american political poetry in the 21st century - STIBA Malang

CONTESTATORY URBAN AGENCY 171
can abstain from making any definitive political comment during a
show and still work to enact in the audience a sense of collective
agency. Therefore, a primary difference between the political work of
printed poetry and hip-hop is the striking form/content distinction in
hip-hop performance. Whereas it would be exceedingly difficult for
poets such as Mark Strand, Sharon Olds, Louise Glück, or Dave Smith
to politicize a reading of their poetry due to its generally politically
disinterested content, hip-hop artists have figured out how to make
the form of their shows political. Even if the overt content of an
artist’s lyrics is not political, their show can be political due to the ways
that shows build collective agency and identity. The functional and
intimate interaction between performers and audience foregrounds
the form of the show, even if its content is not candidly political. In
contrast, poetry readings are often dour affairs with polite applause;
even in poetry slams there is often little interaction other than in
voting or in encouraging.
The primary methods of interaction in hip-hop shows are longstanding
traditions in African American culture. Many of hip-hop’s
most astute critics have alluded to these techniques, but none have
given extended treatment to live hip-hop performance, with the
exception of Greg Dimitriadis and Tricia Rose, who ably tackles the
“context for its public reception,” primarily focusing on large arena
shows during the early 1990s. She also alludes to the form/content
distinction when she warns against the pitfalls of saying hip-hop artists
who do not have explicit political subjects do no political work (124).
William Eric Perkins rightly points out the influence of call-andresponse
on live hip-hop techniques, in lines of descent from western
Africa to African American gospel performances to the present. He
draws a connection between jazz band leaders and hip-hop’s MCs in
his discussion of the “reciprocity between the band and the
audience,” where the performer “shapes the audience’s participation,
which then spurs the band leader to further improvisation” (2–3).
This reciprocity is the crucial interchange that functionally enables the
quasi-public space in which agency is created. Annette J. Saddik, in an
essay on the performance of black male identity and hip-hop, asserts
that hip-hop is a “postmodern form of drama that draws on a long tradition
of African-American performance—incorporating, revising,
and re-creating as it sees fit to serve more current social needs” (112).
Cheryl L. Keyes also briefly discusses the “verbal and physical interplay”
between artist and audience (151), and Nelson George points
out some essentials of hip-hop performance when he writes that
Cowboy of early hip-hop group Grandmaster Flash and the Furious