Review: Keeping It Real: Interpreting Hip-Hop

Reviewed Work(s): That's the Joint! The Hip-Hop Studies Reader by Murray Forman and
Mark Anthony Neal: Prophets of the Hood: Politics and Poetics in Hip Hop by Imani
Perry: Nuthin' but a "G" Thang: The Culture and Commerce of Gangsta Rap by Eithne
Quinn: Can't Stop Won't Stop: A History of the Hip-Hop Generation by Jeff Chang
Review by: Juliana Chang
Source: College English , May, 2006, Vol. 68, No. 5 (May, 2006), pp. 545-554
Published by: National Council of Teachers of English

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/25472170

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide
range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and
facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at
https://about.jstor.org/terms

National Council of Teachers of English is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and
extend access to College English

This content downloaded from

76.137.11.203 on Sat, 03 Dec 2022 06:09:12 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 545

Review: Keeping It Real: Interpreting

Hip-Hop

Juliana Chang

That's the Joint! The Hip-Hop Studies Reader. Ed. Murray Forman and Mark Anthony Neal.
New York: Roudedge, 2004. 628 pp.
Prophets of the Hood: Politics and Poetics in Hip Hop. Imani Perry. Durham, NC: Duke UP,
2004.236 pp.
Nuthin'but a "G" Thang: The Culture and Commerce ofGangsta Rap. Eithne Quinn. New
York: Columbia UP, 2005. 251 pp.
Can't Stop Won't Stop: A History of the Hip-Hop Generation. Jeff Chang. New York: St.
Martin's, 2005. 546 pp.

What is hip-hop? The most obvious and immediate answer is that hip-hop is
rap music: rhymed lyrics that are mainly rapped, rather than sung, over sampled
beats. The unexpectedly widespread, enthusiastic, and sustained reception of
rap music is one of the most remarkable and significant stories of our time.
Developed in the 1970s in the South Bronx with roots in Caribbean and Afrodiasporic
cultural forms, rap music spread through the boroughs and suburbs of New York
City to become a national and global phenomenon, with various regions adapting
the genre into versions that engaged with their particular circumstances. Inspiring
enormous passion, rap music is an object of ardent and soulful love for its commu
nity of fans, as well as an object of great derision and hostility for its detractors. Its
lyrics and phrases are cited at nightclubs, at house parties, at political protests, and
in everyday banter. Its music can be heard not only on the radio, but also in films,
retail stores, cafes, and cellphone ring-tones. This ubiquity of an art form developed
by black and Latino youth well exemplifies the theoretical observation that what is
socially marginalized often becomes culturally centered.

Juliana Chang is director of ethnic studies and associate professor of English at Santa Clara University.
She has published articles on Asian American literature in Contemporary Literature, MELUS, Meridians,
and MFS: Modern Fiction Studies.

College English, Volume 68, Number 5, May 2006

This content downloaded from
76.137.11.203 on Sat, 03 Dec 2022 06:09:12 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
546 College English

However, the story of hip-hop is not just the story of a musical genre. An often
cited distinction is that rap is the music, while hip-hop is the culture. In the early
days, hip-hop comprised "four elements": DJing, MCing, breakdancing, and graf
fiti. In this paradigm, hip-hop emphasizes virtuosity of technique and technology?
a virtuosity that is understood as style. Hip-hop style is a way of dance, dress, hair,
body movement, and speech. Dick Hebdige, Robin Kelley, and others have shown
how style can be profoundly articulate and deeply political. As subcultural style, hip
hop created alternative economies of value. As a site of commodification and entre
preneurship, it created alternative economies, period. And these economies in turn
influenced the development of the genre. Out of the original four elements, MCing
(verbal rapping over music) currently enjoys the greatest prominence, because it
proved to be the easiest element to commodity. The common definition of hip-hop
culture as rap music provides an illustration of how economics shapes culture. But
the story of hip-hop is broader and deeper than this kind of determinism.
For hip-hop heads, hip-hop is an identity, a way of life, a worldview. For hip
hop intellectuals, hip-hop provides fascinating insight into formations of race, gen
der, region, and nation, as well as culture, politics, economics, and history. The
publication of Murray Forman and Mark Anthony Neal's substantial and wide-rang
ing volume Thafs the Joint! The Hip-Hop Studies Reader marks the establishment of
hip-hop studies as a coherent academic subfield. Its contributors draw from and
contribute to the areas of sociology, cultural studies, critical theory, gender studies,
critical race studies, dance studies, and of course music studies. Thafs the Joint! and
the other books under review build on two decades of writing on hip-hop culture.
The earliest book-length studies of hip-hop came out in 1984: David Toop's The Rap
Attack: African Jive to New York Hip-Hop and Steven Hager's Hip Hop: The Illustrated
History of Break Dancing, Rap Music, and Graffiti. Music journalists (most notably
Nelson George and Greg Tate) prolifically published essays on hip-hop throughout
the 1980s and 1990s, while academic scholarship on hip-hop appeared in scattered
journals and anthologies. The breakthrough book on academic terrain was Tricia
Rose's Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America, which is
widely quoted by subsequent scholars of rap. Also influential has been Robin Kelley's
chapter "Kickin' Reality, Kickin' Ballistics: 'Gangsta Rap' and Postindustrial Los
Angeles" from his classic book Race Rebels: Culture, Politics, and the Black Working
Class. Since Black Noise, scores of books and articles on hip-hop have been published,
and numerous university courses offer segments on the study of hip-hop. Thafs the
Joint! gathers together forty-four essays and articles in hip-hop studies in a "reader"
format, including book excerpts and articles by notable hip-hop intellectuals such as
Rose, Kelley, Michael Eric Dyson, Todd Boyd, Cheryl Keyes, Bakari Kitwana, Joan
Morgan, Gwendolyn Pough, and the editors themselves. Thafs the Joint! is clearly
intended for use as an anthology for courses on hip-hop, and as a primer for aca

This content downloaded from

76.137.11.203 on Sat, 03 Dec 2022 06:09:12 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 Review: Keeping It Real: Interpreting Hip-Hop 547

demies and others seeking to learn more about hip-hop. The collection is divided
into seven sections: "Hip-Hop History and Historiography"; "Hip-Hop Culture
and the Authenticity Debates"; "Hip-Hop, Space, and Place"; "Hip-Hop and Gen
der"; "Rap, Politics, and Resistance"; "Hip-Hop Aesthetics and Technologies of
Production"; and "Hip-Hop in/and the Culture Industries." As these section titles
suggest, there are myriad frameworks through which to interpret hip-hop. In out
lining the general concerns of the other three books, I hope to provide a brief over
view of what is at stake in the selection of particular frameworks for interpreting
hip-hop and an in-depth discussion of the interpretive rubrics of rupture and "real
ness" in relation to racial formation and capitalism in the post-civil rights era.
Noting that hip-hop is often understood through the realist lenses of sociology
and history, Imani Perry's Prophets of the Hood: Politics and Poetics in Hip Hop empha
sizes the aesthetics of hip-hop, specifically focusing on the origins of hip-hop in
black American culture. On one level, this seems self-evident: though its multira
cial, transnational, and co-gendered status is somewhat recognized, rap music is still
very much associated with black masculinity. However, Perry acknowledges that
there will be objections to her definition of hip-hop as an African American form,
because of the early influences of Caribbean toasting and dub, Latin-tinged funk,
Puerto Rican breakdancing and graffiti, and even Asian cultures in the form of mar
tial-arts cinema. Nevertheless, Perry asks, "Why can't something be black {read black
American) and be influenced by a number of cultures and styles at the same time?
[. . .] [BJlack music is and has always been hybrid" (10-11). Perry's book examines
the rhetorical, narrative, and discursive structures and positioning of rap music, re
ferring to African American culture; metaphors and exhortations; verbal and visual
intertextuality; and American law.
Like Perry, Eithne Quinn understands hip-hop as continuous with earlier forms
of black vernacular. While Perry devotes a chapter to the black vernacular figure of
the outlaw, Quinn's study of gangsta rap, Nuthin' but a "G" Thang: The Culture and
Commerce of Gangsta Rap, similarly outlines two figures from black folklore: the
badman and the trickster. The establishment of a significant corpus of hip-hop schol
arship over the last two decades has enabled the emergence of specialized studies
like Quinn's. Most of Quinn's book focuses on the period 1988 to 1992, the region
of South-Central Los Angeles, and a small number of rap artists, including mem
bers of NWA (Eazy-E, Ice Cube, Dr. Dre), Snoop Doggy Dogg (now Snoop Dogg),
and Tupac Shakur. Quinn's book is organized by discussions of urban sociology,
popular discourses, vernacular traditions, and intergenerational relations. One of
Quinn's main arguments is that gangsta rap is a form of metacommentary: "[G]angsta
is actually about its own determination" (40). Quinn outlines the bleak economic
circumstances in Los Angeles that gave rise to gangsta rap, arguing that these eco
nomics should be analyzed as both context and text: "[G]angsta rappers chose to

This content downloaded from

76.137.11.203 on Sat, 03 Dec 2022 06:09:12 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
548 College English

mobilize explicitly the very social conditions they faced to forge their product. The
ironies run deep: these artists turned the very social costs of urban poverty, violence,
and social isolation into assets, and they placed this enterprising 'conversion narra
tive' at the heart of their imagery" (42). Illustrating Robin Kelley's remark that capi
talism was both the greatest foe and greatest friend to young black men facing
deindustrialization, the gangsta persona critiqued the options of dead-end service
sector jobs and respectable middle-class upward mobility by staking out a third way:
the more nakedly capitalistic avenue of entrepreneurial acquisition.
Nuthin'but a "G" Thang is the most conventionally scholarly of this collection
of books, its analysis firmly grounded in the kind of interdisciplinary inquiry that
characterizes British cultural and subcultural studies (Quinn teaches at the Univer
sity of Manchester). Prophets of the Hood is mostly analytical, but occasionally in
cludes personal anecdote and vivid description. Referring to the influence of
Muhammad Ali's rhetorical style on rap artists, for example, Perry notes that boxing
itself serves as an apt metaphor for hip-hop: "Hip hop is poetry that shifts styles of
defense and offense, moving between grace and bull-like forward barreling. It dances,
it leans back, and then it attacks" (59). Thafs the Joint! draws from journalism as well
as academic scholarship. Most of its pieces comprise the sustained discussions that
academics are used to writing and studying, ranging in length from five to twenty
five pages. In their section on history and historiography, however, Forman and
Neal include the very first allusions to hip-hop in the printed media, two short ar
ticles from the industry publication Billboard in 1978 and 1979. The tone of the
articles is priceless in its description of a new, curious, not-yet-understood phenom
enon: "It seems Here rose to popularity by playing long sets of assorted rhythm
breaks strung together" (41); "Jive talking N.Y. DJs rapping away in black discos"
(43). A number of pieces in Thafs the Joint! provide engaging narratives that bring to
life the tensions and contradictions of hip-hop, most notably Joan Morgan's interro
gations of eroticism and feminism in "Hip-Hop Feminist." While academic, theo
retical writing, at its best, yields clear understanding of a complex cultural formation,
these moments of descriptive and journalistic writing inspire an appreciation of the
compelling power and peculiar beauty of hip-hop and rap.
Jeff Chang's Can H Stop Won 'r Stop: A History of the Hip-Hop Generation is written
entirely in the storytelling mode of music journalism. Chang breaks down the his
tory of hip-hop culture into a series of narratives and stories, some of which inspire
mythologizing: the mid-twentieth-century leading of the white exodus out of the
Bronx by a man named Moses (urban planner Robert Moses, whose projects in
cluded the Cross-Bronx Expressway); the "giddy affair" (168) between New York's
uptown and downtown that facilitated the dissemination of hip-hop; the succumb
ing of high-minded hip-hop progressives to the seductive down-and-dirtiness of
gangsta rap as a moment of embracing their difficult, millennial destiny. Chang

This content downloaded from

76.137.11.203 on Sat, 03 Dec 2022 06:09:12 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 R E vI e w: Keeping It Real: Interpreting Hip-Hop 549

often narrates a dialectical tension between moments of blissful, transcendent possi

bility and the crashing in of hard reality, as in this evocation of the early-1980s Roxy
nightclub scene in New York:

The nightclub had become a communal sacred space, a chance to escape the chafing
oppression of time, to vault the restrictions of the social order, a place to watch the
rules become liquid, and peer into possibility. (168)

Outside the floating world of the Roxy, Reagan's recession had bloated unemploy
ment levels to the highest levels since the Great Depression?30 million searching
for work. The official Black unemployment rate hit 22 percent [. . .] the Roxy night
always opened into a Reagan morning that was much more than a comedown. "The
Message," released just weeks after the Roxy opened, was a down tempo track that
perfectly captured that after-dawn crash when the buzz wore off. (177-78)

Chang uses the temporal notion of the loop to structure his narratives. Loop 1,
"Babylon is Burning: 1968-1977" traces the contexts and origins of hip-hop. Loop
2, "Planet Rock: 1975-1986" narrates the dissemination of hip-hop from the South
Bronx outward. Loop 3, "The Message: 1984?1992" considers rap as a political
force during the Reagan-Bush era. And Loop 4, "Stakes Is High: 1992-2001" con
siders the impact and significance of hip-hop's major crossover years. Chang's de
scription of DJ Kool Here's now-legendary innovation of creating music out of break
beats articulates the significance of the figure of the loop:

Here had stripped down and let go of everything, save the most powerful basic ele
ments?the rhythm, the motion, the voice, the name. In doing so, he summoned up a
spirit that had been there at Congo Square and in Harlem and on Wareika Hill. The
new culture seemed to whirl backward and forward?a loop of history, history as
loop?calling and responding, leaping, spinning, renewing. In the loop, there is the
alpha, the omega, and the turning points in between. The seam disappears, slips into
endless motion and reveals a new logic?the circumference of a worldview. (85)

This loop, developed by Kool Here, Grandmaster Flash, and other DJs, enacted an
aesthetic of rupture and new continuities. Instead of following a predetermined lin
ear path, musical temporality could be manipulated into a different flow. Hierar
chies were overturned. The rhythm break, previously considered just that, a "break"
in the song, now became the song itself. The crowds went wild. No longer were
their energies constrained by the chronological time and rhythm of the original
music producers. Here and others had created a new sense of time: one of rupture,
suspension, and new possibilities. The title of Chang's book, Can't Stop Won't Stop,
pays homage to this notion of endless flow.
Just as hip-hop created a new sense of time at the microlevel of the song, it also
signifies a new sense of time at the macrolevel of racial politics. Chang, Quinn, and
several contributors to That's the Joint! explicitly analyze hip-hop as a post-civil rights

This content downloaded from

76.137.11.203 on Sat, 03 Dec 2022 06:09:12 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
550 College English

phenomenon. A certain vision of civil rights has become commonsense, which is to

say hegemonic. In this vision, the civil rights movement embodied the pinnacle of
moral enlightenment for blacks and other Americans. Contemporary America is
understood to be living out the promises of the civil rights movement: segregation
and discrimination are considered unjust, and an equal-opportunity color-blindness
is celebrated as the ideal. In contrast to this paradigm of continuity with the civil
rights era, Chang and other critics understand hip-hop as pointing to a rupture,
marking the era of post-civil rights. Chang uses two phrases to convey the forces
that have shaped the post-civil-rights, hip-hop generation: "the politics of abandon
ment" and "the politics of containment." These phrases refer to the two major blind
spots of hegemonic equal-opportunity ideology: postindustrial economic restruc
turing, and the intensive criminalization of youth of color. Deindustrialization cre
ated dramatic declines in manufacturing and blue-collar employment in major
American cities, and erosions in tax revenue led to cuts in education and support
services for urban youth. Meanwhile, youth of color were increasingly represented
in political rhetoric and imagery as dangerous predators for easy political gain and
corporate profit, as politicians ran on "tough on crime" platforms and prison indus
tries stepped in to fill the economic voids left by the flight of manufacturing indus
tries from urban centers. Hip-hop, as a response to these economic and rhetorical
phenomena, may be thought of as a post-civil rights "racial project" in Michael Omi
and Howard Winant's sense: "[A]n interpretation, representation or explanation of racial
dynamics and an effort to reorganize and redistribute resources along particular racial lines"
(56).
Nuthin' but a "G" Thang provides an extensive analysis of gangsta rap as a project
of reorganizing and redistributing resources. The commodification and appropria
tion of hip-hop by the culture industries has been much lamented and analyzed, but
Quinn seeks to cast rappers as historical agents who themselves appropriated the
culture industries. One of the most fascinating aspects of this mutual appropriation
is the marketing of authenticity, or realness. In response to interpretations of hip
hop as simple reflections of reality, critics often position hip-hop as a self-consciously
aesthetic form. Dyson, for example, lists some rhetorical figures and tropes of hip
hop: "[H]yperbole, parody, kitsch, dramatic license, double entendres, signification
[. . .]" (Forman and Neal xii). Hip-hop is a densely metaphorical and flamboyantly
theatrical genre, whose figures of sex, violence, and addiction are often read all too
literally. Indeed, Mark Dery's foregrounding of the sonic elements of Public Enemy's
music (Forman and Neal 407-20) reminds us of the interplay between verbal mean
ing and sound.
In contrast to this critical emphasis on aesthetics is the emphatic downplaying
of artistry that Quinn notes in gangsta rap culture. Observing that Eazy-E's vocal
delivery was considered "weak," Quinn argues that "the credibility of Eazy's [. . .]

This content downloaded from

76.137.11.203 on Sat, 03 Dec 2022 06:09:12 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 Review: Keeping It Real: Interpreting Hip-Hop 551

lyrical flow seems to inhere precisely in its lack of artifice and skill, which [. . .]
announce[s] that he is only about business. His rap is simply a hustle so his gangsta
ethic is authentic" (72). Capitalism, often considered a force that corrupts authen
ticity, here becomes the very sign of authenticity. In an age of bland postmodern
artifice, the survivalist, nakedly capitalist culture of the ghetto or hood embodies the
last bastion of realness. Perry's capitalization of the "R" in her discussion of the
"Real" in hip-hop suggestively reminds us of another realm in which "Real" is capi
talized: psychoanalysis. I agree with critics such as Perry that realist interpretations
of hip-hop are limited, but I find the concept of realness powerfully suggestive and
unsettling. I propose that we think about realism and realness as roughly analogous
to the psychoanalytic distinction between reality and the real. For Lacanian critics,
reality is structured by fantasy, while the real is that which resists incorporation into
this fantasy of reality. For consumers of rap in the late 1980s, the ghetto and the
hood were the hard kernels of the real that could not be incorporated into the Reagan
era trickle-down fantasies of universal prosperity, benevolence, and optimism. In
stead, they erupted in images of capitalism as violence and survivalism, exposing the
rawness and brutalities of these new economies.
"Nigga"?as in the notorious group NWA, Niggas With Attitude?was an
other such eruption of the real into reality. How can we incorporate "niggas" into
our fantasy of color-blind equal opportunity? Quinn interprets the rhetorical strat
egy of the term "nigga" as a convergence of the impulse to represent and the im
pulse to affront. And with this term we find ourselves again in the story of hip-hop as
a post-civil rights cultural formation. For "nigga" not only affronts white America
by tossing its own ugly racism back in its face, but it also affronts respectable, middle
class black folk. Civil rights rhetoric was a rhetoric of uplift, positioning black folk as
the respectable moral conscience of America. "Nigga," like "gangsta," repudiates
this rhetoric of uplift. "Nigga" is not only a nonrespectable word, it embodies
antirespectability?and therein lies its power. Perry quotes journalist Cheo Hodari
Coker on the word's dangerous allure and seductiveness: "It's downright infectious.
Like olives, nigger leaves a sour taste in your mouth, but once you acquire a toler
ance, it has a distinctive saltiness you begin to crave" (qtd. in Perry 143).
Joan Morgan's essay in That's the Joint!, an excerpt from her astonishing book
When Chickenheads Come Home to Roost: My Life as a Hip-Hop Feminist, provides a
gendered take on the seductiveness of the antirespectable. Morgan provocatively
refuses the disciplining of the black female body by expectations of a feminism that
veers too close to the constraints of middle-class respectability.

Is it foul to say that imagining a world where you could paint your big brown lips in
the most decadent of shades, pile your phat ass into your fave micromini, slip your
freshly manicured toes into four-inch fuck-me sandals and have not one single soli

This content downloaded from

76.137.11.203 on Sat, 03 Dec 2022 06:09:12 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
552 College English

tary man objectify?I mean roam his eyes longingly over all the intended places?is,
like, a total drag for you?
Am I no longer down for the cause if I admit that while total gender equality is
an interesting intellectual concept, it doesn't do a damn thing for me erotically? That,
truth be told, men with too many "feminist" sensibilities have never made my panties
wet, at least not like that reformed thug nigga who can make even the most chauvin
istic of "wassup, baby" feel like a sweet, wet tongue darting in and out of your ear.
And how come no one ever admits that part of the reason women love hip-hop?
as sexist as it is?is 'cuz all that in-yo-face testosterone makes our nipples hard? (Forman
and Neal 280)

Morgan's questions here provide a prime example of realness, an eroticism that can
not be constrained by orthodox feminist ideologies. In a Village Voice review of Ice
Cube's album AmerikkkasMost Wanted, titled "The Nigga Ya Hate to Love," Mor
gan positions herself as a female critic who initially resists, but ultimately succumbs
to, the nigga who is all wrong for her (Quinn 128-29).
Why is hip-hop considered such a "wrong" love object for women like Mor
gan? It is commonsense to think of rap as misogynist (though it is not commonplace
for those who make this charge to be able to actually quote specific lyrics). Indeed,
Forman and Neal note that "the most ferocious attacks on hip-hop often focus on
gender issues" (7). This dynamic is partly due to a long-running fascination with
black (hetero)sexuality. The projection of sexual excess and moral lack onto black
ness inscribes black gender and family as dysfunctional, and enables a displacement
of misogyny and sexism onto blackness. (Greg Tate and others have pointed out that
in the 1980s, black men such as Clarence Thomas, Mike Tyson, and O. J. Simpson
became the most visible poster boys for the ills of patriarchy.) Quinn offers a crucial
insight into these charges of misogyny in rap. Citing folklorist John Roberts's schema
of the "motivated badman," who fights against the dominant order, and the "unmo
tivated badman," who represents a threat to the black community, Quinn notes that
corporations, under pressure from the state, succeeded in suppressing antiestablish
ment lyrics?"motivated badman" lyrics?while leaving intact "unmotivated badman"
lyrics: "Once the state stripped away half this equation, there remained only the
stories about badmen preying on women and the weak [. . .]. With the escalating
trend for violent rap lyrics, the regulation of gangsta helped steer content down a
path of lumpen black-on-black violence" (110). In other words, state repression cre
ated the conditions for ever more expressions of violence against black women. The
charge of misogyny provides an instance of the limits of realist and literal readings
of rap, which would attribute misogyny solely to wrongheaded black male speaking
subjects. What critics like Quinn offer are interpretive rubrics that enable an under
standing of how lyrical violence against black women embodies a trace of the "real"
of state suppression and violence.

This content downloaded from

76.137.11.203 on Sat, 03 Dec 2022 06:09:12 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 Review: Keeping It Real: Interpreting Hip-Hop 553

Chang argues that the development of hip-hop journalism was crucial to the
growth of a hip-hop nation. In a similar gesture, Forman and Neal refuse a separa
tion between subjects and objects of study in their assertion that "research and writ
ing, whether in journalistic or academic contexts, is absolutely part of the wider hip-hop
culture" (3). Motivating Forman and Neal's claim, I believe, is an impulse to claim
the real. Academia, like capitalism, is generally viewed as parasitical upon its cultural
objects, corrupting their authenticity. Conceiving of hip-hop scholars instead as or
ganic intellectuals, Forman and Neal posit academic discourse as another mode of
"keeping it real." Again, I would like to emphasize that scholarship as realism (cap
turing the authentic racial subject) is less productive and less interesting than schol
arship that takes some measure of realness (rupturing racial reality). Perry and various
writers in the Forman and Neal anthology eschew literal and realist interpretations
in favor of symbolic and aesthetic readings. Quinn's and Chang's volumes, however,
provide the most compelling interpretive models in their unflinching engagement
with the fractures and impenetrabilities of the hip-hop real.
I would like to close by turning to the hip-hop notion of the cipher. If the loop
symbolizes a cyclical time of rupture, the cipher signifies a circular space of height
ened consciousness. A group of MCs trading off rhymes constitutes the quintessen
tial space of the cipher. The rapidly growing field of hip-hop scholarship may be
thought of as constituting another kind of cipher, an abstract realm of finely tuned
knowledge and wisdom. The loop and the cipher are forms that introduce addi
tional dimensions to the flatness of a secular, historical time. Chang's narrative my
thologizes the early contributions of Afrika Bambaataa and his organization, the
Zulu Nation, whose cultural practices constituted acts and leaps of faith.

So there they were, Bambaataa's army?the MCs, the DJs, the graffiti writers, the b
boys and b-girls, the crews they brought and the crowds they moved. They were
elemental in their creative power?four, after all, was "the foundation number," rep
resenting air, water, earth and fire, and in another sense, the rhythm itself. What they
were doing was yet to be named. But in the cooling sunlight of a park jam or the
mercury-bursting intensity of an indoor one?from everywhere a crowd rising, the
DJ excising and extending the groove, ciphers and crews burning, distinctions and
discriminations dissolving, the lifeblood pulsing and spirit growing?Bambaataa took
Here's party and turned it into the ceremony of a new faith [...] sound and flow. (107)

Hip-hop critics show us how hip-hop, at its best?and maybe even at its worst?
takes us out of the preordained determinism of the social realm. When we return
from the bliss of transcendence or the terror of the real, perhaps we can enact new
formations of time, space, subjectivity, and sociality.

This content downloaded from

76.137.11.203 on Sat, 03 Dec 2022 06:09:12 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
554 College English

Works Cited

Hager, Steven. Hip Hop: The Illustrated History of Break Dancing, Rap Music, and Graffiti. New Y
Martin's, 1984.
Hebdige, Dick. Cut V'Mix: Culture, Identity, and Caribbean Music. London: Methuen, 1987.
-. Subculture: The Meaning of Style. London: Methuen, 1979.
Kelley, Robin D. G. Race Rebels: Culture, Politics, and the Black Working Class. New York: Free P,
Morgan, Joan. When Chickenheads Come Home to Roost: My Life as a Hip-Hop Feminist. New York
1999.
Omi, Michael, and Howard Winant. Racial Formation in the United States. New York: Routledge, 1994.
Rose, Tricia. Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America. Hanover, NH: Wesleyan
UP, 1994.
Toop, David. The Rap Attack: African Jive to New York Hip-Hop. Boston: South End, 1984.

This content downloaded from

76.137.11.203 on Sat, 03 Dec 2022 06:09:12 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms