The Hip-Hop Underground and African American Culture

Beneath the Surface

J. Peterson

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781137305244
• eBook ISBN: 9781137305251
• Topic: Mezzi di comunicazione e arti performative
• Subtopic: Storia nordamericana

The underground is a multi-faceted concept in African American culture. Peterson uses Richard Wright, KRS-One, Thelonius Monk, and the tradition of the Underground Railroad to explore the manifestations and the attributes of the underground within the context of a more panoramic picture of African American expressivity within hip-hop.

CHAPTER 1

ROOTS, RHYMES, AND RHIZOMES: AN INTRODUCTION TO CONCEPTS OF THE UNDERGROUND IN BLACK CULTURE

The Black underground is a rhizome, a diffuse root that projects its multifaceted conceptualizations throughout African American culture. It spreads its root-like tentacles through the fabric of history, manifesting at continuous points in reality and in cultural production. In the book, I attempt to trace some of these tentacles, mapping the conceptual pathways left in the wake of certain manifestations of the Black underground as an artistic or political movement, visual culture, an aesthetic quality or a literary trope. In this introduction to the book, I have culled discursive and meta-discursive texts from a variety of media including music, television, literature, and art. The undergirding guide, this book’s patron saint and muse, can be captured in the multitude of meanings assigned to the homological pairing of roots/routes. In this pairing, the phonological rendering of the word captures its homological masking of underground metaphors. The rhizomorphic qualities of roots/routes are useful introductory symbols to the various concepts of the Black underground. I don’t employ the adjectival form of “rhizome” here to initiate an in-depth analysis of, and/or theoretical engagement with, the works of Deleuze and Guattari. The rhizome simply lends itself to a conceptual understanding of how the Black underground achieves its many meanings and manifestations in African American culture—particularly its extraordinary valence with politics, genealogy, history, language, and, most especially, hip-hop culture. According to Deleuze and Guattari, “a rhizome has no beginning or end; it is always in the middle, between things, interbeing, intermezzo. The tree is filiation, but the rhizome is alliance, uniquely alliance.”¹

There are too many alliances of the concepts of the underground in human culture for me to delineate them all in these pages. I have attempted to detail a few of these concepts in the chapters and pages that follow. I adopt several strategic and/or stylistic approaches that will become apparent throughout the book, but a description of some methodology is appropriate here. This book required the language of literary studies as much as it did a small set of ethnographic investigative experiences and journalistic work. It required as much of my own cultural immersion in hip-hop here at home and abroad as it did of my immersion in various academic disciplines, including linguistics, Africana Studies, and narratology. Due to the various disciplines and approaches available to me, I have resisted, wherever possible, the laborious language of traditional literary theory. Instead of neatly packaged theses and litanies of supporting examples, I attempt to construct discourses around/through the concepts of the underground as they have manifested themselves in hip-hop and African American cultures. I think of these discursive constructions as rhyming (at the discursive level) through repetition with a signifying difference. In this sense, you might consider me an emcee of the concepts of the underground in Black culture.

The chronological range of this book roughly extends from the nineteenth century (slavery and the Underground Railroad) to the twenty-first century (including underground moments in Black literature and the underground constitutions of hip-hop). In the interest of representing the complexity of this scope/range, I deploy the term “roots” in order to explicate and allude to several of my discursive points. Roots are the formative concept of the underground. Not only because they are the term that represents things underground, but also because they represent the human connections to history and genealogy. Roots are literally underground and figuratively emblematic of an individual’s connection to his/her history and culture. The term functions in this introductory chapter as a sociolinguistic rubric through which the listener/reader can explore the concepts of the underground in Black culture. The debut of the Roots miniseries in 1977 presents an opportune initial example, especially in certain literary discourses that previewed the impact of the television version of this series on American society. On September 26, 1976, James Baldwin published “A Review of Roots” in the New York Times. Here Baldwin actually reviews Alex Haley’s literary text of the same name. He situates the book review in a political context at the outset of his discussion. He notes the bicentennial year and suggests the ironic invisibility of Alex Haley whom he heralds as “the first genuine black Westerner.” Baldwin establishes the critical political context of Haley’s hiddenness as being in the midst of Republican and Democratic conventions, presidential hopefuls, and “a carefully muffled pain and panic in the nation.”² For Baldwin, Haley’s narrative is a compassionate testament to a systematically forgotten Black history. “The world of Alex Haley’s book begins in Gambia, West Africa in 1750. . . . In the re-creation of this time and place, Haley succeeds beautifully where many have failed.” Some of the more striking elements of this little review become apparent when it is put into conversation with another one of Baldwin’s classic essays and the inescapable fact that Baldwin’s praise of Roots prophetically anticipates its extraordinary impact on television and the collective consciousness of an essentially pre-cable television American viewing audience. In “Alas, Poor Richard,” Baldwin comes to terms with one of his literary mentors and artistic antagonists, Richard Wright. Through conversational reconstruction, Baldwin invites readers to participate in one of the most exclusive literary cliques of all time: that of himself, Chester Himes, and Richard Wright and his attendant French intellectuals. Baldwin vehemently disliked Wright’s French intellectual friends, suggesting that for all of their mental might, these great French thinkers, including Jean-Paul Sartre, had no conception of or appreciation for Wright’s complex personality. In order to rectify his legendary critique of Richard Wright’s Bigger Thomas figure, Baldwin posits an underlying thesis regarding the Bigger archetype as well as other instances of blatant, unresolvable violence in Wright’s work. “This violence, as in so much of Wright’s work, is gratuitous and compulsive. It is one of the severest criticisms that can be leveled against his work. The violence is gratuitous and compulsive because the root of the violence is never examined. The root is rage. [my emphasis]”³ These roots of rage are grounded in the autobiographical experiences of Wright from his upbringing chronicled in Black Boy to his uncanny portrayal of Bigger Thomas on film. Baldwin traces these experiences even as he critiques the Black artist in exile who experiences a constant “rootlessness.” According to Baldwin, discussions about the roots of Black culture would invariably draw a negative response from Richard Wright. “ ‘Roots,’ Richard would snort, ‘what—roots! Next thing you’ll be telling me is that all colored folks have rhythm.”⁴ The irony for Baldwin in these conversational exchanges is that he considered Wright to be at the center of his literary genealogy, the roots of his artistic development, if you will.

The roots in Baldwin’s discourse coalesce around his ultimate judgments about Black writers. According to Baldwin, Bigger Thomas’s signal failure is his inability to see his own humanity. Almost via extension, he interprets Wright as an author frozen in the era of his life, only eventually able to realize that he and his work could become obsolete. For Baldwin, Bigger simply is not representative. By a comparable Baldwinian metric, Haley’s Kunta Kinte is nearly Bigger’s antithesis. The nuanced depictions of African culture and Black humanity in the face of White depravity suggest a watershed moment in American history for Black and White folk alike. Here was the “truth” about the roots of American culture. And where Baldwin critically shuns Wright and Native Son, he champions Haley and Roots as a defining moment in the sociopolitical fabric of American life. “Roots is a study of continuities, of consequences, of how people perpetuate themselves, how each generation helps to doom, or helps to liberate, the coming one. . . .”⁵ In a sense, where Baldwin denies the crown of the Black literary genealogy to Wright, he anoints Alex Haley as an author of all of our Black roots.

Returning to and re-viewing Roots in 2014 masks the impact it had on American popular culture in 1977. In 1977 nearly 130 million people tuned in to watch television’s first successful consecutive-night miniseries. Roots appeared on television just years before cable television and VCRS completely fragmented the television-viewing audience. Thus nearly half the country watched the most comprehensive portrayal of American history and slavery produced in an audiovisual format to date. For the twenty-fifth anniversary of its broadcast, many of the actors/actresses, the executive producers, scholars, and various cultural critics commented on the significance of this television epic. In response to several well-publicized challenges to the authorial integrity of Alex Haley’s narrative, Dr. Alvin Poussaint, Harvard psychiatrist, noted, “There was a larger truth that he captured: That we were brought here against our will, we were mistreated, we progressed, we had survived, we were a strong people who could keep going on, despite this experience, and become part of America.” At least, according to Dr. Poussaint, Roots, the television series, fulfilled the promise of Haley’s critically acclaimed genealogy. Again here, Baldwin’s sense of this significance is revealed through his intercourse with Richard Wright. Baldwin believed that Richard Wright’s enormous popularity made the Bigger figure all the more dangerous to race relations in America. Bigger represents no one’s roots. Haley’s genealogy even with all of its inaccuracies—or more aptly described, samples of other histories—represents an important popular attempt at a cinematic, Afrocentric genealogy for a critical mass of Black folk living and working in a mid-1970s America. In a sense, Haley’s Roots expands the geographic and Black underground spaces when compared to Wright’s diagrams of ethnic and economic oppression in the South and in Chicago.

More Roots

Romare Beardon crafted a Roots-inspired television guide cover for the 1977 premier of the miniseries. The cover art simply and visually captures the signal issues held forth in the literary and televisual texts of Roots. The most poignant of these issues is the rhizomorphic geneaology of Black folk in America. The American-flag body and the Black (mask-like) head are juxtaposed with and in confrontation with the visual iconography of middle passage, a too-often overlooked historical experience in the discourses on slavery. The whiteness of the ship encases the mortally captured slaves in the hull of the ship, which in its near entirety, appears to be below sea level. I first encountered this image at a University of Pennsylvania exhibit in the fall of 1996 titled, “A Graphic Odyssey: Romare Bearden as Printmaker.” I was only six years old when Roots aired, so although I have memories of it and its discursive impact, I did not recall the television guide cover art. This Roots image is remarkable for its aforementioned visual contemplation of Black American history. But it also represents a mass communication from an artist, whose creative roots reside in the multifaceted production of a postmodern visual art: collage and printmaking. Romare Beardon’s art figures significantly into the formal aspects of underground concepts explored in this book in at least three ways. First, he deliberately chose to be a printmaker because he knew that making multiple copies of his work would allow his message to be disseminated more pervasively than if he simply painted originals. Note here also that printmaking is a collaborative effort. Second, Beardon favored the collage in his artistic production. His prints that are often imported parts of other cultural products (magazine images, ads, etc.) are also layered with colors, prints, and collage-like distortions of images. And finally, Beardon, layered his work with multiple techniques and styles. One image may be produced in three stages, each with an additional printmaking process to slightly alter the appearance of the original.

Beardon’s 1975 painting titled “The Family” was also a part of the “Odyssey” exhibit. Beardon combined the techniques of Aquatint and photoengraving to render this piece. Much of Beardon’s artwork during this era combined various artistic techniques including lithography, photolithography, and etching, among others. The reference to “The Family” is only to put into relief the “stripped-down” quality of his “Roots” drawing/painting. The Roots image was distinct from every other piece in this particular exhibit because it did not appear to employ as many layers or artistic techniques in its visage. However, this image is conceptually layered with the contested and forgotten history of slavery. The layering of American, African, white, and Black identities reflects Beardon’s artistic penchant for sampling and collage. Finally, this semiotic portrait of a signal moment in American televised history also situates a Black visual artist, popularly exploding, on the cover of a mainstream print medium that is ushering in the multimedia emergence of television and the proliferation of channels (and texts) that television will soon feature.

The triumph of Romare Beardon’s TV Guide cover art should be recognized as the realization of his own philosophical approach to art production and art dissemination. He was genuinely committed to the affordability of creativity and the accessibility of art for the masses. Whether or not this TV Guide cover or the airing of Roots on national television had any tangible effects on equal opportunity, police brutality, or other social ills in America that plagued African Americans is impossible to prove or disprove. The plausible impact on the cultural imaginary is suggestive but the rendering of this urtext in one of this century’s most powerful emergent media clearly had affects on the up-and-coming generation of African American cultural producers. There are several contemporaries of Romare Beardon and Alex Haley who contend with the multivalent conceptualizations of roots as I have tried to detail them thus far (Baldwin and Toni Morrison, among others). Yet there are literary moments that precede this initial wrestling with the rhizomorphic roots of Black American cultural production. Fredrick Douglass and Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man provide this introductory reflection with inspired complex scenes of cultural identification through the symbol of the root. In each of the following literary scenes, the botanical root functions as a placebo for existential connections to the roots of culture and humanity for the perspective protagonists. These placebo roots are important tangents in the rhizomorphic cartography of the concepts of the underground in Black culture because through these episodes we can begin to sketch the literary dimensions of the underground imagery manifested in roots.

The root in Frederick Douglass’ 1845 Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, is nearly unremarkable within the narrative structure of the text. Poet and literary critic Kevin Young astutely defines the root in Douglass’s narrative as a fetish, “meaning a physical, visual, even private totem that provides power to its carrier.”⁶ After being hired out to a notoriously cruel, “nigger-breaking” slave master and “trainer” named Covey, Douglass quickly falls in contentious favor with him. Fearing his life, Douglass hides out in the woods surrounding Covey’s plantation. He ventures a return, but he is turned back by a cowhide-wielding Covey. Tired, hungry, and out of options, Douglass turns to an associate of his, named Sandy, who happens to be a root-worker or conjure man. Sandy is married to a free Black woman and claims that he has not been beaten by a White man since he has carried a particular root in his right pocket. Douglass is immediately skeptical of the power of this root. “I at first rejected the idea, that the simple carrying of a root in my pocket would have any such effect as he had said. . . .”⁷ When Douglass returns to Covey’s plantation, he initially reconsiders the powers of the root as he is not immediately set upon by Mr. Covey. But eventually Covey challenges him and Douglass rises to this challenge with inspiring results. “The battle with Mr. Covey was the turning point in my career as a slave. It rekindled the few expiring embers of freedom, and revived within me a sense of my own manhood.”⁸ Douglass’s skepticism regarding the power of the root taps into the rational undertones of his narrative voice throughout the text. Yet the root “works” insofar as he is never again beaten by a White slave master. According to Young, “the root serves to empower Douglass: its mere possession allows him to no longer be a possession.”⁹ The root is a pivotal placebo against the fears and ills of slavery and its debilitating effects on Douglass’s sense of his own humanity. Douglass’s rejection of its powers and his simultaneous acceptance of these same powers (he does take the root with him when he leaves Sandy) symbolically reflect the complex relationships between an American slave and his/her African roots. Those roots exist and are powerful, but a slave’s ability to believe in the elusive and complex epistemology of African and/or Afrocentric cultures is limited by a rationalist Western indoctrination. Some of these tensions will be revisited throughout this book as they mirror a signal tension in American culture between underground and mainstream cultural products (music, literature, political movements, and language itself).¹⁰

Ellison’s protagonist in the classic novel Invisible Man navigates his way through a geographic maze of rural and urban terrains, Black and White worlds in the north and south regions of mid-twentieth-century America. According to literary scholar Kimberly Bentson, Invisible Man is “a novel that ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• 1.  Roots, Rhymes, and Rhizomes: An Introduction to Concepts of the Underground in Black Culture
• 2.  Verbal and Spatial Masks of the Underground
• 3.  The Hip-Hop Underground and African American Culture: The Deep Structure of Black Identity in American Literature
• 4.  Defining an Underground at the Intersections of Hip-Hop and African American Cultures
• 5.  A Cipher of the Underground in Black Literary Culture
• 6.  Tears for the Departed: See(k)ing a Black Visual Underground in Hip-Hop and African American Cultures
• 7.  The Depth of the Hole: Intertextuality and Tom Waits’s “Way Down in the Hole”
• Epilogue   The Ironies Underground: Revolution, Critical Memory, and Black Nostalgia
• Appendix: The Timepiece Hip-Hop Timeline
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index