From: isbell@ai.mit.edu (Charles L Isbell)
Newsgroups: alt.rap,soc.culture.african.american
Subject: That absorbed culture (was Re: Martha & slang)
Date: 7 Apr 92 17:00:10 GMT
	<2APR199213505487@utarlg.uta.edu> <1992Apr4.225339.9151@athena.mit.edu>
	<5APR199200534722@utarlg.uta.edu>
Followup-To: alt.rap
Organization: MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory
In-reply-to: b790zcd@utarlg.uta.edu's message of 5 Apr 92 05:53:00 GMT

I can't believe I'm doing this.  Watch follow-up's please.

b790zcd@utarlg.uta.edu (George M. Smiley) writes:
|ekundayo@athena.mit.edu (Enuma Dayo Ogunyemi) writes...

|EDO>This exposes the invalidity of your responses from this point on.  People are not
|EDO>necessarily "immersing" themselves in hip-hop culture.  It is not something that
|EDO>you have to jump into. Some people actually (believe it or not) are a part of the
|EDO>culture and both reflect and effect its evolution.  

|So what is the point. What has hip-hop ever done to further the cause of
|the black community. Seems to me that things are worse off than they were
|23-30 years ago. Hip-hop is just another in a long line of black entertaining
|white enterprises. You can argue that whites become educated when listening
|to PE or BDP but, either enough aren't getting the message or the message is
|forgotten as soon as the next tape is put in the tape player.

I think that's tragically simplistic, on par with claiming the same of
jazz or blues.  Personally, I couldn't care any less about what other
folk, White or Black, get out of this--I care what I get out of it.

And to call "seems to me that things are worse off..." a non-seqitur
would be an understatement.

[...]
|Assimilation is only part of the answer. You can't take a seperatists veiw and
|expect to make a difference in the modern world. You have to work within the
|system to make the system more equitable.Just what exactly does your so-called
|'dialect of English' represent? Brothers like M.C. Ren driving around town in
|expensive cars, wearing expensive jewelry, bragging about how many white cops
|he shot last week and bragging about how many women he slapped in public. This
|is what it represents to me. If you want to live your life like a rap star
|by emulating his slang you are certainly not going to make any positive 
|difference. On the contrary, you will just be contributing to the new black
|stereotype that portrays a culture concerned only with material possesions,
|concerned only with empty status, concerned only with style and not with
|substance.

Assimliation and separtism hardly span the space of cultural options
available to us.  Further, I would think even a cursory glimpse at
history would allow one to understand the strong cultural distaste for
assimilation, as well as its historical impossibility.  As should be
obvious, this does not lead to separtism, but something more akin to
the "Two Worlds" of Dubois, et al and, more practically, the regional
dialect/culture "code-switching" that David Johns speaks about so often.

And the dialect hardly represents Dr Dre who, along with N.W.A,
represent the more ridiculous aspects of ourselves, any more than the
mainstream dialect represents Ronald Reagan, Axl Rose or Jeffrey
Dalmer.  To extrapolate such indicates a myopic and shallow view of
that which is seen to be a deviation from the mainstream.

|EDO>If you *paid* any attention in your English classes, or got beyond SHakespeare
|EDO>and Chaucer to African-American Women's literature, African and Carribean
|EDO>literature, you would understand the significance of the development of 
|EDO>distinctively black dialects of english.
|EDO> 
|EDO>	From West African pidgin english to Jamaican patois and African-American
|EDO>"black english", our manipulation and conversion of the Queen's English has served
|EDO>black people in resisting and defeating colonisation and slavery.
|EDO> 
|EDO>	If you read the works of great  African (in the truest form of the
|EDO>word) authors like the Nobel laureate, Wole Soyinka of Nigeria, Chinua Achebe,
|EDO>John Pepper Clarke, Ngugi wa' Thiongo, Alice Walker, Ama ata Aidoo, Flora Nwapa,
|EDO>Adaora Lily Ulasi, Mongo Beti, Bessie Head, Buchi Emecheta, Ayi Kwei Armah,
|EDO>Cyprian Ekwensi, Oliver Tambu (I include names so you can educate yourelf further)
|EDO>you would observe a tendency of this authors to switch into the fore-mentioned
|EDO>dialects.  JP Clarke, Wole Soyinka and Cyprian Ekwensi (to give examples) have
|EDO>lauded works written entirely in dialect!


|So has does the hip-hop slang do any of the above ? The above people *were*
|concerned with making a fundamental difference in the societies they were in.
|What fundamental change is hip-hop making ? 

There's a term for this type of shifting of the argument, but I forget
its name.  You claim that the former is concerned with making a change,
which is separate from whether they make a change, then attack the
latter for not a making a change, which is separate from being
concerned with making a change.

This type of argument is difficult to argue against because it is
flawed at its heart (except of course to note the flaw).  Even so, I
perceive both an intent for many artists to affect a change *and*
limited success in this regard.

|Rap stars are concerened first
|and foremost with making money and any that is all they will ever be concerned
|with. Are you telling me that 20-30 years from now that a rap stars lyrics
|will be recognized as works of a 'great African author' ? I'll grant you that
|a few musicians working in rap are approaching 'art', but do you hear them 
|using slang to the degree that the youth of today are using ? Every KRS-1
|interview I've seen comes across as a proud man presenting himself in a
|positive manner minus the slang, but, that is beside the point. 

Clearly, you don't read enough KRS interviews.  Further, it seems
clear to me that KRS-One--at a personal level--is very much a part of
the hiphop culture, including the hard, vivid images, first-person
irony, and of course the real-life egocentrism that have always been a
part of the culture.

|If, you
|want to choose someone to base a new culture on why choose a rapper. Why
|not choose a leader. 

These are not mutally exclusive.  I am forced to wonder if you are
arguing thru simplicity or are simply unable see these false dicotomies
that you create.

|If you want to use slang, use the slang of someone
|who stands up for the black community every day and not just when it is time
|to make a record. 

The cart is before the horse, to overuse a cliche.  Rap stars are
using our slang--we are not using theirs.  Further, I suspect that many
would simply argue that they do emulate "someone who stands up for the
Black community every day and not just when its time to make a record"
even that person whom they emulate is a rap star.

|If you want to emulate a role model emulate a black doctor,
|a black lawyer, a black businessman, or a black business owner, but, please
|don't emulate a rapper or an athlete. However, my complaint is not with you,
|you obviously have a good sense of ethnic pride. I applaud you knowledge of
|great black authors and true black culture and I hope you meet with sucess
|in your studies.

You seem to simply devalue rappers outright.  This seems to me to be
obviously premature and overly simplistic.  Perhaps, we should take
your notion of "true [B]lack culture" to soc.culture.african.american
and discuss it there.  I would assert that rappers are, by definition,
true Black culture.  Further, I would assert they are, on balance, a
positive vehicle for cultural change.  And easily as postive as
lawyers.  Finally, I would note the obvious:   emulation of an
athelete or rapper need not translate into becoming a athelte or
rapper or absorbing all of the characteristics of each and every
rapper and/or athelete.  For example, I respect Malcolm X a great
deal.  However, I do not plan on being shot in Harlem or joining the
Nation of Islam or even going to Mecca.

|>>Somebody had to bring some reality into this discussion,
|>>
|>>George.

|EDO>Unfortunately, you're not the one.  Before you talk about reality you must delve
|EDO>deep into your history.  It isn't even sufficient to know your history, you must
|EDO>know your roots and *culture*.  I'm from Nigeria and I can bet that your
|EDO>knowledge of Nigeria and other *specific* African countries is apalling.
|EDO>Thus we are paraded with individuals who claim to be teachers and
|EDO>*scientists*[dialect] but whose concept of reality and making a difference is
|EDO>assimilation.  Even KRS-1 boasts of being number one in countries all over the
|EDO>world yet mentions only Japan, France and other non-African countries.  THe few
|EDO>references he and other *humanists* members of the rainbow crew (Brother J),
|EDO>treat AFrica as if it were one political unit.
|EDO> 
|EDO>I tell you, I think you better think about it.

|I have thought about it and thought about it often.Why build a new road if you
|can repave the old one. 

Too easy.  The old road may lead to nowhere that I want to go.
Further, even if it does, the tolls may be too high in aggregate.

|If you think that, by seperating yourself from 
|mainstream America, you can achieve equality, your in for disappointment.
|Knowing ones own culture is good, but, when trying to achieve a goal in someone
|elses culture it is better to know that culture as well. 

I suspect that most Black folx, and particularly the one's on this
net, understand mainstream culture all too well.

|Why should 'Amerikka'
|be concerned with your dialect, 'Amerikka' controls the dialect, 'Amerikka'
|dictates what dialect is spoken. 

This is obviously false, since everyone is not speaking the dialect.
Further, the proliferation of slang through mainstream Amercia
("homeboy", "jam", "diss" have spread like wildfire) clearly debunks
this.  Last time I checked, Black folx--whether they wish to be or
not--are distinctly tied to the American experience and the larger
culture.  More importantly, the converse is also true.


|Why try to get away from that ? Running from
|a problem is not going to solve it and speaking in a slang that is nothing
|more than an updated version of Hollywood 'nigga-speak' of the 30's-60's is
|certainly not going to help anything. What do think is going to happen to the
|hip-hop slang ? Like so many other things, it is going to be swallowed up by
|the white culture until it is indistinguisheable from the same. 

I'm confused.  You seem to be contradicting your earlier assertion.  I
think (as elected spokesman of all Black people <sarcasm>) it's fairly
clear that We(tm) would be happy to change the mainstream culture as
we have been slowly doing for the last several hundred years.

|It is already
|happening every day, whites buy more and more rap music every day, every
|month another 'black' film (see _Juice_) comes out of Hollywood  and is
|attended by whites. Why not forgo this drawn out cycle of whites taking a 
|predominantly black form of expression and making it their own and blacks
|coming up with something new (usually peddled by white vendors) and start to
|take white culture and make it black ? Note, I did not say forget ones own
|culture in the process. It is ridiculous to call hip-hop a black
|culture.

I'm afraid that I'm at a loss to extract a point from this.  One could
make the same argument about the Civil Rights Movements of the 60's.
So what?  Hip Hop culture exists.  That White companies are
repackaging it does not destroy it (especially since this just means
that White folx are three years behind the cultural curve, discovering
the "down" thing two years after it has been declared booty).

|Who controls the record companies ? Who controls the merchandising ? The
|same people that have always controlled them. If you think that by speaking
|in rap slang you are expressing yourself in a uniquely black viewpoint, you
|are sadly mistakened. What you are really doing is playing in the hands of
|those who wish to control you. Perhaps I was wrong in phrasing my dislike
|of rap slang in terms of 'laughter', now that I have thought about it my
|dislike is more 'anger', the comedy of fools eludes me now.

This doesn't follow.  You seem to be saying that since someone else
will use what you create, you shouldn't bother creating it because it
stops being yours anymore. Further, you seem to then assert that the
only real alternative is to simply become a part of the mainstream
culture.  But that's clearly absurd!

It rests on several fallacies, not the least of which being that it
requires the minority culture to be static--clearly not the case--and
the majority culture to be unchanged by its absorption of the cultural
output  of the minority culture--even more clearly not the case.

|Oh and please forgive any errors in syntax, I don't have time to proofread
|my post.

A straight line.  This is where flames come from.

Seriously, I've heard this all before and it was better stated.  I
reject your notion of cultural sepuku outright.  I view it as
historically incorrect in its assertion of reality and culturally
inaccurate in its presumption of attitude and inherent worth.

--
Peace.
                           "If God can do anything, can He float a loan 
                            even He can't repay?"
                                      -Blair Houghton
                           ------
Don't just adopt opinions |  \/  | I am Charles Isbell, Homeboy from hell,
      develop them.       |  /\  | living axiom and anonymous absolute ruler
                           ------  of the cosmos.