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Chapter 11 “Tell us how it feels to be a problem”: Hip Hop Longings and Poor Young Black Men Imani Perry . . . fantasy parodies desire replacing longing . . . —Audre Lorde, “Addiction” In “Of Our Spiritual Strivings,” the autobiographical essay that opens The Souls of Black Folk, W. E. B. Du Bois reflected on his response to provocative (and insulting) white peers: “To the real question, How does it feel to be a problem? I answer seldom a word” (1903, 1). In the United States today, perhaps no one is made to feel like a problem more acutely than the poor young Black man who, despite his great social vulnerability, is so often presumed to be a predator or threat.1 These youths, proclaimed to be “in crisis” by commentators ranging from academics to New York Times headlines, respond to the question, “How does it feel to be a problem?” in the lyrics of our popular music. The answer offered there often seems more problematic than problemsolving ; indeed, it seldom even identifies the nature and sources of the problem. The problematic character of this answer is due in part to the fact that today hip hop is dominated by corporations. Choices about what kinds of songs and artists are marketed and what music is most popular are no longer rooted in urban Black communities but rather flow from executive decisions and the voyeuristic interests of a national and international audience. As rapper Nas argues, “Heinous crimes help record sales more than creative lines.”2 However, within the lyrics of hip hop we can find significant commentary on the lives and consciousness of poor young Black men. 11Anderson_Ch11 165-178.qxd 2/20/08 12:21 PM Page 165 Hip hop remains a useful context for social observation. Although its audience has dramatically broadened, hip hop continues to be the music of choice for America’s young Black men. The consistent themes found throughout the history of hip hop are not merely a reflection of corporate choices but rather originate in the Black male experience that is represented in the music. While young Black men are often the fantastic and fantasized “subjects” of entertainment—in athletics, in sensationalized news media (Gilliam and Iyengar 2000), and in reality television—the exhortations of hip hop provide one of the few arenas in which we hear their voices, in either the literal or the role-playing “everyman” voice of the rapper. The voices of hip hop are still overwhelmingly young, Black, and male. The authors remain so as well, even as their words are vetted and evaluated by a wide range of people in the music industry before they hit the clubs, airwaves, and iPods. Moreover, because of the great value placed on the image of authenticity in the art form, some degree of loyalty to urban experience has been sustained even though the music is sensationalized and often resorts to stereotypes to improve sales. British cultural theorist Stuart Hall and his colleagues in the emerging field of cultural studies argued that the meaning of a mass media product exists somewhere between the producer and the audience (Hall et al. 1978). Today cultural products are often produced with ambiguous meanings, and different audiences latch on to different meanings within the music. In 1971, Hall observed presciently: “The mass media play a crucial role in defining the problems and issues of public concern. They are the main channels of public discourse in our segregated society. They transmit stereotypes of one group to other groups. They attach feelings and emotions to problems. They set the terms in which problems are defined as ‘central’ or ‘marginal’.”3 The mass media that propagates hip hop constitutes both mass culture— produced by an industry and channeling stereotypes of Black culture as pathological—and Black popular culture—offering insights into Black experience and appealing to the Black music aesthetic. This music speaks in multiple registers. Nonetheless, any straightforward interpretation of mainstream hip hop might reasonably yet incorrectly lead one to understand young Black men as the sole or dominant authors and creators of the conditions they depict—including urban decay, poverty, and the flood of guns in poor neighborhoods—rather than simply authors of the narratives they tell. The narrative dimension of hip hop tells the story of navigating these conditions, which forms one part of its appeal for Black young men. As The Game boasts, “The hood love me, hoodrats gotta hug me.” 166 Imani Perry 11Anderson_Ch11 165-178.qxd 2/20...

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