17th
Pump Up the Jam
Abdi Farah wrote a really fantastic entry about the Slate article titled “Lil Wayne and the Afronaut Invasion”. The Slate magazine article, and Abdi’s analytic post concerning it, bring up a flurry of themes and motifs that I find fascinating to dissect. Just as in the literature of Central America, hip-hop has its own fantastical mythology in which anything is possible. Ghosts, human flight, ancestors, inter celestial travel—all completely feasible within both genres of storytelling. I’ve been waiting for an article to come up on JSTOR that finds something for my “laura esquivel AND lil weezy” advanced search. I’m still waiting.
But I want to touch on another aspect of the “space and hip-hop” phenomenon that both Slate and Abdi reference. There is certainly a tradition of planetary travel and outer space within hip-hop; additionally, there is a more concrete occupation of space by hip-hop. I’m thinking of a specific scenario: I’m at my little cottage house on my baby southwest Philly street, working on some needlepoint or something unbearably sweet like that. Suddenly, the scene is like that moment in that movie that I never saw completely when they humans are sitting around and suddenly the water in a cup starts shaking and they know something bad is coming—aliens or dinosaurs or peasants with pitchforks or something. That’s what happened, and I held my cat for dear life as a distinctive thud was approaching my house. I looked out the window and I saw a massive car—well, no, it wasn’t really a car. It was like a subwoofer on four wheels with a drivers seat. 
A driveable stereo system, blasting some mildly outdated top 40 hip hop song, “Get Low” (remember that one?) I’m no stranger to cars with loud music pumping out of them, but this was unimaginable din. The glasses in the kitchen were actually shaking. Being from the land of earthquakes, I did what I learned in elementary school and ducked under a desk, covering my neck with my hands (at this point I had released the cat from my squeeze). Surprisingly, our house did not collapse in on itself, and the car presumably drove along to some other baby sidestreet, or back to its family of ridiculously loud and big cars that haven’t bought any new cd’s since 2000. For lullabyes they all listen to “All my life” by K-Ci and JoJo at a 1 on the Richter scale.
The entire hyprebolic and overly dramatized event got me thinking about hip-hop’s connection to physical space and presence. Certainly, as Slate and Abdi pointed out, hip-hop has a real, humorous, and often fetishizing relationship with the extraterrestial (I’m thinking of Kool Keith’s “Supergalactic Lover” song in particular, in which he plays a heroic Prince Charming from the projects that rescues a distressed maiden and takes her into space,where everything is perfect and he can treat her well. Actually, there’s a lot more to say about that song. Different post, though). Hip-hop as a genre, is not merely textual—it is also contextual. Traditionally, rap is about something in a way that squeaky clean pop isn’t. It’s not just boyfriends and girlfriends and everything bein’ so complicated. Hip-hop is political and socially aware in a way that boy bands aren’t—in a way that boy bands can’t be. Of course, this is obvious with those older hip-hop giants. Listing a string like “Tupac, Notorious B.I.G., NWA, Ice T, Wu-Tang Clan” isn’t just about listing those great albums that your older brother hid from your parents in the early 90s. It’s also listing a string of popular artists tackling huge issues like race, poverty, crime, drugs, and the government and throwing them at the American public, ready or not. But I would argue that this tendency hasn’t gone away in hip-hop, even in mainstream hip-hop. It’s easy to simply generalize that all hip-hop is now is hookers and blow, but I would argue that (1.) the big number one hits are usually referencing money and materialism somehow and (2.) these references are alluding to (a.) the uniqueness or specialness of the party that has fountains of 
Moet or the man dressed in head-to-toe Louis Vuitton, (b.) white culture’s own infatuation with wealth and the display of it and, through these allusions, the songs can reference (c.) the de facto state of affairs for a significant portion of black America who feel abandoned and rejected by their government and country (insert Barack Obama campaign commerical here). So while the new generation of hip-hop isn’t explicitly talking about social problems in the way that their predecessors were, it seems that their excessive displays of their wealth and socio-economic status calls just as much attention to social and racial issues, albeit a little more subversively.
So hip-hop is contextual—it demands of the listener not only an attentiveness to specific current events which are referenced within the song, but it also demands an attentiveness to the sites of its experience, be it the club or the car, wherever you are. Especially in such sites in which the hip-hop itself is used to alter the relationship between the public and private. Especially when the hip-hop makes that relationship discordant, as in the man driving a stereo down my street. When the bass of Wu-Tang’s “Bring the Ruckus” blasts out of a trunk, space is reclaimed in an authority-unapproved version. While I’m doing needlepoint in my living room and Lil Jon rides down my street, there is an ethical decision in addition to the aesthetic one. Of course it looks cool. Duh. But also, there is a conscientious decision made by the driver to disrupt any pacificity through lyrics about hearses and gold and private terrorism (as in the case of Wu-Tang) or all the skeet skeets (Lil Jon). The lyrics, the beat, and the stereo system become weapons against the tranquil mases and an assault on public space. It’s an ad hoc war of position. This public audibility is flaunted by black youth who pump the jamz. They too are taking notes from predecessors. In the vein of Watts, Compton, and NWA, these top 40 volume-blasters are creating their own acts of defiance, just with less carnage.
So, whereas we have the fantasy of occupying space (celestial space, that is) with the lyrics and beats of Kool Keith, Lil Wayne, OutKast, etc, we have the real occupation of physical space with the bumpin trunk stereo systems. Both are dissonant from the standard “way things are/way things ought to be” notions of mainstream America. I don’t have a problem with either one, particularly the latter. I’m not afraid to admit that I really like “Get Low”. That wheeled stereo can blast it anytime it wants outside of my house. Maybe I’ll start making requests. Maybe that “Country Grammar” song. Remember that?
