Language, Distance and the Body in Hip-Hop

No question that serious rap is, and is very self-consciously, music by urban blacks about same to and for same. And weirdly, all these prepositions and indirect objects remain identical for the many 'Underground' rappers who are each month, now, captured and contracted by the big white-run recording corps. There's an aura of cohesion-in-competition, of an exclusive and shared universe in the present rap relationship between black artists and black audience not enjoyed by a music especially of and for people of color in something like the last 80 years. To mainstream whites it's a tight cohesion that can't but look, from outside the cultural window, like occlusion, clannishness [sic] and inbredding, a kind of reverse snobbery about what's 'def' and 'fresh' and in-the-Scene that eerily recalls the exclusionary codes of college Societies and WASP-only country clubs. Serious rap's a musical movement that seems to revile white as a group or Establishment and simply to ignore their possibility as distinct individuals-- the Great White Male is rap's Grand Inquisitor, its idiot questioner, its Alien Other no less than Reds were for McCarthy. The music's paranoia, together with its hermetic racial context, maybe helps explain why it appears just as vibrant and impassioned as it does alien and scary, to us, from outside (Wallace, 1990: 23-24).

Although I am not sure if I agree with every sentiment expressed by Wallace, I do think he makes an important point about the exclusivity of hip-hop imagery. It is often said that hip-hop culture can be for anyone who is dedicated, regardless of race, and there is certainly enough division within the black hip-hop community to dispel any myths of cohesion, and yet, there is still truth in what Wallace says. Based on the content of rap's lyrics and imagery, whites neither exist nor belong in hip-hop culture. Rappers lyrics repeatedly reify white rap fans as suburban voyeurs and videos by black artists almost never include white hip-hop heads. What is more, white heads in hip-hop seem to predominantly participate in the most non-visual and disembodied aspects of hip-hop culture. The numbers of white hip-hop writers and editors has grown to a number that is disproportional to their influence anywhere else in hip -hop hold the record companies, and though some whites assert their involvement in graffiti, it also has grown into a subculture of its own that is not necessarily connected to hip-hop. The majority of the hip-hop visual and vocal media refer back to hip-hop's embodied cultural context because the racial, spatial and physical body is seen to be core to hip-hop expression. Hip-hop's images and signifiers are thus intimately tied to a body and space that is irrefutably black and urban.

Historically, hip-hop has inevitably been the product of many cultural movements and meshes. Besides the long-term influence of European musical traditions on black music, original hip-hop culture included a considerable Puerto Rican population and often operated more on the premise of inner-city street culture than on being exclusively for blacks. Regardless, this street culture was defined by the predominately black population and their roots in African tradition and African-American experience. As I discussed in the section on capital, hip-hop developed a unique counter-hegemonic logic that privileged the black inner city experience and its cultural expressions. And, as I illustrated in my examination of hip-hop's reproductive processes, these expressions primarily relied on the body and its immediate space. Between its Afro-diasporic dance moves and speech patterns and its descriptively contextual lyrics, hip-hop is absolutely and undivorcably connected to its black physical, social, political and cultural body.

Because of this, white attempts at rapping have been largely labeled as either alternative (Beastie Boys) or gimmick (Vanilla Ice) and though they have their place in hip-hop history for drawing more people into rap music, they have had little effect on hip-hop's musical trajectory. Tricia Rose questioned Rush Communications' Carmen Ashhurst-Watson on the reasons behind the failure of white rap and her answers point to an important aspect in hip-hop's appropriation:

TR: "But what makes rap so different? It seems that the marketing history is somewhat different; the music seems to have retained a black edge to it for a much longer period of time. Fifteen years into recorded rock 'n' roll history and we had to remind folks that black musicians were the core inventors. Now, fifteen years into rap's recording history we've got Snoop Doggy Dogg and Onyx."

CAW: "Because white people really can't do it very well, or has taken them a very, very long time. Singing was different... For Pat Boone to move from Andy Williams- type songs to black songs was not such a leap; the lyrical line was somewhat familiar. Rapping is a much harder skill to develop from the ground up. Certainly scratching is a different thing: people didn't even believe it was a skill" (Rose, 1994: 127)

She suggests that only those with a specific cultural background would have the physical ability to rap and thus leans towards an ideology that is propagated by many rappers. Most rap albums seem to have lyrics that revolve around the idea that although rapping is not a derivative of blackness, it is dependent on it. Hip-hops' emphasis on its contextual black body thus occasionally promotes a biological essentialism that not only asserts a counter-hegemonic celebration of the body, but resists much of the liberal logic of equality in favor of cultural and physical difference. As rapper Wise Intelligent said, "You have to understand that the potency of melanin in the black man makes him naturally rhythmic... This is our blood" (Decker, 1994: 111). The extremity of this biological essentialism is not propagated by all rappers, but the essentialist undercurrents are definitely formidable forces in hip-hop's ideologies .

This counter-hegemony is not new to black culture, but because of the extensive media exposure and economic viability of rap music, hip-hop's black body has gained a visual power unlike any other black cultural forms. It has a predominant position in today's popular culture from which it promotes hip-hop's body and posture. This can be a source of empowerment within the black community because it values black language and style, but the widespread media can also make for some uncontrolled side effects. For one, because there is limited media exposure of African-Americans in non-musical and sport based positions and because there is a tendency for hip-hop's visual imagery to favor harder, "blacker" artists, there is a limited spectrum of black culture. This makes for a narrow space for cultural variation and defines an authenticity that dismisses variants as "less black". Another danger in media exposure is the spread of hip-hop's posture to communities that do not necessarily have any other contact with black culture and who thus reduce hip-hop to its signifiers. The space between hip-hop's body and the distant listener takes hip-hop out of its larger cultural context which leads to numerous condemning misinterpretations and distorted glamorizations.

Hence, the critics' appalled attacks on hip-hop's violent lyrics take its metaphorical language out of its context and position them as direct threats rather than as figurative boasts of the rappers' lyrical skill. This distant mediation also leads to the voyeuristic exotification of black bodies that though changed, is not necessarily less drastic than the primitivism that preceded it (Hall, 1996: 467).

Through hip-hop's TV-flattened body and contextually flattened posture, outside youth are able to partake of hip-hop's power and prowess without having any actual physical interaction with the culture behind it:

Where the assimilation of black street culture by whites once required a degree of human contact between the races, the street is now available at the flick of a cable channel-- to black and white middle class alike. "People want to consume and they want to consume easy," Hank Shocklee says. "If you're a suburban white kid and you want to find out what life is like for a black city teenager, you buy a record by N.W.A. It's like going on an amusement park and getting on a roller-coaster ride-- records are safe, they're controlled fear, and you always have the choice of turning it off. That's why nobody ever takes a train up to 125th Street and gets out and starts walking around. because then you're not in control anymore: it's a whole other ball game" (Samuels 1991: 251-252).

This appropriation has not been lost on those within the hip-hop community. Many of the reifications of more affluent rap fans I mentioned before are a direct critique of this out-of-context, non-physical participation in hip-hop's posture. Although some hip-hop artists praise rap's ability to create a cultural bridge between white and black hip-hop heads, and educate non-urban youths on the inner-city lifestyle, these same artists also join others in diss(miss)ing the suburbanites sporting hip-hop style and gangsta slang. Much of the style and language is directly derivative of black American experience and so the fact that they can choose to take it as it suits them, leave it when it does not, and avoid all of the messy reality of being black in a racist country is seen as yet another exercise of privilege and exploitive appropriation.

My generalizations on the role of body and posture in hip-hop culture and its appropriation are just that: generalizations, and are never as clear cut as I might have presented them. Race, space, and culture are not mutually exclusive categories and there is a constant pull between the importance of the inner-city vs. blackness, with the one consensus seeming to be that those that can claim neither are perpetually placed on the outside. Although I have briefly discussed hip-hop's point of view of "outsiders" appropriations, I would like to now take a closer look at the dynamics behind non-inner-city, non-African-Americans' relationship to hip-hop's posture. I plan on using language as a tool to explore the issues of distance, physical threat and the authentic body. Often more forced than a clothing style and more critical to the way one defines one's world than a dance move, language is a fundamental part of hip-hop's black roots and its appropriation can tell us a lot about hip-hop's ideology. I believe this will further explain the dynamics between hip-hop's counter hegemonic structure, its authenticated cultural body, and the way in which hip-hop's appropriation asserts its own specific and contextual ideology.

Language, Distance and the Body in Nairobi

I heard DJ Pinja's name many times before I finally met him. He was the only person I heard of who owned his own DJ equipment, he provided the musical mixes for many of Nairobi's matatus and was going to be the DJ for Nairobi's newest radio station. When we at last met, he had a definite opinion on Nairobi youths' relationship to hip-hop: "They just like the beat, and even if you do have guys who know all the words to a song, they don't know what it means" (6/28). I had heard similar statements by other youth, but each also pledged that they were the exception, and that they listened to the lyrics carefully. In order to get at what was behind these contradictions, I started asking my interviewees to define a list of hip-hop slang. Most knew words like 'represent' and 'gangsta', but many did not venture guesses on standard hip-hop words like 'front'. Considering the fact that I was interviewing rappers and people who are considered to be the most knowledgeable on hip-hop in Nairobi, I found this surprising. Even more curious was how many defined words to me in the context of other rappers' lyrics.

AR: "What about 'commercial'?" Kash Da Masta: " There's that song by L.L. Cool J that says something like 'those commercial-ass niggers better have a coke and a smile'" (6/20). AR: "And 'underground'?" Joel: "It's original, like when Craig Mack says: 'Let's get down down down to the underground'" (K South Flava, 7/3).

These responses are not necessarily 'wrong', but the fact that they responded by using other rappers' words is significant. If they are not putting it in their own words, their own context, then are these terms local significance limited to its specific text? I believe this speaks to a larger distance between hip-hop language and Nairobi youths' lives. I repeatedly heard rappers in competitions use words like "niggers" (often ending an -ers vs. the -az heard in American rappers), "bitch" and "motherfucker" and yet in all of my interviews and my less formal time hanging out with Nairobi youth, I never heard anyone integrate this slang into casual conversations. Granted, my presence might have influenced how people talked, but I still think that if Nairobi youth were using these words to describe their environment, I would have overheard it. So what does it mean if Nairobi youth are not appropriating the slang employed in lyrics into their daily lives? And what are the reasons behind this separation between hip-hop language and the youth who adopt hip-hop style?

As my explorations of Nairobi's appropriation of hip-hop's capitalist and production logic have shown, Nairobi youth have not integrated many aspects of hip-hop's structure into a form that reflects their specific environment. I have suggested that a lack of history and the particular structure of gangsta rap makes for a lack of local referentiality. I would like to propose another influence on the hip-hop's contextual separation from Nairobi youth: social views of violence and crime. America is infamous for being an obsessively violent country and though Kenya has its fair share of violence and crime, it does not have the romantic aura that Americans seem to give it. This is especially true for the wealthier classes who have more access to rap. I remember one time I was walking in Nairobi with a friend at night. We passed a flower stall where all of the flowers were left out. Seeing how high security was in Nairobi, this surprised me and I asked my companion about it. He told me the only people who would steal were the people who needed to, and they had no need for flowers. Crime is seen as something done out of economic necessity, not for want of excess and those who do partake in it are highly stigmatized. There are also no gangs in Nairobi's upper classes. They tend to have strong family structures in Kenya and so the alternative family formations provided by gangs is not necessary. Youth do have friendship groups, but they are not connected with livelihood like they are in the States. The economic opportunities in Kenya are such that family connections are the primary means of obtaining jobs (Josh, Ted, Charles), and since I dealt primarily with youth who have these connections, gangs and all of their corresponding behavior are simply not necessary.

But what does this have to do with hip-hop? It explains why words like "glock" and "gat" (guns) may not be known, but what can it tell us about other core concepts like "fronting"? In order to answer this, I will first revisit the importance of violence in gangsta rap. In the states, a gangsta rappers success depends largely on the rappers' authenticity-- the believability that he committed or witnessed the crimes he attests to in his songs. As Ice-T said, "I'm talking about the hard-core, the kids who come with shotguns, and the motherfuckers that are looking like they'll jump off the stage and jack motherfuckers. That shit don't work. It's like, if you don't believe that I'm capable of doing any of that shit on the records, then it sounds like a joke" (Interview with R.J Smith in Ross 1994: 6) After this gangsta realism proved popular, phrases like "don't front" developed so that rappers and fans did not perpetrate a posture they had not lived and could not back up. Music promoters went as far as publicizing rappers' criminal records along with their vinyl ones and those that donned hard-core guises for gangsta rap's commercial success like MC Hammer were resounding failures. The calls to "stay real" entered almost every rappers vocabulary, each pledging their own "trueness" to their particular background and lifestyle.

Since these phrases are such a widespread and formidable force in hip-hop, Nairobi youths' confused looks over the word "front" and the similar word "commercial" surprised me. Some youth described "fronting" as faking which is a close approximation, but other responses ranged from "to step on" (Ted and Charles, 6/16), "to stand in front of someone" (Josh, 6/24) and "to trip, as in 'your frontin' about going to school', you don't want to go to school" (K South Flava, 7/3). Only one youth even ventured a definition of "commercial". But then I realized that by gangsta rap's definition, most of Nairobi youth were "fronting". Since those that listen to it do not have a lifestyle that shares many aspects of the gangsta image and since they do not see any parallels in their own environment, there is no local application for not 'fronting'. None of the rappers who don gangsta language in competitions would "stay true" to what they were saying and thus American hip-hop's fixation with authenticity was simply not applicable.

One more aspect of these language, violence, and distance dynamics requires exploration: the black body. Nairobi youth have easily assumed many of hip-hop's physical postures and thus in clothing style, body language and dance, they look similar to many young black American teenagers. What is more, the biological essentialism in hip-hop seems to translate into a real source of empowerment for Nairobi youth. They see people who look like themselves in a visual and vocal position of power and relate their bodies with their own. I had one rapper tell me that "Every black man can rap" because it took "pain, heart, sympathy" and "anger" (Josh, 6/10). When I contested him on the grounds of the song that was playing at the time, Skee-Lo's "I Wish", he expanded that rapping required wanting things and said that no rich man could rap. I asked about rich black men and he shrugged and when I asked about white poor men, he responded "heavy metal". Or, as another young Kenyan said:

I just believe it is a kind of black music and it is only for blacks. So if you get a white rap, they just like it once and forget about it... The first time I heard of (whites listening to rap), I was like, oh, you guys are getting more interested in black music and you are forgetting about rock and roll. It's like you preferring black music, specifically rap, than your own music (Kash Da Masta, 6/20).

This exclusionary impression of whites was repeated by other interviewees, and I think it might have been said by others were I not white. There is a widespread view that whites in the US are separate musically, culturally and spatially from blacks. The flexibility between race, class and space is not seen in the videos they watch or heard in the lyrics rappers repeat. The "pain" and "heart" Josh talked about is not seen to cross racial boundaries because they do not see whites in rap's class struggles. This makes for a strong identification with the racial essentialism in hip-hop that is only reinforced by the imagery of white fans as the "outsiders". Thus, hip-hop's ideology of a black body as a source of skill and value makes for a direct connection with Nairobi youth and their own bodies. It seems to be the one aspect of their appropriation that most closely parallels hip-hop's counter-hegemonic content. On the other hand, larger cultural and social conditions in African-American inner-cities like violence, and gangs are not appropriated in either Nairobi youths' language or lifestyle. Hip-hop's signifiers are seen to refer to a body, not a cultural context and thus Nairobi youth do not concern themselves with "fronts" because there is no local connection to an authenticity behind it. The surface image--the clothes, the style, the color-- are the important signifiers while the aspects that grant authenticity in the US-- language, class, and crime-- are inapplicable and inappropriated.

Language, Distance and the Body on the Internet

 

That was straight up wack. Internet "freestyle" is a joke. What? You gonna type on beat? Make sure you're hittin' these keys on time? Oh shit-- you were off key, uh I mean beat, un I mean-- hey, not fair, you paused for two spacebars. What kinda freestyle is that? Man, You're a wack Internet emcee. You can't even flow off a keyboard. I'm a represent Compuserve cause all you AOLers can't kick a rhyme for shit. (a new hip-hop dividing line: net-trippin') Esc. Enter. Post your lyrics if you want, but fuck this freestyle bullshit. Take it to the basement or street corner with some peeps and a beatbox. You can't type a freestyle. That's stupid (Quizativ, 10/22/96).

Listen-- I'm as into expansion as the next guy-- I DO NOT think that text (not just the Internet) is a format that lends itself to hip-hop. Hip-hop needs definition- I think one of the things that defines it is the verbal component. That's something I strongly stand by. Hip-hop isn't something you read: you listen to it, you feel it. It's not something that you feel by just reading lyrics. I've often advised people to just skip over posts, but I think that this is a bigger ideological debate (Wassup, 10/21/96).

It's impossible to 'battle' on the net. Please realize this, for as someone who realizes the written part of a verse isn't even the half, works on his delivery between classes, and lives for the day he might be able to hype a crowd, this is offensive. You've stripped a talent down to words on a paper (computer). Kids have posted verses, yeah, from artists whose music is available to analyze, but not like this. Props to the kid for at least writing, but can't you do anything better with your lyrics? Look at them, text. Your soul's behind them words. How can that be represented in text? How can that little pause, or the way you maybe say a certain word come across?.. Put me down as one kid who would NEVER deteriorate a verse I've spent time and effort on into simple words (BREW, 3/25/96).

These posts are just some of the responses to the posting of net "freestyles" or net battles. The attempts at reproducing lyrical competitions are being dismissed on account that they reduce a spontaneous, rhythmic, and, most important, embodied vocal skill into mere words. This absence of the body is a recurring tension in any aspect of the Internet's appropriation, but when it comes to language, violence and posture, the cyberspatial contradictions become paramount. There is an obvious and inescapable distance between the street origins hip-hop privileges and the cybertype that the Internet uses. Hip-hop's physical, social and spatial body is lost in these newsgroups and though this kind of space might be thought to be liberating for some minorities, it is potentially devastating for hip-hop's counter-hegemonic value systems. I will again look at language use to explore the dynamics within these contradictions and examine appropriators'' relationships to violence, distance and authenticity.

Every two weeks, The Unofficial Rap Dictionary is posted on alt.rap and rec.music.hip-hop. Running over a thousand lines in two posts, the dictionary gives Standard English definitions for different words, meanings behind various numbers and locations for different places. Every couple months or so, a debate arises over the existence of this dictionary in which issues of language, access and audience are argued. The following are segments from one of these debates and they illustrate some of the tensions over cultural ownership and understanding inherent in these newsgroups:

'Without that dictionary, Caucasians around the world couldn't communicate wit us, give them a fair chance too...' As a Caucasian, I can vouch for this. Whenever I'm befuddled over a bit of slang I always turn to the good ol' Unofficial Rap Dictionary. So I'm down wit cha. Keep it real, son! Peace! (bridge, 10/18/96).

I'm glad y'all are having such a good time with this. It's shit like this that get true heads so fucking uptight with the growth of hip-hop to mainstream. Y'all always want to analyze and dissect shit. If you get it, good. If you don't, then obviously it ain't for you to understand, so move on to something else. No peace (robin, 6/1/95).

Word up dun. If you don't speak it, don't know it, then it ain't for you obviously. What is the purpose of that bullshit ass dictionary anyway? To give the whites around here a means of understanding? To help those that aren't "down" get up on it? That is something that belongs in a newsgroup like alt.white.understanding-rap. I don't think anyone else has any use for it. And you wonder why headz is always so fuckin mad. 'Cause those herbs don't speak it, know it, they gonna be kissing your ass. 'Thanks gee, on the DL you put me on son' (gtb, 6/1/95).

What if your teachers in school would have said, 'Well, if you get what's written here, good. If you don't, it isn't for you to understand' in reading class. In a way we (Niels and I) are paying the hip-hop culture respect by keeping track of a fraction of it, so that many may learn from (or sometimes of) it. In no way are we trying to disrespect the hip-hop culture (Patrick 6/2/95).

These posts definitely disagree on the idea of having a translating dictionary on the net. Each of the posts asserts different opinions on the legitimacy of cultural outsiders in hip-hop, and yet, if we look at their underlying premises, we can find common ground in hip-hop's embodied posture. For one, all of the posters are accepting the correlation between whiteness and "outside" status. This is definitely not a universally accepted relationship on the Internet (the dynamics of which I will explore later in this section), but the fact that this racial essentialism is not the subject of the debate is worth noting now. Secondly, they are all connecting language with a deeper contextual environment. The anti-dictionary posters are arguing that hip-hop language is derivative of a culture and that if one does not already know the language from direct experience, then they have no need for it. The pro-dictionary posters are asserting their need to know the language, but not because they merely want to, but because of their need to understand the same cultural context the others are emphasizing. In doing so, they are both agreeing that the language develops from a larger whole that must be respected. The exception to this is the first poster who seems to be appropriating the slang exactly as the third poster criticized, in order to be "down wit cha." His typed-in adoption of hip-hop's black English symbolizes just the distance the anti-dictionary members were posting against. However, threads with this kind of forced slang are uncommon on the newsgroups and often incite harsh responses that criticize their use of language as a "front":

I'M FUCKIN LIVIN PROOF DAT WHITE PEEPS GOT MAD FLOW. IM A WHITE MC MYSELF AND WHEN EVA I RAP 2 WHITES BLACKS WHO EVA I ALWAY GOT MAD PROPS IT DOESNT MATTER WHAT FUCKIN COLOR YOU IZ IF U GOT SKILLS YOU GOT SKILLS BUT ME I'M PROBABLY WAANA PHATTEST MCS IN MY AGE GROUP MADAFACT IF YOU WANNA HERE A BUTTER WHITE GROUP BE ON DA LOOK OUT 4 C.O.D. REPRESENTIN OUTA MASSACHUSeTTS SAPURB! (Doug, 11/4/95).

Anybody that types his messages with "4" instead of "for", "2" instead of "to/too", "iz" instead of "is", compares his emceeing skillz with his "age group", uses "wanna" instead of "one of the", "dat" instead of "that", etc, is obviously FRONTIN HARD. Loose the front kid. I don't give a fuck what you have to say, whether you're representing Massachusetts or kakalaka, if you have skills, you don't have to post some bullshit retarded message on a newsgroup. If you are really all that, people will recognize and realize (Quizativ, 11/5/96).

Similar to the critiques of net freestyles, there is a physical and spatial distance on the Internet that written slang can not possibly represent. These mimics of embodied street talk are usually taken as the above responder did: a front. It is a sign that they appropriating hip-hop in a context outside of its original setting, because it is being applied in a context where it does not fit. The black English in hip-hop's slang is an empowering part of hip-hop's posture because it affirms black cultural speech patterns, but when it is removed from the body and laboriously forced into a written text, it's specific contextual significance is lost. Another aspect of hip-hop's posture which is debated on the Internet is physical threat:

I heard you had some things to say about me. Dumbass, you could have e-mailed me. Send me your street address and I can beat your ass in person. Fuck Mobb Deep. I will beat those short motherfuckers until they die. And you'll be next. I'm at XXX Sherman Ave NW, Washington DC. Bring Havoc and Prodigy's bitch asses with you and I will represent Westside by beating the living shit out of all three of you (apage, 4/14/96).

Fuck, this place is beginning to look like air.rap. Fuck y'all talking tough over the net-- what y'all got something to prove? Y'all gotta feel you got something to prove. Pick up a fuckin' mic and represent in your area. DON'T fuckin waste my time making me download new articles in this newsgroup cause the shit is filled up with bullshit and people frontin like above (Quiz, 4/15/96).

Like the member "Doug" who used excessive slang, the poster's threats are dismissed as "bullshit" because there is no physical presence to back them up. The posturing that would incite violence on the street loses its potency in the Internet and becomes another sign of a "front". The first poster, 'Apage', seems to recognize this distance and offers his address to show his commitment to his physical threat, but the fact that he even had to mention Washington DC shows there is not only a virtual distance, but also a physical distance that will not realistically be traveled for a typed threat. What's more, because of the issues of access and class discussed earlier, any newsgroup member's claims to violence or physical hardness are often questioned as being inconsistent to their involvement with the Internet. For, as this member responded to the following sign:

Let's consider it: to post on this newsgroup, you either have to spend money on a PC, modem and Internet connection or you are at college. Real gangstas don't go to college. I've never met a real gangsta so I'm just guessing here, but from what I've worked out, posting to ngs isn't really a gangsta's main priority. so if the above is true, there are no gangsta's posting to this newsgroup. Then, who are all these motherfuckers claiming they are> They're full of shit. However, as I say, I've never met a gangsta, so correct me if I'm wrong about this please. What's more, I'd say 90% of people here (not all, get this right) are white kids from the suburbs. So fuck you if you're a white kid at college claiming to be a gangsta (Mohamed, 11/14/96).

These critiques of using physical threats of violence again emphasize the distance between the embodied hip-hop posture and its inapplicable appropriation on the net, but their references to physical spaces still warrant attention. For although in the posts between 'Apage' and 'Quiz', 'Quiz' dismisses 'Apage's' post, he still emphasizes street space and the physical body by suggesting that he "pick up a fuckin' mic and represent in [his] area." And although 'Apage's' address does not mean much in the international meeting space of the Internet, by including it, he is insisting on his commitment to his physical threat. I bring this up again because, for all of the posts that put down people's attempts to bring the body into the net, there is also a strong force that argues the body must be the center of all authentic hip-hop. Those who do not participate in its street space or in a black cultural context are seen as not having experienced hip-hop at all:

If non-black people want to buy hip-hop, I want them to come to the ghetto to get it (kari orr, 4/18/96)

Sounds poetic, but not too practical. I live in Toronto, and the nearest ghetto is in Detroit, 400 miles away! Besides, not all rappers are from the ghetto.(Ant, 4/19/96)

Do you think you can begin to understand this material if you do not see it's origins? Making hip-hop accessible by first recording it, second giving it mass-distribution, third pressing it on non-core mediums like cd's makes hip-hop into a package you can buy at your local mall for your amusement and entertainment... (kari orr, 4/19/96)

My advice to white kids into hip-hop, read Upski, go to a housing project or rough house part of town, keep going. People will at first look at you like your crazy, maybe scare you out, but if you keep coming back, headz will realize you want to learn. Maybe you'll be lucky and get schooled (Jeffrey, 10/27/96)

The Internet is thus not seen as an essential element of hip-hop culture, but a related medium outside of it. Those that do not deal with the real physical street environment are repeatedly told they are not really part of hip-hop because they are not confronting the violence they otherwise voyeuristically participate in. To paraphrase: if your ass is not on the line, then your ass is not in the game.

From here I would like to return to the tensions between race and outsider status discussed earlier. As was shown by the previous posts, whites are repeatedly reified as outsiders: out-of-body and out-of-context. Despite this, because of the large white and suburban presence on the newsgroups, the Internet also becomes a space where these youth can make claims for their legitimacy within the hip-hop medium. Many white youth use their experience with urban environments or participation in hip-hop's body activities (graffiti, dancing, MCing, rapping) to resist the label "outsider" and prove their commitment to the larger cultural context.

I'm not a wanna-be-emcee, kicking wack rhymes behind a computer screen.. HOWEVER, I am a DJ for a group with major, major affiliations in hip-hop. I sell mixtapes everywhere in Queens, and LOVE HIP-HOP. EAST, WEST, anywhere, as long as the artists are true to hip-hop, the music, the culture, etc. I keep it mad real, not being hard, but being myself. let's see, can you guys say the same?? Well, I can tell you what I'm not first. I'm not a hardrock, or a fake hardrock fronting behind a Macintosh, or IBM for that matter Oh yeah, I'm also WHITE, JEWISH, AND PROUD" (SUGARCUTS, 6/15/95).

As the above poster did, white newsgroup members often connect their relationship to hip-hop's embodied context with their "realness". Since there is so much criticism of whites appropriating hip-hop's posture (i.e. clothes, style and language) many white youth maintain their authenticity by claiming they do not dress the part. People constantly say they do not wear hip-hop clothes and if they do use black English in their speech, they say it is the result of their upbringing, not because of exposure to hip-hop. In doing so, they pledge not only their knowledge of hip-hop's larger context, but also their commitment to its underlying culture. Much of the tension around this relationship between hip-hop's cultural body and its stylistic signifiers seems to boil down to the fact that hip-hop's signifiers can be worn and removed where as skin cannot. Thus, white members constantly struggle with proving they will not exercise white privilege by assuming hip-hop's posture when it suits them and leaving it when societal prejudices make it inconvenient. They assert their distance from the stereotypical suburban consumer by declaring they have no style and are not temporarily adopting current fashion, and thus claim their commitment to the contextual street culture.

Hence, unlike Nairobi, there is very little biological essentialism seen on the Internet. There are discussions of different race's vocal sounds and debates on why there are so few good white rappers, but there seems to be a consensus that it has more to do with demographics and personal skill than biology. Race is usually seen in conjunction or conflict with class and culture, none of which are mutually exclusive. And yet, the tension between these different sources of authenticity are constantly in flux. Blackness is often used as authenticity in itself because it can not be entered like street space, learned like speech or worn like clothes. Hip-hop's counter-hegemonic form speaks to and for black culture, and in any other context, it creates its own ideology that results in "fronting" postures and out-of context disembodied appropriations. Thus, though biological essentialism has little force on the Internet, the social essentialism of being black in America has a ideological weight that is continuously struggling with the borders and bonds between culture and color. I offer no answer on which authenticity the newsgroup members subscribe to because the battle is constantly being waged. The only aspect of these dynamics which remains certain is the fact that neither the street nor skin can be represented on the net and the fact that these remain the premise of newsgroup relations speaks to the force of hip-hop's ideology.

Continue to Defintion and Differentiation in Hip-Hop, Nairobi and the Internet

Return to Home Page