically undervalued positions of practical technical knowledge necessarily

revealed something new and unsaid, and could not but have taken such a form, could not but have been

something so uncharacteristically emergent. Hip Hop, as a concept, is a strategy of fidelity to the Black

American Music Event, one which technico-historically, one could argue, consisted in the first blues

recordings. Further flung and assuredly multitudinous cultural histories aside, the moments when

Subjects, in their materially disenfranchised situation, engage in a truth-telling practice, gaining critical

access to what de Certeau calls the “operational combinations” of culture (whose nature can be romantic,

political, or artistic, among other forms of expression following Badiou): this is what is at issue.

In this sense, abstract categories of identification such as Blackness, so-called “universal truths”

because of their indistinct qualities, are precisely valuable and lived as such only when really, practically

and particularly engaged. One could argue for the Evental status of American Black Music further if one

were only to point out the active consciousness in musicians of this distinct dynamism of truth and

expression, its true locus being a material and temporal expression of what has yet to be said. DJ Kool

Herc, in his love for his hood and the profundity and communicability of his musical insight, is truly a

“militant of truth,” according to Badiou. “The militant of truth,” he writes, “is not only the political

militant working for the emancipation of humanity in its entirety. He or she is also the artist-creator, the

scientist who opens up a new theoretical field, or the lover whose world is enchanted.” Grandmaster

Flash and other technical pioneers like Kool Herc certainly attain the title, among many, justifiably so, as

“scientists,” opening up new theoretical fields. Electronic music would not exist without these bricoleurs

and indeed saviors of industrially alienated, castrated media and technical practices.

Similar militants of truth are discernible at work in Chicago, elevating the practical legacy of

Ghetto Tech, House, and Freestyle to a new standard of technical formalism and frenetic, engaged dance

competition. DJ Spinn’s distinct Juke house DJing, lives “hand in hand… with footwork, one of the last

untapped (and resultantly, unfiltered) hood dance music styles in the world.”

(http://ripitup.co.nz/contentitem/feature-juke-and-footwork-from-chicago-to-the-world/1107) His music

has the effective capacity to transform Chicago public schools (http://soundcloud.com/dj-spinn-1) into

liberated autonomous zones, centers of congregation, healthy competition and athletics as opposed to

alienated, state-directed curricula, where violence is left at the door in fullest realization of the truth

telling capacity of the communal “house party” and hip-hop’s urban Black origins. Subjects in the

situation of the hood bear witness to its truths and create their own, living the eternality of their

subjective vision temporally, in fidelity to the Event, something truly with the orientation and coherence

to justly be called a Nation, of which Black Language is a focal point, but with a dynamic orientation

toward inclusion, ultimately, of truth, and exclusion of untruth, free of a petrifying notion of essence

which plagues other modes of identifying.

This is precisely the answer to the question of blackness in Hip Hop. Hip Hop is black. Whether

hip hop is actually something else instead is the wrong question to ask. Hip Hop is not black-or; it is

black in its origins, but fundamentally black-and. The exclusionary set is the White one, to which

Blackness is a concept, and cannot belong. Hip Hop is a space created by Black individuals as a space

for Blackness, and more. We may surmise that the exclusivity and elusively of the category “Real

Nigga” exists as precisely self-authorship par excellence, the ability to exclusively self-author the terms

of one’s alienation and transcend it, to communicate and thereby establish what is real. The possibility of

authenticity of the “white boy” is contingent, precisely on the extent of a white subjectivity’s ability to

perform the same. The extent to which a “white boy” could never attain the status of “real” is the extent

to which he is systematically spared certain real hardships which a “Real Nigga” knows how to

transcend, only because he has been systematically subjected to them. White attempts to, through music

or some abstract practice, be “black,” however, are all too often mistaken for real white incursions into

hip hop as a truth-telling practice (which go less noted), where the latter here is what is real and the

former what whites and blacks alike see and disparage as really impossible, a clownish white repetition

of minstrelsy as imminent absurdity. White authenticity (especially in Djing as opposed to narrative

expertise) is indeed quite possible as long as it is another, equally recognizable and valid way of relating

to what’s real, whereas it is certainly not really the case that a white person can have black experience.

Suffice it to take “cockney” as an example of what’s real for the British working class, as a

potential, partial synthesis, the tentative interplay of “two-tone” creating linguistic practice where race is,

at times, no longer a discernible factor in flow and performativity (Wiley’s My Mistakes features a white

and an asian emcee, both of whom share Wiley’s South London dialect). The partial nature, then, of all

identifying subjective practices must be identified, and their discreteness acknowledged. The only way

to judge any of them, however, is in their fidelity to Hip Hop as our contemporary temporal form of the

American Afro-Diasporic Musical Event and its generic function, the truth-telling function.

“Authentic philosophy begins,” Badiou insists, “not in structural facts (cultural, linguistic,

constitutional, etc), but in what takes place and what remains in the form of a strictly incalculable

emergence.” To be fully actual, to be a total Subject, then, “is to be a local, active dimension of [the

infinite work of truth].” Authentic Black Expression is thus a part of the whole set Authentic Expression,

by far the most fully actualized, and in fact paradigmatic and vital for the continued survival of culture,

already having revived a dead set of technical practices for the whole world to use as a musical medium,

and only continuing to force dormant expression into self-actualization. Market forces are certainly

ultimately a hindrance to the task. Rappers at the forefront are acutely aware of this and critical, Mos

Def preaching the doctrine of unconditional enjoyment, “fuck money, live up and get free y’all.” That

certainly seems to be the task at hand.

Sources

Adorno. On Popular Music. On Record: Rock, Pop, and the Written Word. Ed. Simon Frith and Andrew Goodwin. New York: Pantheon, 1990. Print.

Ali, H. Samy. "Bring It to the Cypher." That's the Joint!: The Hip-hop Studies Reader. Ed. Mark Anthony. Neal and Murray Forman. New York: Routledge, 2004. Print.

Badiou, Alain. "Author's Preface." Preface. Being and Event. London: Continuum, 2005. Print.

Bowden, Johnathan. "Frankfurt School Revisionism." Interview. Alternative Right. Web. 25 Feb. 2012. <http://altright.podbean.com/mf/play/sg7tf9/FrankfurtSchoolBowden.mp3>.

Certeau, Michel De. Preface. The Practice of Everyday Life,. California: University of California Press. 1984. Print.

Rose, Tricia. "Soul Sonic Forces." Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America. Hanover, NH: University of New England, 1994. Print.