REVIEW: Kelly Baker, Book Review Editor

H-NET BOOK REVIEW
Published by H-Amstdy@h-net.msu.edu (July 2008)

Jeffrey Ogbonna Green Ogbar. _Hip-Hop Revolution: The Culture and Politics
of Rap_. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2007. 236 pp. Notes,
bibliography, index. $29.95 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-7006-1547-6.

Reviewed for H-Amstdy by Imani Kai Johnson, Department of American Studies
and Ethnicity, University of Southern California

The Really Real: Terms of Authenticity in Rap Music

In _Hip-Hop Revolution: The Culture and Politics of Rap_, Jeffrey O. G.
Ogbar writes as one who struggles to love hip-hop while moving it forward
through critique.  The chapters are thematically organized by prominent
debates surrounding rap music, which he uses to unpack the discourse of
race, to a lesser extent gender, notions of "realness," and the terms of
authenticity.  His work focuses on the expanse of these debates rather than
their depth, leaving several critical holes but aptly illustrating the
constricted nature of blackness in the play of authenticity.

Ogbar begins his work by aligning hip-hop with other forms of racialized
cultural production in the United States, demonstrating their inextricable
link to earlier representations of black pathology.  Chapter 1 opens with a
look at popular representations of minstrelsy in the late nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries and the black anti-hero in 1970s black
exploitation cinema.  These twinned figures fundamentally shape hip-hop,
combining to become "the real nigga"--the most commercially and financially
viable rap figure for white and non-white audiences alike.  Ogbar makes the
connection to commercialization, but goes no further than to say, "The
causeof this historical myopia stems chiefly from the marketing of
hip-hop" (p.41).

The next two chapters are about race and gender respectively.  Ogbar argues
that the public use (or absence) of "nigga" by non-black MCs in their
rhymes is for the first time chiefly on black people's terms, even without
their unwavering consensus.  This use marks the confluence of black agency
and the commercialization of black pathology in performances of rebel
authenticity in hip-hop.  Ogbar discusses Latino, Asian American, and
white MCs but misses multiple opportunities to flesh out the first two in
what reads like a rush to whiteness.  For example, he hastily concludes
that blacks and Latinos share an essential comraderie made evident by
black audience's acceptance of Latino male MCs' ubiquitous use of "nigga."
 This argument illustrates the glaring absence of Raquel Rivera's _New
York Ricans in the Hip Hop Zone_ (2003), a work that delves into the often
strained relationship between African Americans and Puerto Ricans.  And
while few works on rap acknowledge Asian American MCs, Ogbar again
abbreviates the analysis, leaving me to wonder how Asian artists represent
themselves within the confines of narrow configurations of hip-hop
authenticity despite their lack of mainstream popularity.  Thus the bulk
of the chapter is dedicated to white MCs' negotiations of black
stereotypes.  He argues that they traverse a terrain circumscribed by
narrow ideas of blackness to which their access is always limited,
probationary, and undergirded by hostile responses for "intolerable
infractions," such as in Eminem's reference to blacks as "niggas" in his
early "lost tapes" (p. 66).

Ogbar successfully expands the discourse of good and bad images of women in
hip-hop by focusing on female MCs whose public personas and rhymes tout
neither extreme of "soft femininity or being one-of-the-boys" (p. 103).  He
concludes that there is a diverse community of women performers and more
spaces for work as actors and models as a result (p. 98).  But when coupled
with the reality of video models who are in the forefront of rap's
marketability, women rappers have a force stronger than their collectivity
to contend with.  His troubling over-simplification fails to acknowledge
the precariousness of video modeling and the unlikelihood of it leading to
bigger and better things for more than a lucky few.

Chapter 4, "Rebels with a Cause: Gangstas, Militants, Media, and the
Contest for Hip-Hop," is about the moral panic over rap music, what he
calls the culture wars, and the hypocrisies they highlight.  Particular
attention is given to accusations of rap's indecency and its correlation
to the downfall of today's youth.  Ogbar uses statistics on the rising
rate of graduate degrees, the drop in teen pregnancies over the last
twenty years, and increased political awareness of youth to challenge
characterizations of young blacks as passive, uncritical listeners.  These
characterizations become ridiculous in the absence of any clear
relationship between such statistics and rap on either side of the debate.
 Simply put, while no one would credit rap for the reported successes,
somehow critics can blame rap for large-scale social problems.

Ogbar ends the work with a chapter on changing lyrical trends.  The thrust
of "Locked Up: Police, the Prison Industrial Complex, Black Youth, and
Social Control" challenges criticisms of cop-killer storylines versus the
utter silence about those on black-on-black violence.  "Following
nationally coordinated protests to court cases and pressure from music
label, the violent thrust of hardcore rappers shifted focus from killing
the police to killing other black people….  Moreover, as violent
narratives about killing black people … expanded, rap songs explored the
prison complex, but largely as a code of honor or a thug rite of passage"
(p. 156).  The shift in lyrical content both comes out of sociopolitical
forces and begins to breed new debates, all within the confines of
realness.  The importance of _Hip-Hop Revolution_ is exemplified in this
chapter as he demonstrates how authenticity shifts within both the scope
of these larger debates and the limitation of black stereotypes.

At the same time, the work falls short at the convergence of experience and
representation.  Ogbar walks a thin line between lyrics as truth and as
artistic play.  So much weight is put on what rappers say that little
analysis is directed toward the music's production in its totality.  While
hip-hop plays in the realm of verisimilitude in public performances,
gangster rappers more than most artists are forced to _be_ their work.  But
knowing that these demands come from the market _and from within_ hip-hop
should complicate his analysis and challenge the status quo because such
lyrics indicate a great deal of room for play.  For example, Ogbar
highlights what he sees as the ironic contradiction of college-educated MCs
who grew up middle class and now live fairly stable home lives with wives
and children of their own despite self-representations as the most
dangerous thugs.  But it is only ironic and contradictory if we give
credence to the demand that they cannot be that and gangsta rappers too in
the first place. These are the limits of lyrical analysis.

There is a growing body of hip-hop scholarship that purposefully moves away
from lyrical analysis, focusing methodologically on field work, archival
research, and critical cultural analyses, including Joe Schloss' _Making
Beats_ (2004), Jeff Chang's _Can't Stop, Won't Stop_ (2005), James Spady's
_The Global Cipha_ (2006), and Halifu Osumare's _The Africanist Aesthetic
in Global Hip-Hop_ (2008).  Ogbar dabbles in but does not fully execute
any of these methods.  While not always adding something new Ogbar manages
to simplify (sometimes overly so) hip-hop's most salient debates and
locates how authenticity and realness become determining forces.  Although
several points demand much greater attention, this book is a primer for
those wanting to delineate these themes, making it a solid resource for
undergraduate classes.



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--
Kelly J. Baker
Doctoral Candidate, Department of Religion, Florida State University
Instructor, University of New Mexico and Central New Mexico
http://kellyjbaker.googlepages.com
http://usreligion.blogspot.com/

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