Is Rap the Reason?

It was only a matter of time it seems before the source of our outrage became our own fault. Imus has been fired and another public good old boy will have to reinvent himself, no doubt the money and infamy, will help. Satellite radio and book deals wait just off stage. Imus will have a few more profitable years in a long and very profitable career. He just won’t slang his type of hype on mainstream radio stations anymore. Perhaps he will find time for his more altruistic pursuits like raising millions for health issues that plague America’s children.

We live in a culture where we often blame the victim. Raped women should not have been attractive. The profiled man should not have been where he was. The mothers of molested children should have watched them better. Most Rappers have a lifetime of a few summers. Most don’t catch on to the pimpish nature of this new wave master slave game until its too late and they find themselves absent even the silver Judas got.

I am reminded of boxing in the colonial era of America. Slaves were pitted against one another for the enjoyment of white audiences. The boxing slaves received preferential treatment and thus often the envy of their less favored brothers and sisters even though matches were often to the death. It would seem that any possibility for a life of security no matter how fleeting was preferable to a life with no hope of escape from the meanness of bondage.

There was a time when a young black man thought his only redemption from ghetto streets inside the law was to run faster, jump higher, or hit harder. Now he will also look to see if his skills at signifying can purchase the ticket up and out of the hood. If he is good enough perhaps he can transcend to the silver screen and become a legitimate icon. If not, then perhaps, a reality side show, or a comedic drive by can secure the means to be above the mean streets. Where and when do we weigh the cost of it all?

We can continue to examine language. It is a powerful builder of reality but it is far from the only battlefield in this war for identity free of coercive mirroring and stereotypical boundaries. When will we address the core of how we are imaged publicly? When will North American Africans and other marginalized groups negotiate the conversation around coercive mirroring tactics employed in media and educational facilities to push us in to one mega culture indivisible? Who owns the airwaves? Where do the millions of dollars in production and marketing money originate? Who finances the rap industry? Who benefits in majority form the money generated by rap sales? Who puts together the play list for corporate sponsored radio? For that matter who picks the TV shows and signs the movie deals, who picks the images to accompany the nightly news, who decides which stories lead and which are consigned to a line of text at the bottom of the screen? How much power have we invested in the talking heads of all stripe that are the shills of corporate owned media? Whose agenda does corporate owned media serve? Follow the money and you find the real power, the real enabler, and the real culprit.

Sir Too $hort says there is money in the ghetto; and apparently there is money in the act of “acting ghetto”, great entertainment value, and perhaps something systemically darker. Corporate media as a whole creates a master image, of what “black life” consist of, an image with international currency in multiple layers. These images serve as markers of how to and how not to fit into a system. The very commercial romance imbued in rebels who reside outside the image of normal in a malfeasant state of perpetual otherness help to make the image more palatable to those who take their exits and their heroes where they find them. The stereotypical images created tar us all with an “ever-otherness” despite levels or lack of assimilation while it serves also to create “normal by serving as the aberrant counter to what dominant society proffers as proper. It also serves to image what rebellion and disenfranchisement from the system looks like and thus makes suspect all who color outside the lines.

I feel it unnecessary to elaborate on the ills of the American inner city and why one would find oneself desperate enough to be unwise about the measures employed to escape its pitfalls. I won’t even offer my concerns about black flight and the resultant effect on those who are forced by circumstance to continue to try to raise families in conditions as far from optimal as imaginable. I will ask us to consider who creates the readymade personas the disenfranchised seem ready for a price to inhabit. How did we learn to be minstrels? Does someone want to argue it as a natural state of being for us or is it rather as I suspect learned behavior that pays?

If there are large numbers of us who have been infected by the hook of capitalist materialism and still think enough money in America equals equality or at least security I find little wonder or wisdom in it. But when we consider the affect it’s negative impact is immeasurable. It seems what we won’t do for love we will do for money, and perhaps at the end of the day that for many really equals inclusion or at least it’s illusion.

The words in rap music like the words Imus used are American words. It is the American cultural system that gave rise and definition to them. It is this system that has normalized the use of this language and continues to give meaning to it. Language is an agreement. We knew and used this language before corporations brought rap. America has given us the room to agree that we are less, marginal, fatally exotic, “other” than those who structure the images that dominate the airwaves. We have also continued to practice inversion within our practice of the American language and artistic culture so I argue that certain phrases are beyond standard American understanding or appreciation in their use while overstanding that self hatred is most often the baseline motivation in self bashing. Now ask yourselves what makes us hate ourselves so?



End part One.

Ayodele Nzinga