Rap, Soul, and the Vortex at 33.3 rpm: Hip-Hop's Implements and African American Modernisms

Rap, Soul, and the Vortex at 33.3 RPM

Hip-Hop's Implements and African American Modernisms

I guess you're right, Lorette,
You can't live in the present forever.

—Tom Waits as Zack "Lee Baby" Sims in Jim Jarmusch's Down by Law

I.

Since its explosion into the open market in the early 1980s, hip-hop music has patterned and repatterned popular cultures all over the world. At the core of most of the music's vibrant innovations are the basic implements of the genre: two turntables, a cross-fader, and a microphone. Made popular by Jamaican DJs in the 1970s, these implements gave rise to the most widely used narrative mode to emerge from the African Diaspora in the last three decades of the twentieth century. Like its cousin, the archetypal "crossroads" themselves, the cross-fader has allowed DJs and audiences to imagine and re-imagine themselves and each other in ways never before possible. That's been the core of the magic (admittedly, turned into media spectacle and orgiastic acquisitiveness) and the music since the start. DJs have turned these narrative tools in many directions. In this essay, I strip the tools bare and show them as they operate closer to the pools and streams of memory than to the big dollars. The DJs in this essay have more in common with Ellison's narrator and Hemingway's Nick Adams than with Sean Puffy Combs. In this sense, their modernism is a romantic meditation on modern reality, using the tools of the modern. They are, however, fully aware that the songs of innocence are always already experienced. A few DJs in Chicago use the implements of hip-hop to produce interactive modernist disruptions and visionary renewals of mind, motion, and memory. With records found mostly in used record bins—the collective unconscious of the city's soundscape—DJs invite dancers, and even just listeners, down to the crossroads. They remake the present where the past and future meet. The result is an enactment of modernist impulses at the heart of African-American literature and culture.

Afro-modernists trying to negotiate the ever-present crossroads of horizontal (social) and vertical (psychological) spaces often turn to music for their images of exchange and connection in both realms. If the theories and techniques of literary modernism are an influence on African-American writers' depiction of psychological space, then music provides a powerful guide in imagining communal space. Simultaneously public and intensely personal, sound organizes experiences from communal rituals to the "emergent patterns" of neurological memory. Therefore, music provides an effective vehicle for what Toni Morrison, in Beloved, calls "rememory." Rememory is Morrison's term for how events of the past, which now exist in personal memory, become present in / as public space. Most modernists, including Bergson, Proust, and to a large extent Wright and Ellison as well, see the impressionistic flux of sensation and memory that washes over and under the rational faculties of consciousness as a personal matter. In their work, Weber, Habermas, and Posnock show the dangers of these "retreats" which can diminish the vibrancy of public space. For Morrison, showing her affinities with the diasporic modernist tradition that emerges out of Zora Neale Hurston's work, these excavations of black consciousness take place in relation to a vibrant public realm. Morrison's Sethe describes rememory in Beloved:

I was talking about time. It's so hard for me to believe in it. Some things go. Pass on. Some things just stay. I used to think it was my rememory. You know. Some things you forget. Other things you never do. But it's not. Places, places are still there. If a house burns down, it's gone, but the place—the picture of it—stays, and not just in my rememory, but out there, in the world[. . . .] Some day you be walking down the road and you hear something or see...