hiphop discourse

[woody tobias jr.]

It seems to me as though the "big black motherfucker" archetype that 
dominates hip-hop represents a challenge to the stereotype foisted upon 
black men for much of the last 400 years: the hat-in-hand negro, the 
gregarious darky character sketched out and celebrated by the slaveholding 
class and its apologists. You'll find that the politically conscious hip-hop 
acts constantly make reference to the black leaders who defied that 
stereotype: Nat Turner, Toussaint L'Ouverture, Marcus Garvey, and Stokely 
Carmichael (to name only a few); very few references to Booker T. 
Washington, for obvious reasons. Michael Frente, the lead singer of 
Spearhead, wrote a song about his own Dream Team in which Nat Turner led the 
offense from the point guard position. Funny stuff. Perhaps the pimp 
personna represents an inversion of the traditional master/slave 
relationship. Pynchon, I think it's safe to say, occasionally resorts to 
inversion when discussing America's race problems. I'm thinking of George 
Washington's wisecracking servant in Mason & Dixon.


From: Thomas Eckhardt <thomas.eckhardt at uni-bonn.de>
To: Doug Millison <DMillison at ftmg.net>
CC: "Pynchon-L (E-mail)" <pynchon-l at waste.org>
Subject: Re: hiphop discourse
Date: Wed, 04 Jul 2001 23:19:54 +0100

Doug Millison wrote:

 > At the risk of drawing fire for merely asking the question, how does this
 > hip-hop thread relate to Pynchon?

Black or Afro-American culture is important in Pynchon. Especially 
stereotypes or archetypes like, for example, the "big black motherfucker" 
aka "badass", a character that was not invented by hip hop (an older version 
would be Stagger Lee) but lies at the heart of the gangsta/pimp-myth some of 
hip hop's protagonists have created around themselves.

Thomas


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