From Jim Crow to Jay-Z: Race, Rap, and the Performance of Masculinity

Introduction

introduction In Playing in the Dark, Toni Morrison offers a compelling reading of the American literary canon that exposes a largely unremarked but salient “Africanist presence” embedded within the nation’s great works of literature. Morrison interrogates the assumption that the American literary canon has not been substantially influenced by four hundred years of the African and African American presence in the United States. In so doing she introduces a refreshing reading of the national literature that allows for a richer and more profound understanding of the American character, one that cannot be separated from its multiracial heritage through what she deems “the process of organizing American coherence through a distancing Africanism,”1 a project that continues unabated to the present day. Morrison’s criticism offers an opportunity to reconsider how African American music and questions around race have also helped to construct our national character and culture. If the contemplation of a peripheral black presence is critical to our understanding of American literature, then we are compelled to ask similar questions about our popular music. It is not just that African American sacred and secular music has served as the critical foundation for American popular music, but that American culture itself would be impossible to imagine without the black presence ever-residing at its margins, occasionally pushing its way into the mainstream and transforming it palpably and profoundly. This book draws a broad arc between the earliest form of popular music, one that is only marginally related to but nonetheless derived from black cultural expressions—American minstrelsy—and one of the most recent forms of popular music—contemporary hip-hop and the cultural milieu that surrounds it. It examines a number of themes related to 2 from jim crow to jay-z performance and the black male body, representations of black masculinity, the construction of emotional affect or feeling around these, and the uses and misuses of black male subjectivity that have helped to shape perceptions and attitudes regarding black males in the American racial imagination. While acknowledging that the popular and scholarly historiography of hip-hop culture has yet not adequately addressed the role of women in that history, this is unabashedly a book about men and masculinities, although it is indebted to many feminist scholars who have expanded our understanding of gender and performance. While it is also the case that women’s studies and gender studies began largely as a way to include women’s excluded histories, gender studies cannot or should not preclude the study of men if only to interrogate presumptions of male privilege and the kinds of constructions of masculinity that I critique. I make a number of connections between masculinity and race as kinds of ritualized performance that have particular types of aesthetic markers and that depend upon certain histories and cultural memories. Writing about masculinity arguably favors a gender position already privileged in many ways, but my intent is to interrogate masculinity as well as racial performance—of blackness and of whiteness—in the context of one of the most commercially and culturally important musical styles of the last quarter century, one that has arguably privileged the male body and performance more than any popular musical form since minstrelsy, and minstrelsy itself, the most important popular musical form in American history since it was the first. I bookend minstrelsy and hardcore hip-hop because they privilege the performance of both masculinity and race and because through them black and white males alike have used essentially the same set of signifiers to construct models of self and identity for themselves. I would argue that performances of race and masculinity have produced social consequences that extend far beyond the spectacle presented on stage. Obviously, issues of appropriation and authenticity become salient as does the fact we are dealing with different historical and cultural spaces. Nonetheless, these two forms of music and performance continue to have great relevance and resonance in discussing race, masculinity, and the ways in which the poetics of the body contributes to their respective musical practices. In many ways, hip-hop music and culture have brought issues of gender to the forefront, but scholarly studies have failed to fully investigate all the ways in which hardcore styles of hip-hop in particular have recast ideas about masculinity and the performance of the body. There has been no paucity of writings that have tended to focus on the ways in which hardcore rap and many black males who participate in it...