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Brothers Gonna Work It Out The Popular/Political Culture of Rap Music In the 1988 Public Enemy release “Party for Your Right to Fight,” rap nationalist and lead lyricist Chuck D ushered in a new moment in hip-hop history when he defiantly stated, Power equality and we’re out to get it I know some of you ain’t with it This party started right in ‘66 With a pro-black radical mix.1 As a trailblazer of the consciousness movement within rap music, Chuck D claimed his legacy as the political progeny of the Black Panther Party. The Black Panthers, remembered by the hip-hop generation as righteous revolutionaries, are deified and located among an elite class of politicized “prophets of rage.” They are black nationalists whose standard for black manhood is preserved and emulated. In fact, Chuck D told a Toronto Sun reporter in May of 1998 that when he and his friends from Adelphi University entered the rap game they did so in a deliberate manner. “We wanted to be known as the Black Panthers of Rap, we wanted our music to be dissonant.”2 With songs like “Party for Your Right to Fight,” “Fight the Power,” and “Power to the People,” these pioneers of rap nationalism purposefully invoked the rhetorical and political styling of the Black Panther Party and the Black Power movement of the late 1960’s, complete with its envisioning of black nationalism as a politics of masculine protest. Like their idols, Chuck D and his crew believed that they were the representatives of a “revolutionary generation,” a group of in-dangered young black males considered by the state to be “Public Enemy 3 63 #1.”3 And as public enemies, Chuck D argued that it was black men’s responsibility to “get mad, revolt, revise, realize” for black liberation;4 for, as he stated on their 1990 album Fear of a Black Planet, “it takes a man to take a stand.”5 Although the use of rap music as a form of cultural expression was not a revolutionary idea (that musical movement began over ten years prior to the introduction of rap nationalism), the use of rap music as a site for political expression was radical. And in politicized rap music demonstrative race and gender politics reemerged with a vengeance, thrusting “it’sa -dick-thing” masculinity into the public sphere and propelling black political /popular culture into the national spotlight. “It is the forcefulness of rap’s insurrection that allows it to penetrate white defenses,” insists Jon Michael Spencer, using the same kind of sexualized masculinist language found in the lyrics of the artists he spotlights.6 From East Coast groups such as Public Enemy, Boogie Down Productions, and X-Clan to West Coast artists like Ice Cube, Paris, and Kam, rap nationalists intentionally conjured a tradition of model, and militant, black manhood. Utilizing black nationalist politics and hip-hop culture, these artists and others offered young black males the opportunity to reassert a masculine presence in the public domain. This effort was, in part, a response to the popular music of the mid-1980’s when black male artists like Michael Jackson and Prince dominated the charts. “When rap came out I thought it was the perfect thing for me,” exclaimed Brand Nubian’s lyricist Lord Jamar. With rap music “a lot of masculine men said, ‘Yeah, this is the way I can sing without singing, and this is a way for me to write poetry without being a poet, like a soft poet.’ And that’s why rap is so popular because you can still keep your masculinity.”7 Public Enemy’s “Sister of Instruction ” Sister Souljah agreed. “Rappers are bringing back the notion of strong, masculine voices,” she declared, singing the praises of hip-hop music in a manner that intimated how she envisioned her (secondary) role as a woman within the rap nationalist movement. “You will not find a black male rapper who sounds like DeBarge or some other soprano singer.”8 Souljah’s view of the masculinist impulse shaping rap nationalism as a counterpoint to the effeminate representation of black men in popular culture was affirmed by her bandmate Chuck D. In the 1991 hiphop documentary Tour of a Black Planet, Chuck proclaimed that the “black man is already emasculated and this standard is projected to black males” through R & B music. Therefore, according to Chuck D, black men needed counterimages, an “intellectual, pro-black...

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