american political poetry in the 21st century - STIBA Malang

CONTESTATORY URBAN AGENCY 179
rhythm, melody, and bass line of the song, not its lyrical content.
The quick-witted chorus further elucidates the problem for MCs with
carefully written lyrics. It claims that people “ain’t listening / they’re
thinking about their Timberlands / they say the shit we talk
about ain’t interesting / we got a better chance of blowing up in
Switzerland.” According to the chorus, active listening has been symbolically
replaced by an icon of consumer culture (Timberland boots).
Additionally, they self-deprecatingly claim that they have a much
greater chance of becoming popular in Switzerland, where English is
not even the primary language, than in the United States. 9 The song
points to some potentially disturbing questions about the state of hiphop
(and American) culture, and it also suggests that live shows help
to eliminate what Little Brother views as a big problem in contemporary
hip-hop—disengaged, passive listening. Passive listening, even if
one cannot understand all of the lyrics, is exceedingly difficult in a
small club hip-hop show due to the emphasis given to active participation
that is always a product of paying close attention to the
performers’ engagements with the audience and responding to them
quickly and energetically.
If we consider not participating an untenable option at a small club
hip-hop show are there elements of coercion present? In other words,
do artists pressure, coerce, and force their audiences to participate as
they wish? Some basic assumptions need to be addressed to answer
this question. First, artists seemingly must speculate about their audience’s
viewpoints. Unlike records, live performances call forth immediate
feedback and judgment. As Arendt might have said, individual
performances in these public spaces require courage. Further, because
live hip-hop at small clubs is wholly dependent upon its audience’s
active participation and consent, performers must work to ensure that
their audience is engaged. However, audience members have presumably
entered the space of their own volition with relatively full knowledge
of what they must bring to the show. They are also free to leave
if they do not want to participate in the collective experience.
The most difficult aspect of the previous question concerns potential
“groupthink” problems. Slug of Atmosphere evinced a keen
understanding of this issue at the November 2003 Cat’s Cradle show.
After an interlude between songs in which his DJ played the Rage
Against the Machine lyrics “Fuck you I won’t do what you tell me,”
he sheepishly mentioned to the crowd the irony of such lyrics in light
of his calls-and-response that the audience follows without hesitation
or deviation. It seems prudent to attribute Slug’s commentary more
to egotism than to a submissive, mechanistic audience. Or, as Hansen