american political poetry in the 21st century - STIBA Malang

184 AMERICAN POLITICAL POETRY
appeal to listeners who believe in social mobility via striving for
individual wealth. Or more simply, some fans now want no more than
to be entertained by easily accessible music.
Shows at small clubs such as Cat’s Cradle do not attract multimillion
selling stars, but artists such as The Coup whose record sales may
range from several thousand to hundreds of thousands of records. So,
though many of these artists will not sell millions of albums, their
shows will continue to create interactive political spaces that enact
collective agency and identity. Their shows will give 25–700 young
people at a time what has largely become a lost participatory experience
in America—“acting in concert” as a coordinated political
practice. In part because audiences may include many white people,
shows will also continue to “invite identification across forbidden
lines” (Potter 10) of race and socioeconomics even if that message is
not reaching much of its intended audience. Without live shows, hiphop’s
political potency would be palpable, but live shows are fundamental
to its status as an evolving cultural practice that challenges
various power structures and the meanings of participatory democracy
and American individualism.
To sum up, then, the small club hip-hop show is just one “snapshot
of a movement” (Potter 148). This segment of hip-hop culture is a
necessary corrective to a largely insipid, corporate-controlled mainstream
hip-hop obsessed with wealth and individualism. It is also a
return to principles that nurtured the culture in its early years—
community-building, direct participation, and live performance.
When we understand the live hip-hop show as Arendtian “acting in
concert” in order to build collective agency and vibrant public spaces
and to organize experience from “below,” it transforms hip-hop from
primarily entertainment to powerful political practice. For these very
reasons, a small club hip-hop show—assuming the audience is sufficiently
energized by the artists and vice versa—does not need explicit
political content in order to be a functioning political space. In
the final analysis, independent hip-hop acts need live shows to disseminate
their music and messages (and to make a living), whereas
independent-minded hip-hop fans seem to crave the energy, creativity,
participation, and community that is not possible through mainstream
channels. Thus, despite significant problems with live shows at small
clubs, not the least of which are audience demographics and occasional
less-than-capacity crowds, these spaces actively create a motivated
hip-hop community. If these shows were able to reach more African
Americans, the small club live hip-hop show would be without peer in
the intersection of politics and literature.