The less said the better, no? Especially since my label-mate Adam Mansbach said quite a bit:
Simultaneously smug and beleaguered, "All About the Beat: Why Hip-Hop Can't Save Black America" raises the question: Who, exactly, is claiming it can? No one -- academic, artist or critic -- has made any such argument since roughly 1988. This puts Manhattan Institute senior fellow John McWhorter in the awkward position of playing provocateur to an empty house, and gives his prose the tone of a petulant undergrad being shouted down in a dorm lounge. It also raises serious doubts about his engagement with either hip-hop or the large body of scholarship about it.
OK, so I'll violate and say a few words. Megan has this whole thing about being polite to people you disagree with. I think it's--generally--a good principle. I disagree with McWhorter quite a bit, but that isn't my beef. I think his book (which I recently received in the mail) is deeply dishonest. As Adam points out, it's the strawmanship that leaves me so cold--I just haven't heard anyone make a claim like that recently. If anything the kids, and the rest of us, have been doing the opposite. McWhorter is allowed to be dishonest because, in his circles, he really doesn't have to worry about people calling him out. This is basically the same scam that box-minded reporters have been pulling while purporting to cover "Obama and race." First you flatten your subject until he resembles a cartoon, and then you "argue" against the cartoon.
It's like watching a fighter who shrinks away from his most formidable opponents and builds his rep whipping up on jobbers and journeymen. It's also a sort of bullying, because you never have to deal with the most potent arguments of your potent critics. I have never known how to be polite with bullies. So I'll simply say this: For a young black boy coming up in these times, I would play Illmatic, De La Soul Is Dead, The Infamous, Word...Life five hundred times over before I would offer him a single word written by John McWhorter.
The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood 
Ta-Nehisi, All I had to read was the title of your post, "McWhorter's New Book On Hip-Hop" and I laughed.
For a young black boy coming up in these times, I would play Illmatic, De La Soul Is Dead, The Infamous, Word...Life five hundred times over before I would offer him a single word written by John McWhorter.
Amen. It's really amazing how intellectually lazy and dishonest these black conservatives are. Are there any worth paying attention to? Glenn Loury maybe?
Hip-Hop Save Black America? Break Dancing maybe, but definitely not Hip-Hop.
I read the Chapter 1 excerpt in Slate a while back and was mystified as to who he was arguing with. But check out how quickly the thread is picked up in the MSM. Here's the Lexington columnist in The Economist, dissecting the policy prescriptions of Tha Carter III:
http://www.economist.com/world/na/displaystory.cfm?story_id=11622433
What strange alternate universe did I wake up in?
this is what the kids call 'going in'.
but seriously...a few weeks back wrote a piece for The Root on...The Roots, arguing against the validity of their supposed political leanings as 'conscious rappers.' In the process he misquoted their lyrics and basically ignored the fact that The Roots have run from that characterization.
Yeah. I'm not a fan.
Dude is a clown but hey, I can't knock his hustle. He is making money/career from being a professional contrarian on matters Hip Hop. Dude probably doesnt even believe teh bs he says/writes. just like Joe Queenan. Grumpy cats just on a hater tour. Anytime you read the dude just listen to Maino-Hi Hater at the same time man.
Dunno. Even so called conscious rappers spout a whole lot of BS. They make themselves easy targets. Excerpted fro a McWhorter article:
Every year, two thirds of new AIDS cases are black women. Kanye West, in the opening to “Late Registration:” “And I know the government administered AIDS.” This nonsense, a point often made by rappers, is all the sadder to hear given how perfect the album is as music. AIDS started with a monkey bite. Pretending to think that snickering white scientists spread it to blacks helps not a bit women living with nausea, diarrhea, and exhaustion. It serves only to allow someone to savor sticking up that middle finger. “Consciously” — but still.
Six weeks ago, 36 people were shot over a weekend in Chicago. In Harlem, seven were shot over Memorial Day weekend, and the weekend after that, 14 in Washington, DC. For every high-profile case of a black man shot by white police, there are countless others of black men killed by other black men, making the back pages of the paper. Black people usually are killed by other black people.
Conscious rappers touch on this now and then, but are much more interested in telling us that black criminals are victims of the system. A recent example: “Black Thought” on The Roots’ new album tells us, “It is what it is, because of what it was, I did what I did, ’cause it does what it does.”
Passivity as politics? Again, this only makes sense as professional indignation. Anger cast in rhyme and set to a beat is not a useful spark for the kind of activism that improves lives in 2008.
So: indeed, it’s “not all like that.” But if the folks known as the hiphop generation are learning their politics from “conscious” rap, there is little hope for our future.
http://tinyurl.com/5ktcyp
Even you agree that McWhorter is beating a straw man, Its always a good idea to call out such BS as the "Government created the AIDS virus" , etc.
Stonetools,
There's nothing more irritating than McWhorter's approach of quoting one line out of a song and then purporting to explain it's politics for people who can't be bothered to listen to the music.
If you read mansbach's review, you'll see how this comes back to bite McWhorter in the ass. Kanye's idiocy aside, he's quoting black thought entirely out of context:
Look, it is what it is
Because of what it was
I did what I did
Cause it does what it does
I don't put nothin' above
What I am, what I love
My family, my blood
My city and my hood
Hater for the greater good
I'm back from Hollywood
And I ain't changed a lick
Though, I know I probably should
But, what I'm doin' is not a good look
I never did it by the good
book, as a lifetime crook
All the petty crime took a toll on me
I look around at my homies
that's gettin' old on me
But still somethin' gotta hold on me
Maybe it's faith
If it's comin', yo I'm willing to wait
I'm not runnin', I done ran through the mud
I done scrambled and such
I done robbed an odd job and gambled enough
Till I'm put up in handcuffs
And pissin' in a cup
If there's a God
I don't know if he listenin' or what
Music isn't a party platform. It's not supposed to be politically correct. It's not supposed to be reported by wolf blitzer, parsed by john king, and spun by fox news. It's supposed to make life a little easier by making you dance, making you smile, or if you're lucky, telling you something about life you don't already know, or didn't know you knew.
If all McWhorter hears from that is someone "blaming the system" (surprised he didn't say "whitey") then he doesn't know how to listen to music.
Speaking of Megan, she should follow her own advice.
"The need to shore up group solidarity by labelling someone as the enemy is probably the least attractive feature of feminine life in America, and it's pretty disappointing to see it so widely reproduced in a movement that's supposed to be liberating us from tired gender roles."
Okay, so aside from playing both herself and her critics by labeling women everywhere catty bitches, what part of that description is limited to "feminine life?"
Not to blow up this board, but oh LAWD do the straw man cometh in that Economist article. I'm assuming they're picking from McWhorter's selections, but this is fucking hilarious:
"Conscious rappers are often well-meaning. Dead Prez, a duo from Florida, sometimes toss apples into the audience to encourage healthy eating. But when it comes to more contentious political issues, hip-hop offers no plausible solutions; only impotent and sometimes self-destructive rage. In “Lost in tha System” by Da Lench Mob, for example, the vocalist says, of a judge: “He added on another year cos I dissed him. Now here I go gettin’ lost in the system.” The disrespect in question was a suggestion that the judge perform fellatio on him."
First of all, Dead Prez are socialists, and if the writers at the economist actually listened to the fucking music before they wrote this column their overbites would be chewing on their stiff upper lips in horror.
Second, that lench mob album predates the Clinton administration, and the song is a fucking cautionary tale! I own the album but even from the exerpt intent should be obvious What planet are these people on? Would they engage any other art form with such profound, swaggering ignorance?
The rest of the article isn't any better. But McWhorter did what he wanted to do. He became the voice of Hip-hop to an disinterested audience with no cultural literacy and a complete unwillingness to engage the subject with any seriousness.
I'm not a huge hip-hop fan. I like it okay, but I tend to listen more to old-school R&B and classic rock/pop.
As for McWhorter, I've never read much of his political commentary, other than a few articles on Slate. The stuff I've seen has usually been moderately conservative, not lunatic right-wing fringe of the Clarencce Thomas variety.
I suspect that McWhorter, if he had it to do over again, would have re-titled his piece "Why Hip Hop Can't SPEAK for Black America." That would at least be an issue that's more open to dispute.
As a Bronx native in his mid-30s, people often assume hip hop is a cultural touchstone for me, which it isn't. (Again, I'm more of a Chaka Khan and Marvin Gaye guy.) So I find the passion aroused in hip hop's defenders interesting whenever it's criticized. People don't seem to get this worked up when crtitics say jazz is boring or obsolete. But hip hop gets all this indignation. "That McWhorter! How dare he!"
Again, I don't have a dog in this fight either way. But as someone standing on the sidelines, I'd be more persuaded if the defenders could point out exactly WHY McWhorter is wrong. Other than "McWhorther is dumb."
JP, the article just linked has some good points. It's always hard for me to take someone seriously when they don't do their homework, and apparently McWhorter didn't-- the stuff on KRS-One is laughably inaccurate. (To be fair, I probably know more about Stop the Violence than the average white girl, thanks to sharing an alma mater with groundbreaking DJ Scott La Rock, but I'm also not writing a book about it.)
JP, you should re-read the original post, and the review linked therein, where Ta-Nehisi does an excellent job explaining why McWhorter is wrong. He's wrong because he's making a dishonest argument, against strawmen, he cherry-picks lines out of context, and he's factually inaccurate many times.
Wouldn't McWhorter actually be a rather nice complement to Illmatic in the dialectical education of a young black boy.
Among other things, I seem to remember a really good essay on Tupac that he wrote for The New Republic a few years ago, and something on Maya Angelou that was nice, and his video conversations with Glenn Loury over at bloggingheads.tv are fascinating.
And while I do think that he spends too much of his time putting down black culture in venues that cater to white people who want excuses not to care about black people (and this book sounds like it's in this vein), I also think that in general he's struggling to live the life of an intellectual in an authentic way.
Maybe you should challenge him to a hip-hop-off over at bloggingheads.