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!)

Confessions of an Assessment Skeptic

At a recent AACU conference and President Obama's State of the Union address, there was more talk about assessment (okay the president did not really talk about it directly) and how we need more information to evaluate educational institutions and determine which ones are good and deserving of more public money.

I must admit being ambivalent about assessment. Although I don't rely on quantitative data or analysis in my research, I think that most proponents of assessment oversell the value of this data/analysis and underestimate the real cost of and effort in producing this information. I must confess, I am an assessment skeptic! Despite being pretty engaged with assessment over the past decade, I am fairly cautions about what it can accomplish and how it can and will be deployed.

I am sure I am missing something important here, but I think the general argument is:

If we government, employers, prospective students, and the parents of prospective students have more information about outcomes, then these people will make better choices about their education.

This argument seems to rely on a number of unspoken assumptions:

(1) students, employers , and governments make rational decisions related to college.
(2) academic achievement (as opposed to convenience, potential earning power, location, athletics, campus social life, etc) are the main factors in shaping decisions about college.
(3)ll institutions (and/or majors) have similar educational goals and thus can be usefully compared.
(4 the primary concern of campus administrators is academic quality (as opposed to budgets, fundraising, enrollment growth, etc)

There is a part of me that really wants to believe in assessment and the promise of a rational conversation about student learning outcomes (after all I am a notorious idealist).

However, my pragmatic side looks at the rest of our capitalist society and thinks about the general irrationality of our stock market and our capitalist system (e.g. the housing and dot.com bubbles - not to mention CEO pay) and wonders why these other areas of our economy have failed to adopt the kind of assessment models proposed for colleges and universities. Just as an aside, I wonder what Walmart (or Target, Kohl's, or K-mart) would be like if consumers applied some sort of assessment measurement tool to its products. I think that most consumers value efficiency and economy over actual achievement - isn't that the whole business discussion about price points and convenience? My guess is that most consumers of higher education rely on their own formula that takes into account a series of factors from convenience to social life to locale to major to reputation to actual quality.

OK, I have probably gotten off track here. It seems to me that the call for assessment is really a an acknowledgement of the failure of the employment market and the behavior of college students (and their families). Neither employers nor college students make good choices and the government is left paying an increasing amount of money to more colleges each year.

I have come to the very tentative conclusion that the assessment movement is failing for a pretty classic fallacy: confusing a means for an end. Assessment proponents appear to believe to have a transformed the process of assessment (or some kind of rational rating or evaluation system) into goal in and of itself. The problem is that the mere existence of information does not mean people will act on in it, they really want that data, or that academic excellence is the main point of college. Moreover, like any market, some sellers focus on low-quality, low-cost education while other sellers will inevitably focus on a different market segment that desires high-quality, high cost "luxury" goods.

My second tentative conclusion is that assessment proponents have failed to understand the nature of the scientific method and statistical analysis: (1) statistical data must be interpreted, (2) the results are only as strong as the inputted data, (3) they frequently give you only probabilities, not eternal verities, and (4) past performance (a la the stock market) does not determine future results, especially as colleges and universities respond to all sorts of situations. Consider how economists continue to struggle to understand and the predict the economy despite a bevy of statistical models for evaluating the health and future of the economy.

I don't think assessment is necessarily a bad thing. (In fact, I have improved my teaching and/or learned stuff about what was happneing in my clas). I just don't thing it is a silver bullet that can cure everything that ails higher education. Moreover, it is a pretty convenient whipping boy or straw man because who wants to defend academic mediocrity or a second-class education? However, the underlying premise is that if we only had more data, then folks would stop making bad choices about higher education. If this were true, then how come consumers continue to make so many unhealthy and inefficient choices when it comes to everything to fast-food to cigarettes?

I really believe that higher education can improve. I am just not sure if the assessment movement is the always the right way to promote quality! It also takes faculty away from what they do best: profess their fields.

I really wish I had the answers to the questions that the assessment movment raises, but I don't. And neither do they.

Technology, Productivity, and Teaching

The common wisdom is that technology increases productivity. If this is true, how come I feel more scattered (in my teaching) than usual after adding blogs and a message board to my classes?

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.

Corporate Free Speech?

As will probably be featured in newspapers and television news over the next 24-48 hours, the United States Supreme Court decided Citizens United vs. FEC http://www.supremecourtus.gov/opinions/09pdf/08-205.pdf. The decision is pretty complicated, largely because elections law is pretty complicated, and relies a lot of legislative interpretation and some analysis of existing case law. In spite of all that, the headlines will probably read something like "Court upholds Free Speech for Corporations." In large part, this is a correct interpretation and one that the court clearly wanted to endorse as the court engaged in a whole lot of interpretative gymnastics to clear away all sorts ways to sidestep the case.

Because this blog is focused on critical thinking, I don't want to review the decision in toto or evaluate its strengths or weaknesses. Rather, I want to focus on an underlying assumption that is pretty settled within law: corporations have or should have constitutional rights.

While I don't think this assumption will change in law anytime soon, it still is something worth considering and evaluating.

As I understand rights, their purpose is to protect individuals and/or people against intrusions from the state. Most justifications of rights hinge on the sanctity and/or moral worth of human beings. It is not uncommon for folks to frame most "rights talk" in the language of human rights. So the jump to corporate rights does not have a clear philosophical foundation. As a historical matter, while corporations existed when the United States was founded, the founders did not really think that they ought to possess rights.

Corporations (or unions and PACS) are legal fictions, not real persons. The move toward a legal recognition of their rights underlines the precarious nature of "rights" talk in the United States. So, for example, actual people, such as felons, illegal immigrants, and in some cases children, lack many "rights" while legal fictions such as Citibank, NBC or Ford posses them.

One consequence of applying rights talk to corporations, is that we view them as moral actors (and this is a good thing). But another consequence of this application is that it completes the shift from the recognition of human rights to something more akin to citizen rights. In other words, rights seem to follow from the social recognition of belonging and participation than concrete being. This, to me, seems like a very slippery slope in which folks or entities gain rights because society recognizes them as rights bearers. Conversely, those without rights lack them because they are not recognized as legitimate rights bearers. I think this is pretty circular and it seems to leave those without social recognition with little recourse.

Another consequence of these linguistic and conceptual shifts is that it requires us to create analogies from corporal existence to fictional entities. I know how to identify when a human being speaks or writes but I am much less certain how to identify when a corporation speaks or writes. At least in contemporary first amendments and election jurisprudence, speech gets transformed into the ability to spend money on advertisements and other things. As a result of all these translations and analogies, we have moved pretty far from the initial formulation and purpose of rights. So, please take the moment of this Supreme Court decision to ponder the current meaning and usage of rights and rights talk!

Reading with a Pen?

Classes begin today at Drury (Hooray! I think I am probably the only person excited to jump back into things)

Once again, one of my goals this semester is to help students become better readers and note-takers. Perhaps, goal is too strong of a word as I "want" to teach this skill but it tends to get lost in the shuffle.

So, I want to offer a few suggestions for students about how to think about reading:

1. Reading should be an active process, not a passive one. You need a pen or a computer to really read!
2. Reading does not begin when your eye glances at the page but when you begin engaging with the text and asking questions.
3. The first question should probably be "what is the main idea." When you locate a possible answer to this question, you should underline it, copy it into your notebook, or type into your computer. Also, you need to label it as a possible thesis. When you finished your first run through the reading assignment, you should review all the possible thesis and try to figure out which one is correct. If you could not find a sentence that contained the main idea, then your job is to write the thesis statement of the piece in your own words.
4. Once you have figured out the main idea, then consider what is the issue or problem the writer is discussing. Evaluate the strength of the connection between the problem or issue and the proposed solution or answer. Also note if this problem is a specialized one, requiring expert or specific knowledge.
5. The second task of the reader is to identify the main evidence or reasoning supporting the thesis or main claim. Once this evidence or reasoning is identified, students should evaluate the relevance, quality, and quantity of this evidence. In most essays, there is a lot of evidence. Your job is to really think through the meaning of this evidence. Like in #3, underline, copy, or type the most important and valuable evidence.
6. The third task of the reader is to determine if the writer recognizes alternative views. Does the acknolwedge that there is an ongoing debate about this topic or issue? Are you persuaded that the writer has complete command of the history of this debate or issue? Has the writer accurately characterized any alternative views or past scholarship on this question? Does the reading address the main concerns or points made within these alternative views? Are there any missing pieces of evidence or reasoning that you wished the author would have discussed? Frequently, it is in this "task" where you can find good paper topics and great questions for class discussion.
7. As you read, write down whatever other questions or concerns you have and jot down the kind of evidence you think is missing.
8. When you have finished "reading," review your notes or underlines regarding the main idea, evidence, and alternative views. Organize your notes or underlines so that you can quickly find these items for your class discussion.
9. Go back and look for any sentences that really nail the argument, stick out to you, seem wrong, or make you angry or frustrated. Save those quotations for possible use in a future paper or quiz.
10. Bring your notes or book to class for easy reference! (Hint: Nothing frustrates a teacher more than students who don't have a book or have no "evidence" that a student has thought about he or she has read).

Anyone who has other ideas or suggestions for how to read, please share them! I will be sure to pass them along to my students!

"Jay Z's Obsession with Warhol and Basquiat"

In a recent article at slate (http://www.slate.com/id/2241208/pagenum/all/#p2), Jonah Weiner examines why Jay Z seems obsessed with Warhol, Basquiat and Damien Hirst. Weiner concludes:

In the early '00s, thanks respectively to a broadening global market for rap and the hedge-fund-era rise of the superrich collector, both the hip-hop and art worlds were more flush with cash than ever before, and Jay-Z, Murakami, and Hirst were among the biggest beneficiaries, poster boys—and narrators—of the boom times. "I'm not a businessman, I'm a business, man," Jay-Z famously rapped. It could make a nice title for the next Hirst exhibit.

I found this argument fairly familiar, given I discuss Basquiat and the relationship between hip-hop culture and materialism in my book, Parodies of Ownership. I think that Weiner is generally right that hip-hop (not just Jay Z) is deeply concerned with ownership and the indices of ownership. However, I would disagree that the roots of this can be found in the early 2000s. As my book outlines, this has been a central issue since the founding moments of hip-hop. Perhaps, of more significance, I argue that it is they very aesthetic structure of hip-hop culture - not just the lyrics - where we can see this anxiety over ownership.

It also would have been nice if he would have looked at the history of appropriation in both hip-hop and contemporary art and how they seem to both rely on materialism and criticize it at the same time. I also think the article could have referenced the long-standing tradition within African American culture of arguing that only through economic success will social and political equality (i.e. power) follow.

I guess his article might be read to imply that knowledge, but the general tenor seems to be that Jay Z is unusually materialistic while lacking any self-consciousness about it. Again, I think the history of hip-hop offers too many counter examples (think all of the conscious and message rappers from Grandmaster Flash and Boogie Down Productions and Public Enemy to Mos Def, Immortal Technique, Dead Pres, and Solliliquies of Sound) to seriously suggest that Jay Z is somehow unaware of this ongoing critique of hip-hop's materialism or this longstanding debate within African American culture.

OK - I just had to get that off my chest!