American Poetry in Performance: From Walt Whitman to Hip Hop

Afterword

Afterword Because rap is poetry, and hip hop is culture. —bob holman, from “praise poem for slam: why slam causes pain and is a good thing” As Dana Gioia points out in his 2004 book Disappearing Ink, we currently are living through a cultural revolution, one in which “print has lost its primacy in communication”; as he observes, “the most surprising and signi‹cant development in recent American poetry has been the wide-scale and unexpected reemergence of popular poetry, a poetry that is predominantly oral and informed by new media.” In addition to slam poetry, one of these poetries is rap, and the debates about authenticity surrounding that form highlight many of the issues that this book raises and call attention to the continuing tradition of the spoken word that harks back to Whitman.1 In 1993 Eric Michael Dyson argued that the rap concert “creates space for cultural resistance and personal agency,” but with the commercial success of hip hop, questions about the oppositional force of hip hop and the attendant issue of authenticity have arisen. He re›ects on this matter of authenticity in a 2006 interview where he addresses the previous year’s ‹lm Hustle & Flow, which features a pimp named Djay who creates his own music at home, in a less-than-advanced technological situation: the ‹lm makes “an argument,” he says, “for an old-school approach to recording. This is about the culture of the tape, this is about recalling the myth of hip hop origins. The iconography of the tape in an era of digital technology is like the ghetto version of Walter Benjamin’s ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.’ It’s about recording technology in the hands of those who control its content and reproduction.” We have seen the ways in which technologies of sound recording carry a political charge for many performance poets, with a lo-‹ feel often symbolic of a return to auratic ori230 gins, to a time before the mechanics of repetition and (often) popular success set in. As Dyson expounds, again with respect to the poetics and politics of Hustle & Flow, “Producing a tape in the age of the CD is . . . about the quixotic politics of nostalgia linked to the authentic. This is about what’s real. . . . Despite newfangled technologies and forms like the CD and MP3, what this is about—this production of a tape—is a man and his voice and his desire, and the people who conspire with him to create art that makes a difference to the soul.” The cassette tape thus serves “to contest the distancing and destabilizing and deracinating forces of technology,” to protect against “a certain loss of community and identity,” with the voice of the artist presented in a way that is direct, unenhanced, “original”—the model being Whitman, whom Ferlinghetti hails as “greatest soul speaker.”2 Dyson credits the Black Arts movement for instructing this sense of community and identity in early hip hop, explaining that those earlier artists felt that “politics is central to artistic vision” and that there must exist a “strong tie between artist and community, spurning the heroic individualism of European models of artistic endeavor in favor of the collective roots of artists who express the values, beliefs, ideals, and perceptions of the communities to which they belong.” He imagines as parallel the live poetry readings of the Black Arts movement and the performance of rap, which, he believes, is “fueled by the same energy and purpose”: “Like their Black Arts Movement predecessors, [socially] conscious rappers insist that politics, art, and life are intricately intertwined.” When Dyson comments on the rhetorical skill of hip hoppers, he notes their esteemed lineage, which, he says, includes Hughes, Giovanni, Sanchez, and Whitman.3 One of the principal elements of rap performance is its liveness; it is on stage in front of an audience “where rappers turn into MCs” or not. As the artists attest, “Hip-hop is all about performing live,” and “is more important than having good records,” as liveness serves as a means of certifying your authenticity (“It seems like you’re fake or something if you sound good on record with Auto-Tune and all of that but onstage you sing horrible ”). Getting the crowd amped, connecting with fans, through a strong interactive performance (a “deeply embodied participatory involvement”) is key.4 The ability to “freestyle,” that is, to improvise, on stage is further proof of the hip hop poet. As with...