Columnists like Stanley Crouch hope that Obama’s win will renovate the content and style of hip hop music. Throughout a recent article he takes hip hop modes of fashion to task and, by extension, the more identifiable affectations of urban culture. With his win, Crouch hopes that Obama will shift trends:
On the pop cultural end, Barack and Michelle Obama’s worldliness and common sense will greatly diminish the national appetite for and the defense of those who proudly commit intellectual suicide by submitting to anti-intellectual stances and the surface styles that repel across all ethnic lines.
At the same time, Obama is considering creating an Office of Urban Policy, hopefully to replace the ailing/failing HUD. Obviously the connection to urban America he developed as a community organizer in Chicago doesn’t stop at the White House.
With Jay-Z and Beyoncé rumored to be performing at the inauguration, and Obama’s now infamous hip hop mannerisms (brushing his shoulders off, the “fist-jab” – as Fox News so adeptly termed it – with his wife, etc.), and the overwhelming support from the urban music community bolstering his win, one has to wonder what role the hip hop community will play in this new office.
While Crouch is holding out for a great shift in urban culture, one has to wonder about the wisdom of that wish. Everyone can agree that Obama is a great role model to urban youth and urban culture in general, but hoping for this seismic shift is glib and doesn’t acknowledge the critical perspective that urban cultural practitioners can and regularly do bring to the discourse on cities. Obama as cultural-consensus-maker might not be in the best interest of the urban discourse. As in intellectual, he might be more interested in working with difference than in drawing it toward his position – collaboration as opposed to consensus.
University of London PhD candidate Markus Miessen examines the potential of a new type of collaboration in a phenomenal article:
An alternative model of participation within spatial practice will be rendered, one that takes as a starting point an understanding of participation beyond models of consensus. Instead of aiming for synchronization, such model could be based on participation through critical distance and the conscious implementation of zones of conflict. Through cyclical specialization, the future spatial practitioner could arguably be understood as an outsider who–instead of trying to set up or sustain common denominators of consensus, enters existing situations or projects by deliberately instigating conflicts as a micro-political form of critical engagement with the environment that one is operating in.
From a policy perspective, what does Obama need with more people like him when he’s trying to address a different demographic? Instead of encouraging urban youth and urban culture to emulate him, wouldn’t it be more useful for him and for them if on-the-ground representatives from urban culture could advise as post-consensus collaborators to help enrich future urban policy? Is there intellectual wealth in the distance between Obama and the “anti-intellectual stances and the surface styles that repel across all ethnic lines”?
And now, as always, some music.
December 5th, 2008 at 11:12 am
Crouch’s idea that there will be a huge shift merely because of a few pop culture habits Obama exhibited is just silly. They’re hardly going to change Hail to the Chief to a hip hop anthem merely because of our President-elect’s mannerisms, race, or work with urban America. That being said, Crouch’s hopefulness that Obama’s new role will help spur on at least a small change in hip hop is something I think many people can get behind. But we have to remember what sells – it will take a big name to come out of hip hop and be willing to change things up and potentially lose money and fans. An entire culture or music genre can’t be altered any more rapidly than this country can be helped economically. But if Obama’s classy demeanor and attire can get a few guys to, as he said, “pull up their pants” sooner rather than later, then hurrah.
December 6th, 2008 at 12:50 pm
Thanks for jumping in Elizabeth,
What I was trying to say is that perhaps this isn’t a situation where one position needs to move further towards the other, so much as one wherein they need to find a discourse where they can be mutually understood from the positions that they occupy.
Later on in that article Miessen says: “Now, I would like to argue that – in order to include the complexity of the city–one also needs to include the conflicting forces of that city. Consensus is only achieved through relationality of powers. One could argue that if such relationality would have been broken, another kind of knowledge would have been produced; one that helps us to understand the composite realities of the contemporary city and the forces at play.”
The value that Hiphop brings to the conversation is precisely that its pants are baggy. As something that creates complexity in the discussion of cities, and is relevant to young America, might it not be better for the discussions that Hiphop remains an alternative voice?