Two Turntables and a …

                           Two Turntables and a
                           Social Movement: Writing
                           Hip-Hop at Century's End
                           Josh Kun




Hip Hop America                   In the eighties, when I was growing up in Los Angeles, Cal
By Nelson George           Worthington was the most famous car salesman in all of Southern
Viking, 1998               California. His television commercials for his Long Beach car lot
The VIBE History of
                           always presented him in the same way: dressed in a two-piece suit,
Hip Hop                    cowboy hat on his head, and twanging--in a dusty drawl that
Edited by Alan Light       sounded imported direct from Dallas--"This is Cal Worthington
Three Rivers Press, 1999   and my dog Spot" while he wrestled with tigers on the hoods of
                           Mustangs and promised slashed prices and bad credit sympathies.
The Dying Ground: A
                           White, Southern, country, and goofy, Worthington was local TV's
Hip-Hop Noir Novel
By Nichelle D. Tramble     reigning pop icon of working-class white suburbia.
Villard, 2001                     After disappearing from the airwaves for most of the nineties,
                           Worthington has finally returned. Now, though, his spots are run-
Representing: Hip Hop      ning on radio, on The Beat, one of LA's leading hip-hop and R&B
Culture and the            stations. In between Nelly and Snoop is Worthington 2001 style.
Production of Black
Cinema
                           It's the same voice, the same country accent, the same banjo
By S. Craig Watkins        plucking away behind him, the same white car dealer in the same
University of Chicago      white cowboy hat on the same lot off the 405 freeway, but now
Press, 1998                Worthington calls Long Beach "The LBC" and talks about car
                           prices that are "the bomb." We all have our ways of registering just
                           how significant hip-hop's impact on mainstream US culture has
                           been and for me this was it: something is definitely up when even
                           Cal Worthington of Worthington Ford has gone hip-hop.
                                  The hip-hopification of Worthington is, of course, about
                           little more than chasing market trends and profit margins (if polka
                           was dominating the Billboard charts, Worthington would be play-
                           ing an accordion on top of a beer barrel). Nevertheless, that it is
                           hip-hop that has been internationally recognized as a dominant
                           commercial force, the commercial idiom with which one must be-
                           come fluent in order to sell products, is the point here. It could be
                           anything else, but it's not: at the turn of the twentieth century, US
                           popular culture has become nearly synonymous with hip-hop cul-
                           ture, or at least a commercialized and commodity-ready version
                           © 2002 OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS         AMERICAN LITERARY HISTORY
                                            American Literary History     581




of what was laid out as hip-hop culture in the late seventies and
early eighties.
       Hip-hop has changed the way radio-ready pop sounds (listen
to the rhythm tracks that hold up *NSYNC and Britney Spears),
changed the way TV advertising works (witness Sprite's glossy
campaign featuring rap artists like Busta Rhymes and its more
underground campaign, which features unknown freestyling rap
MCs culled from the street corner), and further confused the
racialist logics of Billboard sales charts by consistently landing hip-
hop albums on the Top Ten charts above rock and pop releases.
The impact has of course become increasingly global as well: it has
left its mark on local music scenes from Tokyo to Johannesburg to
Mexico City, impacted fashion trends across the world, and is
guaranteed to occupy a prime spot on the new release shelf of any
major chain store. When I recently was in Hong Kong--where
Jay-Z's new album was being hyped alongside the new solo album
from Wong Kar-Wai acting phenom Tony Leung--a cab driver
complained to me that the English his daughter was learning was
not the Queen's English that he had learned. "What English does
she speak?" I asked. "Ice Cube," he answered.1
       The great change is that hip-hop has gone from being a
cumulative inter-American, Afro-Caribbean product of Reagan-
omic violence on US inner cities, the booming crack trade, and
massive deindustrialization campaigns, which shipped jobs out to
metropoles and passed off the decimation of affordable housing
and public space as urban renewal, to being a confirmed US na-
tional commodity that can bring in over $1.8 billion in sales during
a single year (as it did in 2000). The question we're left with, then,
may be simply a matter of definition. Just what is hip-hop at the
turn of the century? Is it, to borrow a framework from Chela San-
doval, a "differential social movement" that produces a "differen-
tial social consciousness," a "theory and method of oppositional
consciousness" that becomes a "method of emancipation" (178­
83)? Or has it become another commodified object of African-
American cultural expression that speaks as much to the con-
struction and performance of race by music industry marketing
campaigns as to the construction and performance of race by hip-
hop practitioners who use it to imagine new social realities?
       Hip-hop is all of this, at once: a bundle of beats, rhymes, and
videos--bling-bling on MTV, broke on the underground--that
speaks to the heart of the contradictions (and sacrifices and tri-
umphs) that all African-American pop cultural forms have always
had to negotiate in order to survive the boom and bust of the
mainstream pop economy. In his New Yorker chronicle of Jay-Z
and the emergence of "corporate rap," Kelefa Sanneh summed it
                       582    Writing Hip-Hop




                              up like this: "Hip-hop, once a noun, has become an adjective, con-
                              stantly invoked if rarely defined; people talk about hip-hop fash-
                              ion and hip-hop novels, hip-hop movies and hip-hop basketball.
                              Like rock and roll in the nineteen-sixties, hip-hop is both a move-
                              ment and a marketing ploy, and the word is used to describe any-
                              thing that's supposed to appeal to young people" (Sanneh 60).
So if hip-hop's scope has           So if hip-hop's scope has grown so much in the past two
grown so much in the past     decades (going from noun to adjective), if indeed hip-hop is every-
two decades . . . if indeed   where, if indeed there's a little hip-hop in everything, if--as Greg
hip-hop is everywhere, if
indeed there's a little
                              Tate puts it in The VIBE History of Hip Hop--hip-hop is "trans-
hip-hop in everything,        historical," "trans-stylistic," and "trans-musical" ("since any
if . . . hip-hop is "trans-   sound can be rendered hip hop-able"), then what is it? (393). How
historical," "trans-          do scholars and critics in the academy talk about hip-hop if what
stylistic," and "trans-       hip-hop is has changed so much since the last time it was talked
musical" . . . then what
                              about in any sustained way? This last question is directed mostly
is it?
                              to the books that have been published about hip-hop, or in the
                              name of hip-hop, since the 1993 publication of Tricia Rose's Black
                              Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America--
                              the first major academic book to refract hip-hop culture through
                              the lens of contemporary scholarship, the first major academic
                              book to take hip-hop seriously enough to analyze it, granting a
                              whole new generation of hip-hop scholars the permission and le-
                              gitimacy to shape their scholarship around the study of hip-hop.
                                    Rose wrote eloquently of hip-hop artists as "prophets of
                              rage" (99). For Rose, hip-hop was both a marginalized and will-
                              fully marginal African-American cultural expression that had
                              an oppositional, contestatory relationship to US racial and eco-
                              nomic hegemony, institutionalized US racism and social injustice,
                              and the biased, exclusionary Eurocentric constraints of Western
                              musical discourse that were deaf to the cut-and-mix, sample-and-
                              sequence, scratch-and-cut "noise" of black youth culture. And
                              yet she was well aware of the contradictions beginning to develop,
                              contradictions which all subsequent writing on hip-hop has been
                              born into and forced to deal with: the extent to which hip-hop's
                              counterhegemonic moves and possibilities were always at risk of
                              reiterating the hegemony they were working against. "It is at once
                              part of the dominant text," Rose commented, "and yet, always on
                              the margins of this text; relying on and commenting on the text's
                              center and always aware of its proximity to the border" (19).
                                    Though acclaimed music critic Nelson George published his
                              trade press overview Hip Hop America five years after Black
                              Noise, he focuses on virtually the same period, but with a different
                              agenda. Where Rose was theorizing hip-hop difference and hip-
                              hop opposition, George is mostly concerned with registering hip-
                                          American Literary History    583




hop as an "American" art form and an "American" industry. Best
known for his previous books on rhythm and blues and the Mo-
town legacy, George was one of early hip-hop's first and most
committed reporters in the late seventies, writing in The Amster-
dam News, Billboard, and Record World (where he spearheaded an
advertorial feature on the then nascent hip-hop indie label Sugar
Hill records) before becoming a leading critic at The Village Voice
in the eighties.
      It is no surprise, then, that George focuses on the two peri-
ods he was most involved with, 1977­1987 and 1987­1993, and
that he identifies himself as a disillusioned outsider to the con-
temporary hip-hop scene, "an affectionate older observer." He
'fesses up early on: "Because I did not grow up with hip hop as the
dominating pop music of my childhood, I don't have the unvar-
nished devotion to it that younger writers do" (x). As a result, Hip
Hop America keeps its critical head pointed backward and George
writes a highly personalized "fall from grace" hip-hop narrative
with nostalgia as his guide, even choosing to begin the book with
a JFK nod: "We would like to live as we once lived but history will
not permit it." George's principal complaint is that hip-hop's val-
ues have been corrupted by its rise to commercial prominence.
"Hip Hop didn't start as a career move," he writes, "but as a way
of announcing one's existence to the world" (14).
      Hip Hop America is less a cohesive book project and more of
a grab bag of anecdotes, reports, and riffs that are connected to
each other only through the author's longing for a hip-hop that no
longer is. His chapters are quick snapshots organized by topic--
moguls, drugs, sampling--that are not personally intimate or
probing enough to add up to a personal history of hip-hop (too
frequently he ends up celebrating the accomplishments of his own
career: who he knows, what film he's produced, what he's written).
And at times the center just cannot hold, for example when
George stretches to connect hip-hop to the world of professional
sports with profiles of Allen Iverson and Mike Tyson. He tries to
position them as hip-hop athletes whose rebel poses and brushes
with the law and the standards of dominant culture, whose per-
formances of in-your-face blackness, are extensions of the oppo-
sitional character of hip-hop.
      Beyond the limits of its form and structure, Hip Hop Amer-
ica makes two serious missteps in its attempt to deliver a wide
angle survey of hip-hop's major topics and events. First, George
repeats the main shortcoming of Black Noise by limiting his look
at "hip hop America" to "hip hop New York." While there is no
doubt that New York City, specifically the boroughs of the South
584   Writing Hip-Hop




      Bronx and Queens, are hip-hop's geocultural home base within a
      broader inter-American and Afro-Caribbean nexus, the music has
      expanded far beyond the borders of New York, sprouting vital
      and booming regional scenes across the US and now across the
      planet. As late as 1998, it seems counterproductive and willfully
      exclusionary to continue to perpetuate the conflation of hip-hop
      with New York. For example, George devotes only 14 pages to
      Los Angeles hip-hop, a scene that cropped up in response to that
      of New York but has since gone on to become one of the most in-
      fluential sites of hip-hop production and performance, containing
      volumes of its own history, its own stories of negotiations with
      deindustrialization and "dopeman" economics (to borrow an
      NWA phrase), its own histories of street survivalism and public
      sphere destruction.2 George's longtime Village Voice affiliation
      doesn't make any of this particularly surprising, but it ends up
      shortchanging the potential of his book by mistaking New York
      for America, by leveling out regional, local differences in order to
      present a cleaner, more unilateral account of hip-hop history.
             The second misstep is Hip Hop America's refusal to take
      women in hip-hop seriously and its near-ignorance of hip-hop
      feminist attempts to theorize and think through the contradic-
      tions and complexities of gender performance and gender repre-
      sentation in hip-hop songs and hip-hop videos. George doesn't
      deal with women until close to the book's end and when he does,
      it is swift, cursory, and dismissive. "If none of these female artists
      had ever made a record," he proposes, "hip hop's development
      would have been no different" (184). Comments like this--which
      defy logic, let alone the actual course of hip-hop history which has
      indeed been dramatically altered by artists from Roxanne Shante
      and Salt-N-Pepa up through Queen Latifah, Missy Elliott, and
      Lil' Kim--reengender "hip hop America" as a masculinist musi-
      cal nation. George even engenders hip-hop fandom by comparing
      his relationship to hip-hop to a relationship with a woman: "There
      have been times I've loved it more than any woman. There have
      been times I hated it with the viciousness usually reserved for a
      cheating lover" (22). George's critical chauvinism is particularly
      disturbing in light of the efforts that Black Noise made so many
      years earlier to address these very issues. George makes no refer-
      ence to feminist hip-hop critics like Joan Morgan and Karen
      Goode and refuses to address what Rose so urgently argued in
      1993. "As women who challenge sexism expressed by male rap-
      pers, yet sustain dialogue with them," she wrote, "who reject the
      racially coded aesthetic hierarchies in American popular culture
      by privileging black female bodies, and who support black women's
      voices and history, black female rappers constitute an important
                                           American Literary History    585




and resistive voice in rap and contemporary black women's cul-
tural production in general" (182).3
      George fares far better when discussing hip-hop's MC alter
egos, turntable innovations, and sampling strides in the context of
African-American traditions of self-formation through creative
practices of appropriation and recycling, of customizing what
you're given so it resonates with your own character and attitude:
"the hipster's cool bop, crisp stride of the corporate boy, the back-
bending b-boy stance" (52). And his destabilizing of hip-hop as
essentially and irrevocably "black" is a welcome intervention into
the strict black/white racial discourse that so much of hip-hop
criticism relies on. George calls the idea of hip-hop as exclusively
African-American "an appealing origin myth," pointing out
Latino contributions to the culture, the impact of non-US popu-
lar music to early hip-hop DJ sets, and the role of white entrepre-
neurs and consumers. Writes George, "I'd argue that without
white entrepreneurial involvement hip hop culture wouldn't have
survived its first half decade on vinyl" (57).
      The best of George's points--and none of his missteps--are
taken up across a more diverse and varied terrain by a collection
of journalists and academics in The VIBE History of Hip Hop, a
helpful, informative, and balanced overview of hip-hop culture
edited by Alan Light, the founding music editor of VIBE (the
glossy monthly hip-hop and R&B magazine created by Quincy
Jones in 1994 that on the book's back cover is tagged as "the voice
of the hip hop generation"). The VIBE History is nowhere near a
scholarly text and doesn't try to be, which is part of why it works
so well: it documents and chronicles hip-hop across a historical
trajectory primarily through the eyes and words of journalists
who have devoted large parts of their careers to writing about var-
ious aspects of hip-hop culture.
      As current VIBE editor Danyel Smith admits in the book's
introduction, the result is a hip-hop sourcebook that acts as a his-
tory only if we understand history to be a selective compendium
of stories told through different voices, in different tones, and in
different forms (The VIBE History moves between historical es-
says, artist profiles, opinion pieces, and extremely helpful chapter-
by-chapter discographies). The stories range across era and topic:
John F. Szwed's excellent grounding of hip-hop orality in Carib-
bean toasting and urban US double dutch, street toasts and story
rhymes (where the creole meets the postmodern); Havelock Nel-
son's informative profile of hip-hop pioneer DJ Kool Herc (a Ja-
maican immigrant about whom much has been speculated and
hypothesized but little has been actually documented in full); and
Chairman Mao's been-there, seen-it-all-firsthand praise song to
586   Writing Hip-Hop




      the techno hijacks and hijinks of the hip-hop DJ who cuts up time,
      space, and beats on homemade mix tapes and hand-manipulated
      vinyl.
            Mao calls the art of the DJ "the essence of hip hop, the basis
      on which everything afterward was founded" (78) and makes a
      purity claim on it that hip-hop history has yet to prove wrong: for
      all the mutations and modifications and compromises that hip-
      hop has undergone since the seventies, it is the dynamic, grass-
      roots creativity and skill of the DJ that have remained constant,
      undaunted. "Hip Hop's Darwinian cycle of natural selection
      has placed its ruthless mack hand down on virtually every disci-
      pline of the culture in some way," he writes, "yet it is DJ-ing which
      has somehow managed to transcend, reinvent, survive, and flour-
      ish throughout" (78).
            The VIBE History covers these other mutations by alternately
      choosing breadth over depth (from Sugar Hill Records to Tupac,
      Biggie Smalls, and quick takes on hip-hop cousins like dancehall
      and trip-hop) and depth over breadth (focused explorations of hip-
      hop's battles with censorship, hip-hop fashion, hip-hop globalism,
      and hip-hop graffiti history). The book's coverage of the West
      Coast scene fills in the gaps of Hip Hop America. Ben Higa's "Early
      Los Angeles Hip Hop" essay shows just how active Los Angeles
      was early in hip-hop history (especially in terms of popping and
      locking dance innovation), and Cheo Hodari Coker, Carter Har-
      ris, and Robert Marriott offer detailed accounts of NWA, Eazy-E,
      and the gangsta empire of Death Row Records, respectively.
            In her finger-snapping contribution to the collection, "Ill Na
      Nas, Goddesses, and Drama Mamas," Karen R. Goode disagrees
      with George on the impact of women in hip-hop. "While the form
      is both a cultural phenomenon and a microcosm of a larger patri-
      archal society," she argues, "the feminism of hip hop informs the
      weight and the creativity of the genre" (374). Foxy Brown, Mia X,
      Queen Pen, Lauryn Hill, Missy Elliott, and Da Brat are all "seri-
      ous women who are not only leading but advancing the form . . .
      These women are here to save hip hop. Well come" (374). In the
      collection's closing essay by veteran hip-hop critic Greg Tate, "15
      Arguments In Favor of the Future of Hip Hop," women don't just
      save hip-hop--they are its future. Tate links hip-hop's increasing
      commodification to an increasing ethics of testosterone and male
      dominance and argues that "if hip hop is to survive as a spiritual
      vessel, it will have to embrace the feminine principle in order to
      become more physically powerful" (from there, though, Tate then
      makes a more traditional hip-hop turn by equating the power of
      women with the reproductive and nurturing locus of the womb:
                                            American Literary History     587




"Hip hop needs to return to the womb for sustenance, nurture,
and guidance") (387).
      Unlike George, who critiques hip-hop out of nostalgia for a
bygone era, Tate critiques hip-hop in order to maintain its dy-
namism and secure its future. He has particularly strong and vital
words for any attempt to conform hip-hop to a racial essence
when that essence has been constructed in response to capitalism's
buying and selling of blackness in a market defined by centuries of
US racism. He writes, "[l]ike the antebellum slavery system and
the American religion of racism that evolved from it, hip hop's au-
dience demands black bodies do the dirty work of sustaining hip
hop's authenticity. The racial imaging of hip hop through mass
media, coupled with an apparent desire on the part of the hip hop
audience for a pure black form, has advanced a kind of preemp-
tive ethnic cleansing in hip hop that grows more extreme across
time" (392).
      For Tate, hip-hop must be discussed with reference to the
history it comes out of and extends: the history of selling black
people and black culture to US audiences, which is inextricable
from the legacies of slavery and institutionalized racism. While
George is all too eager to accept the arrival of hip-hop in the up-
per "big Willie" echelons of corporate commerce as a marker of
success, Tate refuses to forget the ongoing story of race and
money that all black art gets filtered through. For him, hip-hop is
far from just a musical innovation or even a cultural movement. It
is "an African-American response to the consumerization and
disposability of people. It is the vehicle that can represent the mis-
represented and compete in the marketplace. Hip Hop is the pop
art of race politics" (386).
      What Hip Hop America and The VIBE History of Hip Hop
are both clear on is that the hip-hop response that Tate refers to is
a generational one. Early in Hip Hop America, George makes an
argument for hip-hop as the offspring of what he dubs "the post-
soul era . . . a product of post-civil rights era America" (viii). It's
an idea that he never fully explores or returns to, but one that
S. Craig Watkins makes the subject of his thorough study of
African-American filmmaking in the age of "the Hip Hop gener-
ation," Representing: Hip Hop Culture and the Production of Black
Cinema. If you think of hip-hop as solely a three-tiered musical
culture (rapping, break dancing, and graffiti writing) then Repre-
senting isn't quite a hip-hop book. But if you consider hip-hop, as
Watkins puts it, "a generational discourse," then it is an exhaus-
tive account that explores the economic and political contexts of
hip-hop that have enabled a new generation of black filmmakers
588   Writing Hip-Hop




      to make films about the cultures of black youth that hip-hop has
      given voice to.
            At the heart of Watkins's argument is what he sees as a cen-
      tral contradiction. "The same time that black youth are so promi-
      nently figured in the nation's war on drugs, the largest prison in-
      dustrial complex buildup in history, and tightening welfare
      restrictions" they are key players in the marketing and expanding
      of a youth consumer economy. With hip-hop as their primary wit-
      ness, they have successfully seized popular culture as "a crucial lo-
      cation for expressing their ideas and viewpoints about the contra-
      dictory world in which they live" (2).
            Unlike the way George and Rose foreground hip-hop as mu-
      sical performance, Watkins treats hip-hop as a social movement
      that emerged out of the urban rubble of Reaganomics, the expan-
      sion of the welfare state, and "the economic woes of postindustri-
      alism" that disadvantaged the already disadvantaged (24).4 He
      approaches hip-hop as the cultural representative of a social, po-
      litical, and economic paradigm shift. As a result, hip-hop signifies
      far more than just a musical practice; it is a way of being for black
      youth struggling to survive campaigns of racial injustice, eco-
      nomic defeat, and social neglect.
            The element of this transformative, expressive culture that
      Watkins is most interested in is black film, specifically the new
      generation of independent and commercial black filmmakers that
      emerged in the eighties and nineties. But Watkins avoids films di-
      rectly about hip-hop--like Breakin' (1984), Beat Street (1984), or
      Krush Groove (1985) (a film Gary Dauphin calls in his "Hip Hop
      In The Movies" contribution to The VIBE History of Hip Hop
      "quite simply the best `pure' hip hop movie ever made" [205])--
      and heads instead to Spike Lee's Do The Right Thing (1989),
      which made Public Enemy's "Fight the Power" synonymous with
      a trash can thrown through the window of Sal's Pizzeria, and John
      Singleton's Boyz N The Hood (1991), which starred former NWA
      rapper Ice Cube, put a realist, dramatic narrative on "straight
      outta Compton" gangsta philosophy, and helped catapult what
      Watkins dubs "the urban ghetto film cycle" to commercial suc-
      cess. Lee gets the most attention, though, a filmmaker whom
      Watkins believes is the most hip-hop of all (though he never actu-
      ally states it that way) because he "typifies the entrepreneur who
      has transformed marginality . . . into a source of opportunity by
      responding, in innovative fashion, to social, economic, political,
      and cultural changes" (107).
            In Hip Hop America, George argues that films like New Jack
      City (1991) and Menace II Society (1993) "have largely failed the
      culture" (109). Dauphin argues that these "hip hop movies" were
                                            American Literary History    589




all too often "only tied to hip hop at the point of sale, featuring
young black men who, between buying records and sneakers and
particular fits and brands of jeans, had an alarming tendency to
blow each other's brains out over wounded pride and drugs"
(206). But Watkins chooses to neither laud nor condemn the "rep-
etitious production of ghetto-theme action films" and instead in-
vestigate it as yet another component of hip-hop's social, genera-
tional sea change: the film industry's response to the popularity of
gangsta rap and "the perversely prominent rise of the postindus-
trial ghetto in the American popular imagination" (171).
       Watkins's insistence on discussing hip-hop as both a genera-
tional and social category in direct dialogue with transformations
in the economy resonates loudly in Nichelle D. Tramble's debut
novel, The Dying Ground, which is subtitled "A Hip-Hop Noir
Novel." The "noir" part makes immediate sense. Tramble's 23-
year-old Berkeley undergrad protagonist Maceo Redfield is a
black detective by circumstance. His best friend Billy, an entry-
level crack hustler, ends up dead at the corner of College and Al-
catraz in Oakland in 1989. Billy's girlfriend, whom Maceo has
loved for years, flees the scene and the Bay Area, putting Maceo
on a classic noir hunt for answers in a world that won't give him
any. As he says late in the novel, he runs a race he has no chance of
winning, and he runs it amidst the shadows and corpses of urban
black Northern California, from televised funerals at the CME
cathedral to manic drives on the 580 freeway to the "Tombs"
lockup in downtown Oakland.
       The novel's hip-hop affiliation is more difficult to pin down.
Save for characters like Black Jeff and Mike Crowley, who quote
Eric B and Rakim in their freestyles in front of Rasputin's record
store, and infamous Oakland underground MC and mogul Too
Short, who shows up at Billy's funeral, there is little actual hip-hop
itself in the book. The Dying Ground is not saturated in hip-hop
form the way that Ricardo Cortez Cruz's 1992 novel of South
Central surrealism Straight Outta Compton was. On its back
cover, Larry McCaffery dubbed Straight "the first major rap
novel" because Cruz wrote like a DJ, fading and cutting between
chunks of prose, sampling voices and singers, crossfading narra-
tive into a collage of rants, riffs, and paragraph ciphers on a post-
Rodney King Compton block where palm trees had perms and
kids "scratched music on cement." In this sense, then, The Dying
Ground is not a "rap novel" at all--Tramble writes with careful,
studied pacing and follows a traditional linear narrative arc--but
in the sense of hip-hop as a generation-defining social movement
for black youth, it most surely is a hip-hop one.
       The Dying Ground begs an important question for scholars
590   Writing Hip-Hop




      of contemporary literature: What makes a novel hip-hop? Does a
      hip-hop novel have to try to replicate the aesthetic practices of
      hip-hop culture--the flow of an MC, the beats of a DJ, the jagged
      curves of a graffiti artist, the attitude of a b-boy? Does it have to
      come with a Def Jam CD, plugs of Sony artists, and a PNB Nation
      marketing tie-in like Ronin Ro's flimsy pulp flop Street Sweeper
      (2000)? Does it have to have characters directly based on hip-hop
      icons, like the versions of Tupac, Biggie, and Suge Knight who fu-
      eled the West Coast manhunt of Gar Anthony Haywood's excel-
      lent 1999 mystery All The Lucky Ones Are Dead (1999)?
            Bertice Berry uses a little of each of these tactics in her novel
      The Haunting of Hip Hop (2001), which tries to cash in on hip-
      hop's profit clout while taking spiritual high ground against it--
      the hip-hop novel as anti­hip-hop novel. The simplistic plot is de-
      livered with a heavy hand: she gives us Harry "Freedom" Hudson,
      a successful hip-hop producer who becomes a "slave" to the cor-
      porate skyscraper plantations of the rap industry. For Berry, a so-
      ciologist who doubles as an inspirational speaker and a stand-up
      comedian, hip-hop is "hollow" music that uses the sacred African
      drum to send "the wrong message" to the next generation.
            Thankfully, Tramble's novel has more in common with those
      of Cruz and Haywood and its relationship to hip-hop runs deeper.
      The Dying Ground is set just two years after Too Short started
      building his empire selling Born to Mack tapes out of his trunk in
      East Oakland (a history that Billy Jam maps out in his profile of
      Too Short in The VIBE History), but Tramble resists employing
      hip-hop as a literary trick or marketing device. She follows
      Watkins in treating hip-hop as a social movement lived out
      through popular culture, a generational consciousness defined by
      a litany of federal put-downs: the economic disintegration of
      American inner cities, the redistribution of funds away from
      public parks and schools, the massive deindustrialization cam-
      paigns that exported factory jobs away from urban workers. At
      one point late in the novel, Maceo Redfield thinks aloud about
      what links him to his friends: "The three of us, at twenty years of
      age, were connected by abandonment and pain. Our parents, in
      their own unique ways, had made the choice to disregard us and
      forever relegate us to orphan status . . . I didn't want to explore the
      ways in which Billy was linked, or Chantal, or Scottie, or even
      Smokey, but the bottom line was drugs, the common denomina-
      tor for us all. Drugs and a self-hatred so deeply embedded in the
      psyche of our community that we gave away the souls of our chil-
      dren for a golden calf " (252­53).
            That this generation is not only hip-hop but, as George
      would have it, "post-soul" and "post-civil rights America," is lent
                                                    American Literary History         591




further credence in The Dying Ground. When Tramble's Maceo
goes down to the Oakland city jail to bail out a friend, he sees a
photo of Black Panther Huey P. Newton on the wall; Maceo
thinks that Newton's death on an Oakland street corner "was rep-
resentative of where we were and all that was yet to come for us.
The night of his death he was out searching the streets . . . for drugs
at a dangerous hour, in a dangerous city with a dangerously short
memory" (202). A few years later, Newton would become an icon
of hip-hop radicalism. But in the 1989 of The Dying Ground, he is
just another fallen hero reduced to the ash that covers the Oak-
land streets. Beneath all of their serious differences, what is hip-
hop for Tramble is what is hip-hop for VIBE, Watkins, and
George: the urban ash that covers everything and everyone until it
becomes a code for triumphant living, the only way possible to see
enough of the world around you to make your place in it and rise
above it, both on and off the page.



      Notes

1. Writing on hip-hop's global impact is now beginning to surface. For two
good recent examples of hip-hop's presence in Japan, see Nina Cornyetz and Joe
Wood.

2. For treatments of West Coast hip-hop, see Robin D. G. Kelley; Brian Cross,
It's Not About A Salary. . . : Rap, Race, and Resistance in Los Angeles (1993); and
William Shaw, Westside: Young Men and Hip Hop In L.A. (2000).

3.   See also Joan Morgan and Danyel Smith.

4. For a sustained account of music's ability to act as a social movement that
generates the production of new cultural knowledges, see Ron Eyerman and
Andrew Jamison, Music and Social Movements: Mobilizing Traditions in the
Twentieth Century (1998).



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Contemporary Japan." Social Text 41        Postindustrial Los Angeles." Race
(1994).                                    Rebels: Culture, Politics, and The
                                           Black Working-Class. New York: Free,
Cruz, Ricardo Cortez. Straight Outta       1994. 183­227.
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