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CHAPTER FOUR “Commercial Niggas Like Me” Spoken Word Poetry, Hip-Hop, and the Racial Politics of Going Mainstream Over the years, many slam poets, including myself, have resisted commercial exploitation of the slam. Our reasoning was that the movement belongs to thousands of people worldwide; it would be unfair for any one slam or individual to capitalize on its name or popularity. But the door to commercialization is now wide open, and we can only wait and see what it will do to the slam and performance poetry. —Marc Smith, “About Slam Poetry” These niggas are honest as the day is long. They are commercial as the day is long. They are commercial niggas like me, and there’s nothing wrong with that. —Russell Simmons, in Slam Planet, speaking of the poets appearing in his Def Poetry projects Although the slam proper began over twenty years ago at a grassroots level, national attention to slam poetry has been paid only in the last decade. This attention has manifested itself across several different media ; representations of slam poetry have surfaced in theater and ‹lm, on CDs and MP3s, and on streaming video on the Internet, not to mention print and television sources such as the New York Times, the Cable News Network (CNN), 60 Minutes, Ms., and the New Yorker. Poetry slams have been featured in or been the focus of several feature-length movies (including Fighting Words, Love Jones, Slam, Slamnation, and Slam Planet). On television, slam poets have been featured on a shortlived Music Television (MTV) series, and the pilot for a slam-style spoken word game show, Word, was pitched to major television networks in the late 1990s. While these TV projects failed, HBO’s Russell Simmons Presents Def Poetry series and Simmons’s corresponding Broadway show have most recently found success in delivering poetry to mainstream audiences under the commercial rubric of “spoken word poetry.” A distinct focus of many of these projects is on black perform96 ers and the ties of performance poetry to African American popular culture and music, particularly hip-hop. Such spoken word projects are also indicative of slam poetry’s current association with black culture and expression in the public mind. The fact that many newcomers to the poetry slam assume that it originated at the Nuyorican Poets Café—a venue that began as a safe space for urban Puerto Rican underclass poets and now is home to a number of urban African American poets of many classes working in the hip-hop idiom —is indicative of the widespread public image of slam having originated in nonwhite or hip-hop culture. This public image could not be further from the truth. Many new patrons of the slam are surprised to learn that its ‹rst venue was the Get Me High Lounge—a white, workingclass Chicago barroom—and that its initial performances were rooted in the Anglo and European traditions of cabaret and Dadaist performance art rather than New York street culture.1 Although several slam poets practice the aesthetics of hip-hop, the obfuscation of slam’s AngloAmerican origins is a symptom of its larger association with black identity and expression in the popular consciousness. Given these connections between performance poetry, African American culture, and the commercial genre of hip-hop music circulating in mainstream culture—an audience that is multicultural but still dominated by a white, middle-class demographic—it is appropriate to ask how contemporary performance poetry is being marketed, reviewed , and consumed. How are African American poets taken to represent themselves and/or their communities in the commercial arena of spoken word poetry, and what are the politics of such representations? Who are the consumers of spoken word poetry and what desires might their consumption engender? How are these representations complicated by the commercial interests of production companies, marketers, recording labels, and the artists themselves? In short, what are the racial politics of slam poetry going mainstream? The issue of representation is vexed for African American spoken word poets, as it is for many black artists operating in mainstream commercial venues. The scholar Kobena Mercer notes that because of the political nature of reclaiming blackness from the ashes of racism black artists are “burdened with a whole range of extra-artistic concerns precisely because . . . they are seen as ‘representatives’ who speak on behalf of, and are thus accountable to, their communities.”2 Like hip-hop “Commercial Niggas Like Me” / 97 [3.134.85.87] Project MUSE (2024-04-16...

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