Faculty Editorial
Rap and Rights
by William Eric "Doctor P" Perkins

"Rap and Rights:The Arts and the First Amendment" is a subterfuge to alter the way that we talk about rap music in the public sphere. By couching it within the constitutional framework, we are missing the fundamental message that rap artists and hip-hop culture offers to worldÑthat authenticity and being "real" is the nature of the game, a startling counterpoint to an age in which diminished expectations govern social life, in which the political debate has moved to the right of the center, and in which the economics of the post-modern world celebrate the triumph of the capitalist marketplace over the great communist experiment. A brooding cynicism and despair hovers over our social landscape, and hip-hop has managed to capture this emotion. However, in the discursive framework in which the public discusses hip-hop several important factors are at work and need to be addressed, before we come to the issue of "rap and rights."

First, there continues to be an astonishing generation gap when it comes to understanding rap music, rap musicians, and hip-hop culture. Several examples deserve to be called to your attention and they in turn have a direct bearing on the theme of this discussion. In a Washington Post editorial in 1994, columnist and acclaimed novelist, Nathan McCall issued the following call:

There are things that we can do to stop the violence assaulting our eyes and ears. We should denounce misguided rappers who spread messages of hate. Many of us have been reluctant to take part in anything that could be seen as censorship. But as psychologist (Na'im) Akbar says, 'Freedoms have come to be used as a justification of anarchy. Someone has got to monitor civilized life.' Monitoring, and ultimately reining in, gangsta' rap is no panacea for the problems confronting black America.

Mr. McCall's blatant call for "censorship" reveals a curious historical amnesia. McCall, author of the celebrated first novel, Make Me Wanna Holler: A Young Black Man in America has apparently forgotten his own roots as a ruthless and brutal "gangbanger," chronicled in Make Me Wanna Holler. McCall's chorus of regulating rap ignores what gives the gangsta' style its apparent authenticity.

The Gangsta' genre revels in a brash anti-authoritarianism that recalls past generations of youthful rebellion, but its authenticity has been compromised by the powerful cultural industry which in its attempts to commodify this aspect of African American culture has turned the genre inward. Instead of probing the interior textures of this complex world of youth and the streets, of coded rituals and colors, of the decadent post-industrial city, McCall's call for "monitoring civilized life" smacks of a quaint neo-Victorianism. Whose civilization requires monitoring? This civilization of "guts and glory," of frenzied consumption of all in its wake, even consuming nature itself.

There is something strangely twisted in this call that wishes for "the back in the day," when life was much simpler, when children obeyed their parents or surrogates took charge, where dope was confined to jazz and R&B musicians (Billie Holiday, Charlie Parker and Ray Charles) and where sex and violence were Saturday occurrences. McCall's romantic nostalgia for the bygone era of African American culture ignores the current reality, and that reality is harsh, brutal, and even surreal. The lyrical flavors of rap reflect that reality. It deserves our attention, not our regulation. It commands understanding, not repression. So-called old school masters must meet the new school on their terrain and on their terms in order to be really "true to the game."

McCall and other commentators and so-called interpreters of the culture exercise a curious set of double standards in their discourse on hip-hop. The violence and mayhem associated with white rock 'n roll (from the murder of three people at the Rolling Stones 1971 Altamont concert to the incredible machinations of Gun and Roses concerts) have been spared these intellectual surgeon's scalpels while reserving them to slice up hip-hop. It is a curious panacea to me that more of us have not asserted the moral high ground on this issue in holding white rockers to the same rigorous (and I might add artificial) standards that these moral commandos would have us.

More threatening to your freedom and mine are the recent developments that followed Ice-T's recording ban (for "Cop Killer") and contract meltdown in 1992, the effects of which we are still grappling with today. A&M Records artist Tragedy was asked to remove his single "Bullet," which frankly discusses an "eye-for-an-eye" police shooting. The Samaon rappers, the Boo Ya Tribe was asked to delete the single, "Shoot 'Em Down" because the company argued, it endorsed police assassinations; Juvenile Committee was asked to re-record an album for Warner Brothers (this compilation has never been released), and FU2 had a single released from circulation because of its graphic and sexually explicit lyrics.

This recording though not of the gangsta' genre came under attack from MCA female employees and was taken off of the release charts and held in abeyance. All of these incidents come on the heels of prominent first amendment cases initiated by rappers. We can all recall the controversy over the lyrics associated with 2-Live Crew's, As Nasty As They Wanna Be which was banned by the Broward County, Florida courts in 1990. Paul Hetrick, of the right-wing, Focus On the Family counted the number of sexual references in the lyrics, and warned of their hypnotic potential for weak-minded youth. Yet Hetrick and his associates will not attack the sex that occurs daily on afternoon soap operas or their prime-time counterparts like Beverly Hills 90210 or Melrose Place which have widespread following, including many of you in this audience.

Again, we are confronted with a double-standard, one for African American popular culture and the other for white popular culture. And then there is the ultra-moral right. Reverend Calvin Butts of Abyssinian Baptist Church (heir to the flamboyant Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., no stranger to controversy, either) spearheaded a move to banish rap recordings with "vulgar and sexist" lyrics leading a series of demonstration in 1993 to force record companies to do so. Inner City Broadcasting, home of WLIB-AM (the all-Black talk show format) and WBLS-FM (pioneer in the "urban contemporary" sound and home to "Hollywood") refuses to play recordings with "negative and misogynistic" lyrics. And there continues to be a major debate around the use of the word "nigga" as a term of identification and affirmation in the hip-hop vernacular.

Last year, my old neighborhood home-girl, Senator Carol Mosely-Braun was hoodwinked into holding hearings on the effects of "explicit" lyrics on African American youth. She had been misled into this mockery of democracy by C. Delores Tucker, of the National Political Congress of Black Women. The hearings were loaded with commentators, critics, record executives, but no rappers. I repeat no rappers, no artists, no one to articulate the rage and passion that fuel hip-hop's constant innovation and creativity. Neither male nor female rappers to defend the way African American young people are defining themselves above and against the grain of the Ozzie and Harriett and Leave It To Beaver mediocrity the Republicans are seeking to impose on the country.

As the old school generation we must open up the parameters for rap as it matures, just as R&B did, sharing our knowledge, wisdom and experience with the hip-hop generation. They have taken their experiences, molded them with words, packed with emotion and style, and fused them with elemental technologies. Our youth are very sophisticatedÑshaped by the computer, video, digital sampler, and the Technics 2000's and that is where we don't give them enough credit. They know who they are and what there rights are and they are willing to die (and have died). Warriors, truly, but warriors in a war where there enemy is undeclared.

We are slowly witnessing the evolution of a world that parallel's Alex's in Anthony Burgess', A Clockwork Orange, but it's what I call a "Blackwork Orange," where anarchic violence, misogyny, gang wars rule the roost, and where the distinction between the "real" and the "studio," become confused. We must turn this around with advice and consent. The hip-hop community has never let me down, it has the ability "to check itself, before it wrecks itself," but has seldom had the forum to demonstrate that. As old school, let us provide them with at least that forum. And we would do well to heed the late Ralph Ellison's admonition that our society ".has failed to provide rites of passage adequate to the wide variety of experience available to the young."

Hip-hop is a rite of passage, reflecting one initiation into a social order, where, for example in the cosmology of the BaKongo one's individuality within the context of the group is intimately related to commanding the power of the word as a means of integrating the individual into the social order. The word is our right and rite.

cardell@eniac.seas.upenn.edu