Brothers Gonna Work It Out: Sexual Politics in the Golden Age of Rap Nationalism

Notes

Notes notes to chapter one 1. Although Lethal Injection went platinum, the writing was on the wall for Ice Cube as a rap nationalist. After a five-year hiatus from his solo career, Ice Cube’s 1998 single “We Be Clubbin’” from the soundtrack for the movie The Players Club signified a shift to more popular and less political tastes. 2. “Raptivist” is being used as a descriptive term for the politicized rap artist. It is not my intention to suggest that any or all rap nationalists were activists or were involved in community or political organizing. 3. In this book the term “Hip-Hop Nation” is used to refer to a cohort of black neonationalist rap artists, although the term is commonly used in reference to hip-hop artists and fans regardless of their political standpoint. Similarly, the term “hip-hop movement” is used in reference to the golden age of rap nationalism and the generation of activists it has inspired (the latter will be discussed in more depth in chapter 5). 4. Jeffrey Louis Decker, “The State of Rap: Time and Place in Hip Hop Nationalism ,” Social Texts (Spring 1993): 60. 5. See Henry Louis Gates, Jr., “2 Live Crew, Decoded,” New York Times, 19 June 1990; and Henry Louis Gates, Jr., “Rap Music: Don’t Knock It If You’re Not onto Its ‘Lies,’” New York Herald Tribune, 20 June 1990. 6. Jon Michael Spencer, “Introduction,” The Emergency of Black and the Emergence of Rap, Special Issue of Black Sacred Music: A Journal of Theomusicology 5, 1 (Spring 1991): 4 (italics my emphasis). For a critique of the apologetic scholarship on the sexism in rap music, see Sonja Peterson-Lewis, “A Feminist Analysis of the Defenses of Obscene Rap Lyrics,” Black Sacred Music (Spring 1991): 68–79. 7. Among many hip-hop artists and enthusiasts the definitions of “rap” and “hip-hop” have more to do with commercial distinctions than cultural ones. For those hip-hop “heads,” commercial artists are labeled “rap” while “underground ” artists—artists who are recognized as more “authentic” and/or are believed to preserve and project the music as an art form—are endorsed by the more desired “hip-hop” label. These distinctions are best summed up by KRS173 One’s oft-cited statement that “rap is something you do, Hip-Hop is something you live.” See KRS-One, “Hip-Hop v. Rap,” Sound of the Police (Jive, 1993). 8. Chuck D, telephone interview by author, 27 January 2002. 9. David Mills, “The Gangster Rapper: Violent Hero or Negative Role Model?” The Source, Summer 1990, 39. 10. Chuck D, interview. 11. Adam Krims, Rap Music and the Poetics of Identity (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 8, quoting Jody Berland, “Locating Listening: Technological Space, Popular Music, and Canadian Meditations,” in The Place of Music, ed. Andrew Leyshon, David Matless, and George Revill (New York: Guilford, 1998), 138. 12. For a more extensive discussion of the social, economic, and political context of rap’s development, see Tricia Rose, “‘All Aboard the Night Train’: Flow, Layering, and Rupture in Post-Industrial New York,” in Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America (Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press, 1994), 21–34. And for a discussion of the impact of Reaganomics on black youth, see Clarence Lusane, “Rap, Race, and Politics,” Race and Class (Great Britain) 35, 1 (1993): 43. 13. “The Trip to the Bronx,” New York Times, 6 October 1977, 26. 14. Richard Severo, “Bronx a Symbol of America’s Woes,” New York Times, 6 October 1977, B18. 15. Michael Eric Dyson, Between God and Gangsta Rap: Bearing Witness to Black Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 177. 16. Ibid. For Dyson’s description of rappers as “cultural griots,” see Michael Eric Dyson, “Rap Culture, the Church, and American Society,” Sacred Music of the Secular City, Special Issue of Black Sacred Music: A Journal of Theomusicology 6, 1 (Spring 1992): 268. 17. Russell A. Potter, Spectacular Vernaculars: Hip-Hop and the Politics of Postmodernism (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995), 108. 18. Ibid., 18. 19. Ibid., 76. 20. Sheila Rule, “Generation Rap,” New York Times, 3 April 1994, sec. 6, p. 40. 21. Cornel West, “On Afro-American Popular Music: From Bebop to Rap,” Sacred Music of the Secular City, Special Issue of Black Sacred Music: A Journal of Theomusicology 6, 1 (Spring 1992): 293. 22. This is not to minimize Latino influences on hip-hop culture...