As i read an article by Derek Pardue, i cringed. a lot. lets start by his choice of vocabulary, in refering to members of hip hop culture as "hip hoppers". seriously? now i know a lot of MC's personally, i've been listening to hip hop for better or worse for close to 20 years and this term has never been uttered as part of the ingroup lexicon that i know of. and i'm a language geek, i love new vocabulary and slang, so i probably would have noticed.
Most of the articles i am reading are written by anthropologists. Cultural anthropologists tend to name things within other cultures using an emic viewpoint; this simply means that the words, ideas and understandings are represented from that cultures point of view. There should not be invented names by observers for culture specific practices, ideas, and in group identifications. Yet here we are.
Secondly, there seems to be a fetish for "quotations" in the works i have read. Hip Hop tends to be on the front edge of cultural euphamisms and slang, things that are not highly accepted in an academic sense for writing. This results in the authors saying things like this:
.......organized themselves into groups called "posses". (Pardue 2004, p.414)
Hip Hoppers usually refer to all this as "b-boy" or "b-girl" activities ("B" refers to "Break", as break became the umbrella term to refer to all forms of street dance). (Pardue 2004, p.413)
and one of the most ridiculous ones from Pardue would have to be:
To change the system requires a kind of violence that disrupts, or, in common talk "revolutionizes" normal social relations. Hip-Hoppers articulate this sentiment by taking on individual or group names with "crime" or "violence". More commonly, rap groups and hip-hop cultural posses mark their "criminality" nominally in opposition or relation to "the system" (Pardue 2004, p. 417).
unfortunately, Pardue is not the only one caught up in this strange way of elucidating hip hop culture in a what comes across as a condescending paternality. "look at the cute way they pronouce words, awwwww". A book by Russell Potter titled Spectacular Vernaculars: Hip-Hop and the Politics of Postmodernism, has a great title and showed some promise. Until i read the table of contents. Chapter one is called "Gettin' Present as an Art: A Signifyin(g) Hipstory of Hip-hop". If i were to write an article about the Hopi tribe in the southwest U.S., and called it a brief Hopistory of the southwest, i would be laughed out of the department.
So now it seems this blog is going to become my sounding board for trying to figure out why this happens to hip hop when academics try to understand it. Also, could it be that anthropologists really misunderstand many cultures in this same way, and no one really notices beacuse those culture groups may not have representatives in the academic community? Stay tuned for part two... Hip Hop and Academia- what the "fuck" pt.2: Hip Hop and its 4 "elements", no wait 5, er 7, no its 9
In this Post:
-Pardue, Derek (2004). "Writing in the Margins": Brazilian Hip-Hop as an Educational Project. Anthropology and Education Quarterly. 35(4):pp 411-432
-Potter, Russell (1995). Spectacular Vernaculars: Hip-Hop and the Politics of Postmodernism. Albany: State University of New York Press.
Most of the articles i am reading are written by anthropologists. Cultural anthropologists tend to name things within other cultures using an emic viewpoint; this simply means that the words, ideas and understandings are represented from that cultures point of view. There should not be invented names by observers for culture specific practices, ideas, and in group identifications. Yet here we are.
Secondly, there seems to be a fetish for "quotations" in the works i have read. Hip Hop tends to be on the front edge of cultural euphamisms and slang, things that are not highly accepted in an academic sense for writing. This results in the authors saying things like this:
.......organized themselves into groups called "posses". (Pardue 2004, p.414)
Hip Hoppers usually refer to all this as "b-boy" or "b-girl" activities ("B" refers to "Break", as break became the umbrella term to refer to all forms of street dance). (Pardue 2004, p.413)
and one of the most ridiculous ones from Pardue would have to be:
To change the system requires a kind of violence that disrupts, or, in common talk "revolutionizes" normal social relations. Hip-Hoppers articulate this sentiment by taking on individual or group names with "crime" or "violence". More commonly, rap groups and hip-hop cultural posses mark their "criminality" nominally in opposition or relation to "the system" (Pardue 2004, p. 417).
unfortunately, Pardue is not the only one caught up in this strange way of elucidating hip hop culture in a what comes across as a condescending paternality. "look at the cute way they pronouce words, awwwww". A book by Russell Potter titled Spectacular Vernaculars: Hip-Hop and the Politics of Postmodernism, has a great title and showed some promise. Until i read the table of contents. Chapter one is called "Gettin' Present as an Art: A Signifyin(g) Hipstory of Hip-hop". If i were to write an article about the Hopi tribe in the southwest U.S., and called it a brief Hopistory of the southwest, i would be laughed out of the department.
So now it seems this blog is going to become my sounding board for trying to figure out why this happens to hip hop when academics try to understand it. Also, could it be that anthropologists really misunderstand many cultures in this same way, and no one really notices beacuse those culture groups may not have representatives in the academic community? Stay tuned for part two... Hip Hop and Academia- what the "fuck" pt.2: Hip Hop and its 4 "elements", no wait 5, er 7, no its 9
In this Post:
-Pardue, Derek (2004). "Writing in the Margins": Brazilian Hip-Hop as an Educational Project. Anthropology and Education Quarterly. 35(4):pp 411-432
-Potter, Russell (1995). Spectacular Vernaculars: Hip-Hop and the Politics of Postmodernism. Albany: State University of New York Press.
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