Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America

African American Review, Winter, 1995 by Houston A. Baker, Jr.

One of the most bizarre black events of 1994 was the spectacle of Reverend Calvin Butts - pastor of Harlem's Abyssinian Baptist Church and one of America's most prestigious grown men - presiding at a Walpurgis Night, in which construction equipment drove over piles of compact rap discs as the sign of a new morality. Then there was the spectacle of a turbaned Philadelphia Councilwoman, C. Delores Tucker, speaking with high bourgeois condescension about the excesses of rap music; she looked for all the world just like a character from William Makepeace Thackeray's Barchester Towers. While influential and obscenely rich white media moguls, white telecommunications and entertainment giants turned out (produced) rap discs with glad abandon, adult black leaders were moralistically upbraiding black youth and jumping idiotically up and down in the streets on top of the mere product.

But, of course, black adults have not been the only pundits to step forward and confront the moral panic occasioned by rap. White policemen's leagues, ladies' clubs, syndicated columnists, and everyday men and women in the street have decried the "sick," "criminal," "noisy" impropriety of the black popular cultural form known as rap.

Rap first gained currency in the 1970s. Ironically, each new confrontation and glad pronouncement of the death of rap has seemed to trigger ever more inventive directions of the form. The efforts of Run-DMC, one of rap's earliest groups to gain mega-stardom, seem veritable child's play in the company of the gangsta, fusion, jazz, absurdist, cool, and balladic variations of rap that rule a substantial portion of the airwaves today.

From its first commercial success during the 1970s, rap's powers of persuasion were never in doubt. Its powers of adaptation and global influence, however, have proved both surprising and frustrating to even the most tireless adult detractors of the form. One reason for rap's seductive staying power might be inferred from the fascinating work of Professor Tricia Rose, who is a member of the American Studies faculty at New York University.

Rose argues that rap is a unique expressive cultural response by black and Hispanic youth to the miseries of postindustrial urban America. She writes, "In the postindustrial urban context of dwindling low-income housing, a trickle of meaningless jobs for young people, mounting police brutality, and increasingly draconian depictions of young inner city residents, hip hop is black urban renewal." The words hip hop alert us to another reason for rap's survival, one that goes beyond its mere powers of response to urban woes. Rap carries "juice" because it is a crucial fixture in the structures of feeling (the praxis and style) that comprise the culture of "hip hop."

Rose has divided her text into several large divisions. After analyzing the deterioration of urban living conditions that accompanied deindustrialization in the United States, she turns to the early tripartite composition of hip hop culture: Graffiti, breakdancing, and rap are duly explicated. Rose pays requisite attention to the sometimes surprising connections between outmoded industrial skills (such as electronics repair) and an emergent technology of rap with its cleverly engineered electronic sound systems. Paradoxically, such systems were sometimes constructed by out-of-work electronics repairmen, or would-be-employed black electronics technicians. Rose discusses the fluid transformations of a hip hop celebrity like Fab Five Freddy, who went from graffiti writer, to rapper, to broker of graffiti art, and finally to host of MTV's popular show Yo! MTV Raps.

Rose's discussion of rap's emergence from the fantastic colors, kinesthetics, styles, vocals, and sonics of hip hop is ethnographically captivating. She manages to recreate the scene of emergence by drawing on interviews with rappers and through a sometimes too abundant employment of academic secondary sources. After tracing hip hop's origins, she proceeds to discuss the stylistic composition of hip hop (flow, layering, and rupture), differentiations between Western concert music and rap, the oppositional "rage" of selected male tappers, and the dynamic space of black women in the hip hop industry. Her general argument might be summarized as follows: A unique collage of voice, music, sound, and silence is achieved by the layering and ruptures of rap. Rap's "flow" is the product of a skilled mastery of hip hop culture's structures of feeling. It is dependent as well upon a mastery of recording-studio technology, as it is pushed into the "red" (i.e., the zone on studio meters that indicates distortion). When rap's collage is most effective it serves as a voice of opposition or resistance to hegemonic and oppressive arrangements of the dominant culture in the United States. This hegemonic culture seeks always to define black and Hispanic youth as both disorderly and criminal. Importantly, Rose analyzes black women rappets as energetic contributors to a black rage (noise?) that resists such oppressive definitions.