american political poetry in the 21st century - STIBA Malang

CONTESTATORY URBAN AGENCY 167
acquiescence,” which leads to a fundamental suspicion of strangers
and “the bond of a crowd” as opposed to the bonds of intimates (3). Live
hip-hop shows, however, are existing sites where rank and file citizens
can participate in a coordinated political practice that generates
collective agency. Live shows that take place in small, independent
clubs are powerful instances of both community outreach and
community-building. In these shows, hip-hop artists, in conjunction
with a responsive audience, create a collective agency, wherein the
audience members are at least momentarily empowered to enact
change, to practice subversive action, and to speak out about injustice
and current political issues. Michael Eric Dyson has suggested that the
rap concert “creates space for cultural resistance and personal agency”
(5–6), but the primary focus should not be on individual agency
because it is problematic in the political realm. Instead, these shows
ultimately create space for collective agency and identity, and audience
members partly forgo their personal agency for a willingness to
“act in concert.”
In this section I draw upon Hannah Arendt’s notion of “acting in
concert” in order to illustrate the ways that the live hip-hop show can
be an interactive space of collective agency and coordinated political
practice. In live shows, performers and audience jointly produce a
space of interactive engagement in which they can contest dominant
cultural values. In the following pages I outline the dynamics of live
shows at small clubs, briefly discuss five shows as case studies, and consider
some significant problems with audiences at live shows, including
the difficulties of translating political action from the clubs into larger
public spaces. My face-to-face experience with the live performances of
the following artists contributes to my conclusions: Rob Base and DJ
E-Z Rock, De La Soul, A Tribe Called Quest, Biz Markie, The Roots,
The Coup, Talib Kweli, Eyedea & Abilities, Living Legends, Murs,
Little Brother, Dilated Peoples, Prince Paul, Aceyalone, Mr. Lif, Aesop
Rock, Brother Ali, Micranots, Atmosphere, Cunninlynguists, Brand
Nubian, C-Rayz Walz, Cannibal Ox, J-Live, Sadat X, and Zion I.
These shows, and others like them at small, independent clubs across
the country, help illuminate the ways that hip-hop artists utilize alternative
channels for community-building and participatory political
engagement. These shows all took place in small clubs or on college
campuses; such venues are crucial to my interpretation of hip-hop
shows as examples of Arendtian public spaces and should be differentiated
from large arena shows. I return to the problematics of large arena
shows later in this section. Finally, all of the shows I discuss as case
studies took place at Cat’s Cradle (capacity 600–700), located a mile