Avatar and Authenticity

My wife and I were probably the last people in the United States to watch Avator when we got a chance to catch the film last night. I had read that the movie relied pretty heavily on metaphors of colonialism and that seemed all-too accurate to me. Building on this theme, what struck me was how the main character, Jake Sully, learned how to become one of the indigenous people. My father-in-law compared it Dances With Wolves and again I would heartily agree. It definitely seems odd to me that this film, which seems to offer a major critique of the European and American conquests of the "new world," would be so popular. When academics raise the very critiques developed in the film, we are generally castigated for our "weird" ideas.


The only spin that I would want to add to all this commentary is that Avatar has a pretty interesting representation of authenticity. In the field of hip-hop studies (one thing I write about), artists, critics, listeners, and scholars endlessly debate the authenticity of artists. In the film, Sully was able to shed his human skin and become like one of the "natives." So much so, that he manages to become their leader. I could not help to think of white folks like Eminem, Beastie Boys, Brother Ali or even socially conscious rappers like dead prez or Arrested Development. All these acts, even if they attain significant popularity, must engage the authenticity question. I do wonder how Avatar comments on this situation. It seems like a lot of Americans enjoyed watching Jake Sully gain entry into the indigenous society and become an "authentic" member of the community.

On the other hand, it seems like white audiences in hip-hop tend to prefer more "authentic" (i.e. gangsta) forms of rap. I wonder why the film found commerical success but that same kind of success eludes many middle-class and/or white rappers. Obviously, Eminem is the exception here but perhaps his own career might help explain the popularity of Avatar. Eminem and Jake Sully perhaps make whites feel that they could cross-over this seemingly impossible racial/species barriers and be on the "right" or "moral " side of history. Their ability to cross these boundaries suggest that we too might be exception who can escape the rigid nature of racial divides. Perhaps, it is that fantasy that helps catapault both Avatar and Eminem to their stratospheric commerical success.

Origin Myths in Hip-Hop?

Last week during class, one of my students asked a question that has been sticking with me (and I am paraphrasing): "Was hip-hop a revolutionary art form or something that evolved from earlier movements?" I loved the question and it has been bouncing around my brain for the past week. How much does hip-hop owe to James Brown, George Clinton, Sly & and the Family Stone etc.? Are these guys the inspirations for or co-inventors of hip-hop? This question certainly provides a nice transition to evaluating how the reigning origin myths of hip-hop explain the messy reality of the movement's beginning.

This week's readings (from That's the Joint! and Can't Stop, Won't Stop) underlined this question about the powerful need for origin myths in hip-hop, whether they revolve around 1520 Sedgewick Ave, TAKI 183, or Grandmaster Theodore's accidental "invention" of scratching. What purpose do these stories hold? Why do these stories continue to get told and circulated? (FYI - a recent episode of PBS's "The History Detectives" examined the 1520 Sedgewick story). Hip-hop needs an origin myth perhaps to validate or legitimate its status, suggesting that despite a 30 year plus history and billions of units sold, it still lacks institutional recognition. The language of "revolution," "invention," and "origin" help create cultural capital and thus make it "worthy" of social recognition. Perhaps, this teaches us about the "life-course" of cultural movements.

The specific origin myth, however, is revealing. Regardless of the involvement of Puerto Ricans and Jamaicans in the earliest days of deejaying, graffiti, and b-boying, hip-hop gets coded as "Black." It seems like both the hip-hop nation and the general American public (and perhaps the global audience of hip-hop) have a deep desire to code or frame hip-hop as authentically "Black" as part of the origin myth. Another aspect of this myth is that is intimately rooted to urban street life even if some of its most successful acts (i.e. Public Enemy, Run DMC, etc) have pretty solid middle-class roots. It seems like the hip-hop nation is deeply invested in positing itself as oppositional (against dominant culture?) and this stance relies on the figure or metaphor of urban Black males. There is some irony in labeling hip-hop as "street" as hip-hop has become deeply commodified, making billions for record companies and millions for some artists. Certainly, hip-hop is bigger and more complex than this origin myth, but the myth has an enduring power. It probably is even growing as the hip-hop nation becomes even more heterogeneous!

I don't mean to suggest that hip-hop has not been profoundly influenced by African American cultural sensibilities and the historical debates within African American culture. Of course, it has. Rather, the question is how do American cultural assumptions about race shape our understanding of hip-hop and its history. Not to be too melodramatic but the stakes of framing the "origin" of hip-hop may very well be a key to shaping future understandings of race in American culture. Do we want to continue to view American history through a simplistic black-white binary or do we want to understand the complex and paradoxical ways that race, ethnicity, class, gender, and national origin intermingle and operate in American culture and society?

So, what is the origin of hip-hop? Is it the beginning of the Atlantic slave-trade, was it Clyde Stubblefield and the "Funky Drummer," was it when Kool Herc first became a DJ, or when taggers became writers? I don't know, but I do know that we need an origin myth for hip-hop (and just about everything else too) to help ground our understanding. But sometimes that origin myth hides as much as it reveals. It also can tell us as much about "our" fears and hopes as it does about the actual thing itself.

(FYI - I just realized that K'Naan's "Does it Really Matter" was playing on I-tunes when I finished my blog entry!)

Hip-Hop Scholars?

My "Hip-Hop Nation" class begins this week (Hooray!) One issue that really jumped out at me in the readings (from Know What I Mean and That's the Joint! especially) is the real anxiety that surrounds the whole concept of academic scholarship about hip-hop. On the hand, the very of act of having a scholarly discourse about hip-hop legitimates it and helps increase the cultural capital of participants. For these reasons, many folks support the increasing academic popularity of and interest in hip-hop. On the other hand, this increase in scholarship has the potential to undermine the authority of participants in hip-hop culture. Another downside has been that many academic folks with limited or partial knowledge about hip-hop have been able to voice their criticism and praise for hip-hop. Frequently, both popular and academic publications have accepted these scholarly pronouncements without carefully evaluating the data or scholarship upon which that commentary rested! I think that much recent work in hip-hop studies is pretty much eradicating this interloper problem.

I look forward to posing this question to students to see how they respond to the whole situation. In most academic fields, the debate about the relative authority of participants and observers is pretty settled. I am curious whether students will draw on analogies from other things that they have studied, such as history, literature, social science, art, or even biology and apply them here. What complicates this whole question is that race, class, and gender possess a much greater presence in this debate about the relation between the scholar and his/her subject-matter than in other fields. I don't have the answers but I really want to hear what students have to say about all this. I wonder if how students pre-existing knowledge about hip-hop will shape how they approach this debate!

My own take about this question is shaped by my own entry into hip-hop studies via being a lawyer. I came to hip-hop studies because lawyers and judges (mostly white) were making all sorts of judgments about sampling and the meaning of hip-hop culture vis-a-vis criminal law in the early to mid-1990s. Few of those judges, attorneys, legislators, or police officers had a detailed knowledge of hip-hop, but their views shaped how hip-hop has developed and been regulated by the state. For this reason, I have always been somewhat skeptical of the claim that ONLY hip-hop participants can and should discuss and analyze hip-hop. The challenge I have always struggled with is how to balance the two very different forms of knowledge being developed about hip-hop.

As I think about all this, my mind keeps coming back to the debate within American studies (the field where I received my Ph.D.) between those who viewed American culture as unique and exceptional and those who viewed American culture as following similar rules (regarding class, gender, ethnicity, capitalism, democracy, etc) as other countries. While the critics of American exceptionalism tend to rule the current day in the study of American culture, it appears that the exceptionalists tend to hold the dominant position in hip-hop studies. In other words, it seems that the consensus is that hip-hop is so unique that we cannot apply existing theories to understand it and we would be better off emphasizing the view of the actual participants. I am not confident enough to want to defend this position yet, but I am hoping my students will help me figure out if this analogy holds or if it simply an interesting but failed idea.

In Honor of MLK

I just returned from our local MLK celebration. It was great to see so many folks out. I am sure the nice weather helped!

To help honor of MLK, I have created a top ten list of things we should remember today:

1. Millions of people and thousands of leaders shaped the Civil Rights movement. While MLK was incredibly important and influential, he was just the tip of the proverbial iceberg.
2. The Civil Rights movement focused on changing ordinary things, such as access to pools, schools, and restaurants. Sometimes, you get the impression the movement was mostly philosophy or theory.
3. Per James Hal Cone's scholarship, King's success is linked to the popularity of Malcolm X. King's fame is as much related to who he wasn't as to who he was.
4. King's career did not end in 1963 with his "I Have a Dream" speech.
5. King was assassinated while helping sanitation workers improve their negotiating position during a strike.
6. King (and the rest of the civil rights movment)was much more successful in changing social institutions in the South and attitudes in the North than he was at changing social institutions in the North and attitudes in the South.
7. The Civil Rights movement was primarily a religious movement.
8. The Civil Rights movement relied on music (both gospel and soul music) and art to bring people together.
9. The NAACP litigation strategy and lawyers (including people like Thurgood Marshall and Constance Baker Motley) were a significant element to the Civil Rights movement.
10. The Civil Rights movement was as much about property and power as it was abstract rights. Consequently, we should not be satisfied with the rights revolution. We should look to the distribution of power and property to determine how much racial progress has been made.

The Harry Reid Controversy

As is probably well-known, Harry Reid privately told two journalists in 2008 that Obama was more electable because he's "light-skinned" and lacked a "Negro dialect, unless he wanted to have one." (This description is based on the story posted at the Root: http://www.theroot.com/views/was-harry-reid-right). Since that has been revealed by the journalists, there has been considerable discussion about Reid's comments and whether he should resign his position as Senate Majority Leader.

I am not going to address whether he should resign, but I do want to try to clarify (a key critical thinking step) about the issues swirling around his comments. It seems like there are a number of key points here:

1. Reid used an extremely dated term to refer to African Americans.
2. Reid identified that race mattered in the election of Obama
3. Reid identified that intra-racial differences matter and they can affect interracial communication and perception.
4. Reid identified that cultural practices, specifically language patterns, can change depending on the audience.
5. Reid noted that shifting and controlling one's linguistic patterns can affect people's perceptions (and in turn affect electoral success).

I think that we should hold our political leaders accountable for their language. While perhaps it is understandable that Reid might employ a racial term frequently used in his youth, Reid clearly made an error in his language usage. Again, I leave it to others about what the consequence of this should be, but he definitely should have apologized for that error.

As for the remaining issues, I think the distinction that needs to be made is whether Reid is making descriptive statements or prescriptive ones. From what has been reported, he appears to be describing reality, not promoting his wish for how things ought to be. Based on my assumptions as a professor, telling the truth or trying to tell the truth is not in itself of objectionable. If his descriptions are wrong, bring evidence that they are wrong. (I am happy to see that some folks, like those at the Root, are doing precisely this!)

While he may be wrong in his descriptions of contemporary reality, it seems like the outrage, especially from conservative media, over his comments has stifled a discussion about his observations about contemporary America. I think the controversy reveals, among other things, that white America is still so obsessed with colorblindness as the only strategy to approach race that any reference or discussion of race makes folks cringe. It seems like some of the uproar results from the fact that a white person appears to be acknowledging that race and culture matter.