"MNA" vs NWA

[jbor]

Millison:

> A Pynchonian take on rap music, I think, might be to note how rapidly
> the street poetry was co-opted by the powers that be, economic and
> cultural, how quickly They made a few lucky rappers swaggering
> advertisements for Capital's most blatant promises in order to keep
> the rest of the kids under control, buying those records, jes' a
> popping that rag to beat the band instead of engaging with the
> politics of their situation -- black kids spinning discs and
> breakdancing  to entertain the white tourists in front of the Hotels
> Plaza and Pierre - that's what this music had already become when I
> made a New York pilgrimage in the very early '80s. Just as the Reagan
> forces needed some Zoyd-like exemplars as a warning of what might go
> wrong again (after getting that '60s revolution under control, with
> the revolutionaries now transfixed by the Tube), so They also got the
> scary gangsta Others necessary to sharpen social divisions in the
> wake of a civil rights political revolution that threatened to break
> out of control.  Divide and conquer. Rap glorifies the violence
> (street and domestic) that flows from Their socio-economic and
> foreign ("war on drugs" that favors the CIA's favorite producers and
> distributors and floods the U.S. with crack) policies, scares the
> shit out of Most Normal Americans, justifies the investment in the
> police state (S.W.A.T. teams and the rest of the paramilitarization
> of local police forces) that's been erected in most American cities
> -- a good example of the Control that Pynchon illuminates in his
> fictions.
> --

There is just so so much wrong with this type of reactionary rant ...
Pynchon's acknowledged appreciation of black jazz musicians where scat,
jamming and improv. are mainstays of the mode ... a certain rappiness in
some of his own lyrics and the appropriations (aka "sampling") of popular
melodies and hooklines therein ... the overt commitment to the civil rights
cause in his texts (eg 'TSI', 'Watts') ... an assumption that "Most Normal
Americans" are neither poor nor black ... the patronising stereotyping of
rap artists ... the setting up of a fantasy Us ("Most Normal Americans") and
Them (rappers, the drug cartels, the CIA & the police all in cahoots) ...

When rap music is "co-opted by the powers that be" -- commercialised and
de-politicised -- the bland product which results (eg Vanilla Ice, MC
Hammer, Kris Kross) lasts for about a minute. The kids just ain't that
stoopid.

Break dancing is so 80s ...


>From 'A Journey Into the Mind of Watts' (NYT Magazine, 12 June 1966)

     It is, after all, in white L.A.'s interest to cool Watts any way it can
   -- to put the area under a siege of persuasion: to coax the Negro poor
   into taking on certain white values. Give them a little property, and
   they will be less tolerant of arson; get them to go in hock for a car or
   color TV, and they'll be more likely to hold down a steady job. Some see
   it for what it is -- this come-on, this false welcome, this attempt to
   transmogrify the reality of Watts into the unreality of Los Angeles. Some
   don't.

     Watts is tough: has been able to resist the unreal. If there is any
   drift away from reality, it is by way of mythmaking. As this summer warms
   them up, last August's riot is being remembered less as chaos and more as
   art. Some talk now of a balletic quality to it, a coordinated and
   graceful drawing of cops away from the center of the action, a scattering
   of The Man's power, either with real incidents or false alarms.

     Others remember it in terms of music: through much of the rioting
   seemed to run, they say, a remarkable empathy, or whatever it is that
   jazz musicians feel on certain nights: everybody knowing what to do and
   when to do it without needing a word or a signal: "You could go up to
   anybody, the cats could be in the middle of burning down a store or
   something, but they'd tell you, explain very calm, just what they were
   doing, what they were going to do next. And that's what they'd do; man,
   nobody had to give orders."

http://www.rpg.net/quail/libyrinth/pynchon/pynchon_essays_watts.html