Popular culture

Course will focus on the production of popular or ‘pop’ culture in the United States with special emphasis on linkages between ‘mainstream’ pop culture and pop culture originating in the African American experience. The course will provide a sociological perspective for understanding and examining topics related to popular culture including Black film, R&B, literature, Disco, art, Rap, and Hip Hop and their correlates to topics such as the African oral tradition, folklore, and minstrelsy. Through the use of music, film, dance, literary and visual arts, and poetry, students will gain insight into ways that shared meanings and ways of life have emerged via U.S. traditions, in general, and the African American experience, in particular.

Black popular culture is an arena of daily life in any culture that actualizes, engenders, operationalizes, or signifies pleasure, enjoyment, and amusement according to the beliefs, values, experiences, and social institutions of people of African descent in particular but also other racial groups in general. To British cultural studies pioneer Stuart Hall in “What is This ‘Black’ in Black Popular Culture?”, “black” signifies the black community (the site or location of the experiences, pleasures, memories, and everyday practices of black people), the "persistence of the black experience (the historical experience of black people in the diaspora), of the black aesthetic (the distinctive cultural repertoires out of which popular representations were made), and of the black counternarratives we have struggled to voice".

Hall further declares that “good” black popular culture can pass the test of authenticity when the form or product refers to the black experience (history) and black expressivity (aesthetic and counternarratives).

In this same writing, Hall described three “black repertoires” from which black popular culture draws: style, music, and the use of the body as a canvas of representation.

Together these repertoires form a “black aesthetic” which Hall defines as the “distinctive cultural repertoires out of which popular representations” of diasporan blacks are made.

Define “black cultural repertoire” as the specific devices, techniques, figures, black objects, expressive art forms, or products of people of Africana descent that form part of their culture (whether as context, texture, or text), that are often derived from the folk tradition , that form a foundation of a black aesthetic, and that are used to create black popular cultural products. In this paper, I propose seven key components of the black repertoire: the city [or space and place], food/cuisine, rhythm, percussiveness, call-response, worship service and party, and middle-class ideology. I will elaborate on this seven-part repertoire by defining each component and briefly highlighting their occurrence in such black popular cultural productions as music, orature, literature, and film.

Idea of the hip city is found in Chester Himes’s Harlem domestic series of hard-boiled detective novels (Jeffries 159; Soitos 125-78) which included For the Love of Imabelle (1957); The Real Cook Killers (1959), The Crazy Kill (1959), The Big Gold Dream (1960); All Shot Up (1960); Cotton Comes to Harlem (1965); Run, Man Run (1966); The Heat’s On (1966); Blind Man with a Pistol (1969); and the posthumously published Plan B (1993). Following the work of detectives Coffin Eddie and Gravedigger Jones in the Harlem series of novels, Himes created a mythical cityscape of Harlem as a “city within a city” and made Harlem a microcosmic testing ground for his portrayal of African-American existence surrounded by racism, social injustice, and poverty. Himes also creatively used signifyin(g), an “African American language act whose characteristics include irony, indirection, humor and circumlocution” (Soitos 159), as executed by the detectives, and often referred to African-American food, black language, blues, and jazz.

Rhythm in rap is especially important because it gives rap its movement, momentum, and a significant portion of its meaning. Rhythm is rap’s most powerful effect (Rose 64). Tricia Rose argues:

Rap’s primary force is sonic, and the distinctive, systematic use of rhythm and sound, especially the use of repetition and musical breaks, are part of a rich history of New World black traditions and practices. Rap music centers on the quality and nature of rhythm and sound, the lowest, “fattest beats” being the most significant and emotionally charged… Unlike the complexity of Western classical music, which is primarily represented in its melodic and harmonic structures, the complexity of rap music, like many Afrodiasporic musics, is in the rhythmic and percussive density and organization. (64-5)

Since the art of rapping is based on a precise knowledge, skill, and ability to use complex rhythms, rappers themselves boast of their skill in being able to control it. For example, Public Enemy boasts in their rap titled “Reggie Jax” that "homeboys and girls" will "testify" that "p-e-f-u-n and the K [Public Enemy funk or music] will stay" and make their "body sway" because they have the "funky beat [rhythm] on the street" that compells their audience to dance. The Jungle Brothers, hinting toward the religiosity of rhythm, say, “praise the rhythms”; while A Tribe Called Quest recognizes the high importance of rhythm by simply titling one of their raps “Rhythm.” Female rapper MC Lyte wonders, "why is it that your watch stops ticking but you keep clockin'?" and that "no matter how hard you [try], you keep rockin'?" She replies: Because I'm a “slave to the rhythm.” MC Lyte’s experience suggests that rhythm is an “intoxicating” musical element, over which in ritual (to use an appropriate term) she has no control.

Black religious services, worshipers engage in more than simply acknowledging the sermon with an “amen” or like responses, they actually preach back (Spencer, Sacred Symphony 6). Also, the preacher makes statements that are frequently responded to before he completes his statement or thought. In this situation, as in other black speech or music events, the speaker may not have an opportunity to "call" an entire phrase or verse before a response is made. This “overlapping” in black speech or music events is related to African scholar John Miller Chernoff’s description of the African “conversational mode” in music performance (56). Adding to this theory, Molefi Asante says speaker and audience roles often shift with the audience doing most of the calling and the speaker doing most of the responding (193). In African music, as in African-American music says Chernoff, all of the musicians are playing "forward toward the beat" and "pushing the beat" to make it more dynamic (56). This is what occurs in African-American religious services when the preacher adapts and employs every verbal response from the audience in a direct search for spiritual harmony. The vitality and rhythm of life is in the unified and collective response of the audience to the speaker or rapper.

Works

Asante, Molefi. The Afrocentric Idea. Philadelphia: Temple UP, 1987.

Burrows, David. Sound, Speech, and Music. Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 1990.

Chernoff, John Miller. African Rhythm and African Sensibility: Aesthetics and Social Action in African Musical Idioms. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1979.

Gaston, E. Thayer, ed. Music in Therapy. New York: MacMillan, 1968.

Greeley, Andrew. God in Popular Culture. Chicago: Thomas More, 1988.

Hall, Stuart. “What is This ‘Black’ in Black Popular Culture?” Black Popular Culture: A Project by Michele Wallace. Ed. Gina Dent. Seattle: Bay P, 1992. 21-33.

Hazzard-Gordon, Katrina. “Dancing to Rebalance the Universe: African American Secular Dance and Spirituality.” Black Sacred Music: A Journal of Theomusicology 7.1 (1993): 17-28.

Hurston, Zora Neale. “Characteristics of Negro Expression.” Signifyin(g), Sanctifyin’, and Slam Dunking: A Reader in African American Expressive Culture. Gena Caponi. Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 1999. 293-308.

Jeffries, John. “Toward a Redefinition of the Urban: The Collison of Culture.” Black Popular Culture: A Project by Michele Wallace. Ed. Gina Dent. Seattle: Bay P, 1992. 153-63.

Jungle Brothers. Done by the Forces of Nature. Warner, 9-26072-4, 1989.

MC Lyte. Eyes on This. First Priority, A4-91304, 1989.

Naughty by Nature. Naughty by Nature. Tommy Boy Music, TBCD 1044, 1991.

Public Enemy. Fear of a Black Planet. Def Jam, CT-45413, 1990.

Rose, Tricia. Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in America. Hanover: Wesleyan UP, 1994.

Salt ‘n’ Pepa. Colors. Warner, 9 25713-1, 1988.

Sidran, Ben. Black Talk. New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1971.

Slovenz, Madeline. “’Rock the House’: The Aesthetic Dimensions of Rap Music in New York City." New York Folklore 14.3-4 (1988): 151-163.

Smitherman, Geneva. Talkin’ and Testifyin’: The Language of Black America. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1977.

Soitos, Stephen F. The Blues Detective: A Study of African American Detective Fiction. Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 1996.

Southern, Eileen. The Music of Black Americans. New York: Norton, 1983.

Spencer, Jon Michael. Sacred Symphony: The Chanted Sermon of the Black Preacher. New York: Greenwood, 1987.

Tillich, Paul. Theology of Culture. Ed. Robert C. Kimball. New York: Oxford UP, 1959.

A Tribe Called Quest. People’s Instinctive Travels and The Paths of Rhythm. Jive, 1331-4-J, 1990.

West, Cornel. “On Afro-American Popular Music: From Bebop to Rap.” Prophetic Fragments. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1988.

Witt, Doris. Black Hunger: Food and the Politics of U.S. Identity. New York: Oxford UP, 1999.