american political poetry in the 21st century - STIBA Malang

160 AMERICAN POLITICAL POETRY
credible. 4 So, when Lif raps that “it’s easy to control the scared / so
they keep us in fear / with their favorite Middle Eastern villain named
Bin Laden,” he engages a historical voice of hip-hop distrust for supposedly
beneficial policies that are detrimental to urban African
Americans.
Like Lif’s song, Mos Def’s verse on Black Star’s “What’s Beef?”
criticizes American geopolitics and economics, but unlike Lif, Mos
Def speaks directly to the hip-hop community about its misdirected
resistance. First performed on Comedy Central’s Chappelle’s Show in
2003, its main conceit is the concept of “beef.” In hip-hop, a “beef”
is a public feud between rappers in which each stakes a claim as the
more skillful MC, often using ferocious insults. A “beef” is more than
a “battle”—the latter implies a verbal contest between MCs, whereas
the former suggests a more personal conflict. Hip-hop has had many
“beefs,” most of which have produced records rather than physical
confrontations, between Roxanne Shante and the Real Roxanne,
KRS-One and MC Shan, LL Cool J and Kool Moe Dee, Dr. Dre and
Eazy-E, and famously, between 2Pac and the Notorious B.I.G.
“What’s Beef?” is a series of terse statements that redefine “beef.”
Mos Def addresses his audience via hip-hop terminology, and he
speaks for that same audience when he addresses the larger political
context. In doing so, he utilizes rap’s “dual identity as both head and
limb, speaking both to and for its audience” (Costello and Wallace 38).
He begins by referring to the recent beef between hip-hop icons Jay-Z
and Nas. Mos Def’s redefinition of “beef” dramatically shifts contexts
away from music and into the communities in which hip-hop was
born: “Beef is not what Jay said to Nas / Beef is when the working
folks can’t find jobs / Beef is when the crack babies can’t find moms /
Because they’re in a pine box or locked behind bars.” Beef, according
to Mos Def, does not consist of what Jay-Z said to Nas, or what “Ja
said to 50” (Ja Rule and 50 Cent); instead, beef is unemployment,
crack, jail sentences in lieu of rehabilitation, and an inability to secure
home loans. Hip-hop, Mos Def suggests, loses its ethic of resistance
when it focuses on internal conflicts; he redirects “beef” in much the
same way as Public Enemy and Chuck D, who has said that hip-hop
draws power from anger, but this anger is often “directed at other
rappers.” Instead, Public Enemy directed anger at “the government
and people who were responsible for what was happening in society”
(Hillburn). Beef, according to Mos Def and Chuck D, should not be
directed internally but at the forces that oppress African Americans
and the poor, thereby preventing them from exercising agency to
improve their communities.