Signifying Rappers by David Foster Wallace & Mark Costello

Author:David Foster Wallace & Mark Costello
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Music / Genres & Styles - Rap & Hip Hop
ISBN: 9780316401111
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
Published: 2013-07-23T07:00:00+00:00

D.

(2C)

STILL, SOMEWHERE ALONG the line something can happen where you think you all of a sudden understand why this weird closed antimusic holds such jittery fascination for you who are outside it, getting the ‘Real Thing’ mostly off discs and equipment in cozy Boston digs, able to turn the stuff on and off, listening with the blank distant intensity of someone gazing out the window of a fast train.

Do those of you in like Chicago or NYC ever notice how commuters on the train tend to get all quiet and intense when South Side or South Bronx starts to flow past? If you look closely at the faces, you see it’s not depression, not even discomfort; it’s a kind of rigid fascination with the beauty of ruins in which people live but look or love nothing like you, a horizonful of numbly complex vistas in slab-gray and spraypaint-red. Hieroglyphs on walls, people on stoops, hoops w/o nets. White people have always loved to gaze at the ‘real black world,’ preferably at a distance and while moving briskly through, toward business. A view from this remove yields easy abstractions about rap in its role as just the latest ‘black’ music. Like: the less real power a people have, the more they’ll assert hegemony in areas that don’t much matter in any grand scheme. A way to rule in hell: their own vocabulary, syntax, gestures, music, dance; own food; religious rhetoric; social and party customs; that… well-known athletic superiority—the foot-speed, vertical leap—we like them in fields, cotton- or ball-.1 It’s a Hell we like to look at because it has so clearly been made someone else’s very own…. And the exported popular arts! the singing and dancing!… each innovation, new Scene, and genius born of a ‘suffering’ we somehow long to imagine, even as we co-opt, overpay, homogenize, make the best of that suffering song go to stud for our own pale performers.

So an easy analysis, through the fast train’s glass, of rap as the latest occasion for the postliberal and highly vicarious guilt we find as exhilarating as it is necessary—that we like to play voyeur, play at being kept, for once, truly outside; it assuages, makes us think what’s inside that torn-down world refers to us in no way, abides here decayed because Meant To, the pain of the snarling faces the raps exit no more relevant or real than the cathode guts of Our own biggest window. The white illusion of ‘authenticity’ as a signpost to equity, the sameness-in-indifference of ’80s P.R.: Let Ghetto Be Ghetto, from the train.

Except but now here’s what’s neat: Step out, even just for a moment, and it turns out that this time it isn’t the train that’s moving, it’s the gutted landscape of rap itself; and the ‘ruins’ that are its home and raison aren’t nearly the static archeology they seem, they themselves are moving, arranging themselves, becoming something no less bombed-out or dire but now somehow intended from within, a hegemony that

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