"The Unclean Break": Re-Imagining the Sound of Hip-Hop

Of Carter Mathes's several remarkable interventions in Imagine the Sound: Experimental African American Literature After Civil Rights, this essay spells out the implications of his subtle analyses of hip-hop. Mathes's introduction says "the movement between sound and constructions of black consciousness refuses a straightforward internalization of the 'hurt' of history" (2015, 8). He footnotes this passage, by discussing the book's "relationship" to "the narrative and critical power of rap and the sonic dimensions of its production" (206n14). Taken to their logical endpoint, Carter's observations usher hip-hop out of the limited purview of Hip-Hop Studies and into the more capacious intersection of Black Studies, Literary studies, and Sound Studies, a subfield including Shana Redmond's Anthem, Ashon Crawley's Blackpentacostal Breath, Emily Lordi's Black Resonance, Candace Jenkin's "Hip-Hop and the Literary" collection, and Nathaniel Mackey's writing.¹

Multiple essays from the early twentieth century down to the 1980s—including W.E.B Du Bois's "Sorrow Songs," Zora Neale Hurston's "Spirituals and Neo-Spirituals," James Baldwin's "If Black English Isn't a Language, Then Tell Me, What Is?" and James Snead's "On Repetition in Black Culture"—inform classic studies of hip-hop. Tricia Rose's Black Noise, Imani Perry's Prophets of the Hood, Murray Forman's The Hood Comes First, and Ronald Judy's "On the Question of Nigga Authenticity" each opened new paths of inquiry. The most pioneering dimension of their scholarship has faded from view—their sensitivity to the aesthetic, historical, and political "noise" overwhelming Western standards of creating, feeling, and knowing. Imagine the Sound demonstrates how to hear this noise, once again.

At stake here is scholarly disavowal of the "uncanny"—that which makes the home unfamiliar and frightening—within the Civil Rights Movement (CRM) (Freud 1945, 222). In an interview, Hortense Spillers notes this uncanny dimension, by calling hip-hop "the first time I have not necessarily felt at home" in a putatively "important aspect of black culture." Spillers warns that "the comparative angle seems to drop away" when scholarship on hip-hop erects a problematic "hierarchy" to make hip-hop the cultural "measure" (Leonard 2007, 1063). If hip-hop is the uncanny misleading black culture, then scholars will judge hip-hop the traitor or pre-empt this accusation by making hip-hop "the measure." Either option keeps this bifurcation intact, thereby constraining future research paths to naïve triumphalism or apologia. However, songs like Biggie's "Things Done Changed" (Notorious 1993) suggest this uncanny force predates, arises coterminous with, and in response to hip-hop's emergence, but is not hip-hop itself.

Re-framing hip-hop as an effort to grapple with the CRM's transmogrification means that hip-hop can question change across generations, musical forms, and sonic environments. Imagine the Sound does this work through readings of Souls of Black Folk's "Of the Sorrow Songs" chapter and John Edgar Wideman's writings. A quotation from "Of the Wings of Atalanta" augments Mathes's turn to Souls and my interest in hip-hop. In the quotation, Du Bois describes knowing that Emancipation's ideals remained unfulfilled. "It is a hard thing to live haunted by the ghost of an untrue dream … To know that with the Right that triumphed, triumphed something of Wrong" (1996, 415). Antebellum Negro Spirituals take on new meaning when post-Reconstruction discontent morphs into new demands for justice.² A similar discontent returns when the CRM's dreams go awry. Broken political promises and betrayals lead Joseph Winters (2013) and Reiland Rabaka (2011) to call hip-hop a new iteration of the sorrow songs.

Mathes and Wideman would likely agree. Like Du Bois's view of Negro spirituals, Mathes considers hip-hop more akin to "structures of feeling" than static political affiliations (2015, 200). Similarly, in "The Architectonics of Fiction," Wideman says rap extends the "African American tradition" because it, too, "contain[s] the memory of a hard, unclean break" (1990, 44). One cannot read Wideman without thinking of the break beat, hip...