Scott Artley

Anthropology of Hip-Hop

Instr. Melisa Riviere

November 21, 2006

Aural Intrusions: Contests of Discursive Invasion in Rap Music

            Most often situated in economically unstable urban neighborhoods, public housing for low-income African Americans is characterized by an architecture of necessity without flourish. Not simply plain or ordinary, they are great ugly monoliths set against the sky in contrast to the surrounding city. As scholar Tricia Rose (1994) suggests, the buildings might not be only visually unpleasing, but serve as a visual concentration point of anxiety for the fears associated with African Americans. The origin of concentration is the “white gaze” that characterizes American media, government, and general consciousness. Known in greater discourse as the abode of poor African Americans, drug use, prostitution, and gang violence, these categories represented in public housing, in some respects, eventually feed into a single threat under the heading of “black men.” In this way, surveillance can be understood, truly, as an anxiety that black male society will invade the general (read: white) populous.

Near the end of the 1980s, “gang databases,” filled predominantly with African American men, began appearing in United States police departments. The profiles of men who appeared in the database included those who had been arrested, whether they had been convicted or not. Suspicion was based on “gang profiles,” and any youth who exhibited “gang-like” hairstyles, colors, jewelry, or slang could be placed on the database. (Chang 388-389)

Yet the surveillance is not one-way, as African Americans are acutely aware of the white gaze lain upon them. Media, government, and consumer culture is saturated in the white gaze, a prison potentially more inescapable for African Americans than the very socioeconomic troubles on which these white institutions focus. Rose emphasizes that although formal forms of discrimination have been made illegal, “informal, yet trenchant forms of institutional discrimination still exist in full force” (Rose 125).  Events such as brutality against Rodney King, fiercely beaten by police officers after being unfairly profiled on the basis of race, and the Charles Stuart case, in which a white man who had murdered his wife effectively avoided arrest until much later by blaming the crime on a fictitious black male, made clear to the African American population the very real physical and cultural threat of oppression through sight. In a way similar to how white anxiety consolidated into the black male, the locus of surveillance-anxiety for minority populations merged into a critique of police forces.

Faced by the oppression of what Rose calls “dominant transcripts,” rap becomes a lone soapbox on which minority concerns can be expressed. As this awareness grew on both sides, so rose the culture of the hip-hop generation, whose increased visibility lent a popular voice to historically silent concerns. Two rap songs, “Who Protects Us from You?” by KRS-One (1989) and “Illegal Search” by L.L. Cool J (1990), represent important voices of discursive dissent, unified in their critique of police forces invading the physical, legal, and social spaces of African American men.

KRS-One’s “Who Protects Us from You?” is a remarkably aggressive song directly addressing the police, rather than the listening audience, about acts of excessive, unfocused police force. The title suggests ambiguity about the true identities of “Us” and “You,” illustrating the polarity of identity at play. Each group, in the context of the song, belongs to either the dominant or oppressed identity, leaving little room for overlap. In listening to the song, however, is not at all ambiguous, but clearly about the black men (“Us”) unjustly profiled by police (“You”).

Although the song is rhetorically directed at the police about acts of violence and surveillance, the song is situated in a larger discourse to society. The song is intended not only for the police, but for the public, especially those who have been wronged by injustice. This initial ambiguity, however, is eventually harnessed by the narrator of the song by listing off those who have been made into an “other” by the dominant aspect of society: “Now he’s judged by if he’s Spanish,/ Black, Italian, or Jew” (KRS-One).  Broadening the scope of ethnic backgrounds affected by the injustice of the police also extends the audience, serving as a call-to-arms to all victims of ethnic-based injustice. The song empowers “Us” by creating a mass of peoples behind it, while objectifying and stereotyping the law enforcers, thus turning back the surveillance on the seers, “rendering their [the police’s] behavior suspect” (Rose 108).

The song is also steeped in rhetorical modes of black cultural production that seek to give it the kind of authority automatically granted to traditional mass media while also parodying its methods of dissemination. The song begins with a reference to the Rastafarian symbol of fire (“Fy-ah!”) as a destructive and regenerative force for social change: “The [fire’s] destruction that precedes revelation, precedes new knowledge” (Rose 108).  Interspersed between lines of the song are voices agreeing and emphasizing aspects of the message. “Every time you say that’s illegal/ Doesn’t mean that that’s true,” speaks the main narrating voice, and a second voice gives a deep “Uh-huh,” referencing the mutual agreement built into a call-and-response type of African American rhetorical structure (KRS-One).  At the end of the song is a spoken voice, exaggerated and engineered to sound empty, telling the audience that this is, “A public service announcement brought to you by the scientists of Boogie Down Productions” (KRS-One).  This final blow satirizes media’s aversion to the voice of the victims of police brutality and injustice by juxtaposing Boogie Down Productions’ perceived authority as a point of “public service” discourse with commercials aired during after-school television shows. KRS-One teases that despite its stigma, rap holds more sway as a public announcement medium, despite the authority of white gaze’s media resources.

LL Cool J’s 1990 song “Illegal Search” is narrated from the perspective of the victim of racial profiling. This voice is rarely ever heard directly in traditional media. It is either translated into the dull, mediated, and unemotional voice of nightly news shows or court documents, or oppressed entirely by the opposing voice of police forces. Part of the “project” of LL Cool J’s rap, then, is an effort to clarify the emotionality of the subject that so often gets lost under legality. With the popularity of 1987’s “I Need Love” and his famously nude torso, the rapper broke from media stereotypes about black men, effectively exposing the nakedly emotional and physical aspects of his humanity. The narrator of “Illegal Search” is similarly humanized, if even aggressively, by an exposure of the feelings of anger, humiliation, and distrust. By divulging the emotional side of its victim (who is already stigmatized in media discourse), the song loosens the tension of black male representation in the weightier space of larger discourse.

“Illegal Search” outlines a specific event of racial profiling, in which the narrator (presumably LL Cool J, himself) is pulled over, according to the rapper, because he is a black male driving a nice car. Unlike “Who Protects Us from You?” LL Cool J’s version of invasion is driven by the questioning of his material goods, owned property, already in place. “Can’t a young man make money anymore?” the rapper protests to the police searching his car, “Wear my jewels and like freak it on the floor?/ Or is it my job to make sure I’m poor?” (LL Cool J).  As he says, “Get that flashlight out of my face” (LL Cool J)  his anger is directly related to the scrutiny, the surveillance, of his lifestyle. The lines, “I’m not a dog, so damn it, put away the mace” and “Eating in the mess-hall, saying my grace” (LL Cool J)  point to a frustration by the leveling of class that occurs with the threat of being imprisoned, where any man will be treated like a confined animal because he has committed a crime.

Because he has not done anything wrong, however, LL Cool J places himself in a higher moral authority, signified by an omniscient narrative perspective. He is aware, as the song begins, that the efforts by the police to entrap him in the discourse of criminality will fail, and that, in the end, the invasion of his property will be termed an “illegal search” by the court. This contest of perspective is best shown in the lines that signify back-and-forth definitions of the black male, that of the media stereotype and that of LL Cool J’s reality: “I call it ‘nice,’ you call it a ‘drug car,’/ I say ‘disco,’ you call it a ‘drug bar,’/ I say ‘nice guy,’ you call me ‘Mr. Good Bar’” (LL Cool J).  Still, sure of his eventual justice, he even teases the officers, egging them on to “Keep on searchin’” (LL Cool J).

In a startling turn of structure, however, he implicitly shifts the reins of the narrative to an institution that is an essential aspect of African American narrative discourse: religion. With the choir echoing his sentiments throughout the song, LL Cool J is sermonizing, placing his audience into the pews, he is implicitly juxtaposing the seemingly arbitrary institution of law enforcement with the eternal justice of religious morality. With instances where he could be framed through planted weapons or attempted evasion, eternal laws of religion are, he knows from the beginning, what will save him. There is even a suggestion of the narrator taking on a Christ-like martyr role, wrongly oppressed, but eventually reversing the act of symbolic torture, ignominy, and legal death with the judge (read: God) declaring innocence (a “resurrection” of legal and social prestige).  His final solution is therefore focused, unlike that of KRS-One, in an institution of the law.

Rose states that the authors of works such as the two songs presented acknowledge the songs’ inability to prevent the action that has already taken place, but calls the performance of it a “discursive revision of such incidents [of race-based legal injustice]” (Rose 113).  Rapper Ice Cube, on the other hand, calls this a “revenge fantasy” (Rose 128).  Rose’s definition recognizes rap’s hostility to authority as culturally productive in that it will revise weakened cultural authority and autonomy, while Ice Cube imagines it as more productive, or healing, to the individual sense of authority and autonomy. Somewhere in the middle of these two definitions lies an overlapping goal to review events of the past with a critical eye, and use the music media as a vehicle for reinstituting valued cultural confidence.

At the cusp of the 1990s, white gaze found itself barraged with a new, more invasive, oral medium. Whereas before black males could be surveilled from a comfortable distance, rap was now the force invading the physical and cultural environment, as cars driving down the street blasted their bass speakers into the landscape and hip-hop music was finally being recognized in mass media discourse as something more than a fad with the first Grammy award for best rap album in 1989. At this point, “white gaze” becomes the “white ear” with critique of Public Enemy’s “Fuck the Police” (1989) and NWA’s “Cop Killer” (1992), representative of the new, more aggressive stage in hip-hop’s relationship to the law. This new stage, which would upset previously silent conversations about racial politics and the cultural space afforded to African Americans, was directly dependent on the victory of rap’s initial contests for discursive authority.

Works Cited

Chang, Jeff. 2005. Can’t Stop Won’t Stop: A History of the Hip-Hop Generation. St Martin’s Press: New York.

 

KRS-One. “Who Protects Us from You?” Zomba Recording Corporation: 1989.

 

LL Cool J. “Illegal Search.” Mama Said Knock You Out. Universal Music Group: 1990.

 

LL Cool J. "I Need Love."  Bigger and Deffer. Def Jam/Columbia:  

          1987.

 

Rose, Tricia. Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America. Middletown, Connecticut: Wesleyan UP, 1994.