Foucault's Turntable

[Dave Monroe]

Hip-Hop Scholars Bumrush the Academy
Foucault's Turntable
by Hua Hsu
The Village Voice
January 8 - 14, 2003

"Like Craig Mack said, here comes a brand-new flava in
your ear!" Professor Todd Boyd is hyping his latest
book, The New H.N.I.C.: The Death of Civil Rights and
the Reign of Hip-Hop (NYU Press), but it's not so much
what he's saying as how he says it that captures the
ear. His argument begins in a rich, methodical tone,
elegantly scripting the fall of the previous
generation alongside the rise of a new hip-hop ethos,
occasionally punctuated with a line lifted from Jay-Z
or Nas.
 
But as the momentum of his account builds, he starts
to lean into his syllables, swerving and gusting
through words that usually lie restless in his books.
The pacing and arc are there, and it becomes clear:
Boyd sounds like a rapper, and he knows it. "I got
confidence in my skills," he offers half-jokingly, but
with just enough rise to suggest that it's more than
gesture. "Like I said, I'm infused with that MC
spirit—any nigga that wants to get on the stand, let's
go!" 

Boyd, 38, who has taught critical studies at the
University of Southern California School of
Cinema-Television since 1992, may sound like an odd
professor given the academy's reputation for dry
detachment, but he's part of an expanding class of
scholars applying their professional wits to
hip-hop....

Stray sociologists and literary scholars had looked at
hip-hop music and graffiti culture since the late
1970s, and critics like Nelson George and Greg Tate
(in the Voice) and British musician and writer David
Toop engaged the subject with considerable
intellectual rigor in the 1980s, but a critical mass
of university scholars studying hip-hop didn't emerge
until the mid '90s. This first generation consisted
largely of folks who'd grown up with the culture and
applied traditional disciplinary models to their work.
NYU historian Tricia Rose's Black Noise: Rap Music and
Black Culture in Contemporary America (1994) is often
regarded as the seminal text of this group....

[...]

"I think of myself as someone here to shake all that
up. I approach my writing like a hip-hop producer
produces a track. To me, that language that I learned
in grad school [film studies at the University of Iowa
in the late 1980s]—that language of high theory—is
another place I can sample from. To be able to
reference Foucault, Lacan, or Gramsci and at the same
time make it hip-hop—to use hip-hop to read those
figures—gives me an advantage." 

The New H.N.I.C. (the acronym stands for "Head Niggas
in Charge") is Boyd's attempt to "shake all that up."
The slender volume is built on the provocative premise
that this generation's hip-hop culture has come to
supersede the previous one's paradigm of civil
rights.... He writes: "Although I would never
encourage anyone to ignore one's history, I would
suggest that you might get a better read of what's
going on in the world of Black people today by
listening to DMX on It's Dark and Hell Is Hot than by
listening to repeated broadcasts of Martin Luther King
speeches." 

Unfortunately, The New H.N.I.C. stumbles under the
weight of its intentions.... his discussion relies
more on anecdote, generalizations, and casual
sensationalism than analysis.... there is far more
continuity and play between the two generations than
Boyd indicates. The New H.N.I.C. would have benefited
from a stronger look at the culture's political
nuances as it has evolved over the past two decades,
and it leaves many obvious questions unanswered....

Boyd is unaffected by the criticism, either of his
scholarship or his taste in rap. "I find myself far
out in left field. Tricia [Rose] and Dyson and others
are probably bit more conservative than I am relative
to hip-hop. Within this group of people who write
about hip-hop, I find that a lot of them have a bit of
a moralizing tone to what they say. It should be about
the culture—this is what it is, with all its problems,
all its warts. Take it for what it is. Deal with it,
break it down, chop it up, and leave it for somebody
else to do with it what they want, know what I'm
sayin'?" 

[...]

Any hip-hop academic shoulders a unique double
burden—not only is there the expectation of serious
scholarship, there is also a mandate to legitimize an
entire field of study in a world built on canons and
orthodoxy.... 

... The identities and ideas of hip-hop are impossible
to ignore today, and as a result it has landed in the
most unlikely of places. 

The W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for Afro-American
Research is on the second floor of Harvard
University's Barker Center, and at the end of the
Institute's main hallway ... is the Hip-Hop Archive, a
small office stocked with records, books, magazines,
flyers, and other curios collected by Professor
Marcyliena Morgan. It's probably one of the only
(smoke-free) places in town where you'll find a copy
of Los Angeles rapper Aceyalone's out-of-print debut
record. 

[...]

"I think academics ... We don't have a lot of heart,"
laments Morgan. "That's not what we do. And I think we
drag things down [because] as far as we're concerned,
everything is dying, everything had a problem. That's
what we do—we don't have anything to write about if
there isn't that!" Perhaps, as Boyd suggested, the key
lies in approaching the academy in terms of hip-hop
and not vice versa. "I'm just being real," he laughs
after suggesting that he could take his good friend
Dyson in an academic MC battle. "This sort of
competition has always informed black culture; let's
bring it to the academy. Take the best and the
brightest—Cornel West, Skip Gates, Noam Chomsky—take
'em all, give 'em a mic, put 'em on a stage, and let's
go at it. I guarantee you that when the conversation
is over, people will be thinking and talking about
Doctor Boyd. Like Nas, all I need is one mic." 

http://www.villagevoice.com/issues/0302/hsu.php

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