David Foster Wallace

Mark Costello

Rap and Race in the Urban Present

Signifying Rappers

Gavin

The first book on hip-hop? Certainly the first High Academic one. Though, not really a book, as they frequently acknowledge: it's a "sampler". And not expert, as they constantly acknowledge: more than half of it is them pseudo-nervously hedging about being two elite white guys peering into what was then a fairly closed circle. A solid effort too - it knows and guesses and connects more than most critics today, despite the scene being far more ethnically closed, and far less obviously of artistic wealth; despite their often comically mishearing the lyrics; and despite not being able to find anything out about the people behind the music, because no-one returned their calls (until they pretended to be journalists).
 
Anyway this has 80pp of recognisably enervated DFW popping off the top of this allocortex, decent fuel for the fire of an admirer, or at any rate the only coal on offer (he was embarrassed by this book, but it is too stylish and enthusiastic to be embarrassing to us):

  
Ironies abound, of course, as ironies must when cash and art do lunch. Tearing down the prop-thin symbolic walls, Run-DMC aim to celebrate desegregation, but miss the fact that Aerosmith, those whitest of white rockers, are merely big-budget Led Zeppelin ripoffs, and that Led Zep came straight outta the jet-black Rhythm & Blues of Chicago’s Chess Records. Dancing with Steve Tyler, Run-DMC forgets that Muddy Waters’ sideman Willie Dixon had to sue Led Zeppelin to get proper credit for their use of his blues. “Walk This Way” is an unwanted reunion of 80s black street music with part of its rich heritage, as that heritage has been mined and mongrelized by Show Biz. If this is desegregation, then shopping malls hold treasure...

It’s a new and carnivorous kind of mimesis that makes weary old ‘self-reference’ actually kind of interesting, because it enlarges Self from the standard rock-subjective–a bundle of hormone-drenched emotions attached to a larynx and pelvis–to a 'big ole head,’ a kind of visual street-corner, a monadic Everybrother, an angry, jaded eye on a centerless pop-culture country full of marginalized subnations that are themselves postmodern, looped, self-referential, self-obsessed, voyeuristic, passive, slack-jawed, debased, and sources of such prodigious signal-and-data bombardment that they seem to move faster than the angry eye itself can see…

I had been putting off reading this because of the title: I didn't know about Schooly D's track, so I read the verb in a gross academic voice ("in which we give rappers true signification") rather than the adjectival sense they actually meant ("rappers who signify").
Costello's bits are ok, DJ "MC" to MC "DFW". Wallace is harder than Costello - noting that MCs really are just yuppies, that Chuck D's claims to not be glorifying violence are absurd, that part of the fascination of hard rap is the snuff-spiral of trying to be nastier and nastier than previous hard rappers, which is just the commercial impulse of Alice Cooper minus musicianship. But this is also a winning early bet: that rap is poetry, that it was and would be "the decade's most important and influential pop movement":

  

  Our opinion, then, from a distance: not only is serious rap poetry, but, in terms of the size of its audience, its potency in the Great U.S. Market, its power to spur and to authorize the artistic endeavor of a discouraged and malschooled young urban culture we’ve been encouraged sadly to write off, it’s quite possibly the most important stuff happening in American poetry today. ‘Real’ (viz. academic) U.S. poetry, a world no less insular than rap, no less strange or stringent about vocal, manner, and the contexts it works off, has today become so inbred (against its professed wishes) inaccessible that it just doesn’t get to share its creative products with more than a couple thousand fanatical, sandal-shod readers..
  


Your enjoyment will depend on you giving a crap about the sheer horror of rap's initial context and being able to tolerate intentionally torturous pomo prose and juxtapositions (e.g. I Dream of Jeannie vs race riots). I loved it and twice missed my stop on the tube reading it.

[Data #1, Theory #1, Values #1, Thinking #2]

Signifying Rappers Rap and Race in the Urban Present

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