cornerstone of hip hop indicates the scar tissue of black male powerlessness—and at the same time it testifies to the unrelenting will to survive in the midst of a deck loaded with wild jokers and stacked way against you. Call this Stagoleeism.
But hip hop has no room for the antiheroic, no sympathy for the weak, no blues-like tales of the man lamenting the fact that he sent his son out to face the regulators. The one who ain’t have no choice as he saw it: surrounded on all sides, no way to protect your boy without sacrificing your pregnant woman and the two young daughters. Jack Trice and his boy escaped that night in 1896, but a new mob found his elderly mother and burned her house to the ground. The lines between hero and coward, thug and bitch-nigga become blurred when choosing among rival worst-case scenarios. The truth is that some men are larger than life, but life looms large over very many more. When you boil away the excess, the hero might just be the coward with a better plan B.
The two most identifiable American folk heroes are the cowboy and the gangster, men who conquered the frontiers of sod and concrete, replaying the age-old conflict of man versus nature and at the same time, man versus human nature. In hip hop, so-called Gangsta Rap is an echo of the folklore tradition of lionizing the outlaw, the robber of banks, and stealer of men’s lives—a tradition that gets its start in black music with the blues. Within blues and hip hop, the outlaw has a distinct hue—his crimes are the inevitable product of a system that has made slaves of human beings and left babies to inherit despair. The bluesman may ask, “What did I do to get so black and blue?” but that same sentiment is being echoed by Tupac Shakur’s line that “I was given this world/I didn’t make it.”
The critic Robert Warshow has written that the gangster is an American catharsis figure. In a society where official power requires a state-sponsored public optimism in order to preserve the perception of order, the gangster’s monochromatic world, with its pessimistic symbols and the inevitably bloody demise of the protagonist, is subversive—in a way that is most useful to those in power:
I watch a gangster flick and cheer for the bad guy And turn if off before the end because the bad guy dies.
—50 Cent
In the case of hip hop, the gangster has become the means by which the lives of the marginal, the lesser, the weak have been transformed into entertainment.
It is this gangster ethos that makes gems of sympathetic rendering like Talib Kweli’s “Get By” or the Black Eyed Peas’ “Where’s the Love?” so hard to come by in hip hop. The unanswered question is whether or not hip hop as a genre, as an approach to life, will persuasively deal with human weakness and the ways in which the “weak,” the marginalized, and exploited are able to flip the script and instill their lives with meaning. This is the message implicit not only within the musical expression of blues, but also to the blues-contemporary phenomenon of social realism—the aesthetic philosophy underpinning the work of Dos Passos, Steinbeck, and Richard Wright in the 1930s. With The Grapes of Wrath, Steinbeck delivered a reckoning with the humanity of heretofore disposable white people. With his murals, Rivera fashioned a vision of the outsized humanity pulsing within the common Mexican laborer. To cut to the quick, what the world needs now is a rapper who can do for the common man and woman verbally what Diego Rivera was able to do with a paint brush and a blank wall.
GROWN FOLK BUSINESS
I pointed out earlier that the “Baaad Nigger” of the blues tradition was reincarnated as the “Real Nigga” of hip hop lore. The blues trickster, on the other hand, descends in hip hop to the playa-pimp, a character who occupies the improvised crossroads of the street corner. He contains the contradiction of male violence while coiffed and primped to the feminine extremes and uses his verbal cunning to literally persuade his stable to do tricks. But the similarity between the two genres on the level of character and archetype does not end with men. Look closely and you find the tradition of the blues woman remixed and replayed in the work of the MC; women whose births were separated by the better part of a century, but who whose work nonetheless bears a family resemblance.
Blues articulated that feeling of running up against the jagged and splintered realities of life, and the specific twists that those realities held for women who were hemmed in by both their race and their gender. Whether in the boll-weevil stricken soils of the South or the stone and steel depots that the Great Migration had delivered them to, the blues woman spoke of life distilled to the polarities of pain and pleasure, worry, and bravado: The rent note that comes due and the shiftless man with nothing to put toward it. The respite of sexual release and the jealous drive to hold onto what is yours. The major concerns with one’s material needs and ones sexuality that find themselves entwined within the music.
The historian Darlene Clark Hine, explained that phenomenon when she wrote women who migrated north and became occasional prostitutes “were extracting value from the only thing society allowed them to sell.” Sara Brooks, a black domestic who migrated from Alabama to Cleveland, Ohio, in the 1930s, pointed to this reality when she said that some women “meet a man and if he promises them four or five dollars to go to bed, they’s grab it. That’s called sellin’ your own body, and I wasn’t raised like that.” But as Hine argued, “As long as they occupied an enforced subordinate position within American society, this ‘sellin’ your own body,’ was, I submit, Rape.”
James Baldwin spoke the truth when he said that “Mama has to feed her children and on one level, she really cannot afford to care how she does it.” And it was equally true that this self-perpetuating circumstance played into the prevailing ideas that weighed on black women in the first place. The historian Deborah White spoke of that body of myths, sown in the soil of slavery, to justify the sexual exploitation of black women:
One of the most prevalent images of black women in antebellum America was of a person governed almost entirely by libido, a Jezebel character. In every way, Jezebel was the counter-image of the nineteenth century ideal of the Victorian lady. She did not lead men and children to God; piety was foreign to her. She saw no advantage in prudery, indeed domesticity paled in importance before matters of the flesh.
A loose woman, a sharp-tongue, and a temptress of the type that caused bureaucrats, respectable race folk, and sociologists to wring their hands for an entire century. So it is up against the backdrop of this skewed vision of reality that blues provided women with an arena in which they could articulate life as they saw, experienced, and understood it. The music allowed black women to flip the script and speak of pleasure on their own terms. Such concerns had to be placed in the foreground before Mary Dixon could record a song like “All Around Mama,” where the vocalist explains the talents and shortcomings of her past lovers.
I met a man, he was a jockey Did the things he should Always ready, that’s the reason He could ride so good.
Dixon could have compared notes with Lil’ Kim, whose “How Many Licks?” contrasts the coital skills of men of different races:
Had a Puerto Rican Papi, used to be a deacon But now he be sucking me off on the weekend.
Blues was the only forum in 1939 in which Ida Cox could’ve thrown down the gauntlet as she did in “One Hour Mama,” a bold-print statement of her sexual prerequisites:
I don’t want no imitation My requirements ain’t no joke ’cause I’ve got pure indignation for a guy what’s lost his stroke.
Lest there be any confusion, the chorus added:
I’m a one hour mama So no one minute papa Ain’t the kind of man for me.
In Shakespearean terms, there is no new thing beneath the sun; but in this context that observation could be stretched to
