Melville House Books

Big Daddy Kane, poet

If one good thing comes from the recent Republican takeover of the House of Representatives and near-takeover of the Senate, it’s a pretty sure bet that art, literature, and music will benefit. Punk started in the 70′s largely as a reaction to hippies and a malaise among voiceless youngsters. Hardcore, an exponent of punk, was equally a reaction to Ronald Reagan and his ilk in the 80′s. Serious–if abrasive–artistic movements that were reactions to repressive elements in society, movements that deserve to be studied, emulated, and enjoyed. Perhaps John Darnielle, a.k.a The Mountain Goats, said it best when he tweeted the other day, “Do the mid-term election results mean we get a bunch of great politically-charged hardcore and metal bands now? glass half full, people.”

Given all the attention being paid to hip-hop with the recent publication of The Anthology of Rap (Yale University Press), it would seem rap might be poised to be the first beneficiary. Despite hip-hop’s stigma as not terribly literary, the Anthology is getting some serious bookish attention (it is an academic anthology after all). Sam Anderson, in his fairly effusive review for New York Magazine, articulated a position probably pretty common; ignorance of rap’s complex lyricism and genuine awe upon encountering it on the page:

Normally I don’t mind being out of the pop-cultural loop–I’ve even learned, over the years, to wear my ignorance with a certain musty old-man pride. Given, however, that I am a professional studier of words, my hip-hop blind spot has come to seem indefensible: I am clueless about one of the culture’s most vital fronts of verbal artistry. It would be like an art critic who’s never seen a comic book, or a choreographer who’s never heard of Michael Jackson.

Not everyone is as excited. Matt Labash, in his review for the Wall Street Journal, summed up something that’s elemental and paradoxical about pop and, in this instance, rap music: “lousy song lyrics often make for great songs. But when the music stops, and the lyrics are robbed of their delivery vehicle and forced to stand out in the light of day by their lonesome, they just look like bad poetry.” True enough, but Labash seems offended in that typically conservative way when something that’s not Ronald Reagan or Aristotle is written about for and by the academy. Calling the book “pseudo-scholarship,” he snidely remarks that, “Now that the academy venerates all manner of pop-culture–study everything from Muppet Magic: Jim Henson’s Art (U.C. Santa Cruz) to Learning From YouTube (Pitzer College)–the question isn’t, ‘Why an Ivy-League certified anthology of rap lyrics?’ But rather, ‘What took them so long?’” Fortunately the Journal offset a bit of the condescension by including a list of other books on hip-hop.

At any rate, now that people like Anderson and NPR’s Guy Raz are enthusiastically paying attention to hip-hop, maybe whenever the next iteration of “Fuck tha Police” comes out, people won’t reflexively question the motives of the MC. Maybe they’ll wonder why things like “stop-and-frisk” are still happening in 2010.