The Hip-Hop Underground and African American Culture

The Black underground is a rhizome, a diffuse root that projects its multifaceted conceptualizations throughout African American culture. It spreads its root-like tentacles through the fabric of history, manifesting at continuous points in reality and in cultural production. In the book, I attempt to trace some of these tentacles, mapping the conceptual pathways left in the wake of certain manifestations of the Black underground as an artistic or political movement, visual culture, an aesthetic quality or a literary trope. In this introduction to the book, I have culled discursive and meta-discursive texts from a variety of media including music, television, literature, and art. The undergirding guide, this book’s patron saint and muse, can be captured in the multitude of meanings assigned to the homological pairing of roots/routes. In this pairing, the phonological rendering of the word captures its homological masking of underground metaphors. The rhizomorphic qualities of roots/routes are useful introductory symbols to the various concepts of the Black underground. I don’t employ the adjectival form of “rhizome” here to initiate an in-depth analysis of, and/or theoretical engagement with, the works of Deleuze and Guattari.

In an album skit, DJ Premier, one half of hip-hop’s underground duo Gangstarr, explicitly warns “break-record cats” against revealing the secreted samples in his production. The most striking aspect about this skit, on Gangstarr’s fifth album, titled Moment of Truth, is the actual voice of DJ Premier.¹ We are used to hearing Premo (as he is affectionately called in hip-hop parlance) ventriloquize his artistic voice through a collage of samples and memorable hip-hop voices, producing for hip-hop’s greatest artists, including Biggie Smalls, Jay Z, Nas, M.O.P., Snoop Dogg, and many others. Hearing his voice is revealing in and of itself, but he also anticipates the cottage industry within/out hip-hop that would reveal rare recordings and/or riffs secreted through the production process. He tells them plainly and forcefully to knock it off. This gesture may appear to be economically motivated because Premo has to pay legal sampling fees if his production secrets are revealed. However, since this prophetic response to the exploitation of hip-hop production (the revealing of sampling secrets for money by those viewed by Premo as transgressing the rules of hip-hop culture), many hip-hop artists and producers have been profiled on compilations that reveal the original songs from which many hip-hop producers shamelessly borrow. DJ Premier would not deny this impulse to borrow from the best of the Black, blues, soul music tradition. But those who reveal the code are considered to be operating in violation of a hip-hop policy that protects the creative expression of traditional Black American artistry, represented here as sampling, but tapping into the Black tradition of repetition with a signifying difference.²

In as much as this book grapples with the underground in hip-hop culture, African American literature and music, language, particularly linguistic identity as it is represented in literature, tends to suggest the extensive role of African American Vernacular English (AAVE) in these discussions. In chapter 3, AAVE informs the verbal masking that often emerges among literary subjects, hip-hop artistic personas, and various individuals in a range of underground contexts. In this chapter I focus briefly on various African American/ethno-linguistic identities in literature, and the theorems herein that largely refer to and reflect the use of Black vernacular speech (or any Black variety of Standard English) in music and cultural production. Many of the ways in which writers present and represent social identity in American literature are not directly related to traditional linguistic analyses, yet many depend directly on language. The question we might ask of any novel (or poem, play, or other literary genre) is what do we know about the identity of the characters/actors in the particular text: who we are reading? This question has many possible answers, but for the student of literature and linguistics the answers can be limited to four modes for analyzing the social identity of a character. Whether or not the representation is authentic to the ethnicity, class, or sexual orientation, characteristics of “real-life” persons or community certainly haunts this discussion. The four modes explained and exemplified in this chapter address some of these concerns, while offering an efficient means of analyzing African American identity in literature and the roles language plays in constituting social (and racial) identity in American literature.

The narrator of Saul Williams’s Dead Emcee Scrolls opens his collection of poems and essays with a story about a series of scrolls that he discovered in the catacombs of the New York City subway system. Williams narrates a story of how he descended into the underground and discovered cryptic scrolls encased in an aerosol paint can. As the narrative unfolds, he enigmatically argues that these found scrolls serve as the sui generis texts from which his spoken word, hip-hop-oriented lyricism emerges. This is an instructive place to begin the herculean task of defining a hip-hop underground, interstitially linked to and with African American culture. This definitive process is distinct from the extensive ethnographic, linguistic, and anthropological work done by Marcyliena Morgan (2009) and Anthony Kwame Harrison (2009). Each of these major works on the underground of hip-hop culture focuses on the rich tradition of underground hip-hop music cultivated and circulated from and throughout the west coast of the United States. Morgan’s The Real Hip-Hop centers on a physical space/place—the historic Project Blowed located across the street from Leimert Park in Los Angeles.

In this chapter the concept of the cipher is an underground signifier for distinct discursive relationships in the works of Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, Amiri Baraka, Thelonius Monk, Houston Baker, and KRS One. These discursive relationships center on tropological variations on the concept of the underground referenced in the work of the aforementioned artists as kiln holes, manhole/sewers, basements, the subway, hell, black holes, or the black (w)hole. The rich semantic content attributable to the word cipher in Standard English (SE) as well as in African American Vernacular English (AAVE) offers a unique way of reading the oft-cited genealogical conversation in Black Artistic production, which, in this case, converses/converges on the trope of the underground.¹ This interaction between Wright and others is discursive only in as much as one can discern the inner workings of distinct concepts of the underground as they are configured in the following texts: Richard Wright’s “Big Boy Leaves Home” and “The Man Who Lived Underground,” Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, Amiri Baraka’s Dutchman and The System of Dante’s Hell, the grammy-award winning album cover art for Thelonius Monk’s Underground, Houston Baker’s “Black (W)hole” theory and KRS One’s storied rap titled “Hol(d).”

Critical inquiry at the intersections of hip-hop music, African American literature, and Black visual culture inform a generative discourse for Black underground imagery within and across an array of interrelated texts. Through certain textual pairings—Jonathan Green’s “Seeking” and the Gravediggaz’s “The Night the Earth Cried”; or Mos Def’s “hip-hop” and Jeff Wall’s “After Invisible Man,” (among others)—this chapter seeks to excavate a ritualistic intertextuality imbedded in certain works that feature elements of what can tentatively be referred to as Black visual underground culture, a constellation of lyrics, images, and textual allusions that articulate an underground ethos present (if not readily audible/visible) in hip-hop culture. In Practices of Looking …, Marita Sturken and Lisa Cartwright argue that “visual culture encompasses many media forms ranging from fine art to popular film and television to advertising to visual data in fields such as the sciences, law and medicine.”¹ The Black visual underground functions in much the same way except that the subject matter embraces blackness and the cultural, spiritual, and political markers of Black identity—especially here in contemporary popular culture.

The opening theme music for HBO’s series The Wire is a song written by Tom Waits titled “Way Down in the Hole” (1987). Each year, during the series’ five-season run, the producers selected or solicited a different version of the song. As a series, The Wire is often interpreted as lacking a space for representations of Black spirituality. Each of the five seasons features complex institutional characterizations and explorations of the Street, the Port, the Law, the Hall (i.e., politics), the School, and/or the Paper (i.e., media). Through these institutional characters and the individual characters that inhabit, construct, and confront them, The Wire depicts urban America, writ large across the canvas of cultural and existential identity. For all of its institutional complexity, The Wire then serially marginalizes Black spirituality in favor of realism, naturalism, and some may argue, nihilism.¹ “Way Down in the Hole” is a paratextual narrative that embodies this marginalization and creates a potential space for viewers (and listeners) of the show, one that frames each episode and the entire run, through literary and spiritual Black musical contexts. The multiple versions of “Way Down in the Hole” ultimately function as a marginalized repository for the literary and spiritual narratives that are connected to the series—narratives that become legible via intertextual analyses and in turn render visible The Wire’s least visible entities: Black spirituality and the Black Church.²

The central concept of the underground is that of revolution. The Underground Railroad sought to subvert and ultimately overthrow the slaveocracy. The Black literary undergrounds of Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, and Amiri Baraka, all sought to articulate and/or depict the psyche of a Black revolutionary in the ultimate signifying space underground, a space that facilitates the subversion of White supremacy. The hip-hop underground signifies on much of this historical, political, and literary energy. Gil Scott Heron’s “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised” is situated at the intersection of these intersections. This poem, a precursor to hip-hop culture and rap in many ways, provides the touchstone from which certain ironies of the underground unfold in the public sphere. “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised” employs commercial references to explore the lure of consumer culture on the collective conscious of Black folk. Television is the media that produces the imagery and celebrates the popular trinkets that distract people from their revolutionary objectives. In a prolific referential array of popular commercial products, Heron creates a timeless sense of advertising and marketing as the dominant modes of communication in capitalist culture.