american political poetry in the 21st century - STIBA Malang

162 AMERICAN POLITICAL POETRY
is “bullshit.” Her condemnation of the hypermasculine “thug”
posture of toughness, loyalty, and pride is severe, as is her rebuke of
individual wealth. For her, “ownership” is “bullshit”; one reason the
African American community lacks “wealth” is that in economic terms
“it’s every man for himself.” Her criticism excoriates when she raps
that many—presumably rappers—would rather “be chilling with rich
white folks” as a sign of success. She laments that some would let their
“kids go hungry” before their “wardrobe is outdated.” But as
“What’s Beef?” condemns, she targets hip-hop values when she could
indict instead the dominant American culture they imitate.
Jean Grae’s harsh criticisms of hip-hop, and her solutions for them,
are admirable but idealistic. In lieu of machismo and material wealth,
she emphasizes education and travel. Everyone in the hip-hop
community, she raps, should “pick up a book,” “read a paper,” “take a
free class,” and “get out your house / get off your block / travel the
world.” These actions would create more enlightened communities,
but they hide pragmatic concerns—traveling requires leisure time and
economic resources, two privileges the poor lack. In a desire to nurture
hope and possibility for change, Grae attributes too much agency to
African American communities. As Rose warns, songs that
“overemphasize” African American agency ignore constraints that can
prevent them from achieving their goals (141–142). As such, the lines
“If the system’s corrupt, change it. / Fought for the right to vote, don’t
even use it” deny how corporate, institutional powers systematically
resist progressive change and the empowerment of urban
communities. Yet the spirit of these lines descends directly from civil
rights leaders, Freedom Marchers, the SCLC (Southern Christian
Leadership Conference), and SNCC (Student Nonviolent Coordinating
Committee), all of whom worked tirelessly for voting rights and an end to
segregation in the 1960s. Jean Grae’s song thus shows in part the
difficulty of articulating feasible, but also engaging, solutions to problems
in hip-hop culture.
Whereas J-Live, Mr. Lif, and Jean Grae are independent artists, and
Mos Def is better known as an actor, even those unfamiliar with hiphop
will recognize the name Notorious B.I.G., if only for the circumstances
of his murder and Tupac Shakur’s. The year 1994, when his
debut album was released, is widely considered one of the best in hiphop
history, due in part to the release of B.I.G.’s Ready to Die and
Nas’s Illmatic. The lyrics and sensibilities of Ready to Die illustrate
both poles that bound contestatory urban agency. They show the perplexing
binary enabled by the conditions of urban poverty: an obsession
with death apparent in the album title and a revelatory