american political poetry in the 21st century - STIBA Malang

CONTESTATORY URBAN AGENCY 185
Summary and Conclusions:
A Global Hip-Hop Future?
Hip-hop is now an entrenched part of the dominant cultural
landscape rather than a threat to that landscape. Chuck D’s claim that
hip-hop is the Black CNN, cited in the introduction to this book, is
no longer accurate; it is currently more appropriate to see mainstream
hip-hop as an African American Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous, a
claim that MTV’s Cribs supports. Now that there are few selfconscious,
progressive political voices—perhaps with the exception of
Kanye West—alongside the merely entertaining ones on MTV and
BET, as there were in the late 1980s and early 1990s, the critical,
introspective, and innovative voices of contestatory urban agency, like
those discussed here, carry hip-hop’s torch as a force of resistance to
social injustice.
To watch videos on MTV and BET for an afternoon is to see hiphop
as a shallow, image-driven culture of exaggerated masculinity,
misogyny, gratuitous sex, audacious wealth, and unabashed consumerism.
In this visible segment of hip-hop, individual consumption
and wealth are primary values and means to social advancement. Much
of commercial hip-hop’s ethos of hyperconsumerism, which includes
the ostentatious flaunting of luxury items such as jewelry and cars,
serves in part to encourage listeners and viewers to “ ‘buy in’ to the
emerging paradigm of accessible luxury” (Smith 71)—an American
Dream in which anyone can have a mansion. In this way, hip-hop
becomes a symbol of upward mobility via material gain that drives an
economy based on consumption. Christopher Holmes Smith suggests
that this paradigm departs from civil rights “communal development
blueprints” (71). Mainstream hip-hop thus arguably reinforces some
negative values that the civil rights movement fought.
Yet what is most interesting about this mainstream dynamic is initially
suggested by Patrick Neate. He claims, “It is white, corporate
America that bestrides the globe economically,” but “it is black
America in general and hip-hop in particular that bestrides the world’s
popular culture” (13–14). If this is true, and I believe it is, then these
two previously disparate forces have joined together in a strange partnership
in the ultimate service of wealth creation. Given hip-hop’s
changing roles in U.S. culture, Rose’s claims about rap’s marginality
in 1994 now seem tenuous. She wrote then that hip-hop was “part of
the dominant text, and yet always on the margins of this text; relying
on and commenting on the text’s center and always aware of its proximity
to the border” (19). Now, though, rap is so imbricated in the