Ralph Ellison always remembered the black jazzmen of his native Oklahoma City fondly: “Life could be harsh, loud and wrong if it wished, but they lived it fully, and when they expressed their attitude toward the world it was with a fluid style that reduced the chaos of living to form.” This is a beautiful definition of jazz, and a brilliant one of art in general — for what more could we ask of art than to render human experience, even at its worst, an understandable and even palatable thing? American blacks have long made music of their suffering, and blues and jazz once gave prime voice to a part of black experience in America. As the years have passed, the timbre of that voice has changed, and so has the experience being articulated. We are now in the age of hip-hop, a culture born in the Bronx and bred of the calamities of ghetto life.
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Jeff Chang, a writer on American culture and politics, has just put out his second volume on hip-hop. In
Total Chaos: The Art and Aesthetics of Hip-Hop, he examines hip-hop in all its manifestations — as music, as dance, as graffiti, as photography, as film; hip-hop
ad absurdum. The book, edited by Chang, is a mixed bag of essays, interviews, poems, raps, and photographs. Chang’s title is apt, for the definitions of hip-hop his volume offers are just as desultory and chaotic as the aesthetic it champions.
The book begins on an especially contrived note, with this hip-hop apologia from Chang: “Heir to the Black Arts and the postmodernist and multiculturalist movements, head high amid all of the terms batted about to try to frame the imperatives and urgencies of Now — such as post-Blackness, polyculturalism, globalism, and transnationalism — hip-hop is where flux, identity, revolution, and the masses mix, and keep on expanding.” It is not easy to make sense of this, and Chang’s attempt to mold hip-hop into a postmodern intellectual movement is utterly ineffective. This particular effort is revived at times by the contributors, notably in a roundtable on Homohop (gay contributions to hip-hop), but these moments are thankfully few.
One idea put forward repeatedly is that hip-hop is a form of protest. For Sanford Biggers, a sculptor and artist, hip-hop is “a rebel
culture, and in that respect it [is] very much like rock, bebop, jazz, which went against the grain at the time.” Hip-hop is rebellious not only in artistic terms, but in political ones as well. In a discussion of “Identity and Aesthetics after Multiculturalism,” moderator Greg Tate suggests that hip-hop is naturally inclined toward politics: “Because of where hip-hop came from in the social base, it already suggested a political opposition and a political possibility for the creativity for the people at the margins of society, socially, economically — people at the margins in terms of power.”
Tate sees the artistic voice of a downtrodden people as being necessarily political in nature, but this may not be true. Similar claims have been made for blues and jazz, but Ralph Ellison, responding to LeRoi Jones’s book,
Blues People, objected:
It is unfortunate that Jones thought it necessary to ignore the aesthetic nature of the blues in order to make his ideological point, for he might have come much closer had he considered the blues not as politics but as art. . . . For the blues are not primarily concerned with civil rights or obvious political protest; they are an art form and thus a transcendence of those conditions created within the Negro community by the denial of social justice.
Just as LeRoi Jones (soon to become Amiri Baraka) wished to foist politics and ideology onto the blues, so too do the contributors to this roundtable ostensibly devoted to aesthetics seek to politicize hip-hop. The discussion soon devolves into a paranoid fit and fantasy, ignoring the issue of art.
Ellison’s principle is correct here too, for the hip-hop forms are not political at root — they constitute instead a kind of black folk art rather than a means of political protest. To explain this assertion, we must turn to the only true unifying theme in Total Chaos, which runs as an undercurrent throughout Chang’s book: the question of black identity.
There is a notable passage in a roundtable discussion on hip-hop design. The graphic designer Cey Adams enunciates a theme that the book has been quietly (and unwittingly) moving toward. “One of the things I immediately thought about when I started to approach the idea of graphic design was that I am hip-hop, so I don’t need to always have to show it on paper. . . . It’s in me, and it’s in the artist” (emphasis in the original). Hip-hop, according to Adams, is an outgrowth of identity. The artist embodies the form — “I am hip-hop” — and the art is not so much a conscious intellectual effort as it is a medium for the expression of life on the black street. All the forms of art discussed in the book are means of articulating what it is to be young and black through song and dance, film and aerosol.
In this reading, it would be a folk art if it is any art at all. When it is political, where it is destructive (in the case of some graffiti), it is the voice of an embittered people; where it is more purely art created as art (as a novel or a mural), it is a celebration of and by that people. Ellison saw this clearly: The blues are “an art form and thus a transcendence” of the hardships of life. Hip-hop does not need the appellation of postmodern to be listened to, appreciated, and heeded.
What is the book missing, then? It lacks an honest account of the role of identity in the hip-hop aesthetic, which must be gleaned from under the surface. The chapters on hip-hop photography and film, most notably, fail to touch on a unifying hip-hop aesthetic beyond their particular subject matter; for these artists, their work is hip-hop if it simply records black artists and musicians. Again, identity is at the root of their definition, eclipsing questions of technique and even style.
