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An existential history of rap aesthetics and black identity
Roberto Domingo Toledo
I argue that the aesthetic history of rap is
simultaneously the history of the elaboration of an
authentic black identity. Much hip-hop research reduces
blackness to a narrow and fixed notion of African-American
ethnicity, especially when it comes to rap. Rigid
definitions of blackness are unable to account for the
facility with which other racially marginalized popular
cultures appropriate and revise U.S. rap music among other
elements of hip-hop culture. A flexible non-exclusive
definition of blackness, drawing on existential philosophy,
is needed to understand how stigmatized urban youth around
the world are able to identify with black popular culture
while retaining the particularities of their racial and
cultural identities. Existentialist thinkers have often
understood the construction of an authentic self as a
creative and aesthetic act, and existentialism from the
margins has focused more specifically on links between
authenticity and culture. This article will draw on this
notion of authenticity to help distinguish inauthentic
appropriations and relationships to hip-hop culture from
authentic manifestations of hip-hop in the elaboration of
postcolonial identities.
The history of what is today called ‘rap’ is
inseparable from the broader movement named hip-hop. This
cultural movement emerged in the 1970s in the Bronx when
DJs, rappers (also known as MCs), break dancers, and
graffiti artists of primarily Afro-North American1 and Afro-
Caribbean origin progressively came together in block
parties and public spaces and developed fresh cross-cultural
art forms. At the end of this generative decade, the DJ and
ex-gang leader turned peace activist, Afrika Bambaataa,
regrouped these four elements under ‘hip-hop’, a term
1 When specifying the culture of descendants of U.S. slavery, I use theterm Afro-North American in place of the more common term “African-American” to avoid confusion. Technically, South Americans andCaribbeans of afro-descent are also American.
already in use on the streets. ‘Hip’ means ‘to be in the
know, to be cool’ and ‘hop’ means to ‘dance’ (Bazin 1995,
11, my translation). Whereas other black cultural movements,
such as ‘jazz’2, are often remembered through the pejorative
names givent to them by white observers, this auto-
designation by one of the original trinity of hip-hop3
represents a rare moment of successful black self-
definition: ‘hip-hop’ and ‘rap’ remain official terms
throughout the world (Béthune 1999, 27).
However, numerous scholars argue that the origins of
the artistic and cultural elements of hip-hop predate the
1970s and are not restricted to the continent of North
America. In The Black Atlantic, Paul Gilroy criticizes the
nationalism of certain African-American writers:
We have to ask how a form which flaunts and gloriesits own malleability as well as its transnationalcharacter becomes interpreted as an expression of someauthentic African-American essence? How can rap bediscussed as if it sprang intact from the entrails ofthe blues? (Gilroy 1995, 33-4)
2 In his book on the Jazz musician and critique Sydney Bechet, Béthunenotes that the Bechet preferred the term ‘ragtime’ because Jazz,deriving from the term ‘jass’ meaning ‘sex’, was what white people hadnamed the genre (Béthune 1997, 19).3 DJ Kool Herc and DJ and MC Grandmaster Flash are the other two membersincluded within the trinity of hip-hop.
I will begin by accounting for rap’s most thoroughly
researched roots within the United States before proceeding
to clarify certain contributions from other cultures within
the African diaspora as well as the particularities of this
post-modern polycultural artistic movement that distinguish
it from earlier black cultural forms. In what follows, I
will draw from numerous scholarly resources from around the
world, and especially from contemporary research on hip-hop
in France, the second largest producer of rap-music after
the United States, and in Brazil where Afro-Brazilian
representatives of Brazilian hip-hop have conducted
historical research regarding similarities between the
transnational movement and earlier Afro-Brazilian art forms.
U.S. hip-hop within the history of black ‘transculturation’
In tracing the history of US black art forms that
preceded rap, I will focus on their transnational and
polycultural aspects, even if research in this area is
sparse and sometimes speculative. Following Gilroy, I argue
that ‘the precious intellectual legacy claimed by African-
American intellectuals as the substance of their
particularity is in fact only partly their absolute ethnic
property’ (Gilroy 1995, 15).
Gilroy’s colleague Stuart Hall also notes that
blackness has never been a static identity. He draws on the
US philosopher Cornell West to explain the interactional
dynamic of black culture:
Selective appropriation, incorporation, andrearticulation of European ideologies, cultures, andinstitutions, alongside an African heritage -- this isCornel West again -- led to linguistic innovations inrhetorical stylization of the body, forms of occupyingan alien social space, heightened expressions,hairstyles, ways of walking, standing, and talking,and a means of constituting and sustaining camaraderieand community. (Hall 1996, 474)
Stuart’s description of black popular culture resonates with
Bambaataa’s definition of hip-hop, the current inheritor of
black cultural history. In an interview published in French
after he had already added a fifth element—knowledge—to hip-
hop, Bambaataa outlines a range of cultural expressions
within the movement:
The term hip-hop refers to the culture that includesbreak-dance, freestyle dance, the graffiti arts,clothing style, street language and slang, the b-boyand b-girl look, and rap: the rappin’ way of speaking,its music, and its discs. (Bazin 1995, 20-1)
The inclusion of graphic arts and new technologies that have
transformed means of communication and circulation is what
separates hip-hop in Bambaataa’s quote from descriptions of
earlier black cultural movements. The African heritage that
Hall mentions still persists in high-tech and diversified
hip-hop, but not in a pure form. Moreover, these same
authors would argue that this African heritage has never
been present in a purified form in black culture.
Black cultural creations can be understood within the
broader context of the transculturation that takes place in
situations of colonial conquest. The Cuban anthropologist
Fernando Ortiz, considered to be the founder of Afrocuban
studies, defines this process of transculturation as forced
deculturation of oppressed cultures coupled with creative
neoculturation. Neoculturation occurs when oppressed
cultures successfully fuse remaining fragments of their
partially erased cultures with adopted elements of the
dominant culture in order to reaffirm a distinct identity in
opposition to the oppressor (Ortiz 1995, 102-3). In this
sense, the construction of an identity through
neoculturation, in response to violent deculturation, is a
profoundly aesthetic act. Existentialist accounts of
identity construction are particularly useful to clarifying
links between hip-hop and black identity since
existentialists (such as Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, and Miguel
de Unamuno) argue that existing authentically within a
community as a self-creating being is an aesthetic
endeavour. Here, I argue that the aesthetic practices within
hip-hop are particularly conducive to such creative identity
construction. Ortiz’s work concentrates on the descendants
of Cuban slavery and much of his writing focuses on Afro-
Cuban music.4 Nevertheless, he argues that any syncretic
popular culture that is the product of transculturation in a
colonial context shares the characteristics that Hall
ascribes to black popular cultural forms:
4 His book, La africanía de la música folklórica de Cuba (Ong 2004, 41) is still amajor a reference in the study of Afro-Cuban music.
Always these forms are the product of partialsynchronization, of engagement across culturalboundaries, of the confluence of more than onecultural tradition, of the negotiations of dominantand subordinate positions, of the subterraneanstrategies of recoding and transcoding, of criticalsignification, of signifying. (Hall 1996, 474)
Deculturation can occur in any colonial situation, including
the context of post-colonial immigration that characterizes
many nation-states today. Persistent stigmatization of the
new urban poor often leads minority communities to hide or
erase large parts of their cultures of origin, cultures that
are also largely neglected by dominant education systems.
The particularity of modern European slavery conditions,
according to the African-American philosopher Henry Louis
Gates, Jr., was the creation of a ‘dynamic of exchange and
revision among numerous previously isolated Black African
cultures on a scale unprecedented in African history’, the
creation of a ‘truly Pan-African culture’ (Gates 1989, 4).
The claim that enslaved African cultures were
previously isolated is questionable considering the
widespread cultural overlaps in the colonized regions.
Nevertheless, there is no doubt that slavery accelerated
translinguistic cultural exchanges between certain West and
Central African cultural groups. The aesthetics of this Pan-
African slave culture is characterized by specific
linguistic practices intimately linked to specific forms of
musical improvisation. However, this specificity need not
imply that other cultures have not developed similar
practices as well.
Though blackness is often defined in essentialising and
exclusionary terms, the history of black culture is one of
exchange. The search for an authentic black identity
parallels attempts at postcolonial affirmation of difference
in general. Much Latin-American philosophy, which is often
oriented around questions of postcolonial identity, examines
authentic identity formation as neither exclusive nor
assimilative. The Mexican existentialist5 philosopher, Luiz
Villoro argues that not just colonized cultures but rather
all cultures are interdependent and that cultural identities
cannot be constructed in rigid terms that exclude other
5 Villoro draws on many philosophical traditions, including analyticphilosophy. However, when it comes to questions of identity, he ishighly influenced by the existential phenomenology of José Gaos viaGaos’s student Leopoldo Zea.
cultures. Following Villoro, I argue that black communities
are not simply defined through ‘characteristics that
distinguish [the communities] from the rest’, but instead
through their ‘concrete manner of expressing, in a given
situation, their needs and desires, and manner of
manifesting their projects, whether or not these are
exclusive to them alone’ (Villoro 1998, 75).
Black cultural productions, like all authentic cultural
productions as Villoro defines them, often appropriate
foreign elements in order to creatively respond to current
circumstances (Villoro 1995, 95). Villoro’s definition of
cultural identity explains why hip-hop is not one
community’s exclusive property. Black aesthetic practices
have incorporated elements from outside the African diaspora
through the process of transculturation. In turn, other
racially marginalized communities may resonate with black
cultural productions and appropriate them in authentic ways.
The origins of US rap in black Signifyin(g)
Rap, the most stigmatized and controversial element of
hip-hop culture, has received the most detailed scholarly
attention than the other elements of hip-hop. Gates, well
known for his defence of rap, traces the African-American
literary tradition in general as far back as the colonial
invasion of Africa and the transplantation of Yoruba and
Vodun culture throughout the Americas and the Caribbean
through slavery.
The Yoruba people, based in present-day Nigeria and
Benin are members of a different linguistic family than the
Fon and Ewe peoples of Benin, Togo, and Ghana. Nevertheless,
Yoruba religious traditions are very similar to the Vodun of
the latter.
Haitian vodou, Brazilian Candomblé, and Cuban Santería
syncretized this shared religious culture with Christianity,
Amerindian religions, and the religious cultures of the
Bantu peoples of present-day Congo-Brazzaville, Democratic
Republic of Congo, and Angola (Lovejoy 2000).
Gates emphasizes the importance of one particular deity
in the slave cultures of the Americas: the divine trickster
figure called Esu-Elegbara in Yoruba and Legba the ‘divine
linguist’ in Fon. This deity is also known as Exú in Brazil,
Echu-Elegua in Cuba, and Papa Legba in Haitian Vodou (Onuoha
1988). In Yoruba culture, Ifa is the text of divination,
composed of 256 chapters (Odu) and thousands of lyrical
poems. When humans consult it to decipher their destiny,
they are given specific ambiguous poems with no single
determinate meaning, which Esu must interpret. Esu thus
‘embodies the ambiguity of figurative language’(Gates 1989,
21). As the union of opposites and the embodiment of all
perspectives, Esu’s interpretations are merely ‘second-
order’ riddles. Esu’s answers ‘fail to resolve the puzzles
and perplexities’ of Ifa’s figurative discourse’, as Esu
‘delights in describing [these riddles] in his cryptic
responses’ (Gates 1989, 42).
Another important feature of Esu’s discourse is the
power that it wields. His word is capable of changing the
order of things. Both female and male and the master of
duplicity and plurality, Esu is the deity of indeterminacy.
Thus, when Esu become’s an ally, he ‘represents power in
terms of the agency of the will’ (Gates 1989, 37). Esu’s
earthly power was especially attractive in the context of
slavery such as in Brazil where, according to anthropologist
Roger Bastide, Esu was represented as the liberator of the
slaves, ‘killing, poisoning, and driving mad their
oppressors’ (Bastide 1960).
Gates notes a functional equivalency between the figure
of the signifying monkey in the United States and the
various manifestations of Esu throughout the Americas. Echu-
Elegua is often portrayed in Cuban narratives as a ‘small
black man/woman’ with ‘long hair and large eyes’ and
accompanied by a monkey. Offering support to Gilroy’s theory
of the Black Atlantic, Gates suggests that the
representation of Esu as a monkey in the United States was a
result of exchanges with Cuban slave culture (Gates 1989,
42). Potentially influenced by local representations of
blacks as monkeys, the signifying monkey came to represent a
particularly North-American secular literary tradition
influenced by the slave religions of other colonized
countries (Gates 1989, 52).6
Trickster figures, which exist in numerous popular
traditions, have appeared in African-American stories since
the days of slavery. Br’er Rabbit from the Uncle Remus
stories is the most widely known African-American trickster
figure in North America.7 In fact, the Uncle Remus stories
contain many elements of Cherokee and Creek Indian folklore
in which the trickster takes the form of a hare (Baringer
2003).8 The Cherokees and Creek Indians possessed African
slaves and intermarried with liberated Afro-North Americans.
This under-recognized cultural syncretism reinforces
Gilroy’s statement that the African-American tradition is
only partly Afro-North Americans’ ‘absolute ethnic property’
(Gilroy 1995, 15).9
6 Gates does not mention that Yoruba and Vodun based religioustraditions have also had a significant presence in the United States,becoming sources of black empowerment in different historical moments(Ortiz 1998). 7 Br’er rabbit is the main character of Disney’s Song of the South (1946).8 For a discussion of the importance of the trickster figure for Indianliberation struggles, see Spirit and Resistance: Political Theology and AmericanIndian Liberation (Capone 2005).9 Cultural exchange between North American Indian and African culturesextended beyond the United States through the exportation of Indianslaves to the Caribbean (Tinker 2004).
Gates focuses on the hundreds of signifying monkey
tales, recorded since the 19th century, which are lesser
known outside the Afro-North American community. For Gates,
these tales represent the specificity of U.S. black culture
because they teach black rhetoric through analogy with the
monkey figure and through their rhetorical form. In contrast
to the trickster within other slave myths throughout the
Americas, Gates argues that in the United States, ‘the
Signifying Monkey exists not primarily as a character in a
narrative but rather as a vehicle for narration’ (Gates
1989, 52).
The tales provide innumerable variations on a basic
tripartite structure: a monkey usually starts trouble by
telling a lion bad things that an elephant said about him.
The proud lion goes and defends his honour and is beaten in
the process, after which he realizes the monkey lied. He
returns to the monkey with angry threats such as, ‘I’m gonna
whip your ass for signifyin’ (Jackson 1974, 168). The monkey
replies with taunts and then often slips from his tree,
forcing him to use his clever tongue to escape death in the
versions in which he survives.
Though the stories often evoke resistance against white
racism and ‘chiastic fantasies of reversal of power
relationships’, Gates argues that the tripartite structure
suggests that binary power relationships are not the primary
concern of the tales (Gates 1989, 59). The tales are about
the importance of not confounding the literal with the
figurative practice of ‘Signifyin(g)’10: ‘the Monkey speaks
figuratively, while the Lion reads his discourse literally.
For his act of misinterpretation, he suffers grave
consequence’(Gates 1989, 85). Anthropologist Claudia
Mitchell-Kernan, argues that ‘the terminological use of
signifying [refers] to a particular kind of language
specialization’ that ‘defines the Black community as a
speech community in contrast to non-Black communities’
(Mitchell-Kernan 1990, 311). The signifying monkey tales are
about non-black incomprehension of black linguistic
practices: ‘The monkey and the lion do not speak the same
10 I explain Gates definition of this key term in detail below.
language; the lion is not able to interpret the monkey’s use
of language, he is an outsider, un-hip, in a word’
(Mitchell-Kernan 1990, 322-3, my emphasis).
The formal qualities of these lyrical tales--based on
repetition and variation-- display aspects of black literacy
that illiterate interpreters have often misinterpreted.
Gates argues that white-bourgeois misunderstanding of black
Signifyin(g) is an element of Eurocentric racism:
The eighteenth century abounds in comments fromphilosophers such as David Hume in “Of NationalCharacters” and statements such as Thomas Jefferson inNotes on the State of Virginia, who argued that blacks were‘imitative’ rather than ‘creative.’ All along,however, black people were merely Signifyin(g) througha motivated repetition. (Gates 1989, 66)
One of the many manners of creating variations through
Signifyin(g) in the tales is still used in rap today:
[The artistry of the artist] depends on his or herdisplay of the ability to group together two linesthat end in words that sound alike, that bear aphonetic similarity to each other. (Gates 1989, 60)
The constant repetition of the same content and characters
permits attention to be drawn to creative acts of
Signifyin(g) rather than to the literal content:
The narrator’s technique, his or her craft, is to begauged by the creative (re)placement of these expectedor anticipated formulaic phrases and formulaic events,rendered anew in unexpected ways. (Gates 1989, 61)
This practice of recycling widely shared cultural elements
in fresh ways is a fundamental element of improvised jazz
music as well. This practice is explicitly named in songs
like Oscar Patterson’s ‘Signify’ and Count Basie’s
‘Signifyin’ (Gates 1989, 63).
The ‘dozens’ are, in Gates words, an ‘especially
compelling subset of Signifyin(g)’ that he believes was
named in reference to an eighteenth century meaning of the
verb ‘dozen’: ‘to stun, stupefy, daze’ (Gates 1989, 71). In
African American oral traditions in Louisiana, author Mona Lisa Saloy
provides an alternative explanation:
The dozens has its origins in the slave trade of NewOrleans where deformed slaves--generally slavespunished with dismemberment for disobedience--weregrouped in lots of a ‘cheap dozen' for sale to slaveowners. For a Black to be sold as part of the ‘dozens’was the lowest blow possible. (Saloy 1999)
In the dozens, predominantly male11 black youth engage in
verbal battles. Through humour, rhyme and verbal agility11 In his autobiography, the infamous dozens player H. Rap Brownnevertheless notes that ‘some of the best Dozens players were girls’(Gallay 2003).
each opponent aims to offend and ‘stupefy’ the other through
witty and obscene insults, especially about the other’s
mother. The insulted party must retain self-control in the
face of exaggerated and especially personal insults and up
the ante with an even more clever and biting response. The
player who is unable to respond, or who loses their
composure, loses.
According to the French philosopher and black music
theorist Christian Béthune, such ‘verbal mastery’ was
important in the context of slavery. Not only did North
American slave-owners forbid drums, reunions, reading, and
so forth, they also severely punished any acts of physical
aggression between slaves (Béthune 1999, 86-8). He argues
that verbal battles, like the dozens, allowed slaves to
dispute and win without physical blows. Béthune notes that
subtle double-meaning verbal provocation and gestural
‘attitude’, both of which are central to hip-hop culture, is
also used in forms of resistance and affirmation in the face
of the domination tactics of today’s authority figures. Many
police officers and schoolteachers continue to impose
rituals of submission on racially stigmatized youth while
heavily punishing perceived aggressions (Béthune 2004, 43-5)
However, there is nothing subtle about the language in
the dozens and in certain boogie-woogie, blues, and rap
songs that explicitly or implicitly incorporate the
tradition. Even though post-slavery dozens is primarily a
playful adolescent game that involves complex linguistic
skills, researchers have primarily focused on its profanity
and violence. As Gates notes, linguists have given ‘undue
attention to the use of words such as motherfucker’, and have
taken these insulting rituals ‘as an end rather than as the
drills common to classical rhetorical study’ (Gates 1989,
80). The prejudiced outsider position of many researchers on
Signifyin(g) is reflected in their tendency to reduce
Signifyin(g) in general to the ‘black person’s symbolic
aggression enacted in language’ (Gates 1989, 68).
H. Rap Brown, the infamous dozens player and Black
panther militant, offers a much more nuanced understanding
of Signifyin(g) that Gates argues is ‘unsurpassed by that of
any scholar’ (Gates 1989, 72), In his autobiography Die nigger
die!, Brown emphasizes that Signifyin(g) is above all about
‘poetry’ and ‘verbal skills’. Brown points out that he
received his name in the 1960s precisely because he could
‘rap’ (Brown 1969, 25-6). The term rap was already used at
the time to refer to the ability to ‘use the vernacular with
great dexterity’ (Gates 1989, 72). According to Brown,
Signifyin(g) is ‘more humane’ than the dozens, in which a
player attempts to ‘destroy somebody else with words’ (Brown
1969, 29-30). Brown argues that ‘Signifying allowed you a
choice—you could either made a cat feel good or bad. If you
had just destroyed someone [verbally] or if they were just
down already, signifying could help them over’. Finally,
Brown explains that Signifyin(g) ‘was also a way of
expressing your own feelings’ (Brown 1969, 29-30).
In the face of constant misinterpretations of black
cultural practices, Gates uses the signifying monkey tales,
the dozens, and other examples of ‘black vernacular
rhetorical games’ (Gates 1989, 72) to elaborate a general
theory of Signifyin(g) in black literary theory. He writes
the black version of the word ‘signifying’ with a capital S
and the final ‘g’ in parentheses. In this way, he shows that
the black word means something different and is usually
written without the ‘g’ while simultaneously showing that
the absent ‘g’ is still present in the sense the black term
plays on the standard English term.12
The play between the term ‘Signifyin(g)’ and
‘signifying’ is itself an example of black vernacular’s
relation to standard signification practice:
Whereas signification depends for order and coherenceon the exclusion of unconscious associations which anygiven word yields at any given time, Significationluxuriates in the inclusion of the free play of theseassociative rhetorical and semantic relations. (Gates1989, 49)
The term ‘Signifyin(g)’, like many other terms that are
products of black signifying practices, is what philosopher
and literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin calls a ‘double-
voiced’ word, which is the product of ‘inserting a new
semantic orientation into a word which has—and retains—its
own orientation’:
12 Gates credits Derrida for inspiring his written transliteration ofthe term pronounced ‘signifying’ or ‘signifyin’ depending on thecontext. Derrida’s French neologism ‘difference’, which isindistinguishable from ‘difference’ in pronunciation, has a related yetdifferent meaning than the latter (Brown 1969, 26).
The audience of a double-voiced word is thereforemeant to hear both a version of the original utteranceas the embodiment of its speaker’s point of view (or‘semantic position’ and the second speaker’s evaluationof the utterance from a different point of view.13
Gates argues that Signifyin(g), this intentional playing
with double-meanings and associations, is a fundamental
aspect of the numerous language games that black North
Americans play and have explicitly named. Gates’ non-
exclusive list of Signifyin(g) games, compiled from Roger D.
Abrahams’ Talking Black, includes: ‘talking shit, woofin,
spouting , muckty muck , boogerbang , beating your gums, talking
smart, putting down, putting on, playing, sounding, telling
lies, shag-lag, marking, shucking, jiving, jitterbugging,
bugging, mounting, charging, cracking, harping, rapping,
bookooing, low-rating, hoorawing, sweet-talking, smart-
talking’ (Gates 1989, 77-8, Abrahams 1976).
For Gates, the black concept of ‘Signifyin(g)’ has been
at the heart of the black community’s meta-reflection on the
particularity of black linguistic activities. According to
gates, this alternative linguistics challenges theories13 Gary Saul Morson’s exposition of Bakhtin’s concept in Boundaries ofGenre: Dostoevsky’s Diary of a Writer and the Traditions of Literary Utopia (Gates 1989,46).
within the dominant canon such as Ferdinand de Saussure’s
argument that the signifier is ‘fixed’ and that the ‘masses
have no voice in the matter’ (De Saussure 1966, 50, Gates
1989). Black aesthetic practices show that signifiers can be
altered and that a community that shares a common
understanding of the nature of Signifyin(g) can understand
these alterations. Successful Signifyin(g) can even be used
to communicate original content through improvised
alterations of signifiers. Improvised Signifyin(g) is based
on the ability of drawing the attention of audiences within
a Signifyin(g) community towards innovative Signifyin(g)
acts that outsiders do not understand (Gates 1989, 86).
The construction of black identity through black oral and
musical culture
In addition to clarifying the practice of Signifyin(g),
Gates analysis also accounts for the importance of music and
tales in the development of this modern yet counter modern
culture. The concept of Signifyin(g) and numerous language
games that enact it have been taught to each new generation
through black music, street poetry and literature. Black
literary practices are intimately connected with black
expression through music, dance and gesture, and
Signifyin(g) often relies on the play between the meaning of
words and the gestural and tonal aspects of their
expression.14 As the Caribbean writer and literary critic
Édouard Glissant notes, ‘for us music, gesture, dance are
forms of communication, just as important as the gift of
speech’ (Glissant 1989, 248).
Gilroy notes that Eurocentric aesthetics considers
music to be the lowest of the arts. He argues that the
importance of black popular music is often overlooked in
black literary studies even though music is the primary
aesthetic reference for writers like Toni Morrison (Gates
1989, 78).
For Gilroy, black popular music is especially important
because, as ‘the grudging gift that supposedly compensated
slaves . . . for their complete exclusion from modern
14 Ibid., 67.
political society, [it] has been refined and developed so
that it provides an enhanced mode of communication beyond
the petty power of words--spoken or written’ (Gates 1989,
76).
Black popular music is far from a mere source of
‘entertainment’, the pejorative term that white society
frequently applies to black cultural creations. Gilroy
argues that black music, poetry, theater, and dance are
nothing less than ‘an alternative body of cultural and
political expression that considers the world critically
from the point of view of its emancipatory transformation’
(Gates 1989, 76). This historical accumulation of critical
practices, aesthetic principles, and vital philosophies is
the existential core of black diasporic identity; a
‘counterculture of modernity’ (Gates 1989, 36). For Gilroy,
such subversive cultural transmission shows that blackness
is neither a ‘fixed essence’ nor simply a ‘social and
political category to be used or abandoned’ (Gates 1989,
102). Black popular culture is not the expression of an
underlying racial essence, but rather one of the primary
tools for producing common racial identifications throughout
the world. Blackness is affirmed, and cultural assimilation
resisted, through this global ‘transfer of cultural and
political forms and structures of feeling’ (Gates 1989, 83).
Signifyin(g) in black music throughout the Americas
This existential history of black identity and black
aesthetics that I have provided helps clarifies associations
between rap, hip-hop and blackness. Gilroy notes that an
overemphasis on ‘rap’ in the media has contributed to a
common reading of this polycultural movement through the
lens of a reductive and nationalist notion of US black
identity. More than the other disciplines of hip-hop, rap is
directly related to a long spoken, acted, sung and written
tradition of Signifyin(g) within the Afro-North-American
community.
However, I have attempted to show that even in the case
of rap and US varieties of Signifyin(g) practices,
transnational and intercultural exchanges contributed to
their emergence. These exchanges date back to Gates
hypothetical Cuban-American dialogue and to better-
documented exchanges between North American Indian slave-
owners and African slaves. Cultural exchanges throughout the
African diaspora continued through the countless travels of
famous former slaves turned sailors and black musicians
whose internationalist sense of identity are documented by
Gilroy in The Black Atlantic. Moreover, US history has been
heavily shaped by Caribbean immigration. Caribbeans
influenced many Afro-North American movements such as the
Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s and 30s that was a product
of Harlem’s polycultural setting (Turner 2005).
The Jamaican influences that unquestionably influenced
what is called ‘rap music’ today are merely a continuation
of ever-accelerating exchanges that gave birth to North
American Signifyin(g) traditions. Moreover, even if the US
Signifyin(g) tradition has been highly self-reflective
throughout its history, from slave autobiographies and music
to Gates recent academic analysis, Signifyin(g) traditions
are not limited to North American black popular culture.
They are found throughout the black diaspora and in some
form or other in most popular cultures suffering systematic
oppression.
In the case of the black diaspora, differing contexts
of slavery have impacted black artistic practices and
Signifyin(g) traditions in different ways. For example, the
banning of drums in the United States may have led slaves to
invest in the voice in innovative ways in gospel and the
blues. In contrast, Brazilian slave culture has produced one
of the richest drumming traditions in the world.15
Nevertheless, many overlaps in practices exist, as can
be seen in the numerous Brazilian oral traditions that share
many characteristics with the long tradition of North
American rapping. These include the improvised singing
battles of the particularly urban style of samba called
partido alto from Rio de Janeiro and the even older
tradition of ‘spoken singing’ of the ganhadores de pau.
According to many Brazilian researchers on rap, the latter
15 For an interesting analysis the diasporic perspectives of Brazilianevangelical gospel singers, see 'The Singing Voice and Racial Politicson the Brazilian Evangelical Music Scene' (Morson 1981, 108).
were slaves who sold water on the streets of Salvador,
Bahia16 and who used a style of rapping to protest slavery
(de Andrade 1999, 87).17 Two Brazilian traditions that are
still widely practiced in the Northeast and are syncretizing
with hip-hop culture are repente and coco de embolada.
Poetic insulting rituals that are as profane as the
dozens in the Unites States characterize both of these
Northeastern traditions. The rhymed battles of coco de
embolada rely on the rhythm and singing styles of the Afro-
Amerindian dance coco, which uses the tambourine for musical
accompaniment. Repente, which means ‘sudden’ in Portuguese,
is a form of verbal battling accompanied by a guitar that
also depends on rapid improvisation skills.
Both styles are influenced by African slave culture,
Amerindian culture, and North African Arab elements of
Portuguese culture (Soares Ferreira 2008). North American
slavery conditions may have been particularly conducive to
16 Bahia is known as the center of Afro-Brazilian culture because of theconcentration of sugar cane plantations in the region during slavery.17 For a more detailed account of the particular subversive streetculture of these slaves, see: J. J Reis, '"The Revolution of theGanhadores": Urban Labour, Ethnicity and the African Strike of 1857 inBahia, Brazil' (Burdick 2009).
the emergence of a battling aesthetic and a particular
history of rhetorical practices. However, historical
evidence shows that similar aesthetic traditions that are
not exclusively black have emerged in other popular contexts
as well.
At the same time, Brazilian rap today is not a mere
continuation of these Brazilian traditions either. The
Brazilian rapper Big Richard acknowledges that North America
and the English language have undeniably influenced rap
music in Brazil. Critiquing both nationalists who want to
sever all ties from the United States and ‘americanistas’
who merely imitate the United States, he argues that there
is no problem drawing on Brazilian sources or James Brown in
a creative manner because for him, it’s all ‘black music’
(DJ TR 2007, 233, English in the original). This overlapping
of black cultures can be seen in the practices of Brazilian
rappers18 and dancers19 who often integrate elements of samba
18 Rappin Hood’s ‘Negrão’ is a good example of a rap song that combineship-hop with samba in its homage to Brazil's great black musicians. Therapper also happens to be the vice-president of the Imperador doIpiranga samba school (Buzo 2010, 41).19 Marcus Vinicius Azevedo and Raphael Duarte are two dancers from Rio de Janeiro who integrate samba and hip-hop dancing cultures.
culture—including the ways and the attitude of the malandro
[‘bad boy’]—into hip-hop dancing and rapping styles that
emerged in the United States. Despite its long international
history and all the transformations it is undergoing,
today’s rap music remains a product of the Bronx that has
transmitted new aesthetic sensibilities and structures of
feeling throughout the black diaspora and the world’s
popular cultures.
Passing through the Caribbean to arrive at today’s rap music
The Bronx context united descendants of North American
and Caribbean slavery in one racially marginalized
neighborhood. Within New York’s Hip-Hop culture, descendants
of Jamaican immigration particularly impacted rap music.
According to Béthune, Jamaican music attempts to produce ‘a
physical and even visceral perception of sound, directly
tied to increasing decibels’, the ‘noise’20 that rappers aim
for. (Béthune 2004, 37, my translation). Another influence
20 In English in the original.
of Reggae on today’s rap is Jamaican music’s use of ‘rhythm
as a collage of rhythmic themes (riddims)’. Reggae ‘opposes
the continuity of the beat to the continual rhythmic rupture
of riddims’ (Béthune 2004, 37, my translation).
Reggae, dub and dancehall’s ‘toasting’ and ‘talk-over’
and their aesthetic of rupture is itself the inheritor of a
tradition of post-independence exchanges between music and
poetry that rejected the limits of the English pentameter
(Brathwaite 1984, 8-9). In History of the voice, the Caribbean
writer and poet Edward Kamau Brathwaite argues that in the
‘poetry, the culture itself’ of the English-speaking
Caribbean, ‘the noise that it makes is part of the meaning,
and if you ignore the noise (or what you would think of as
noise, shall I say) then you lose part of the meaning’
(Brathwaite 1984, 18). Caribbean writers and poets have
routinely turned to local syncretized music traditions, such
as Calypso, Reggae, and various Rastafarian cultural forms
for inspiration. A particularly important figure in
Caribbean poetry was the Rastafarian poet, Bongo Jerry who
explodes the limits of standard written English with his use
of loud graphic capitalization and ruptures in the text
(Brathwaite 1984, 161).
Complementing Gilroy’s research on the black Atlantic,
and his challenging of unidirectional models of cultural
exchange, Brathwaite also notes the importance of jazz music
in the Caribbean search for a non-European language and
identity (Brathwaite 1984, 48-9). Caribbeans revised North
American cultural forms with the help of local traditions
and produced a Caribbean aesthetic that particularly
emphasizes sound and the rupture of riddims. Both black
cultures share a sense of ‘total expression’ in contrast to
‘isolated, individualistic expression’ like ‘[r]eading’
(Brathwaite 1984, 19). Hip-Hop culture, a fusion of North
American and Caribbean traditions, is thus characterized by
the typically black call and response aesthetic where ‘the
noise and sounds that the maker makes are responded to by
the audience and are returned to him’, creating a ‘continuum
where meaning truly resides’ (Brathwaite 1984, 19).
Brathwaite depicts the general features of oppressive
contexts in which such aesthetics develop:
total expression comes about because people be in theopen air, because people live in conditions of poverty(‘unhouselled’) because they come from a historicalexperience where they had to rely on their very breathrather than on paraphernalia like books and museumsand machines (Brathwaite 1984, 19).
In the Bronx in the 1970s, Jamaican traditions
intermingled with Afro-North American traditions to
create Hip-Hop music. The Signifyin(g) practices that
characterized the dozens and the signifying monkey
tales are present in hip-hop lyrics as well as the
figure of the ‘trickster’. Black music scholars argue
that the ‘trickster’ takes the form of the thug, the
pimp and the gangsta in the texts of the black
militants of the Last Poets, with their infamous album
‘Hustlers Convention’, of the Watts Prophets, and of
the Original (Old School) Gangsta rappers of N.W.A. and
other group. The California-based Gangsta Rappers
shifted the hip-hop mainstream away from the more
explicitly lyrics of Public Enemy, bringing certain
underground aspects of black culture to the mainstream
perhaps for the first time.
Béthune argues that the trickster, the badman, the
gangsta and other ‘negative heros’ that embody an
attitude of ‘transgression’ have been omnipresent in
black cultural productions due to the illegal status of
black existence throughout the history. Whether black
cultural creation was prohibited, like during the epoch
of slavery, or whether blacks--and especially black
men--have been simply excluded from the workforce and
criminalized by the forces d’ordre, black culture has
often developed on the margins of society and been
associated with delinquency and the figure of the
‘outlaw’ (Béthune 2003). This innate rebelliousness of
the original gangsta rappers, and of the trickster in
black mythology could explain why black militants in
France (Dalton 2012) and Brazil (TR 2007, 131) both
mention US old school gansgta rap as an important
influence on their revolutionary awakening and their
revolt against the injustices imposed by white society.
They also mention the importance of communication
technologies that have given youth across the world
access to recordings and videos of their favourite
rappers from the United States.
The post-literate orality and electronic transmission of
transnational rap music
Though, today’s rap music emerged out of a context of
poverty and exclusion like past black musical traditions
across the globe, its production context because of new
communication technologies. A complete understanding of
today’s rap aesthetic requires clarifying rap’s complex
relation to written culture and new communication
technologies. As cultural critic Tricia Rose argues in Black
Noise, ‘Rap . . . is not simply a linear extension of other
orally based African-American traditions with beat boxes and
cool European electronics added on’ (Rose 1994, 85). Though,
‘not purely oral’, today’s rap ‘maintains many
characteristics of orally based expression and at the same
time incorporates or destabilizes many characteristics of
the literate and highly technological society in which its
practitioners live’ (Rose 1994, 85). Today’s rap is a
product of what literary and orality theorist Walter Ong
calls the ‘post-literate orality’ of the digital age.
Electronic communication has opened new possibilities for
integrating writing and oral-based traditions because it
‘depends on writing and print for its existence’ while
expanding communicative possibilities (Ong 2004, 11).
Middle-class teachers, particularly in racially
marginalized neighborhoods, routinely deplore the use of
non-standard Internet chat language in class assignments.
They see such writing as mere reflection of Facebook’s and
Youtube’s degradation of their nation’s proper language.
Their positions reflect a broader ‘technophobic’21 tendency
in certain social critics who see the effects of audio-
visual technology on youth simply in terms of a regression
to a primitive condition.22 Critics of technology
justifiably consider the potential reduction in reading of
21 I borrow this term from the French philosopher of technology, MichelPuech. His rich analysis of the electronic age avoids the apocalypticextremes of “technophobic” and the utopic extremes of “technophilic”discourse (Reis 1997).22 For example, see Carr's, The shallows: What the internet is doing to our brains(Puech 2008).
complex argumentative texts, due to too much time spent with
audio-visual technologies or in simple chat settings, as a
loss.
However, few middle-class teachers recognize the
aesthetic worth of the Facebook language of today’s racially
marginalized youth. Throughout the world, generations of
hip-hop youth are creating new written languages. They
rework language by Signifyin(g) on dominant colonial
languages and by stretching the bounds of standard prose to
express noise and emotion in writing. In this sense, black
and other popular cultures have never been so literate.
Today’s rap music, which itself blends literary culture and
popular oral language, is influencing the development of
these new popular text-based languages. As Béthune notes:
This collusion between the oral and the written inhip-hop is without a doubt one of the elements thatexplains the seduction of rap for youth. It is theproof in action that, contrary to what is incessantlyrepeated to them at school, it is entirely possible towrite as we speak. (Béthune 1999, 36, my translation)
Rap lyrics introduce complex discourse into the lives of
youth and adults, stretching the limits of discourse of
everyday chat situations while also defying some of the
written standards of white-bourgeois-centric schooling.
Writing rap involves slow-reflection and subtle
revisions of a recorded text. These literary texts are more
complex than most texts intended for oral transmission.
Repente and coco de embolada in Brazil and the signifying
monkey tales and the dozens in the United States often
relied on norms of oral traditions described by Ong, such as
‘fixed, rhythmically balanced expressions’ (Ong 2004, 41).
In contrast, Rose argues that rap’s aesthetic practices are
more diverse:
[I]n rap the rhymed word is often in the middle of along sentence, and punctuated short phrases are workedagainst the meter of the bass line. The ability toeasily reconstruct the rhyme and the music allows forgreater flexibility in the construction andperformances of rhymed lyrics. (Béthune 1999, 88)23
Béthune also argues that, due to the ability of listeners to
replay recordings, rappers are not dependent on traditional
rhyme structures intended for auditory memory. Thus, rap
today is able to appropriate previous oral forms with a
23For an analysis of diverse ways in which rap uses rhyme, homonymy, andother rhetorical forms, see Ésthetique du rap (Béthune 2004, 99-103).
variety of aesthetic practices simply for the purpose of
‘pure poetic play’ (Béthune 1999, 48, my translation).
Rappers can repeat traditional rhyme structures for emphasis
while constantly weaving together rhythmic ruptures into
carefully composed texts.
Writing is even important in the “freestyle” rapping of
improvised rap battles, a skill that most resembles earlier
forms of street rapping and that is still a mark of
authenticity for today’s rappers. Béthune notes that most
freestyle today relies on appropriately placed verses that
are drawn from a ‘previously composed text that can even
take several months to prepare’ (Béthune 1999, 39, my
translation). Thus the importance of flow in rap, which Rose
defines as the ‘ability to move easily and powerfully
through complex lyrics’ (Rose 1994, 39). Not only rappers,
but also many of their listeners memorize and attempt to
repeat the complex rhythms of intricate rap texts.
Consequently, for active listeners, today’s rap usually
demands more mental effort than traditional songs or lyrical
poetry.
Much rap is complex not only in terms of rhythm, but
also content. Carefully produced rap texts weave together
metaphors, detailed narratives and even structured arguments
in some cases. Analyzing the lyrics of Public Enemy’s ‘Fear
of a Black Planet’, Béthune notes that aspects of oral
culture give them much of their force, such as the use of
direct address and of a call and response narrative
structure. At the same time, the rap has ‘demonstrative
force’ through its linear argument structure, passing from a
particular case to a general theme in a syllogistic manner
(Béthune 1999, 40, my translation).
Conclusion: Rap and the authentic individual within a
community
For all these reasons, today’s rappers are best
understood as artists who give ‘oral performances that
display written (literate) forms of thought and
communication’, rather than simply lyrical poets (Rose 1994,
88). On the one hand, rap’s focus on the interior experience
of individuals resonates with the art of the short story and
the novel.24 On the other hand, its focus on shared meanings
brings it closer to oral poetry. According to Rose, this
tension creates a sense of individuality within a collective
identity: ‘There are hundreds of shared phrases and slang
words in rap lyrics, yet a given rap text is the personal
and emotive voice of the rapper’ (Rose 1994, 95). While
proudly restituting their texts in a public context, Béthune
notes that rappers often rap about writing rap. They portray
the writing phase as an ‘introspective moment’ in which they
‘mercilessly question themselves’ (Béthune 2004, 94, my
translation).
However, the individualism of rap does not merely stem
from novel-like norms with their focus on authorship and on
recounting the existential experiences of individual
characters. Rappers express their individuality directly
24 The combination of accounts of interior experience of rappersthemselves placed within a collective context in many rap texts isreminiscent of the black autobiographical tradition. This tradition hasshaped Afro-North American literature since the groundbreaking work ofthe escaped slave Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass: AnAmerican Slave (Douglass 2011).
through performance and through their writing style, which
is inseparable from how they perform:
[U]nlike traditional Western notions of compositionsßin which the composer’s text is in a separate spherefrom that of the performer, rap lyrics are the voiceof the composer and the performer. Rap fuses literateconcepts of authorship with orally based constructionsof thought, expression, and performance. (Rose 1994,87)
A rapper’s text is subordinated to his or her flow, which
the French sociologist of music Christophe Rubin defines as
their particular ‘rhythm and use of their voice’. This ‘oral
signature’ may be used to alter the original text depending
on context while remaining ‘recognizable in its variations,
allowing the rapper to impose his or her subjectivity and to
construct an identity’ (Rubin 1999, my translation).
Rappers thus develop an expressive individualism that
does not distance themselves from their communities despite
the personal character of much of their lyrics. In their
carefully crafted and widely distributed rap-recordings and
in their public performances, they continue to use effective
oral tools to engage their communities. These include
‘constant solicitations of a collective memory through
citations and references’, the ‘use of standardized
formulas’ and ‘constant interaction with the audience when
giving a performance’ (Béthune 2004, 74, my translation).
The expressive individuality that is produced through
rap aesthetics is based on developing an authentic
individual voice and style and representing a community.
This highly individual yet community-based aesthetic, with
its diverse transcultural roots among marginalized
descendants of colonialism and slavery, explains the
particular force of this art form. Individuals from
marginalized communities around the world have creatively
appropriated the tools of rap to create a sense of identity
in complexity and to promote recognition of their
communities. Despite many inauthentic appropriations of the
art form, hip-hop culture still alive and well and is
continuing to grow in a period of much soul-searching
throughout the world. .
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