If Barack Obama is the most admired black man in America right now, it may be
no exaggeration to say that John McWhorter is a candidate for the
unpopularity prize. Which is an odd thing to say about a courteous academic
from the arcane realm of linguistics. Yet by venturing onto the mean streets
of hiphop with a dispassionate critique of a multimillion-dollar industry,
he risks becoming a target of drive-by shootings by enraged academics, book
reviewers and bloggers.
McWhorter is not all that surprised that critics have given him a pummelling.
He lets out a sigh of resignation: “By its very nature, this book cannot be
received fairly. It’s difficult for people to separate feelings from
thought. Tempers are going to have to cool.”
So, what is the incendiary message of his book? Interestingly enough,
McWhorter doesn’t align himself with that beleaguered minority of sceptics
who see rap as a cultural dead end, a bloated, bragging perversion of the
American Dream. He may be in his forties, he may be a devotee of musical
theatre (Cole Porter is one of his deities, and he met his wife at a
sing-along cabaret bar), yet McWhorter admires the best that rap has to
offer. He likes the Roots; he occasionally listens to Snoop Dogg while
cooking dinner.
All of which makes him sound like your average right-on professor. McWhorter’s
animus is reserved for those pundits and intellectuals who see in hiphop the
makings of a social revolution, guided by rappers whose outspoken
commentaries on race, poverty and violence have made them, in the famous
words of Public Enemy’s Chuck D, “Black America’s CNN”.
Nothing could be further from the truth, McWhorter argues. Far from being
truth-tellers, he says, so-called “conscious” rappers recycle endless
clichés and conspiracy theories about inner-city blight, the drugs trade and
Aids. Instead of generating a desire to change the system, rappers and their
acolytes in the media and academia simply encourage a sense of passivity.
“Insisting that things are still so simple that black people need to get
together and rise in fury against an evil oppressor makes for entertaining
hiphop,” he writes. “It sounds good uttered fiercely and set to a driving
beat. But this way of parsing things does not correspond to what black
America really needs today, as opposed to what it needed 50 years ago.”
Naturally, hiphop’s defenders have been quick to respond. In the harshest
riposte to appear so far, the LA Times’s reviewer dismissed McWhorter as
“smug and beleaguered”, insisting that he had got the politics all wrong:
“The idea that hiphop in 2008 is ‘antiestablishment’ and ‘by definition
about protest’ is equally perplexing, given that so much of hiphop has
embraced the trappings of materialism in recent years. McWhorter glosses
over a complex reality in which rappers are record-label CEOs and corporate
pitch men, small-business owners and schoolteachers.”
The author is unrepentant. One of the most common responses to the book, he
says, is that his thesis misses the point because hiphop is now more about
bling than social protest. He disagrees, arguing that big-selling stars such
as Kanye West routinely recycle political slogans. In any case, McWhorter’s
argument is more with the intellectuals who praise hiphop than with the
performers who make the records.
“One reason I wrote this book is that I worry that there are bookshelves
groaning with titles by bright people with PhDs saying how important
conscious hiphop is. They get urgent attention. There’s nothing wrong with
that, but they present only a partial picture. They’re mistaking volume for
substance. Most people on the street realise that conscious hiphop doesn’t
play much of a political role, but the intellectuals don’t. They think it’s
still in the vanguard.”
The controversy adds a refreshing twist to a debate that has long been
simmering within the African-American community. Bill Cosby, for instance,
has declared war on rappers who, in his eyes, make a killing from
degradation and violence. The trumpeter Wynton Marsalis is even more
damning. “I call it ghetto minstrelsy,” he has said. “Old-school minstrels
used to say they were ‘real darkies from the real plantation’. Hiphop
substitutes the plantation for the streets. Now you have to say you’re from
the streets, you shot some brothers, you went to jail. Rap has become a
safari for people who get their thrills from watching African-American
people debase themselves, men dressing in gold, calling themselves stupid
names such as Ludacris and 50 Cent, spending money on expensive fluff, using
language such as ‘bitch’ and ‘ho’ and ‘nigger’.”
Brave words. The problem with Marsalis’s assessment, however, is that the kind
of retro-jazz he has championed in the past two decades is, bluntly, an
overreverential facsimile of the music of 40 or 50 years ago. Although his
restless campaigning on behalf of jazz has paid dividends in the creation of
a splendid new performing base at the Lincoln Center, in New York, it is
still not entirely clear whether the venue will ever amount to more than a
museum for the well-heeled Manhattan middle class, black and white.
McWhorter’s comparatively measured approach may strike more of a chord with
black listeners, although the fact that he is a senior fellow at the
conservative Manhattan Institute means many people not familiar with his
previous forays into politics (including the excellent polemic Losing the
Race) will automatically write him off as a Republican hack. In fact, he is
a centrist, and is supporting Obama in the presidential contest. (His
Bloggingheads video dialogues with another independent-minded black
intellectual, Glenn Loury, have been one of the most fascinating new media
phenomena of this election year.)
In his previous books, McWhorter has bravely categorised the worst excesses of
hiphop as a manifestation of “therapeutic alienation” - by which he means
that they pander to a corrosive sense of victimisation. America, he insists,
has moved far beyond the poisonous racial climate of the pre-civil-rights
era. More controversially still, he believes racism is no longer the prime
barrier to black progress. “Self-sabotage” is what concerns him most. Unlike
Cosby, however, he hesitates before drawing a direct connection between
rap’s most unsavoury manifestations and general levels of street violence.
It is, he says, a stale argument, and one reason he thinks his book will
annoy right-wingers almost as much as liberals.
What about the casual abuse of women embedded in so many rap lyrics? Again,
McWhorter is cautious, perhaps excessively so. On the one hand, he has no
problem reiterating his view that hiphop has produced “the most misogynistic
music” in human history. On the other, he has yet to be convinced that the
lyrics actually encourage violence. It is an exceedingly tricky balancing
act.
McWhorter is much less shy about proclaiming his belief in an old-fashioned
hierarchy of artistic values. Much as he enjoys the best examples of rap, he
hesitates before placing most of them on the same level as the best black
music of the 1960s and 1970s. Stevie Wonder’s socially charged album of
1973, Innervisions, remains one of his measures of R&B excellence.
A quarter of a century ago, McWhorter was intrigued by the advent of
Grandmaster Flash, the pioneer rapper. Then disillusionment set in, as the
next wave of practitioners slipped into bombast. Years later, he began
listening seriously again, if only to try to connect with the all-pervasive
music that was, for better or worse, shaping the tastes of the next
generation in America and beyond.
At the pinnacle of McWhorter’s pantheon sit Brahms, Duke Ellington and Billy
Strayhorn. In the end, he reaches for a gourmet analogy: “It’s like duck à
l’orange and hot dog. Now, I love hot dogs, but sausage only takes you so
far. To me, hiphop is like that. It’s great, but it’s not going to rise to
the level of Porgy and Bess.”
All About the Beat: Why Hiphop Can’t Save Black America is published by
Gotham Books
