Reflections

            Initially, I was leaning toward writing with Smalls, I enjoyed their pieces in our Queer Hip Hop module, and I am confident I would have benefited from spending another 90 minutes with them. But I have decided to spend my reading/listening time 90 with Carson. I admit to being more than a little skeptical at the idea of a dissertation as an album, so colonized is my thinking. Recognizing my position in this way, as colonized, I knew that I needed to step out of the white colonial taxonomies of academia and push through to the otherwise happening in places like Carson’s work. I felt the internal resistance to approaching Carson’s work as academic, the little gaggle of dead white men, like monkeys on my back, shaking their heads and wagging their fingers, making me feel like a bad dog for even considering such unorthodoxy. But the more instinctually resistant Carson’s dissertation, the more required I felt to push past these dead white men, brush them aside like so many wooden or stone idols that do not see, do not hear, and do not speak to us today of life. A.C. Carson is of the here and now and has something to say about the things we cling to as a nation, the so-called American dream, and he treats it with all seriousness, not looking away when it becomes contradictory or downright ugly.

Describing his sample selection process for the dissertation, Carson shares: “The way I went about choosing the samples on this album comes from actually reading a lot of James Baldwin and Malcolm X, and then thinking about the economic and sociopolitical aspects of issues that afflicted black and American communities in general.”(Dowling, 2019).  The words he raps on “Grand Wizard” (Owning My Masters: The Rhetorics of Rhymes & Revolutions, by A.D. Carson, 2017) put the listener in the racist white man’s shoes and speaks truth to the lies of Southern tragedy and romanticized rape and murder, and we are compelled to feel the words as directed at us. Carson doesn’t just theorize hip hop; he flips it verb-wise, does the thing, and invites us into doing it (Robertson et al., 2017).

His writing and rhetoric style is inclusionary and participatory. There are no locked doors or double speak. He sets out to be understood, even by the colonized and disbelievers. When asked about the future of hip hop as a cultural form, “[w]ord-crafting is part of this conversation as an influence,” shares Carson (Dowling, 2019), further unveiling his apparent commitment to changing and crafting language and sound and moving from the logocentric to the phonocentric, an embodied and felt language of aesthetically adjacent experiences.

As an academic, AD Carson does not attempt anything that has not happened before, save that, as a Black man, he dares to hold his art as a legitimate academic epistemology and ontology. He introspectively takes his place in the anti-Black socio-cultural history, taking up space and refusing to be minimized. For Carson, the future means a willingness to scribble over the lies of the American Dream (Video, 2017). The work is a challenge to proponents of a so-called America that was once great, racists who uncritically hold that there was a value in slavery, even for the slaves. Carson points at the truths we, as citizens, have as self-evident; they are convenient truths standing in for the inconvenient lies and blasphemy that racist capitalism will always need blacks to enslave and exploit, whatever name they need to give it. White is so dirty and covered in blood; it cannot be whitewashed, pretending instead, lying through stories so old we are compelled to hear them, words from on high, from the mouth of a blind white god, and it just so happens blood and money make his dick hard.

In “The Song I Should Have Written” (Owning My Masters: The Rhetorics of Rhymes & Revolutions, by A.D. Carson, 2017), Carson samples James Baldwin saying that a writer must change the language they are involved in. Carson does this when he points to the validity of rap and hip hop as stories, history, and knowledge of itself and the world. He has added to that story here and will undoubtedly be remembered by many as someone who labored to change the world.

 

Dowling, M. K. (2019, November 19). PhD candidate Aydee The Great’s new album is a study of Black excellence. Bandcamp Daily. https://daily.bandcamp.com/features/aydee-the-great-interview

Owning My Masters: The Rhetorics of Rhymes & Revolutions, by A.D. Carson. (2017, April 3). A.D. Carson. https://aydeethegreat.bandcamp.com/album/owning-my-masters-the-rhetorics-of-rhymes-revolutions

Robertson, D., Robertson, D., & Robertson, D. (2017, April 13). On Hip-Hop, Teaching, and Social Justice: An Interview with A.D. Carson. AAIHS - African American Intellectual History Society. https://www.aaihs.org/on-hip-hop-teaching-and-social-justice-an-interview-with-a-d-carson/

Video, H. (2017, September 29). UVA Hip hop professor reflects on Charlottesville tragedy [Video]. HuffPost. https://www.huffpost.com/entry/meet-the-uva-hip-hop-professor-who-started-two-weeks-after-charlottesville-tragedy_n_59c9dd1de4b021fe27e2cd30

 

            Vibe or a felt sense of communication is employed to read situations and circumstances that cannot be immediately quantifiable in any sense that requires a term of reduction, language, words, or symbols that act by bracketing the circumstances from any of its explicit particularities (Miles, 2022). Concepts can sometimes do violence to experience in how they limit and confine the parts of an experience interpreted as valid. Yet, from the assigned readings, vibe stands apart as an attempt to analyze and understand lived experiences on a physical, emotional, and mental basis more broadly. Personal sensation that has yet to take meaning in the social world. A response to the symbolic orders of power and control that cannot in the moment be subsumed into any singular symbolic expression other than as its affects or felt expression, with this sensation ‘feeling’ a person's social location and indicative of the forces encountered in that moment. Emotions organize social structures, so it must work both ways, with emotional reciprocity further lessening or augmenting the social positionality and subjection being experienced. The vibe is constituted and constitutive of the power differential experienced at any time.

            Whenever white anti-Blackness surfaces, this, too, is sensed by both parties, with each side understanding the prescriptive and proscriptive nature of actions tolerable to hegemonic whiteness and being. Placing white folk in comfortable positions to enact racist and anti-Black actions. Whites sense the vibes of white oppression as entitlement and authorization, with their buy-in further exacerbating the negative vibes experienced by Blacks in any number of social locations and positions. The affects of white hegemony are manifold, and the Black terror and resistance that it evokes/provokes is also multivalent, as witnessed in hip hop, which cannot be reduced to any single cultural manifestation as representative of the whole (music, dance, fashion, turntablism, art, writing, etc.). Hip-hop is a sensual experience that “exercises the senses” (Prettyman, 2020, p. 151) and transcends white being and discourse while responding and resisting, remembering Richard Wright’s forged library card (Young, 2012), its claims, and authority over Black bodies.

            Felt experience, or vibe, is theorized with hip hop being a medium that can change how people subject to the vibe might alternatively relate to the social landscape and the restrictions and oppressive marginalization unfolding there, as witnessed by vibe. Rose (1991) notes that resistance to anti-Blackness is exercised, that is embodied and made physically manifest, through varied signs and language, notably, those present in hip hop, which are not immediately accessible to white interrogators, requiring next-level decoding skills (Prettyman, 2020). This potentiality for ideological resistance to the status quo, the socio-economic whiteness of being, is felt by those on any side, but most forcefully, those oppressed in such power differentials. When Rose (1991) describes the circumstances and conditions to attending a rap show and how Black attendees are made to feel unwelcome, it betrays the affect of white being and racial capitalism as it presses against the physical bounds of place, space, and body as an emotional habitus (Miles 2022). Even here, in an event and venue designated for the appreciation and participation of rap music and culture, a carceral position is built and polices the proceedings from an institutional level. Unreasonable searches, roughness, and a complete lack of dignified and respectful treatment, even as customers.

            Rap and rap concerts are villainized and described using vocabularies of criminality and public menace, hyperbolically describing and cataloging violence in racialized terms. Further highlighting what Rose (1991) calls the more prominent social fear of “the consolidation of Black rage” (283). White being feels threatened and afraid of Blackness, most especially when embodied and demonstrated in a collective form. As a result, the vibe present under such pressures is palpable, an affective disturbance keenly felt by Black men and women, as it underscores their positions with their socio-cultural environs in the face of anti-Blackness.

            Rose’s (1991) work continues to remain relevant, with hip-hop and rap events remaining a source of white rhetoric and discourse on the fear of Black violence and depravity, especially as grounds for policing and discipline, hypersexualized othering, and anti-blackness. Rose not only comments on the factors that contribute to vibe but also create vibe now in pointing out the climate of racist situations that also function in ways that exploit the very social locations they seek to control and condemn. Miles's (2022) work is harmonious with many approaches to embodied rhetoric and affect, especially in how vibe considers communication at multiple levels, not just an implicit/explicit binary.

            I selected the Prettyman (2020) piece on “Wild Style” because 1) I am currently watching the film, and 2) the film demonstrates how hip hop cannot be reduced to one single point of experience. It is not just the music or the DJ. It is not just the movements and fashion. There is a collective vibe that permeates hip hop as it is constituted in resistance to the pervasive and violent nature of anti-Blackness. Prettyman (2020) demonstrates how these historical elements of anti-Blackness accumulate over time and are drawn upon in contemporary ways that challenge the status quo and demonstrate other ways of being in the face of such racism. I find this edifying because we must know our histories and write our futures to live in a more just world.

 

Miles, C. J. (2022). Sociology of Vibe: Blackness, felt criminality, and Emotional Epistemology. Humanity & Society, 47(3), 365–384. https://doi.org/10.1177/01605976221146733

Prettyman, M. (2020). The persistence of “Wild Style”: Hip-Hop and music video culture at the intersection of performance and provocation. Journal of Cinema and Media Studies, 59(2), 151–157. https://doi.org/10.1353/cj.2020.0008

Rose, T. (1991). “Fear of a Black Planet”: rap music and Black cultural politics in the 1990s. The Journal of Negro Education, 60(3), 276. https://doi.org/10.2307/2295482