Part I
Home Is Where We Start
An elder once suggested we change the name of First of the Month to Harlem First. He was thinking locally (and universally)âproclaiming faith in rootsy humanism, not promoting black supremacy. There were reasons to be wary of our elderâs proposed name-change. The main one being that it might have seemed presumptuous to some Harlemites. But there are Firsters who got a right to sing at midnight on 125th. (See âA Childâs Vision of the Great Depressionâ p. 17 or âManilow or Monkâ p. 22.)
America loses out wherever tight-thinking culturalists rule, but the bigger danger comes from bland suburban blenders. Everybody wins when rapper Lilâ Wayne resists deracinationââI live in the suburbs but I comes from the hoodâ (with a little help from a sampled Nina Simone, âPlease donât let me be misunderstood... hood... hood... hoodâ). A happy few win too when Roxane Beth Johnson races Whitman in this volumeââSlaves out back in the garden among the zinnias are singingâdeath is a simple thing, he go from door to door.â Those who itch for a âpost-racialâ America tend to miss whatâs made our culture great. And theyâre not just dim about art-life. The notion that Obamaâs election obviates the need for race men like Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton is false. As long as thereâs âScooter Libby justice for some and Jena justice for othersâ (to use Obamaâs phrase) there will be spots for African American âspokespeopleâ who defend local people of color against white power structures. Still, thereâs one set of racial middlemen and women who may soon be displaced. Iâm thinking of African American âpublic intellectualsâ who exploit an experiential gap that first became apparent to the gentility in the 60s. I canât go into the rise of their âcultural studiesâ here. But a New York Times take on an incident at a mid-60s White House Conference on race matters provides a bit of back story. One of the invitees to that rap on raceâan African-American singerâburst out in condemnation of the other respondents, slamming the unreality of their discourse when seen in the light of her own experience. A shaken but proud Lady Bird Johnson responded she couldnât âunderstandâ the outburst because she hadnât had the same experience. A New York Times editorial promptly credited the First Lady for her âcandor.â That Times-approved notion that the feelings and sense of life of black communities were somehow beyond white peopleâs comprehension has lived long and fooled many since the 60s. We started First in part to resist it. And weâre still a place to be for crossover artists as many pieces in this volume prove. But back to those public intellectuals who make a career out of translating âthe black experienceâ into bad English.
Their hustle might be past the sell-by date due to the accessibility of our new First Family. Black people and culture seem less and less alien to many white Americans. The process of familiarization began to accelerate during the primaries. I recall thinking we were in a brave new world as David Gergen explained Frederick Douglassâs âFourth of July Speechâ in primetime on CNN. When a national voice of conventional wisdom like Gergen talks up the relevance of Douglassâs rhetorical questionsââWhat to a slave is the fourth of July?ââthereâs less call for self-styled clerics with negritude (or hip hop profs with attitude). Obamaâs appointment of Lawrence Summers, who once âdisrespectedâ Cornel West causing him to leave Harvard for Princeton, may come to symbolize the Decline of West and the rest. But if not, a new book by Tricia Rose, The Hip Hop Wars, hints a nadir is near for those who interpret âsignsâ of blackness for the clueless. Iâm going to take a page or two to examine Roseâs dead end because it clarifies where First of the Year wonât go.
Starting with the over-the-top praise on the front and back cover from (1) Cornel West: âRose is the distinguished Dean of hip hop studies and her recent book... affirms her grand status...â (2) Michael Eric Dyson: âA bracing and brilliant salvo from the front lines of hip hopâs war...â (3) Henry Louis Gates: âWhile the depth of Roseâs analytical skills is breathtaking, even more impressive... (4) Jill Nelson: âThe Hip Hop Wars is The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual for a new generation...â (5) Robin D.G. Kelley: âA loving, smart and searing critique from the pioneer of Hip Hop studies...â
Once itâs on, the pioneerâs intervention quickly assumes a numbing, been-there-done-that quality.
Is the glorification of predatory behaviorâdirected against other African-Americansâdesirable? Are prison derived behaviors and socializations a good model for non-incarcerated community development? Of course not. Should young black men and women, boys and girls, be emulating street hustling as a way of life? No. Should black fathers leave all parenting responsibilities to black mothers? No...
Roseâs dying falls give up the ghost. Sheâs not asking burning questionsâher only motivation is to fill enough pages to let the log-rolling begin. She manages it (barely) by hammering on the obvious and piling up pieties. Hard to fathom how that blurber could conflate the high contentious spirit of Harold Cruseâs Crisis with pap like this:
In one class a white male student fan of hip hop exasperatedly asked, âAre you saying that white males as a group actually have more power and privilege than others in society?â I replied âYes,â but said that this fact was not a personal indictment of him or others; it was the result of ideas and policies that support racial and gender inequality we can work together to change...
Roseâs invocation of her classroom serves as a reminder she must regularly judge writing by Brown University students though her own prose is a testimony to inconsecutive thought. Wars slogs through grammatical snafusââLyrics that depend on expression of injustice without critique or challenge are reflecting them, not exposing themâânon-sequitursââIf commercially successful rappers produced as many songs about global warming and George Bushâs war in Iraq as they do about so-called bitches and hoes...those rappers could effectively address questions about global warming and the warââall the way to Extreme Palin:
A powerful progressive emphasis on the destruction of foundational American values such as equality and justice has the potential not only to successfully respond to conservatives who use rappers as an easy target but also to challenge rappers to live up to the progressive values that highlight and work to change the unequal environment out of which hip hop has emerged.
Rose plays feminist cards like her Alaskan sister-under-the-skin too. But how feminist can she be when she offers this reading of hip hop argot: â[tip drill] is slang for a girl who is considered ugly but who has a nice ass.â
Roseâs flips from rote p.c. to vulgarity arenât due to her immersion in street culture. Sheâs not hanging with homeboys. Thereâs a line in her acknowledgements that points to her distance from her putative subject(s). She thanks a colleague for âsitting me down and playing me several Lupe Fiasco tunes early in the project.â Lupe Fiascoâs rap is worth more than a nod. So Rose was nearly on to something. She includes Fiasco in lists of âprogressiveâ rappers, quotes a passage from an interview with him, and name-checks one of his tracks. Yet she never provides a close hearing of any of his songs. And thatâs par for the Wars.
And part of what makes her book the antithesis of First of the Year: 2009. Thereâs writing in this volume of First about contemporary R&B, Afro-pop, 60s rock and soul, hip hop and Bruce Springsteenâs Magic; all of it marked byâthis time itâs for realâloving attention to details of pop musical performances. Armond Whiteâs attentiveness is exemplary on this score. See how he notices (in his review of Magic) âwaitress Sheniqua pouring coffee for âmy poor Billâ... the first black female character in [Springsteenâs] songbook cosmology.â Or how he zeroes in on these lines of Biggie Smallsâ (to show up critics who claimed Eminem was hip hopâs genius):
Tell them hos,
Take they clothes off slowly
Hit em with a force like Obi
Big black like Toby
Watch me roam like Romey
Lucky they donât owe me
When they say show me
Homie
The awesome, pop modernist range of Biggieâs references cohere with the brevity and plausibility of the rhyme sourcesâStar Wars, Roots, Frank Sinatra, the streetâwithout ever explicitly defining what comprises his fantasy world. Itâs sexual, criminal, historical, musical and, in the end, what Eminem never is: affirmative.
Hip hop positivity is supposed to be Roseâs specialty, but she has nothing vital to say about whatâs good, bad or ugly in specific rap tracks. That might be a sign sheâs lost her vocation. Yet her mangling of the title of the classic 1990 rap by A Tribe Called Quest suggests sheâs never really been all that into hip hop. Only a Dean of Hip Hop studies (with a research assistant!) could turn Tribeâs round-the-way girl âBonita Applebumâ into a nice Jewish one, âBonita Applebaumâ (italics added).
On the real side, Roseâs mistake might be a revelation of personal (or social) history. I donât know about Roseâs racial/ethnic ties, but Iâm reminded of my first conversations about turning our newspaper First of the Month into an annual First of the Year. As our future publisher mulled over writers weâd printed and quotes from folks whoâd allowed our rag wasnât worthless, what struck him was the density of the linksâfractious and fraternalâbetween African Americans and Jews in Firstâs corner.
Some things donât never change. The title of Judy Oppenheimerâs tribute in this volume to her old school BFF, âTight Connection,â underscores bonds between African Americans and Jews so evident throughout the book.
I planned for that reason to dedicate this First of the Year to the late James Bevelâorganizer of the Childrenâs Crusade in Birmingham (and the Million Man March)âwho once seemed to incarnate the Movementâs Black/Jewish thing. Bevel wore a yarmulke in tribute to Old Testament prophets. But right before Bevel died last December, he was convicted of committing incest back in the 90s. (Bevel had 16 children by 7 women.) The case against him seems to have been incontrovertible so his glory days will always be shadowed by his low end. John Lewis thinks Bevel went mad after King was shot. But he seems to have always marched to a different music inside his head. (He had a doo-wop group in the 50s, around the time he began reading late Tolstoy.)
First will always make room for radical imaginations (though we canât bow to someone like Bevel who moved on from the Movementâs Beloved Community to prey on his own family). A glance at this volume confirms the margin is still the center for us. And that margin extends from Harlem to the world. There are tales here of edgy sojourns in Afghanistan by an ex-hippie and an ex-drug-store cowboy. A Q&A with Ousmane Sembene who taught Africans to resist âelements of received cultureâthose fixed rules and values which nobody but those on the margins dare to question.â A Q&A with Adam Hochschild who celebrates the Brit who invented Abolition (and an African American original who coined the phrase âcrimes against humanityâ). A protest against the Israeli war machine by Uri Avnery who has long been a creative outsider in his society.
Iâd caution longtime First readers not to understand Avneryâs presenceâor the other critique here of Israelâs incursion in Gazaâtoo quickly. There hasnât been an about-face at First on the Middle East. (No one in this neck of the woods ever thought the road to Jerusalem went through Baghdad.) Please donât be misled by the recent review of last yearâs FirstââIn Praise of First of the Yearââin the influential international journal Democratiya. While Iâm glad author Thomas Hale gave First points for style, intellectual seriousness and a âsense of place,â he misrepresented positions on the Iraq War taken by me (and other First contributors). In First of the Year: 2008 Iâd owned up to alleging before the invasion of Iraq the choice for the American left came down to âwar or tortureââa claim blown away by the Abu Ghraib scandal. But Hale misread my admission of error, falsely asserting Iâd conceded I was wrong to support the overthrow of Baathism in Iraq.
Clarity counts here chiefly because Hale aligned Kanan Makiyaâs position with mine. No illusions the world must know my take on my shaming back pages, but Makiya matters. While he certainly has regrets about whatâs happened in Iraq (as would anybody whoâs tried to walk with that nationâs democrats), heâs explicitly rejected what he describes as âMaoistâ calls for recantation. Hale notes I repeatedly cited a piece of Makiyaâs in my introduction to a section of First articles on the Iraq war in our last volume. I did that in the course of criticizing (what seemed to me to be) a duplicitous âgood-bye to all thatâ by New Yorker writer George Packer who had once been a lukewarm ally of Makiyaâs. Packer (and others) traduced Makiyaâs pre-war movement of mind, avowing that he cultivated beamishness about prospects for democracy in Iraq. But Makiya warned his compatriots they couldnât âride into Iraq on American tanks... without having to wade knee-high in the shit that the Baath party has made of your country.â He detailed daunting dealings with âdamagedâ Iraqis in his own camp:
People who breathe nationalism, sectarianism, without knowing that they are doing so, and people who are deeply suspicious towards their fellow Iraqis. These are the facts of life for the next generation in this poor, unhappy, and ravaged land.
This passage and others I quoted in First of the Year: 2008 date from before the invasion of Iraq. Makiya was not engaging, as Hale seems to assume, in a retrospective mea culpa.
Hale slips from misinterpreting positions (and timelines) to mockery of my âself-aggrandizingâ claim First deserved credit for the range of our polemics on the Iraq war. His sarcasmââWe may have been wrong, DeMott admits, but at least we were open to debateââ is a little out of order as Charles OâBrien says (see p. 235) in âTo Criticize the Criticâ:
Hale lectures, âThe purpose of open debate [!] is not to embrace all views at all times [as if anyone has ever said that], but rather to allow the more intelligent position to win out.â Halesâ phraseology is important here...âPurposeâ suggest that there was always only one admissible right answer, and that is Haleâs mind-set. And his phrase, âthe most intelligent position,â is revealing. Most people would have said the best or the truest. Not the soon-to-be Dr. Hale: what counts for him is the most acceptable position. And there, time and again, we have been seriously wanting.
First isnât about to start toeing correct lines now. Given the recent election in Iraq, which hints the idea of establishing a federal, democratic state there might not be a pipedream, it still seems wise to tune out certain trumpets on the leftââSOFA [Status of Forces Agreement] means total defeat for the U.S. in Iraq!ââas well as blowhards on the rightââ2008 was the year we won in Iraq!â
American ideologues (on both extremes) keep getting Iraq and everything else wrong because they wonât grasp the complexities of any country, including their own. Minority angles on America have helped teach Firsters to see Iraq through Kurdish eyes and envisionâwith a push from Avnery (the âgrandfatherâ of the Israeli peace movement)âthe busy-being-born potency of Mizrahim in Israel.
Avnery is one ballsy Israeli. It takes much less audacity to be an anti-militarist in American universities as Fredric Smoler notes in his review here of soldierâs heart: Reading Literature Through Peace and War at West Point. Smoler uses the phrase âtwo nationsâ to evoke the gulf between academics and Americaâs officer class that the author of soldierâs heart managed to bridge when she taught cadets at West Point. Smoler reads this book as an account of a rare âmutually respectful meeting of oppositesâ in the Academy. Mike Roseâs piece in this volumeâa sympathetic explanation of how everyday people are tested (and tricked) by higher educationâengenders more faith in the possibility of such respectful meetings. Rose notes, in his other contribution here, that candidate Obama was faulted for his professorial manner (though it doesnât seem to have hurt him). Perhaps Americans arenât as anti-intellectual as some pundits assume. Especially when the intellectual in question is a good listener who seems to believe (as per Wesley Hogan in this First) âeveryoneâfrom Pat Buchanan to Sista Souljah, from Milton Friedman to Jim Hightowerâhas something to contribute to the civic conversation.â
Lawrence Goodwyn noted Obamaâs knack for stimulating candid democratic exchanges in a First piece written before the future president gave the 2004 convention speech that made him a national figure. Goodwyn paired Obama then with another ârelentless democratââthe late Polish intellectual and Solidarnosc ally Jacek Kuron, whose âenduring legacyâ was his âcommitment to candor as an instrument of politics and his belief that one worked with anybody who was willing to help one deal with a persisting social malfunction inherited from the past....