Original Article: http://dartreview.com/archives/2004/04/11/woe_for_hiphop_has_lost_its_soul.php
Sunday, April 11, 2004
Most people would consider their lives a failure if at age 40 they conducted lectures on hip-hop. Not Tricia Rose, professor of American studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and a "scholar" of hip-hop and black women's sexual histories—to her, it's a dream job. She recently brought her tour to Dartmouth, where she delivered the keynote address to the Hip-Hop Identities and Poetic Race Relations conference.
From the start, Rose made it clear that audience participation was a must. She began her lecture by cranking up the frail speakers to blare an angry hip-hop tirade. As the audience began clapping and dancing to the nearly indecipherable medley, she exclaimed, "I love this stuff! Rose herself twitched out a dance as her crowd, right down to several eighty-year-olds, tried to follow her lead. She quickly turned down the music, however, and launched into her address. Rose, it appears, is concerned for the future of hip-hop; as she put it,"we are in a bit of a crisis." Mainstream hip-hop has lost its voice and, she said,its attitude of "there ain't no stopping us now." Never fear: Rose eagerly assigned blame for the art's downfall.
Rose attacked anyone she felt was polluting the "soul" of hip-hop, in other words anything white or corporate. Railing against the "conservative, narrow-minded, up-by-your-bootstraps" commercial culture, Rose accused record corporations of engaging in "mockery for the purposes of profit." She also blamed white people as a race, claiming "white culture" had used hip-hop as a tool of denigration. This all formed part of a "national need" to project negative stereotypes onto blacks, she explained, a way to justify "the suffering of black people." Rose exempted herself from the blame, though she is white, because she "grew up in the barrio." Her rage at this corruption, she added, was all-consuming.
Interspersed with her ramblings, Rose also found the time to blame "the prison-industrial complex" and an "unconscionably low" poverty line. Her voice rising to a raving crescendo, she added that looking at black history, it was impossible not to "first be depressed and then be incredibly angry."
Rose also encouraged the audience to see that standard, comprehendible English was a form of oppression. To speak proper English, she noted, was to "act white," a form of "brainwashing" and worse. Her handler, frequently feeling the urge to punctuate her speech with barely intelligible comments, reinforced the point. His garbled vocalizations included: "Oh? Oh…"; "Say it 'gain"; and "You tell 'em."
The speaker proceeded to make it clear that she preferred "other cultural codes," namely hip-hop. While she expressed reservations about hip-hop's treatment of women, she reveled in its "expressive form that will articulate [black] suffering." Audience members snapped their fingers in quiet agreement with her insight.
As the audience queried Rose about the "culture" of hip-hop, and while she divined answers, one pressing question came to mind: "Why is Dartmouth funding this claptrap?" But to my question, left unsaid, no answer emerged.