american political poetry in the 21st century - STIBA Malang

166 AMERICAN POLITICAL POETRY
Hip-hop’s contestatory urban agency is—if these songs represent
how progressive and iconic rappers poeticize agency while challenging
dominant culture’s frameworks for understanding it—complex, irreducible
to a simple formula. Its figures of voice draw from and foreground
a mutating vernacular that frames agency in hip-hop
terminology. Though unrestrained agency is a utopian dream in some
lyrics, artists often acknowledge factors that influence an actor’s
capacity for achieving her purposes. This fundamental dynamic frames
contestatory urban agency and hip-hop’s legion of protest songs. So
though there is great truth in the claim that “old white men” run hiphop,
there is also some truth—at least through rap music—that for
young urbanites “the world is what you make it,” if we consider that
rappers remake the world each time they grab a microphone. Finally, from
a lyrical standpoint, hip-hop embodies a diverse range of poetics; as such,
it is reasonable to claim that rappers activate, to some extent, variations
of experiential, authoritative, equivocal, and migratory agencies
as part of its main form—contestatory urban agency.
“Get Live Y’all”: Hip-Hop’s Contestatory
Urban Agency—Live Performance
In this section I explore the political aspects of live hip-hop at small
independent clubs. Unlike the private political exchange possible
when an individual reads a poem or listens to a song, a hip-hop show
is capable of creating a participatory political space involving upward
of 600–700 people. Live hip-hop aesthetics are the primary elements
for giving the art form and its performers more political strength than
printed poetry. They also illuminate further hip-hop’s contestatory
urban agency and how it is transformed and magnified in the spaces of
live hip-hop.
Given the increasingly oppressive influence of multinational corporations
and multimillion dollar campaigns on the American political
process, average citizens across the country are largely being precluded
from participatory politics. As Michael Parenti writes, “The
power of money works ceaselessly to reduce the influence of citizens
who have nothing to offer but their votes” (219). Further, an abiding
belief in isolated bourgeois individualism forestalls citizens from
impacting politics, where only collective, not individual action, is
capable of creating social and political change. One of the results of
these two conditions is a lack of substantive participation in the public
sphere. Richard Sennett notes that citizens’ engagements with
public life are now a “matter of formal obligation” and “resigned