american political poetry in the 21st century - STIBA Malang

168 AMERICAN POLITICAL POETRY
from the campus of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
As such, these examples should be considered local, specific ones, but
also ones that provide evidence for the dynamics of live shows at small
clubs throughout the United States. The demographics of Cat’s
Cradle, moreover, bring up some difficult but illuminating questions
about the state of hip-hop, which I discuss later in this chapter. 7
The otherwise lost experience of the political—citizens acting
together in a public space with coordinated effort—is a distinctive
characteristic of the hip-hop show that points to the inroads many
hip-hop artists make against a politically disinterested individualism
that encourages us “to get what we can for ourselves and not be too
troubled by the problems faced by others” (Sennett 31). The hip-hop
artists I discuss here often challenge this brand of individualism; as
such, their shows have different social and political value as well as a
different niche in the consumer market than contemporary multiplatinum,
mainstream hip-hop. Their live shows balance the way that
much mainstream hip-hop styles “socially competitive consumption as
a viable mode of civic participation and personal fulfillment”
(Smith 71). In his article on social mobility and the “hip-hop mogul,”
Christopher Holmes Smith suggests that for wealthy hip-hop
luminaries such as Combs and Master P and the artists who emulate
them, a successful rapper’s “upwardly mobile ascent is not tethered to
a sense of either individual propriety or communal accountability” (80).
Under these prevailing mainstream conditions in which individual
wealth and a “consumptive ethos” (71) are paramount, the live hiphop
show at a small club is a sorely needed corrective. These shows
unveil an aspect of hip-hop culture that is concerned both with
collective experience and with collective—rather than individual—
identity. As Patrick Neate writes, hip-hop must maintain some independence
from the “corporate giants that do neither the form nor its
worldwide consumers any favors” (257–258). Live shows at small
clubs work to counter unchecked individualism, passive consumerism,
and big business.
During these live shows artists and audience create a communitybased
space. Hannah Arendt’s work on the necessity of well-defined
public spaces for participatory politics illuminates the hip-hop show as
a space that enacts collective agency and identity while giving citizens
an experience of a practice that is fundamentally political. Arendt’s critique
of Western representative democracies focuses on the ways that
they exclude citizens from “participating, and having a share in public
power” (On Revolution 255). She contends that the primary understanding
of citizenship in contemporary Western cultures centers on