Hip-hop, the era

Writers probe whether a revolutionary art form has matured enough to remake politics and culture

June 22, 2008|Saul Austerlitz

All About the Beat: Why Hip-Hop Can't Save Black America
By John McWhorter
Gotham, 186 pp., $20

Party Crashing: How the Hip-Hop Generation Declared Political Independence
By Keli Goff
Basic Civitas, 294 pp., paperback, $16.95

The hip-hop generation: The phrase has a certain summational ring, an aura of capturing a kernel of truth about American youth in the same way that Generation X seemed to define an earlier cohort. A nation of millions, raised on Public Enemy's "Fight the Power," Jay-Z, and Kanye West, will rise to seize power from greedy capitalist fat-cats and neoconservative warmongers. Hip-hop, the revolutionary art form of the past quarter-century, will expand its reach into spheres beyond music and culture, remaking politics in its image.

Or will it? Two new books examine the promise of the hip-hop generation, wondering what - if anything - will be its political legacy. John McWhorter's "All About the Beat: Why Hip-Hop Can't Save Black America" and Keli Goff's "Party Crashing: How the Hip-Hop Generation Declared Political Independence" reach diametrically opposed conclusions about hip-hop's political impact, but share a fundamentally flawed set of assumptions that cause them to misunderstand the relationship between culture and politics.

McWhorter, noted policy wonk and author of "Losing the Race," pets hip-hop with one hand as he slaps it with the other. How can mere music - particularly music riven by such inner contradiction - be capable of true change? "Actually listen to a rap track, even by a conscious artist, and then think about the real world. How many among us really believe there is a meaningful connection between that rap and making people think in new ways - ways so new that the nation's fabric changes?" The answer is almost nobody. McWhorter assembles a paper tiger in order to repeatedly lunge at it, and then waits for our applause when he has vanquished the beast. It is not that "All About the Beat" is fundamentally mistaken; hip-hop is not a likely precursor of revolutionary change, and incremental, piecemeal efforts to improve the lives of African-Americans are often ignored in favor of pie-in-the-sky theorizing. It is just that in 2008, in the era of Soulja Boy, few would claim otherwise.