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TIM’M T. WEST Keepin’ It Real Disidentification and Its Discontents You and me, what does that mean? Always, what does that mean? Forever, what does that mean? It means we’ll manage, I’ll master your language, and in the meantime, I’ll create my own. —Tricky, Pre-millennium Tension [I]n the diverse invitations to suspend artistic experimentation , there is an identical call for order, a desire for unity, for identity, for security, or popularity (in the sense of “‹nding a public”). Artists and writers must be brought back into the bosom of the community, or at least, if the latter is considered to be ill, they must be assigned the task of healing it. —Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition Disidentification’s Discontents The Bay Area rap group Deep Dickollective1 (of which I am a founding member) came together with buckets on which to bang, a piano, freestyle rhymes, and the daunting task of consoling a friend’s post-HIV crisis. I was that friend in crisis. Dis/ease with hip-hop is not so ‹gurative these days. It is the performance I enact each time I step on the stage and check the mic; it is the vantage point through which I theorize my movements in hip-hop culture as a black gay-identi‹ed man. The burgeoning hip-hop subculture called “homo hop” is the inevitable outgrowth of a tension between hip-hop’s greatest taboo and the ‹gurative dis/ease experienced by its “homiesexual” disciples. Homo hop has an origin narrative of its own: romantic and revolutionary, just like the origin 162 narrative of hip-hop, the global and cultural movement out of which it was born. Some will come to say that the momentous year was 1999. D/DC was founded on beats, rhymes, and the dis/ease of a gay black man moved to self-treatment: making hip-hop music with his “niggaz.” As black queer men we came together having accepted the idea that there are few “safe” spaces in which to live, and therefore, claiming all space as salvageable for whichever ways it supports our breathing. During that ‹rst freestyle and spoken word session “check the breath” became a mantra not only marking our testimony to life beyond dis/ease, but also a declaration that hiphop would be our most viable pulpit for broadcasting resurrection. The notion of revival connotes the spiritual proselytizing inherent in black gospel tradition, but at the turn of the twenty-‹rst century, it was accompanied by break-beats and a beat-box. This time the “faggots” are not the silent choir members, deacons, or ushers assuming a compulsory silence after a pastor’s rebuke of Sodom. This time we would be the ones “mic checking.” In hip-hop the person who “mic checks” tests the viability of the medium for communication. Nothing is voiced until the microphone is checked. Some will come to say that gay hip-hop terrorists began seizing control over microphones in this new millennium. Others will praise us for doing so. What is certain is D/DC’s focus on empowerment and agency—not obsession with marginalization or complaints without action—has ultimately spawned an empowered and visible community that has been referenced everywhere from the New York Times to Newsweek. For members of my rap group, D/DC, there was no way around the hip-hop culture that had been so central to our rites of passage into black manhood in America. The insults in hip-hop music, uncomfortable and badgering to our gay identities as they have been, either become the tropes that make us cringe at every other refrain, or the thing we merely manage or tolerate—‹nding neither identi‹cation nor counteridenti‹cation with hip-hop culture. This tension, this in-betweenness mediating identi‹cation (e.g., assimilation) and counteridenti‹cation (e.g., de‹ance), is what José Muñoz calls disidenti‹cation. The disidentifying subject necessarily mediates an unhappy attachment to something often inextricable to his or her very sense of self. The queer’s relationship to hip-hop re›ects increasing grounds for divorce, even when there is love enough to justify “till death do us part.” Like the ironic failure of some of our most liberal states to honor same-sex marriage in 2004, the inextricable bond between the “homiesexual” and his or her hip-hop muse re›ects a desire for someKeepin ’ It Real 163 [18.220.154.41] Project MUSE (2024...

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