Reading Reflection

Edited by

ADAM BRADLEY ANDREW DUBOIS

Foreword by Henry Louis Gates, Jr.

Afterwords by Chuck D and Common

Yale UNIVERSITY PRESS New Haven and London

Copyright © 2010 by Adam Bradley and Andrew DuBois.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in- Publication Data

The anthology of rap / edited by Adam Bradley and Andrew DuBois; foreword by Henry Louis

Gates, Jr.; afterwords by Chuck D and Common.

p. em.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-300-14190-0 (hardcover: alk. paper) 1. Rap (Music)- History and criticism.

2. Rap (Music)-Texts. I. Bradley, Adam. II. DuBois, Andrew (Andrew Lee)

ML3531.A57 2010

782.42164909-dc22 2010023316

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

HENRY LOUIS GATES, JR. The first person I ever heard "rap" was a man born in 1913, my

father, Henry Louis Gates, Sr. Daddy's generation didn't call the

rhetorical games they played "rapping"; they signified, they

layed the Dozens. But this was rapping just the same, rapping

y another name. Signifying is the grandparent of Rap; and Rap

s signifying in a postmodern way. The narratives that my fa-

her recited in rhyme told the tale of defiant heroes named

hine or Stagolee or, my absolute favorite, the Signifyin:g Mon-

ey. They were linguistically intricate, they were funny and

pirited, and they were astonishingly profane. Soon the stories became familiar to me and I started

memorizing parts of them, especially striking couplets and

ometimes an entire resonant stanza. But every time my dad re-

a version of one of these tales, he somehow made it new

reminding me of all that a virtuosic performer possessed:

an excellent memory, a mastery of pace and timing, the capac-

'ty to inflect and gesture, the ability to summon the identities of

ifferent characters simply through the nuances of their voices.

My father and his friends called their raps "signifying" or

'playing the Dozens;' a younger generation named them

Toasts, and an even younger generation called it "rapping:' But

regardless of the name, much about the genre remained the

ame. Since anthropologists tend to call them "Toasts;' we will

mploy that term here. Toasts are long oral poems that had

emerged by World War I, shortly after the sinking of the Ti- tanic, judging by the fact that one of the earliest surviving ex- amples of the genre was called "Shine and the Titanic." And the act that the French words for "monkey" and "sign" are a bit of

a visual pun (singe and signe, respectively) also points to a World War I ori- gin of the genre as it would have been revised by returning black veterans

from the European theater of war. (My father recalls meeting southern

black soldiers at the beginning of World War II at Camp Lee, Virginia,

who were barely literate but who could recite "acres of verses" of "The Sig-

nifying MonkeY;' underscoring the role of the military and war as a cross-

pollinating mechanism for black cultural practices. And of these various

forms, none would be more compelling, more popular, more shared than

signifying.)

xxiii

All of these sub genres emerged out of the African American rhetorical

practice of signifying. Signifying is the defining rhetorical principle of all

African American discourse, the language game of black language games,

both sacred and secular, from the preacher's call-and-response to the irony

and indirection of playing the Dozens. These oral poets practiced their arts

in ritual settings such as the street corner or the barbershop, sometimes en-

gaging in verbal duels with contenders like a lingUistic boxing match. These

recitations were a form of artistic practice and honing, but they were also

the source of great entertainment displayed before an audience with a most

sophisticated ear. And though certain poems, such as "Shine and the Ti- tanic" and "The Signifying MonkeY;' had a familiar, repeated narrative con- tent, poets improvised through and around this received content, with im-

provised stanzas and lyrics that might address a range of concerns from

social and political issues to love, loneliness, heartbreak, and even death.

The Dozens and the Toasts were, first and foremost, forms of art, and ev-

eryone on the street or sitting around the barbershop knew this. Rapping

was a performance, rappers were to be judged, and the judges were the peo-

ple on the corner or in the shop. Everyone, it seemed to me as I watched

these performances unfolding even as a child, was literate in the fine arts of

signification.

As I listened to my father delighting us in the late fifties with tales of

the Monkey and old Shine, I knew at once that there was something sub-

lime, something marvelous and forbidden and dangerous about them. And

it was easy to recognize variations on rapping that started emerging in

rhythm and blues and soul music in the sixties. I am thinking of James

Brown's nine-minute rendition of "Lost Someone" on his Live at the Apollo album in 1963, or Isaac Hayes's paradigm-shifting version of "By the Time I

Get to Phoenix" from his Hot Buttered Soul album of 1969. And H. Rap Brown's emergence as one of the leaders of the younger black militants of

the Black Power movement brought the word "Rap" and the lyrics of the

xxiv Dozens to a generation of black students because he included his most

original raps, as a point of pride in his own artistry, in his autobiography,

Die, Nigger, Die. (Unfortunately, Mr. Brown did not write as well as he

rapped!) A few years later, I would hear echoes of all of these formal antecedents

in the early Rap songs hitting the airwaves in the late seventies and early

eighties. Melle Mel's verse on "The Message":

A child is born with no state of mind

Blind to the ways of mankind

God is smiling on you but he's frowning too

Because only God knows what you'll go through

echoes across the decades back to these lines from the toast called "Life's a

Funny Old Proposition":

A man comes to birth on this funny old earth

With not a chance in a million to win

To find that he's through and his funeral is due

Before he can even begin

Despite all that is different about them, these two verses are bound to-

gether by both sound and sense. They each insist upon an unstinting and

unflinching confrontation with reality, while somehow staving off despair.

Great art so often does this, offering expiation and transcendence all at

once. As an art form, Rap is defined, like the Toasts before it, by a set of for-

mal qualities, an iconoclastic spirit, and a virtuosic sense of wordplay. It ex-

tends the long-standing practice in the African American oral tradition of

language games. Simply put, Rap is a contemporary form of signifying.

By the time I began my first job teaching at Yale while still a graduate

student in the mid-1970s, I began to hear about a new music coming out of

the Bronx. It was simply called Rap-an old word for those familiar with

black slang, but a new form that combined rhythm and rhyme in a style all

its own. Like all art-vernacular or high art-it took the familiar and made

it unfamiliar again. Rap's signature characteristic is the parody and pastiche

of its lyrics, including "sampling;' which is just another word for intertextu-

ality. Rap is the art form par excellence of synthesiS and recombination. No

one could say that Afrika Bambaataa or Grandmaster Flash was not creat-

, ing something new, but each would be quick to acknowledge his forIP.-al

debts to other artists, especially to old school musicians from the past.

xxv As we have seen, Rap is the postmodern version of an African Ameri-

can vernacular tradition that stretches back to chants, Toasts, and trickster

tales. It connects through its percussive sensibility, its riffs, and its penchant

for rhyme, with a range of forms including scat singing, radio DJ patter, and

Black Arts movement poets like Amiri Baraka, Nikki Giovanni, and Jayne

Cortez. Its sense of musicality, both in voice and beat, owes a great deal to

performers like Gil Scott-Heron and the Last Poets, as well as to funk and

soul artists like James Brown, Isaac Hayes, George Clinton, and Sly Stone.

Rap is, in other words, a multifarious, multifaceted tradition imbedded

within an African American oral culture that itself shares in the rich history

of human expression across the ages.

At its best, Rap, though a most serious genre, doesn't take itself too self-

consciously or try to overburden its lines with rehearsed wisdom, or the

cant of ideology. It complicates or even rejects literal interpretation. It de-

mands fluency in the recondite codes of African American speech. Just like

the Dozens before it, Rap draws strength by shattering taboos, sending up

stereotype, and relishing risque language and subject matter.

I learned this last lesson firsthand more than two decades ago. In the

spring of 1990, after I had published an editorial on the case in the New York Times, I was called to testify as an expert witness before a Florida court in the obscenity trial of the 2 Live Crew. The group's 1989 album, As

Nasty as They Wanna Be, with its provocative single "Me So Horny;' had in- spired such heated response from civic leaders that copies were burned in

the streets. At stake was not simply the songs of one group of young black

men, but the very freedom of expression at the core of all artistic creation.

In my testimony, I stated that in the very lyrics that some found simply

crass and pornographic, "what you hear is great humor, great joy, and great

boisterousness. It's a joke. It's a parody and parody is one of the most vener-

ated forms of art:'

Rap has always been animated by this complexity of meaning and in-

tention. This is by no means to absolve artists of the ethics of form, particu-

larly in the artist's capacity as a role model for young people, but rather to

point out that there's an underlying value worth fighting for in defending

Rap-or any other form of art for that matter-against those who would si-

lence its voice. One of the hallmarks of a democratic society should be en-

suring the space for all citizens to express themselves in art, whether we like

what they have to say or not. After all, censorship is to art as lynching is to

justice.

As we have seen, it is not difficult to trace a straight line between the

xxvi marvelously formulaic oral tales like "Shine and the Titanic" and "The Sig- nifying Monkey" and Rap, and, in terms ofliterary history, it is a short line,

too. Rappers often make direct allusions to vernacular culture, as we see on

songs like Schoolly D's "Signifying Rapper" and Devin the Dude's "Briar-

patch:' Even when the connection is less explicit, it is no less apparent. It's

impossible not to hear echoes of H. Rap Brown's signifYing virtuosity when reading the lyrics to Smoothe da Hustler and Trigga da Gambler's "Broken

Language:' And there is undoubtedly something of that swaggering folk

hero Stagolee in someone like 2Pac, or of that trickster the Signifying Mon-

key in someone like 01' Dirty Bastard.

Given Rap's close connection to the African American oral tradition, it

should come as no surprise that it also carries with it much of the same

baggage. Misogyny and homophobia, which we must critique, often mar

the effectiveness of the music. But as with practices like the Toasts and the

Dozens, these influences are by no means absolute. Perhaps one of the most

bracing things about reading this anthology is the way that it complicates

our assumptions about what Rap is and what Rap does, who makes it and

who consumes it. In this anthology, we see Yo-yo going head to head

against Ice Cube in a battle of the sexes, or female MCs like Eve and Jean

Grae calling attention to issues like domestic violence and abortion that of-

ten get left out of Hip-Hop discourse, and artists often associated with

gangsta personas or "conscious" perspecti~es revealing the full range and complexity of their subjectivity.

The Anthology of Rap is an essential contribution to our living literary tradition. It calls attention to the artistry, sense of craft, and striking origi-

nality of an art form born of young black and brown men and women who

found their voices in rhyme, and chanted a poetic discourse to the rhythm

of the beat. This groundbreaking anthology masterfully assembles part of a

new vanguard of American poetry. One of its greatest virtues is that it fo-

cuses attention, often for the first time, upon Rap's lyrics alone. This is not a

rejection of the music, but rather a reminder that the words are finally the

best reason for the beat.

One finds in this anthology many lyrics that complicate common as-

sumptions about Rap music. And as we might expect, the reader encoun-

ters the brutal diction of Gangsta Rap, but also its leavening humor and

parody. One finds instances of sexism and homophobia, but also resistance

to them. One finds words seemingly intended to offend, but also, some-

times, the deeper meanings of and motives for this sort of conscious provo-

cation. Rap's tradition is as broad and as deep as any other form of poetry,

but like any other literary tradition, it contains its shallows, its whirlpools,

and its muddy waters. Our task as active, informed readers is to navigate

through the tributaries of Rap's canon, both for the pleasure that comes

from the journey as readers, but also for the wisdom born of traveling to

any uncharted destinations of the mind. Adam Bradley and Andrew

DuBois's superbly edited, pioneering anthology makes such a journey possible.

xxvii