How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America: Essays(17)

That was then.

Rewind or fast-forward to 2013. I’m standing in the bathroom of Vassar College, a college sixty-five miles north of New York City. During the last five years, I sold two blues and hip-hop inspired novels and taught four different courses with hip-hop at their center, including one called “Shawn Carter: Autobiography of an Autobiographer.” Many of my students are New York-bred lovers of hip-hop. Around five years ago, I noticed that my kids were beginning to wear those white Lance Armstrong-style wristbands that say “I Love Hip-Hop.” Their love for hip-hop, interestingly, didn’t know what to do with Southern hip-hop or Mississippi. They didn’t love the South or Southern hip-hop and they weren’t sure that most Southern artists hadn’t stylized their Southern worlds into digestible, aesthetically acceptable terms for “real lovers” of New York hip-hop.

They were equally unsure how to deal with the fact that the South began to sell millions more albums and get way more spins than any other region in the country, while newish New York hip-hop created a number of young artists who actually sounded Southern. So many of my students, like many other so-called purists, dismissed Southern hip-hop as ignorant, catchy, pop, hollow, shameful. Most of my students knew, and wanted me to believe, that in addition to white suburbia’s uncritical devouring of the music minus culture and the countless emcees pandering to the black girl audience in the hallway and corporate America’s glossy detailing of hip-hop, the music was dying because Three-Six Mafia won an Oscar, Trina showed her booty, Mike Jones went platinum, Li’l Jon couldn’t rap, and Trinidad James was Trinidad James.

I honestly didn’t see any of this coming in that Central Mississippi B-Boy bathroom twenty years ago, but I did understand that loving New York hip-hop wasn’t enough. Isolated from caring and curious black girls in the hallway and a destructive white gaze in my Central Mississippi world, I loved New York and New York hip-hop through the likes of Kane, KRS, Rakim, and LL. But even in that safe space, in longing for hip-hop and loving what B. Dazzle represented, I couldn’t fully love my Southern self, Southern black girls, or the culture that created us.

The raggedy clinking of this essay should not contradict the fact that we Southern Black Boys and girls owe New York an almost unpayable debt. New York hip-hop literally gave us means to boast, critique, and confess ourselves into a peculiar existence, in ciphers and on the page. And really, it let us love its brilliance. For that, I will always respect New York ciphers, aesthetics, and sounds.

It’s taken me twenty years to understand why my uttering and writing the word “cipher” frightened me for so long. The “cipher” reminded me of the Southern Black Boy who longed, like Lil Wayne, Jay Electronica, and J. Cole a few years ago, for an artistic letter of acceptance from New York. Truth be told, the art of Big K.R.I.T, Charlie Braxton, Cassandra Wilson, and Margaret Walker Alexander helped me reckon with a fear that my work would never be significant without a stylization that accommodated what I believed were New York sensibilities. It doesn’t make much sense, but it’s true.

I now accept the Black Boys, Invisible Men, Native Sons, and Blues People who grandfolked hip-hop into existence. And just like its grandfolks, I also accept that while it’s painfully brilliant, innovative, and inspiring at times, hip-hop hasn’t come close to meaningfully loving, accepting, and disagreeing with black girls; it’s kept their sensibilities, ears, eyes, and voices in the hallway and/or pandered to what we believe is their pussies, instead of asking and imagining what’s happening in their ciphers. It also hasn’t come close to faithfully disarming and laughing at white gazes. Nor has it even come close to gracefully mediating the space between the urban and the rural, the gaps between poverty and working poor, the difference between new money and wealth. And though it’s come closer to realizing and illuminating these relationships in more considerable ways than contemporary literature, punditry, television, movies, or any mass of critical citizenry, it probably never will.

But if it can’t do these things, or we can’t do these things through hip-hop, from what are we running when we proclaim a love for hip-hop? That’s the question. In and out of B-Boy ciphers, Black Boys like me have been asking a music and a so-called culture, as hokey as it sounds, to do the real work of the self, and the soul—really, work that black Southerners have been doing for decades.

We black Southerners, through life, love, and labor, are the generators and architects of American music, narrative, language, capital, and morality. That belongs to us. Take away all those stolen West African girls and boys forced to find an oral culture to express, resist, and signify in the South, and we have no rich American idiom. Erase Nigger Jim from our literary imagination and we have no American story of conflicted movement, place, and moral conundrum. Eliminate the Great Migration of Southern black girls and boys and you have no Los Angeles, Chicago, Detroit, Indianapolis, Cleveland, or New York City. Expunge the sorrow songs, gospel, and blues of the Deep South and we have no rock and roll, rhythm and blues, funk, or hip-hop.

I am a black Southern artist. Our tradition is responsible for me, and I am responsible to it.

When Outkast won the The Source magazine’s “Best New Artist” award more than ten years ago at the Apollo, New York booed. Andre 3000 addressed the booing of “them closed-minded folks” with the defiant utterance that “the South got something to say and that’s all I got to say.” Up until this very point, I’ve agreed with Andre to death and hoped to God he was right. I now know that he was and he wasn’t. The South not only has something to say to New York; it has something to say to itself and to the world, and we’ve been saying it for years, decades, centuries. As hip-hop has grown way bigger than New York, and the new sound and art coming from New York ciphers and writerly circles have become more mimetic and less soulfully significant, New York and the rest of the country now has to listen, take note, and literally emulate us, even if they still don’t fully respect or understand from whence we come.