Topics in Cultural Studies: Black Popular Culture

EN 385/AAS 499 Mark Anthony Neal, Ph.D. Fall 1999

…the biggest problem with the way social scientist employ the culture concept in their studies of the black urban poor is their inability to see what it all means to the participants and practitioners. In other words, they do not consider what Clinton (George, that is) calls the "pleasure principle." If I may use a metaphor here, rather than hear a singer they analyze the lyrics; rather than hear the drum they study the song title. Black music, creativity and experimentation in language, that walk, that talk, that style, must also be understood as sources of visceral and psychic pleasure. Though they may also reflect and speak to the political and social world of inner city communities, expressive cultures are not simply mirrors of social life or expressions of conflicts, pathos, and anxieties.

Robin D.G. Kelley, "Looking for the Real Nigga: Social Scientists Construct the Ghetto"

First, I ask you to not how, within the black repertoire, style---which mainstream cultural critics often believe to be mere husk, the wrapping, the sugar coating on the pill---has become itself the subject of what’s going on. Second, mark how, displaced from a logocentric world---where the direct mastery of cultural modes meant the mastery of writing, and hence, both the criticism of writing (logocentric criticism) and the deconstruction of writing---the people of the black diaspora have, in opposition to all of that, found the deep form, the deep structure of their cultural life in music. Third, think how these cultures have used the body---as if it was, and it often was, the only cultural capital we had. We have worked on ourselves as the canvases of representation.

Stuart Hall, "What is This ‘Black’ in Black Popular Culture

Black women's bodies remain a critical negative point of reference in the racist and sexist battle to define good, evil, normalcy and abnormality, sexual purity and sexual contamination, property and ownership…As explicitly sexualized women in a national atmosphere where young people of color are hyper-visible, young black women are highly visible and yet invisible, seen and yet mis-seen, heard and yet unvoiced…The welfare queen and the "teenage mother" are now the most prominent "characters" in the drama of the state's multi-faceted labeling of black women's sexual behavior as deviant and costly.

Tricia Rose, "Race, Class, and the Pleasure/Danger Dialectic: Rewriting Black Female Teenage Sexuality in the Popular Imagination"

I’m the intelligent wise on the mic/I will rise right in front of your eyes cuz I am a surprise/So I’ma let my knowledge be born to perfection/All praises due to Allah and that’s a blessing/With knowledge of self, there’s nothing I can’t solve/At 360 degrees, I revolve/This is actual fact, it’s not an act, it’s been proven/Indeed and I proceed to make the crowd keep moving…

Rakim Allah,"Move the Crowd"

Black Popular Culture---ed. Gina Dent

Language, Rhythm, and Sound: Black Popular Cultures into the twenty-first Century---ed. Adjaye and Andrews

What the Music Said: Black Popular Music and Black Public Culture---Mark Anthony Neal

Color By Fox: The Fox Network and the Revolution in Black Television—–Kristal Brent Zook

Am I Black Enough for You?: Popular Culture from the Hood and Beyond---Todd Boyd

The course explores the historical and contemporary constructions of "blackness" within the popular realms of film, television, and popular music and the relationship of those constructs to the realties of African-American life and culture. As the study and critique of black popular culture provides alternative locations to examine the historical and contemporary uses of African-American culture(s) and iconography, such examinations highlight internal African-American relations as well African-American engagement with the dominant social, cultural and political institutions.

I guess perhaps, this is about flow; the desire to get that one last swerve on before the realities of the world once again bear witness to the experience of being black. Pleasure in a world of pain; Pleasure for the sake of pleasure. It’s like Rakim said, "I take seven mc’s put in a line and seven more brothers who think they can rhyme, and it will take seven more mc’s ‘fore I go for mine…" Damn, the pure joy of expression, reflected in a community that understands the joys, risk, dangers and beauty of being black in America. Yes, for the sake aesthetics…like Iverson, breaking Jordan’s ankles off and telling him to get the "f**k out his face---Still got that "s—t" on videotape---or Like Tupac's "I get Around," or the first time I heard Puffy's remix of "Flava in Your Ear" or the last time I heard Greg Nice get off on "Dwick"…talking about "ohh lalala oui oui, you say muhammed ali, I say cassius clay, you say butter, I say parkay…," but it’s like Donny said…during one of his many sermons, "ya'll don't know what I'm talking about…" but then ya'll probably don't know who Donny Hathaway was in the first place, but ask David Holister, while he talking about the "baby mama drama" where he get that big-ass hat from, see 'cause he know Donny created them "ghetto hymns" he singing. But folks don't ever understand taking s**t to another level. Like when Bird said "ya'll ain't gonna steal this' 'cause ya'll can't play this" and Be-Bop was the next level…or when Sam Cooke stepped to the mic---in church no less---panties flying, taking about "You Send Me" and God became the woman scorned so often in this music called SOUL. I'M TALKING ABOUT GWENDOLYN BROOKS WALKING OUT OF MAUD MARTHA'S DREAMS WITH AN AFRO AND THE REVOLUTIONARY VANGUARD IN HER HIP POCKET AND BLACK LITERATURE AIN'T BEEN THE SAME SINCE…or you thought that "spoken word" or Hip-Hop for that matter started with Saul Williams or RUN-DMC, like Henry Dumas didn't die on that platform on 125^th street, a victim of police brutality.

But this also how we choose to be ourselves and that our choices project "what we be" against the grain of what others believe us to be…"F**K an Image Award." Positivity is just a word some folks use ‘cause they embarrassed "folks" got hold of the mic on national television and chose not to leave---the cornbread, cornrows, corn chips, fried chicken, doo-rags, pink rollers and if you a real playa, the ebonically correct discourse at home. How about these nominations for an NAACP image award: Latrell Sprewell, ODB (Osirus, Big Baby Jesus, whatever the hell his name is), Lil' Kim, and OJ Simpson? It like my man PUN said "You ain’t a playa, just ‘cause I hate you." Just a reminder that this ain’t always a response to a few ig’nant white folks either. Though that don’t always keep the most ig’nant ones from using our images to sell every s—t from pancakes to toothpaste---"Bad, Bad, Bad Bad, boy, it’ll make your teeth white and clean…."---and that we are very often minor players in the selling of our culture, though ready and willing to "shuck and jive" ‘till the next payday. Rest assured Puff pimping beats for Clive Davis and Arista/BMG; (He owe him like 35 million muh**king dollars) Bad Boy just the little "ghetto" (a post-modern plantation, in reality) they give him control over. If brother don’t move no units, (and lately he ain’t)he gittin’ pimp slapped (a metaphor really) "big willie style" (no doubt), just like his man Andre Harrell…but yo, dat’s just this brother’s opinion.

What the Music Said is a book about communities under siege, but also communities engaged in various forms of resistance, institution-building, and everyday pleasures. Beginning with the Be-Bop era, Mark Anthony Neal reads the story of "black communities" through the black tradition in popular music. Exploring the broad range of black cultural experience and expression, Neal locates a history that challenges the view that hip-hop was the first black cultural movement to "speak truth to power.

The Sonja Haynes Stone Black Cultural Center, University of North Carlona at Chapel Hill. Thursday September 23, 1999 at 7:00pm

The Annual Conference of the International Association for the Study of Popular Music, Middle Tennessee State University, Murfreesboro, TN. Saturday October 2, 1999 at 10:00 am

The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame American Music Masters, "At the Swing Cat's Ball: Louis Jordan's Rhythm and Blues," Case Western University. Saturday October 9, 1999

Mark Anthony Neal holds joint appointments in the departments of Africana Studies and English at the State University of New York at Albany, where he offers courses in African-American Cultural Studies. Neal has taught at Xavier University in New Orleans, Louisiana and the University of Pittsburgh at Bradford. He has also lectured in the English department at The State University of New York College at Fredonia.

Neal has lectured at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, Worcester Polytechnic Institute, Duquesne University, the University of Minnesota at Minneapolis, the State University of New York at Stony Brook, the State University of New York College at Potsdam, Drake University, Howard University, Kansas State University, Clark University, the Federal Job Corps Center in Cassadega, NY, the Albany County Correctional Facility, the New York State Prisons at Comstock and Coxsakie, NY and the Federal Correctional Institution in McKean County, Pennsylvania, as well as given presentations for the Popular Culture Association of the South, the National Association of African American Studies, the NAACP and the Center for Multidisciplinary Applied Research in Urban Issues at the State University of New York College at Buffalo. He has also been a frequent presenter for the Western New York School Press Association.

Black Intellectual Tradition: The Black Public Intellectual

AAS 599 Mark Anthony Neal, Ph.D. Fall 1999

For this generation of Black scholars, intellectuals, and professors, socially irrelevant scholarship has been increasingly equated with race treason. The pressure to "contribute" to the lives of everyday people through one’s scholarship or teaching has seemingly increased in the post-Civil Rights era; the sacrifice and bloodshed to improve Black participation and opportunity has amplified the notion that increased opportunity for the individual should translate into collective gain. Fifty years ago, simply being a Black intellectual was a sign of collective gain: now the standards are much higher. This, coupled with the continued crises facing the vast majority of African Americans, can produce immense pressure and conflict in a cerebrally orientated Black person—–especially one who attends or teaches at a predominately White institution.

Tricia Rose, Soul: Black Power, Politics, and Pleasure

Erasing the political from the pedagogical, I believe, largely closes down the opportunities for teachers and students alike to engage and challenge the prevailing notions of authority and power that influence the selection of specific forms of classroom knowledge, legitimate particular pedagogical practices, and rationalize the exclusions of specific histories, experiences, and ideologies.

Henry Giroux, Channel Surfing: Racism, the Media, and the destruction of Today’s Youth

For instance, there seems to be a conspiracy to keep black students from learning how to write...the situation is further compounded by the unconscious racism of these and other white teachers who assume that it is impossible to reverse the inexorable process of under-education. Perhaps they’re right, but it’s not as though not being able to write (or read) was a handicap that black America can continue to absorb. It robs the black student of her ability to protest by any means but dropping out. The difficulties she’s having with writing invariably reflect her lack of public confidence (her voice may be virtually inaudible in classroom discussion), her conviction that she is incapable of coherently representing her own oppositional impulses and anger, and communicating them in speech.

Michele Wallace, Invisibility Blues: From Pop to Theory

"Booker Tell Us What the Drums Mean" and thus we have but one function of the black intellectual: To interpret the black world for the white gaze; a gaze that is at best insensitive and at worst controlling, if even only in the black mind. But to simply focus on this role does not do justice to a tradition that at its core has grappled with the fundamental issues that face the black world. Yes, many have chosen to or have even be forced to do the "work of the mind" from bourgeois spaces far removed from the realities of black life and still others struggle organically in the very spaces of crises, but without the benefits that rigorous intellectual "struggle" are bound to produce. The tragedy is that so many black folks chose to privilege one over the other, while the mainstream looks on sheepishly as it chooses its next stars. So what does it mean to be a "Black Public Intellectual?" 10,000 dollar honorariums? Endowed University Chairs? Two class a year teaching loads? Regular appearances on Charlie Rose, Nightline, or the Firing Line? Holler if you hear me Skip, Cornel, bell, and even my man Mike. (I ain’t hatin’, just naming names...I know folks got college tuitions, mortgages and car notes.) But rather is the point to collapse those spaces between the street philosophers and the academic witch doctors; to "keep it real" for those in the need, and a few who are not. To be a "Black Public Intellectual" means you got to come wit’ it or don‘t come at all. You ain’t got to flow like Rakim or Lyte for that matter, but like the brotha said, "what ever it is...It gots to be Fonky...

Valerie Smith Not Just Race, Not Just Gender

Barbara Smith The Truth That Never Hurts

Dorothy Roberts Killing the Black Body

Hazel Carby Race Men

Michele Wallace Black Macho and the Myth of the Super Woman

Harold Cruse The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual

Adolph Reed W.E.B. DuBois and American Political Thought

hooks and West Breaking Bread

Lee D. Baker From Savage to Negro

Tommy Lott The Invention of Race

Komozi Woodard A Nation Within a Nation

Joan Morgan When Chickenheads Come to Roost

Last Revised: December 14, 1998