DESTINY
A learning
process might appear … for the crushed, the forbidden-to-be, the rejected, that
would teach them that, through serious, just, determined, untiring struggle, it
is possible to remake the world.
—Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of Hope: Reliving Pedagogy of the
Oppressed (New York: The Continuum Publishing Co., 1994), p. 198.
Must survive any how you have to/ Despair, desperation/
But I have no fear/ When I hold this spear/
—Nas and Damian
Marley, “DiSpear,” Distant Relatives
(2010).
“[H]ow do you tell people they are
dying, the culture is dying?” a very astute Black scholar asked me last week,
upon reading the second part of this series, which dealt principally with
cultural death. “The very things they engage with—are killing them. But they
seem oblivious and willing to go to their deaths without a fight.”
Canadian poet Truth Is… suggests no less on
“How Do You Choose to Fight?” (off her self-titled debut), demanding, “How do
you take actions against a reaction to actions not being acted upon?”
For good time now, the grounds have been
shifting, the clouds have been darkening, hearts have been hardening. And the
graveness of this moment upon which we are currently poised might be eluding
the everyday-realities of most public Rap artists, who find greater joy
carrying off as though life today reeks of nothing extraordinary—as though all
the injustices and infractions on humanity being swiftly dealt are mere
transient, inevitable elements of the ongoing human quest for survival.
The brutal conditions under which many
are forced to live daily don’t seem to tarnish their calm one bit. Long as the
ropes, cars, and disposable females keep within arm’s reach, they stay prepared
to forever hold peace. Only when the public gets private—when the political
invades the personal—can society expect address. And, even then, whatever comes
forth is bound to rub tepidly, pack no punches, and scream of civic illiteracy,
rather than genuine, heart-thumping repudiation of a society slipping off the
edges of sanity and humanity.
Most mainstream fans are just as devoted
to lapping up whatever crumbs come darted their direction. They’ll take the
scraps of occasional, emotivity-engineered political stances they can get: à la
Obama ’08. They know the closest to any radical expression might be, as with
one well-known rapper recently, posing
as Malcolm X
to throw solidarity behind drug dealers.This culture, like or not, is slowly
sapping life from its members, producers, and supporters; and that those dying
this very slow death have thus far preferred to go down hands folded, legs
crossed, reveals further the precariousness of the moment—
And we are alive
in amazing times:
Delicate hearts,
diabolical minds
The times call for some serious
reflection, but judging by the batch of Rap songs topping the charts, public
life is as accident-free, fun-filled, innocent
as a Disney theme park.
From the vantage points of the singers
of these songs, children in public schools today have all the opportunities an
affluent society can afford; and their experiences—far from the militarized and
privatized environments hundreds of reports have documented for decades—fall no
short of pleasant and rewarding. From their vantage points, children growing up
today have no worries for their future: hovering above their todays are tomorrows of promising possibilities, of enriching opportunities, just
waiting to be harnessed. From their vantage points, no such reports of gross
financial inequality contains credibility, for most people fall a nail-length
away from peaceful prosperity: most families can afford vacations any time of
the year; most can send their kids to college, without the six-figure debts
many young people complain of post-graduation. From their vantage points,
homelessness is a terrible blight only indigenous to countries thousands of
miles southward and eastward—in places where the Browns and Blacks of this world
are yet to catch up in the Great Race-of-Civilization. From their vantage
points, health insurance is a privilege enjoyed by all under the canopy of
citizenship: a private privilege affordable to all, without the need of a
government agency to rein in avaricious insurance firms and supply universal
coverage for those uncovered. From their vantage points, poverty is another pandemic
native only to nations where coups are common and riots rational. From their
vantage points, Capitalism has done the world no shortage of perfection, in all
aspects—from the ability to cash in quick on the latest, pyrrhic fad (à la
slavery and prisons), to leveling all financial playing fields, to keeping the
bridge otherwise segregating rich-from-poor unbroken. From their vantage
points, homes aren’t being foreclosed, and families aren’t being forced into
cold, hopeless shelters: everyone has a house. From their vantage points,
commodities weigh the same as Soul on the scale of humanity; and if the world
would only learn this, happiness can be at once placed in eye-sight of anyone
with the courage to consume. From their vantage points, no present dangers of
social anarchy threatens the world surrounding us, for the vast majority are
satisfied to their stomachs, gouging on the surplus sprawling into the streets
from the admirable, praise-worthy performance of government officials sworn to
service of the public. From their vantage points, only downers insist this current mode of neoliberalism and biopolitics
threatens to wipe out all that is sane and humane about our society and
universe, and is poised to wreak immitigable havoc on generations to come,
thrusting their futures into bottomless infernos, consuming their hopes and
dreams without remorse.
Here, only the negative-types subscribe to concerns about constant erosion of
civil liberties, constant privatization of public space, constant deregulation
of oligarchic financial firms, constant
militarization of schools, constant incarceration of kids and non-violent
offenders, constant destruction of the planet, constant cheapening of human
life. One set-full of video vixens, one garage-full of vehicles, one tray-full
of bling, one table-full of latest liquor line, one closet-full of sweatshop
clothing, one head-full of fantasy-fueled conceptions of reality—and we’re on
course to create the next Rap star.
“Yes!” Willy Wonka cried, “the danger
must be growing/ For the rowers keep on rowing/ And they’re certainly not
showing/ Any signs that they are slowing.”
Once upon a time Public Enemy could have
legislators and pollsters rushing off to bathrooms every five seconds, scared
to death a young, uncounted, undesired population was rising to consciousness,
was starting to take sharper look at the society that saw no wrong in making
its life hell-on-earth. Today the rulers can snore soundly, aware the corporate
serfs who call themselves artists have assured their much too uninformed fanbase
the world is one big music video set, stocked with enough green screens to make
fantasies real—however morally decadent, however ethically derelict. And hooked
on the pipedream of one day strutting down sets like those upon which their favorite
stars twinkle, many young fans, of shades as elaborate as George W. Bush’s war
cabinet, can claim no understanding of how critical these fleeting moments are
for serious-political activism to protect their future from the claws of
ravenous corporations bent on cleaning out the world until the casino manager
is forced to make a personal visit and announce the game is up.
They could cull up countless rhymes on
demand, a skill I find no fault in, but couldn’t explain what is demanded of
them to transform their world—and the larger one. They know the world is
terrible enough, but they have no political experience and no civic literacy
and no social language to talk back,
as the timeless bell hooks once ordered, against the evil forces feasting on
their future. They’ll just as soon tear your skin apart rhetorically—I’ve been
in such circles—in defense of their favorite (drink-soaked, smoke-filled) Rap
artist, but would fall flat immediately issues of Ideology and Resistance are
invoked. They’ll listen but remain silent. These topics, they’ve come to concede,
are better suited for others of higher intellectual callings.
“Dear God 2.0.,” leaked last week, has
Black Thought of The Roots venting—
Everybody
checking for the new award nominees
Wars and
atrocities,
Look at all the
poverty
Ignoring the
prophecies…
… Corporate monopoly
Weak world
economy, stock market toppling
Mad marijuana, OxyContin
and Klonopin
Everybody out of
it!
The days when public Rap artists steered
the hearts of young people toward opposition to a tyrannical society have blown
past. Now, indifference to youth, long-normalized in government halls and
school boards, has trailed to music studios, where men and women with kids see
no irony in advising the teenage fans who patronize their music to dump any
notion of Struggle for a carefree, careless, nonchalant outlook—accepting of
the blows life’s emissaries deal, and subservient to authority figures in whose
palms rest the fate of millions worldwide: from food to war to water to life.
With bitter sarcasm Damian Marley urges
on “Patience,” off the recently released Distant
Relatives—
Pay no mind to
the Youths
‘Cause it’s not
like the future depends on it
But save the
animals in the zoo
‘Cause the
Chimpanzee dem a make big money
Young people, kids especially, form a
base without which many rappers’ wallets would contract completely. The smart
record executive understands whichever way they decide—whether consciously or
otherwise—Hip-Hop sound should veer in would mark the next turn for this
directionless wheel. But if they ever suddenly, as a mass, grew into political
awareness of the soulless realities to which their society has assigned them,
realities which their elders have remained reluctant to battle with all the
determination demanded of the culpable,
many rappers would be out of jobs, and many record companies would turn
bankrupt fast. No radical shift of the sort can occur within such short period—and
satisfy an astute generation.
In firm resolve to ensure this renaissance
never succeeds, artists are implored to ratchet up the guns-drugs-hoes anthems.
Flood the masses with cesspool and they couldn’t find good time to get baptized
and cleansed. More specific, bombard kids with nihilism and materialism, and
their reading of the world would no doubt linger between rejection of Struggle
and acceptance of Fate, before ultimately seeking out whatever commodity the
omniscient artist has laid down as requisite for a bliss-filled life. But just
in case one or two fans decide to get wise and concern themselves with a world
where women aren’t objects to be trampled for pleasure, an occasional political
stunt, nursed in superficiality, always works in silencing dissenters.
Two years ago, the Obama presidency bid
afforded perfect catalyst for the throng of rappers who were dying to register
political engagement on their résumé. Most cast their lot with swiftness upon
hearing a Black Man was in the run to head the nation with the most costly war
apparatus. Most would have needed paramedic attention if questioned on specific
policies espoused by the man they cried was on verge of restoring Hope and
inspiring Change. But the chants kept undisturbed. Obama was the first “Hip-Hop
President,” they declared. Concerts were thrown in his honor, artists and
executives produced mixtapes of support, rappers were dispatched to colleges as
unofficial surrogates, dedication-songs blew up on major radio stations which
in years hadn’t considered any song with a slight bent from rancid materialism
worth the play. Hip-Hop, it was said, had found its new leader. Rappers felt
good. They had once more helped lure fans into the clutches of the Democratic
Party.
Two years later, as the Hip-Hop
President sets impressive records for drone-use
(/fatalities) in Pakistan and immigration deportation at home, records
superseding his very unpopular predecessor (one which the same artists, in firm
tradition with tokenism, had jabbed a couple of times through those eventful eight
years); as he genuflects to Wall Street barons and cowers before the great
overlords at the Pentagon, as he looks the other way while black sites blow up
around the world, while torture proceeds under a different name, while
Afghanistan children are kidnapped and assassinated in nighttime raids based on
false pretexts, the astute political theorists who two years ago had their
hearts beating with pride have held their peace, even while millions of
families hang on the tight rope holding homelessness beneath, even while
millions of children go hungry daily from belly-bloating poverty, even while
cynicism comes back with a vengeance, claiming the spirits of youth nationwide
who hearkened to the rappers’ calls, but now weigh heavily the pain of betrayal
and broken promises—
You feel it in
the streets: the people breathe without hope
They going
through the motion, they dimming down the focus
The focus get
cleared, then the light turn sharp
And the eyes go
teary, the mind grow weary
It made sense that these rappers, these
corporate clowns, would carry kegs for the Establishment—do for the Democratic
Party what for years they had done for other corporations. Thoughts of
subversion and insurgency were farthest in such minds as sanity to Sarah Palin.
And refusal to lift their allotted share could be costly—could revoke certain
privileges corporate rappers have grown well accustomed to.
“Once outside the stultifying yet secure
shelter of the native organization, out in the windy, noisy and crowded
expanses of the agora,” wrote Zygmunt Bauman on a topic of equal relevance, “the
specific intellectuals (if they step beyond the strictly circumscribed expert
role, acting as themselves, not as the spokesmen delegated by the organization)
find themselves on their own.” [Zygmunt Bauman, Mortality, Immortality, and Other Life Strategies (Stanford,
California: Stanford University Press, 1992), p. 82.]
Loneliness is tough for most people—and
most lonely are the red zones where dissidents in any society and of any
organization have been banished to. The few dissident artists in the Hip-Hop
community have little to show since being flung outside the golden gates. And
“public humiliation,” which Canibus, one such dissident, has written
courageously about (calling it “the worst pain”), does enough good in ensuring
less dissidence in a society where popularity counts more than conviction and
courage.
As defense, many rappers raise stories
of growing up poor, of squatting in shacks, of being forced to street life to
stack food on the table. While much truth is found here, childhood poverty
should never excuse a zombifying opulence that denies far more than this
travailing childhood they seek to run so fast away from. A few toys and meals
and apparel should never tally up the price of the soul of anyone—much less
adults traumatized as kids by a rancid capitalist culture arguing opposite. And
Art should never fall victim to the abuse of artists trying to win a financial
war with the past. Wallace Shawn, in his nonfiction collection Essays, explained:
Now, if you
write with the expectation that what you say will be heard and understood, then
you and your audience are actually involved in a common endeavor, and while
you’re writing, they’re sitting there beside you, helping you to know how best
to reach them. … If you’re writing to “make your living” as well, a further
valuable disciple asserts itself, because the more successful you are in
speaking to your audience directly and clearly, the nicer the life you’ll be
able to lead. [Wallace Shawn, Essays
(Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2009), p. 111.]
Hip-Hop artists, if they would have any
worthy impact in the coming days, must drop this senseless mode of
sales-pitching, and restart the work of working up consciousness within the
generation they were called to serve. They must come to see their role as equal
to the critical educator, the emancipator educator—the public intellectual.
Unwavering, Unaccommodating, Unnerving.
It’s time for
rebirth
Burning up the
branch and the root
The empty
pursuits of every tree bearing the wrong fruit
Two decades back, renowned educator
Henry Giroux demanded teachers understand their roles as central to any
progress in society, as one of the only channels through which the young masses
could learn about their world and develop the political agency required to
engage and transform it. “Any educational theory that is to be critical and
emancipatory, that is to function in the interests of critical understanding
and self-determining action,” he instructed, “must generate a discourse that
moves beyond the established language of administration and conformity.” [Henry
A. Giroux, Teachers as Intellectuals: Toward
a Critical Pedagogy of Learning (Granby, CO: Bergin & Garvey
Publishers, Inc., 1988), p. 3.]
Hip-Hop artists must see themselves
under this light—as responsible for the perception of the world fostered by a
generation deprived critical thinking skills; a generation unloved and unwanted.
And as this generation unravels the mystery of iniquity suffocating their
society, it is set upon artists the task to help foster self-empowerment to “critically
appropriate those forms of knowledge that traditionally have been denied to
them.” (Giroux, Teachers as Intellectuals,
p. 106)
None of these would roll down the
sleeves seamlessly. None of these would rush through with the kind of
haphazard, emotionless, thought-pierced practice that produced stale,
predictable commercial Rap records through the last decade. And no shortcuts or
easy-way-outs can offer sufficient bail out. No more would “conscious artists”
feel superior to their commercial counterparts simply for stating the
obvious—that the world is a bad, bad, bad place; that Black history is Whitewashed;
that Egypt lies in Africa; that the original peoples featured dark skin; that
all human trails lead back to The Motherland. Enough of the decayed and dusty
scripts which rather than meet their own standards—of setting free colonized
minds—only identify the artists as well-read in Afrocentric texts.
“[W]e invent the opportunity of setting
ourselves free by perceiving, as well, that the sheer perception of inconclusion,
limitation, opportunity, is not enough,” declared Paulo Freire almost two
decades back. “To the perception must be joined the political struggle for the
transformation of the world. The liberation of individuals acquires profound
meaning only when the transformation of society is achieved.” (Freire, Pedagogy of Hope, p. 100)
Artists bold enough to claim their
function as intellectuals must rise up without fear of consequence, without
dread of loneliness, and stay committed through this long distance fight for
restoration of hope amongst a cynicism-seized community, for restoration of
dignity amongst a dehumanized society. They must understand their moral
responsibilities as firing up dreams of a better tomorrow and an unfinished today.
And whereas a money-cureth-all
philosophy might have sufficed in past years as worthy response to complex moral,
social, historical, and political crises, they must firm their grip around this
very loaded moment anchoring our existence, refusing to give into fatalism,
invoking non-market principles upon which livable societies depend, utilizing
all the blood and pain and sacrifice of the present “to unveil opportunities
for hope, no matter what the obstacles may be. After all, without hope there is
little we can do. It will be hard to struggle on, and when we fight as hopeless
or despairing persons, our struggle will be suicidal.” (Freire, Pedagogy of Hope, p. 9)
If not, if the sickness of despair
should entice stronger than this call, Thomas Gray’s “Elegy” would dictate our
fate:
The boast of
heraldry, the pomp of power,
And all that
beauty, all that wealth e’er gave,
Awaits alike th’
inevitable hour:—
The paths of
glory lead but to the grave
Tolu Olorunda is a cultural critic whose
work appears in various online journals. He can be reached at: Tolu.Olorunda@gmail.com.
[Writer’s note: The above artwork,
“Meditations on Hip-Hop: Destiny,” appears thanks to the brilliance of Ade Awofadeju,
a reader and London-based visual artist who composed it for the conclusion of
this series. Contact him at: coldblack01@googlemail.com.]
