ARTICLE UNDER REVIEW

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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