Spectacular Vernaculars: Hip-Hop and the Politics of Postmodernism

by Russell A. Potter

Viewing hip-hop as the postmodern successor to African American culture's Jazz modernism, this book examines hip-hop music's role in the history of the African-American experience.

Spectacular Vernaculars examines hip-hop's cultural rebellion in terms of its specific implications for postmodern theory and practice, using the politics of reception as its primary rhetorical ground. Hip-hop culture in general, and rap music in particular, present model sites for such an inquiry, since they enact both postmodern modes of production --the appropriation of tropes, technologies, and material culture--and a potential means of resistance to the commodification of cultural forms under late capitalism. By paying specific attention to the historical and cultural context of hip-hop as a black artform and locating its practice of resistance in terms of a postmodernist reading of consumer culture, this book offers a complex reading of hip-hop as a postmodern practice, with implications both for theories of postmodernism and cultural studies as a whole.

Genres: Music, Hip Hop, Research

208 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1995

About the author

I teach Victorian literature, the history of Arctic exploration, and early media at Rhode Island College. My first novel, Pyg: The Memoirs of a Learned Pig, has just been published by Penguin Books.

Reviews

[Steven H · Rating 3 out of 5]

AN ENGLISH PROFESSOR LOOKS ‘ACADEMICALLY’ AT HIP-HOP AND POSTMODERNISM

Russell A. Potter (b. 1960) teaches English literature at Rhode Island College.

He wrote in the Introduction to this 1995 book, “The broader cultural debates about postmodernism have in recent years become almost a kind of cottage industry---fueled both by fascination and loathing, as critics alternately extol the ‘postmodernity’ of some text or social phenomenon, or decry the intellectual bankruptcy of a ‘postmodernism’ that they regard as a sort of willful intellectual meltdown…” (Pg. 1)

He adds, “[A] question about postmodernism … is what exactly it is ‘post.’ And, while that remains an inevitable slippage into chronology, I think the central problem of postmodernism is that its own TIME is deeply and repeatedly UNTIMELY.” (Pg. 2)

He continues, “How exactly hip-hop culture can be seen as ‘postmodern’ has everything to do with this same peculiar splitting of time. In one sense, African-Americans have good reason not to give too much credence to ‘progressive’ time, since for four hundred years most of the economic ‘progress’ in the United States has disproportionately benefited its white citizens. Yet at the same time, there has been an unyielding hunger and thirst for the PROMISE of the future… coupled with a bitter awareness of the PRESENCE of ‘past’ oppressions. This split in time, in turn, has potent connections to the inner-spatial ‘double consciousness’ articulated almost a century ago by W.E.B. Du Bois: that African-Americans, even as they have sought to build from within a full sense of self-authenticity, have had to exist in a nation where the fundamental symbolic structures continually place them in the position of ‘Other.’” (Pg. 3)

He asserts, “it could be said that ALL black artistic movements are postmodern. In fact, I would argue that, while in a very general sense such a statement has its truth, in actual historical practice postmodernity had marked a particular PART of the cycle of African-American arts, a past intimately related to its material situation. For there is history at stake here, not only this history of the structures of resistance, from spiritual songs to Calypso stick-dancers to Public Enemy’s S1W security force, but the already double(d) history of ‘white’ appropriation. Commodification, and dilution of black artistic expression… A great deal of value has been placed on black arts, but this value has been largely negotiable only in terms of white dollars. Conscious of this recurring act of appropriation, African-American artists have again and again wrenched new time out of old, refusing and interrupting the commodification of their work.” (Pg. 4)

He goes on, “So ‘resistance postmodernism,’ as I hope to articulate it in this book, is not simply a theorization of a more political postmodernist stance; it proposes against the graiaĺn of many self-announced ‘resistance postmodernists’ that the material and social forms RESISTANCE takes in a specific cultural context exceed and may well be indifferent or even hostile to some of the academic formulations of postmodernism. And, as in the case of black cultural histories, the reason for its hostility lies not solely or even primarily in what is too readily construed as a reactive hearkening towards a pre-modernist worldview, but in a deeply historical and resonantly informed VERNACULAR articulation of ANTI-modernism.” (Pg. 5-6)

He argues, “I would put hip-hop forward as one form of radical post-modernism, a postmodernism whose representational strategies, while complex and contradictory, do not for that reason lose their liberatory potential. While its rhetorical and musical structures clearly come out of African-American vernacular traditions, its audience has from the start crossed racial and regional lines, and the substantial sales figures of hip-hop albums by groups such as Public Enemy, De La Soul, and A Tribe Called Quest clearly indicate that their audience includes both black and white listeners of a wide range of social classes. As Chuck D has remarked, hip-hop has come to mark more of a generational line than a racial one, and indeed this is one reason why it is so threatening to the dominant race-class system; it invites identification across forbidden lines, and demonstrates widespread disaffection from the machinery of capitalism at a time when the free market is widely hailed in the media as the great economic savior.” (Pg. 9-10)

He summarizes, “Finally, I must account for my own position---or POSITIONS---in relation to both hip-hop and postmodernism. Both formations have their own protocols for making such an account---hip-hop has its ubiquitous name-, place-, and date-tagging… and postmodernism has its reflexive self-accounting in terms of race, gender, class, and sexuality. These modes… have a great deal in common; both are highly contingent, aware of the multiplicity and flux that surrounds any act of self-accounting, and both recognize themselves as PERFORMATIVE acts, acts of self-staging.” (Pg. 20)

He continues, “Thus the question is not: ‘Of what significance could I (or the ubiquitous academic ‘we’) declare rap to be?’ but rather, ‘What are rap’s own modes of signification, intelligibility, and reference?’ And how might they constitute a postmodern politics of resistance? These questions cannot be answered without reference to the networks of power/knowledge within which hip-hop circulates, which must include television coverage of the Los Angeles uprising, MTV, the controversy over 2 Live Crew, Ice-T’s ‘Cop Killer,’ and Snoop Doggy Dogg, the 1994 congressional hearings on gangsta rap, the 5% Nation, and the local hip-hop scenes in New York, Miami, Oakland, Los Angeles, Houston, Detroit, Philadelphia, and other major urban areas. As with other cultural productions, there is no essential inside/outside, only enactments of who or what is ‘in’ or ‘out.’ Academics only remain ‘outside’ if they fail to realize that whatever their material privilege and shelf-load of degrees, their planet and the hip-hop planet are one and the same, and if the music doesn’t seem to speak to them, perhaps it’s because they just haven’t been listening.” (Pg. 22)

He points out, “Rappers and producers, for their part, [are an] increasingly visible and proactive force on college campuses; Public Enemy’s Chuck D sets aside a part of each year to travel the college lecture circuit, and rappers such as Sister Souljah, KRS-One, and Queen Latifah have also lectured at major universities. College towns are also primary sites for rap in performance, especially since the mid-’80s wave of paranoia about violence at rap concerts, which closed many major stadium and indoor venues to rap artists.” (Pg. 23)

He reports, “One immediate site of … friction between blacks and gays lies in the politics of dance halls and clubs. The gay club scene has been crucial in the establishment of the modern dance music industry… Hip-hop, taking disco as one of its first sites of incursion, and actively producing trends in dance music such as ‘electro funk,’ has moved between solidarity and a kind of tense cohabitation with gay audiences and DJs. For black gay men, the contradiction of an ostensibly ‘liberatory’ music whose lyrics so often celebrate gay-bashing has bitter ironies, and yet paradoxically such music is extremely influential in the club scene… The situation is changing, however; while Ice-T may be alone among hardcore rappers in actively denouncing homophobia, a number of newer hip-hop groups have taken up the cause of gay rights.” (Pg. 101-102)

Fans of hip-hop music are likely to find this book too ‘abstract’ and ‘academic,’ while academics will probably react to it by saying, “I still don’t get it.” (Maybe Postmodernists will appreciate it...)

[Marylou R. · Rating 5 out of 5]

I enjoyed this book for its content but it also serves as an excellent case study for young academics grappling with how to make a mere interest or clever insight relevant. An excellent read for introducing postmodernism/poststructuralism. It grounds theory and demonstrates how the theoretical orientation has materiality. It also helps students understand how to make the distinction between how their work can be read as rhetorically significant rather than rhetorically interesting.

[Eelke · Rating 5 out of 5]

Having grown up (as a white male) in the ‘90s, when gangsta rap was booming, this book is an eye opener. Spectacular vernaculars encouraged me to be introspective, which was at times confronting. It left me to appreciate and admire rap and hip-hop culture even more than I already did.