american political poetry in the 21st century - STIBA Malang

CONTESTATORY URBAN AGENCY 175
entertains, enables collective agency, and gives its participants an
experience of the political.
“The Best Damn Rap Tour,” which stopped at Cat’s Cradle on
June 27, 2005, is the last case study discussed here. The show
included C-Rayz Walz (recently featured on an issue of MTV’s Made
as a freestyle rap coach), Vast Aire and Cannibal Ox, and J-Live. The
most striking aspect of this show was its myriad subversions of the
corporate-dominated music world. First, the show cost just $12 for
nearly four and half hours of music by three reputable artists; second,
the artists mingled with fans in the audience during the opening acts,
talking and listening; third, the artists were at the “merch” (merchandise)
table selling (and autographing) their records directly to fans.
(It is easy to notice the similarities to poetry readings, which usually
include merchandise tables for purchasing poets’ books.) This direct
relationship between performers and their audience is a much needed
intervention in the mythology, distance, and wealth of highly mediated
celebrity and corporate cultures. It moves hip-hop away from
videos and celebrities and back to its beginnings in the late 1970s and
early 1980s when it “was dependent upon face-to-face interaction and
small-scale mediation” in which the “event itself was more important
than any particular separable discourse” (Dimitriadis 184). For many
independent artists, the live show is still the cornerstone of the art,
although a skeptic could say that these artists simply do not have
access to larger commercial channels and would use them if they did.
But as C-Rayz Walz raps on his latest album, “I won’t dumb it down
to double my dollars” (“First Words Worse” Year of the Beast 2005).
This stated ethic permeates the independent hip-hop music scene, but
is difficult to parse for its truth-value.
The centrality of live hip-hop to independent artists and audiences may
partially alleviate the concerns of many critics and fans. Central to their
concerns is the prominence of costly videos and marketing at the expense
of “face-to-face community building practices” (Dimitriadis 191).
Regardless of the differences between the two, the visual is key to
both. Things were not always this way. In Elizabethan England, theatergoers
went to “hear” a play. Now, however, U.S. theatergoers,
although largely from a different socioeconomic class than most theatergoers
in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century London, go to “see”
a Broadway play. Twenty-first century audiences go to “see” a hiphop
show, whether that show is in a small club or in a large arena.
Even if the audience attends in part for the aural experience, the visual
dimension takes precedence in the way that encounters with live musical
performances are explained. This modest sociolinguistic change is