McWhorter - All about the Beat

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Table of Contents

ALSO BY JOHN MCWHORTER

TOWARDS A NEW MODEL OF CREOLE GENESIS

THE MISSING SPANISH CREOLES: Recovering the Birth of Plantation Contact Languages

WORD ON THE STREET: Debunking the Myth of a Pure Standard English

SPREADING THE WORD:

Language and Dialect in America

LOSING THE RACE:

Self-Sabotage in Black America

THE POWER OF BABEL:

A Natural History of Language

AUTHENTICALLY BLACK:

Essays for the Black Silent Majority

DOING OUR OWN THING: The Degradation of Language and Music and Why We Should, Like, Care

DEFINING CREOLE

WINNING THE RACE:

Beyond the Crisis in Black America

LANGUAGE INTERRUPTED: Signs of Non-Native Acquisition in Standard Language

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Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

Published by Gotham Books, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

First printing, June

Copyright 2008 by John McWhorter

All rights reserved

Gotham Books and the skyscraper logo are trademarks of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
McWhorter, John H.
All about the beat : why hip-hop cant save Black America / John McWhorter.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.

eISBN : 978-1-592-40374-5

1975- 2. African AmericansPolitics and government. 3. Hip-hop
Social aspects. 4. Hip-hopPolitical aspects. 5. Rap (Music)Social aspects
United States 6. Rap (Music)Political aspectsUnited States. 7. Social
changeUnited States. 8. United StatesRace relations. I. Title.
E185.615.M3538 2008
305.896073dc22 2008000816

Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

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While the author has made every effort to provide accurate telephone numbers and Internet addresses at the time of publication, neither the publisher nor the author assumes any responsibility for errors, or for changes that occur after publication. Further, the publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party Web sites or their content.

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INTRODUCTION

MOVE SOMETHING

This aint the time or place for you to prove somethin.
Cut the stargazin yo, move somethin!

Talib Kweli, Move Somethin, Reflection Eternal

The problem I want to address in this book reveals itself even in the words people choose on the fly. In Colorado Springs, there has lately been a spate of murders traced to fights beginning at hip-hop clubs and concerts. The local police have called attention to it, and a twenty-six-year-old interviewed on the topic said, This city wants to shut down hip-hop. They dont want it to survive.

The word survive is key here. There is a certain drama in it. There is, we are to assume, something or someone working against hip-hop in some way that threatens that it will, someday soon, cease to exist. The idea is that hip-hop is not just music, but that it has some kind of larger potential. It is trying to go somewhere, do somethingbut is always just on the verge of disappearing.

Yet lets face it: The interviewee could not think hip-hop in itself is in danger of eclipse; new recordings and mixtapes are released weekly and have been for decades. To him, theres something larger, more abstract, than hip-hops mere existence: hip-hop must not just exist but survive, like some tropical flower or, more pointedly, a race of people.

You often hear people talking about the survival of hip-hop, and it is an established way of kicking off or titling an article on hip-hop. This interviewee has drunk in this pervasive sense in our culture, of hip-hop as more than club music and clothes, but as something that must survive. What does someone mean when he talks about hip-hop surviving?

Of course, white rockers are hardly unknown to espouse antiestablishment politics in their music. But no one is under the impression that their doing so is anything other than what it is. For a lot of folks out there, hip-hop is somehow different. Apparently there is something weightier, deepersome kind of potential in hip-hop that the rest of us have missed.

Quite a few seem to think so. There are legions of people on fire with this idea: that the hip-hop they love has significance, beyond its volume and how much fun it is to dance to.

You hear this in the way people talk about hip-hop on talk shows, discussion panels, and in casual conversations. A lot of the titles of the books always coming out on hip-hop tell it all, for example.

S. Craig Watkins tells us that Hip Hop Matters. He is saluting Cornel Wests book title Race Matters, with an implication that hip-hop is not just something to enjoy, but that it means something in a societal sense. Imani Perrys title is Prophets of the Hood: Politics and Poetics in Hip Hop: prophets who will, as prophets do, tell us something important. Something of even a religious weight, perhaps, as Alex Gee and John E. Teter imply with their title Jesus and the Hip-Hop Prophets, and Saideh Page-Browne does with the title From Hiphop to Heaven.

Hip-hop is not just music, but some kind of force, apparently. Jeff Chang titled his signature history of the music Cant Stop Wont Stop. Catchy, but people are writing new chamber music all the time, and yet imagine a history of classical chamber music called Cant Stop Wont Stop. Chang taps into a sense that there is something dramatically notable about the fact that hip-hop doesnt stop. It wont stopThe Man wants it to but it will not, it refuses to. Presumably because it promises to do something that will make Establishment types very uncomfortable. Or: Changs subtitle is A History of the Hip-hop Generation. Hip-hop Generation carries an air of surging forward as well: a generation of people raised on hip-hop and as such, poised to do something based on that. There is, apparently, something

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