I hate hip hop. Always have. It seems to me a break with a long tradition of wonderful, melodic and inventive Black music in America*, one which was eloquent about both sorrow and joy, and replaced it with mechanical victimist resentment which models the very behavior that creates the bad conditions it complains about. And it encapsulates most of what I hate about current Black culture. Yet it is immensely popular with young whites, male and female both.
I am sure there are a host of reasons why, but one that intrigues me is related to the decline of white masculinity after feminism. Like it or not, blacks play the role of the primitive in American culture: the shadow of "soul" --which blacks are supposedly endowed with-- is primitivity: emotional volatility, irrationality, diminished intellect, religiosity, and a kind of physicality which is both very powerful (sports) and attractive (sex) and which indicates a lower stage of development. In the case of black males, they are the carriers of a raw pre-feminist masculinity. This must account for a huge part of their attraction for white males, with the consequent --and to me, embarrassing-- adoption by younger white men of styles of speech and dress which scream black ghetto.
Being given covert cultural permission, and encouragement, to remain the primitives that they are, young black males retain an archetypal stage of manhood that is now hard for white males to claim. But is it an archetypal stage: it is adolescent. One of the tragedies of American blacks' catastrophically high rate of out-of-wedlock births (70%) is that the dominant image of maleness for them is fatherless; it is adolescent, and angrily adolescent at that. Thuggish and barbarian.
And the saintly and struggling black mother --the cooingly titled "single mom"--only achieves her victim status by being abandoned by her lover(s). (And the gender role expectations of young blacks are as opposite as you can imagine, except when it comes to sexual activity. Talk about heteronormative!) As I have said before, the message sent to generations of young blacks, male and female, is that they were not worth enough for their fathers to hang around for. Blacks in Oakland rage angrily in the streets when a white officer shoots a young black man. But how often, and for long, have their own young males murdered one another on the streets, in their homes? For that ongoing crime we get weepy memorials in churches, not rioting. And what about the self-destructive male-female collusion which keeps females getting themselves pregnant by men whom they know will not stay around to make a family, just furthering the cycle?
But thuggish and immature though hiphop maleness be, it is nevertheless real masculinity, something that white feminism has severely damaged in the currently majority demographic. No matter how ridiculous it looks and sounds for a chubby, curly-haired, four-eyed Caucasian boy in a bowtie to sing words like "stank" and "drop some knowledge on ya" or "check the legal, y'all." So it is not only the band that is pathetic, it is our cultural situation.
*Just one example, at 2:32 in this video.
No comments:
Post a Comment