Clearly, hip-hop was not fizzling out in the 90s, and it is not fizzling out today. As Rose writes: “The purported imminent death of rap music, however, is a myth that deliberately misconstrues Black rage as mere juvenile rebellion yet retains the necessary specter of Black violence to justify the social repression of rap music and Black youth alike” (287). Rooted in white supremacy and paternalistic concern, false narratives abound still of an intrinsic link between hip-hop and violence, along with the continued excessive policing of Black people’s lives, community spaces, and discourses. But, I think the conversation has shifted a bit as Hip-Hop, though still marginalized in many ways, is largely understood as a mainstream music genre within white critical and mainstream circles, whereas in the early 90s this was largely not true. I’m reminded of NWA boycotting the 1989 Grammys due to the institution’s refusal to fully recognize Hip-Hop’s artistic merit and generic distinction by televising the category during the main ceremony, as well as the 50th anniversary of Hip-Hop tribute at the Grammys last year. I don’t mean to paint in broad strokes and say that this tribute is the paragon of progress or anything because this transition from a mainly Black subculture to the mainstream is thoroughly enmeshed in racial capitalism and the commodification and appropriation of Black art and expression, but I think that we are dealing with a very different landscape.
In “Sociology of Vibe: Blackness, Felt Criminality, and Emotional Epistemology” Miles describes how a Black community in the south uses the word “vibe” to communicate a complex emotive processing and understanding of the often invisibilized violence of white supremacy. I’m thinking about the term vibe in connection to surveillance, as Miles introduces the term through a quote from Boone, a rapper from South Carolina. In reference to the cops, Boone says: “Can’t even drive straight when they behind me, the vibe be off” (366). Expounding upon this interaction, Miles writes: “To this end my conceptualization of vibe is twofold: vibe names the process in which Black southerners use the felt experience of their social location to understand social structures and it is also a collective communicative system used to name experiences that standard emotive language fails to approximate.” (367). The feeling of being watched and surveilled, especially in a panoptic situation where one can not even be sure they are actively being watched, is encapsulated when Boone says “the vibe be off.” The use of the habitual be here is also interesting, as it indicates that it’s not like the vibe IS off, in this present moment and hasn’t been before and won’t be after, rather, “the vibe be off,” continuously ruptured by this surveillance.
Following this idea of surveillance, I looked at “Can’t C Me” Surveillance and Rap Music to consider how this vibe of surveillance reverberates throughout the genre, and also to consider some of the issues taken up by Rose in the 90s in a slightly more contemporary context. Nielson discusses how rappers’ elaborate elaborate strategies for subverting surveillance through their music. Situating these strategies within Black rhetorical traditions, Nielson quotes Smitherman’s discussion of semantic inversion as a strategy to communicate outside of the oppressor’s comprehension, writing that “many of these terms unique to Black speech “lose their linguistic currency when they move into the white mainstream,” at least in part because the need for a “black linguistic code.” Nielson also takes up respellings as a type of encryption along these lines.
Nielsen writes that the hip-hop sample “resides in a much larger tradition of Black signification through recontextualization—using existing elements (words, technologies, fashions, etc.) in unique ways to create new meaning. “ (1262) Nielsen further argues that this incorporation of often many voices and musical bites leads to a kind of collective authorship, and a degree of anonymity/distance from the music that subverts the surveilling structures restricting hip-hop culture (1263). This leads to a complex discursive and sonic relationship that resounds across time and space, what Nielson, borrowing a term from Kodwo Eshun, calls “spacetime dislocation.” As a rhetorical tool drawing different artifacts together, sampling goes beyond gestures of allusion or citation, rather it’s more akin to quotation in Nielson’s view. Each rhetorical artifact belongs to a larger dialogue, is a response and expected to be responded to, or even sampled itself, more akin to a dialogue rather than a solitary rhetorical act. Nielsen also discusses how rappers aestheticize their own surveillance while bolstering anonymity, through an emphasis on the technological, such as the inclusion of wire tap hisses, layered samples, and vocoders on several songs.
Works Cited:
Miles, C. J. (2022). Sociology of vibe: Blackness, felt criminality, and emotional epistemology. Humanity & Society, 47(3), 365–384. https://doi.org/10.1177/01605976221146733
Nielson, E. (2009). “Can’t c me.” Journal of Black Studies, 40(6), 1254–1274. https://doi.org/10.1177/0021934708328906
Oldschoolhiphoplust. (2015, November 30). Know Your Hip-Hop History: The DJ. Tumblr. Retrieved October 5, 2024, from https://www.oldschoolhiphoplust.com/post/134292119916/knowyourhiphophistorythedj
Rose, Tricia. “‘Fear of a Black Planet’: Rap Music and Black Cultural Politics in the 1990s.” The Journal of Negro Education, vol. 60, no. 3, Jan. 1991, p. 276. https://doi.org/10.2307/2295482.