Black Studies, Rap, and the Academy.

Houston A. Baker, Jr. Black Studies, Rap, and the Academy. Chicago: U of Chicago Press, 1963. 110 pp. $16.95.

Houston Baker's Black Studies, Rap, and the Academy has two goals: First, Baker analyzes Black and Afro-American Studies departments and rap music as "ground[s] of contestation" between various forces of modern American life; second, Baker enacts his concepts of Black Studies as an organic link between black communities and mainstream American universities, and rap music as an authentic, black poetic voice.

For Baker, the principal contribution of rap music and Black Studies is their respective oppositions to mainstream, white, American popular culture and universities. As a function of this opposition, Baker claims that Black Studies "arrested `normal' academic practice" and "forged a connection between everyday black urban life and traditionally dis-interested academic provinces." Using "post-structuralist" Cultural Studies terminology, he describes "Black Studies as a sign ... [, as] a signifying amalgam of energies" which "was committed in the first instance of its determination to undoing all prevalent `authentic' notions of such disciplines as history and English." So, for Baker, especially in early moments, Black Studies was able to act as an authentic connection to "everyday black urban life," thereby dislodging notions of authenticity in the "academic provinces." The problem with this approach is in large part contextual. Both at present and in 1993 when Baker's book went to press, I see scant evidence that either one of these "victories" was widespread or long-lived.

Baker's "post-structuralist" account of Black Studies seems to be in tension with his Levi-Straussian, binary structuralist analytical methods, which frame both Black Studies and rap music in opposition to mainstream institutions. Many of the vital contributions of, and issues faced by, rap and Black Studies seem to have fallen into the silence of this methodological interstice. Given the limitations of Professor Baker's knowledge of rap music, Black Studies, Rap, and the Academy becomes a symptom of its own mis-alignment. The silences created by the methodology of the book limit its value as a source on the historical development of Black Studies. Baker's treatment of rap music relates to select incidents in which the "mainstream" mis-perceives the music in particularly heinous ways. However, his analysis lacks depth and fails to address key issues in the development of rap as an art form/marketing tool. This interest in the (mis)reception of rap by the "mainstream" gives the book little value for anyone interested in the importance of rap to either "everyday black urban life" or more supportive portions of mainstream culture in the 1990s. As a product of Afro-American Studies departments, and a rap audience member since 1980, I left the book, at times, wondering just what it was about.

The most valuable aspect of Baker's study is his improvised description of the great distance between black American communities and elite American universities illuminated by the arrival of black students from inner cities. Baker describes the arriving students of the late 1960s as "far from grateful subjects ... [ready] to take up the business of assimilating white behavioral codes and intellectual fare." Baker then describes how this energy was translated into a burgeoning movement of student activism and how the "moral panic" on the part of university administrations led to the creation of more than 200 Black Studies departments by 1973.

Baker writes the history of Black Studies as a success story, but raises few of the issues which continue to vex the field. He concludes with an image of traditional disciplines dealing with the necessity of "rhythmic coexistence" with Black Studies departments, which represent "everyday black urban life." Yet little hard evidence exists that "traditional disciplines" are in fact attempting "rhythmic coexistence" with Black Studies, to say nothing of "everyday black urban life." Indeed, creating institutionalized connections to black communities doesn't seem to be high on the list for the faculty of most Black Studies departments. Baker concludes his victory passage with the sentence, "As Public Enemy might make the point: `It's like that y'all.'" As an avid Public Enemy listener over the last nine years, I can't help but comment that this reference sounds much more like early Run-DMC than anything I recall hearing from Chuck D or Flavor Flav. A minor point, unless the book happens to be about rap music.

Baker's analysis makes no mention of numerous issues which seem crucial to Black Studies programs: the steady decline in black enrollments in American universities; the great and growing distance between academic intellectuals, including those in Black Studies, and inner-city black life; the myriad contradictions in the study of African-American culture in "diasporic" terms; and the fundamental fact that 30 years after the emergence of the "field," sometimes even called a "discipline," most appointments in "Black Studies" are of scholars trained in "traditional" disciplines. To date, not only has "Black Studies" failed to sustain itself as a distinct field, it hasn't, with the exception of the cautionary example of Temple University, attempted to become such. In fact, "Black Studies" departments have been most successful when they work not in opposition to, but in cooperation with, traditional English, History, and Comparative Literature departments in training young "Black Studies" scholars.

But, in the end, what makes the book puzzling is not so much its limited scope, but the lack of seriousness with which the author seems to take even central concerns like the relationship of Black Studies to black communities outside the academy. It seems that, despite the post-structuralist language about the play of "signs" and accumulating "simulacra," Baker still believes that there exists some line of authenticity or "straight up" signification between black communities outside the university and the work of academic intellectuals under the rubric of "Black Studies." Rather, it seems to me that the 1980s and 1990s combination of economic success in middle-class black communities and the utter devastation of working- and lower-class black urban neighborhoods have alienated the critiques initiated by "Black Studies" in two profound ways.

First, the success of middle-class black America in the '80s and '90s has delivered the "children" of Robert Stepto's "ascent narrative" to the doorsteps of Black Studies. Engaged mainly in pre-professional study, most of these students have only vaguely conscious notions of the experiences the work of a Du Bois, Baldwin, Hurston, or Morrison so self-consciously and painfully wades through. Baker rightly describes the 1960s arrival of inner-city students on white American campuses as "an immigration." Today, one is stunned by similar "distance" between where many black students come from and the works that "Black Studies" considers the central avenue back to the community. The profound level of conservatism and de- or re-attachment among certain demographics of black undergraduates baffles Black Studies professors.

Second, the combination of post-industrial economics and hyper-acquisitive cultural forces have so undermined the lives of poor and working-class black communities that the public high schools in inner cities rarely produce students able to engage the works being offered by Black Studies departments. Let's be real. In my experience, it's very common that an identification with the sense of urgency and critique implicit in "Black Studies" scholarship and curricula is found in students whose educational experiences have seriously restricted their scholastic abilities. These students are often intellectually acute, sharp, and engaged but mystified by the expanses of time and concentration required to perform even introductory college-level work. They're out of place in college classrooms, and in 1997 there's a dearth of adolescent revolutionary impulse offering even the problematic grounding it offered in the late 1960s. Rather, these students seem to hear glimmers of their experience of "everyday black urban life" rendered in forms they have little experience in engaging. This observation is not offered in support of self-conscious/tough-love, anti-Affirmative Action rhetoric about qualifications. It is an effort to be frank about what "being connected to community" means in 1997.

Anyone who teaches Black Studies is likely to experience the "peculiar sensation" of grading tests in which the top grades are earned by white women who, on some level, have little idea what the class is about, while the worst grades are predictably performed by those living closest to the experiences being written, read, and "theorized." He's attended the lecture, assimilated a version of the narrative type, run it through the terrain of his own experience. He's asked all the right questions, anticipated the core issues, but his eyes glaze over as you inform him that the whole of The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass is assigned for this week's reading. He's failing the abstraction of his own life in the midst of people who breeze the 70 pages in an hour, flip the analytical concepts around like mathematical functions, and earn their A's. Or maybe they simply ride their suburban SAT scores to B's while humming along with the latest Wu Tang release. This is the contemporary terrain of "Black Studies" classrooms, and I wouldn't choose to be anywhere else. But combinations of these dynamics plus our own active imaginations have certainly caused all of us, at least once, to pack up our notes midway through a class and issue some form of vendetta-laced accusation at the "now attentive" players in our rooms.

These are notes on some of the complexities of contemporary "Black Studies" classrooms which make the field so difficult to finger. Yet Baker's poststructuralist paradigms seem designed to display the field as complex in mainstream terms rather than to help engage the crucial issues. It's not my wish to be harsh in critique of what is not a bad book. It is, however, true that Baker's treatment of rap music shows scant evidence that he really got deeply into the music. Apart from lists, short ones, of various rappers and DJ's and a symbolic gesture at an etiology of rap similar to that of "Black Studies," the book has very little to do with the actual story or importance of rap music. Baker merely uses it to stand in as "simulacrum number two" in his paradigm of organic connections. Ever since reading the book I've had this tape running in my head repeating to the rhythm of "Public, Public Enemy number one ...," "Simu, simulacrum number two...."

What makes this so ironic is Baker's use of rap to call Henry Louis Gates, Jr., to task for/us ignorance of rap, which allowed Gates to make exaggerated claims about the aesthetic merit of Two Live Crew's work. Certainly Gates's praise of the excellence of the group's work was exaggerated. But one doesn't have to be a trial lawyer to realize that the job of a paid expert witness in court is not to offer balanced critique; it is, as rappers most definitely understand, to represent, and get paid. Ironically, whether knowingly or not, Gates comes closer to replicating the crux of the Hip Hop aesthetic itself. "The brothers needed him, they had the money, so Professor Gates came through like a trooper and represented like a ...," defending the brothers' right to get "Real" rich and "Real" nasty. It's not surprising that Baker misconstrues this scene for something other than what it was for the rap world. Wu Tang Clan, a true "amalgam of energy," got it right a few years later in "C.R.E.A.M.": "Cash rules everything around me, cream get the money, dollar dollar bill y'all." And that's what that was about.

Baker's lack of familiarity with rap music deeply circumscribes his ability to comment coherently on the topic. His suggested reading list of works on rap, offered to Gates as rhetorical hindsight, includes horrible books like Signifying Rappers. His consistent misspelling of the title of N.W.A's album Straight Outta Compton deals a dose of signified disrespect to the music, while contributing to the Cultural Studies tradition which correctly transcribes difficult passages from Hegel and Baudrillard and then, as does Paul Gilroy in The Black Atlantic, misquotes LL Cool J's "'Round the Way Girl." These "incidental" errors represent and suppose precisely the division their works deny. These errors exist in the space between the "everyday black urban life" and the writers, readers, and editors of works like The Black Atlantic or Black Studies, Rap, and the Academy. Ironically, given the language of the discourse, the only thing an average rap fan or any non-academic reader might glean from these texts is the mistaken quotations and misspelled titles.

In short, if Baker doesn't like what Gates did to rap for money, publicity, and a beleaguered notion of free speech, he should take a closer listen to rap's main themes before he credits the genre for the merits he imagines it to contain. I grew up listening to rap. We sat around memorizing the lyrics of Funky Four Plus One, Spoonie Gee, Grand Master Flash, Busy Bee, and others; we used the lines on each other; we fantasized about using them with girls we knew. I felt a Midwestern "version" of what it means to have the genre grow out of one's own adolescent poetic impulses and up on to Soul Train and MTV, and after holding out as long as possible, BET, too. Since graduate school and my own engagement with long expanses of silent concentration, I hear rap differently. There have been many changes--in the music, in the world, and in me. One of the hardest things to map is the convergence of the three. I think if Baker had been more explicit in locating himself in relationship to rap music, his insights into the music might be easier to understand and more valuable. Most importantly, Black Studies contains no mention of the politics of marketing rap music and what effects "the market" has on these emerging poetic voices.

The combination of the post-industrial wasteland as "playground" and the market potential of the emerging young, urban, African-American consciousness and poetic voice has fused the naked flex of market morality with developing voices and identities in an intimate and disturbing way. Yusef Komunyakaa's recent Indiana Review essay entitled "Masks" wonders about the fusion of the market and the mask, which he sees in the faces of "high-risk" Indianapolis high school students in a photo exhibit. Komunyakaa hears in rap music a generation of would-be poets who seem to create consumable personae in return for money. He then wonders about the effects of these "Masks"-for-sale on the persons beneath the personae and among the members of the generation who aren't rap stars: "Some of these faces would be surprised to find that they are wearing the masks that society created for them, that their features have hardened into caricatures of their real selves." His comment calls into question the worth of these fashioned, "oppositional stances" and interrogates the level at which they succeed in opposing what they imagine themselves to oppose. Komunyakaa's short essay isn't written about rap per se, but in a few pages he identifies fundamental issues more accurately than Baker does in his book. After reading Komunyakaa, one watches rap videos and listens to the stanzas in a different way, wondering to what extent "their survival masks are devouring them," and if the cure is really a Lexus. Then we turn back to the "wasteland" of a post-industrial Camden, NJ, or an Albuquerque, NM, and wonder again if there's really a livable choice, or oscillation, between the vulnerable interior and the "mad dog" mask. I'll conclude with James Baldwin in "Notes of a Native Son": "... the trouble, finally, is that the risks are real even if the choices do not exist."