american political poetry in the 21st century - STIBA Malang

172 AMERICAN POLITICAL POETRY
Five invented phrases such as “Throw your hands in the air and wave
them like you just don’t care!” (20). Call-and-response staples such as
this one help to structure live hip-hop. They provide the working
blueprint for the fashioning of collective identity and collective
agency; in each of the following case studies call-and-response anchors
performer/audience collaboration.
On February 15, 2003, when the San Francisco-based group
Living Legends performed on the “Creative Differences” tour at
Cat’s Cradle, it was just over one month away from President Bush’s
declaration of war against Iraq, during a time when it was becoming
obvious that such a course of action was imminent. Although Living
Legends, a collection of eight MCs, was primarily interested in entertaining
the audience, there was no shortage of social and political
commentary. The prominence of calls for peace and demonstrations
of peace signs in call-and-response between stage and audience, often
done in explicitly stated reference to the building war effort, was one
of the most salient features of the evening. The crowd was buoyant
and responsive, thus enabling the features Arendt claims are necessary
to constitute this public space of action—courageous individual performance,
intersubjective relations between relative strangers, “acting
in concert,” and collective identity. The participatory form of the
show created a politics of engagement between audience and performers
and within the audience that superseded the actual political
content. Each time the audience called for peace in response to Living
Legends, it was “acting in concert” and creating a collective identity.
Nearly a year earlier, on April 12, 2002, the Oakland-based rap
group The Coup, widely considered one of the most political groups
in the hip-hop community, performed at Cat’s Cradle. This show,
unlike most of Living Legends’ performance, united explicit political
content with the political form inherent in small club hip-hop shows.
On their latest album (Party Music 2001), MC Boots Riley uses
Marxist rhetoric to attack multinational corporations, the oppression
of wage laborers via exorbitant rents and unfair wages, American
imperialism, unchecked capitalism, and institutionalized religion’s
willful ignorance of socioeconomic justice issues, all the while
proclaiming pro-union, pro-Zapatista, and pro-revolution stances.
The proletarian message is best distilled in one line, rendered in
Spanish: “Pro-La Raza sayin’ ‘Fuck La Migra!’ ” (“Ride the Fence”).
This exclamation is an explicit refusal to accept the immigration
authority’s likely attempts to send Chicanos out of California from
land that was ceded from Mexico in the Treaty of Guadalupe–Hidalgo
in 1848. The result of such moves by official power structures and the