Hip-Hop Jes Grew

Ishmael Reed is certainly a “specialized taste”—his fiction is difficult, evasive, at times maddening and perplexing. He may not become your new favorite writer, and you may not be giving copies of Mumbo Jumbo as birthday gifts anytime soon. (Although more than one former student of History as Fiction has named it as their favorite novel from any of my classes.) Some of you have probably been hating it, but some have been getting into this novel, finding its playful and irreverent qualities fun and interesting. I hope that most of you are at least enjoying Reed’s absurdist, cartoonish humor. But I know that others have been turned off, and that’s just the way it goes with art like this—not everyone is going to respond with the same enthusiasm. Reed isn’t setting out to write a bestseller, and the novel is designed to be challenging, upsetting, and provocative.

But don’t you agree that this is interesting stuff, however dizzying it might be to work through? That a book which appears to take such a light, loose, and irreverent view of capital-H History is also at the same time so deadly serious about the importance of history? Because this whole Jes Grew/Book of Thoth story is all about history—an “unofficial” cultural history that has been suppressed, gone underground, denounced and marginalized by “official” voices and finding expression in creative, veiled, surreptitious ways. Its expression is policed by a range of gatekeepers that often do operate like secret societies, controlling and regulating the spread and distribution of culture (academies of higher learning, the publishing industry, record labels, promoters, radio programmers,  “the algorithm,”  and so on). These gatekeepers often function in ways that are demonstrably white supremacist, and the history of the twentieth century presents one instance after another where white/mainstream audiences are “protected” from music and dance and art that is “too Black.” Reed’s secret-society narrative might seem paranoid or hyperbolic, but history makes clear that, for whatever reason (Atonism, racism, low self-esteem, anxiety about maintaining “standards”), older American white folks tend to get in a tizzy when younger American white folks start dressing, talking, moving, and thinking like younger American Black folks.

When Jes Grew emerges, it is hard to recognize at first. It doesn’t appear to be anything particularly significant. It pops up in the least likely places, outside the mainstream institutions of academia, finance, media, and culture. It is sometimes “mistaken for entertainment,” as PaPa LaBas puts it (174). It might appear to be a passing fad, a fleeting trend. But it has the capacity to change the world by way of a potent combination of rhythm and Text. It makes people’s heads bob, and it captures their ear, their gut, their knees, and whatever additional body parts might respond to rhythm. But at the same time it engages the mind with narrative and word play and history and punchlines and aesthetic manifestoes and mythology.

Does this description ring any bells for you?

The South Bronx, New York City, the mid 1970s. A more neglected, institutionally ignored and marginalized location would be hard to imagine. Completely off the radar of the mainstream media and culture industry (concentrated just across the East River in Manhattan), no one could have predicted that loosely connected groups of poor Black and Latino kids in one of the most desperately struggling neighborhoods in the nation would be inventing a set of interconnected art forms—visual art (graffiti), fashion (Filas and a Kangol), dance (breakdancing), rhythmically driven music (break beats, lifted from funk, disco, soul, and R&B records), and, perhaps most crucially, spoken words, poetry in the oral tradition—that would eventually transform popular culture around the world. And, like with Congo Square and New Orleans with their Haitian connections, in the South Bronx we once again have a crucial infusion from the West Indies—Jamaica and its “sound system” culture. When PaPa LaBas points out that “slang is Jes Grew too” (214), Reed seems to pretty much predict the emergence of hip-hop, and the epilogue as a whole (which is set in the “present,” 1971, with LaBas at age 100 giving his annual guest lecture on Jes Grew and the Harlem Renaissance) strikes me as an uncanny anticipation of where Black culture in America was in fact headed at the time Reed was writing. There’s an optimism about the end of the novel, despite the fact that the Book of Thoth has been destroyed (the translation is still out there somewhere!) and Jes Grew has died out. LaBas assures Earline, “Jes Grew has no end and no beginning. . . . Jes Grew is life. . . . They will try to repress Jes Grew but it will only spring back and prosper. We will make our own future Text. A future generation of young artists will accomplish this” (204).

To follow the structural logic of Reed’s fictional-historical narrative, jazz, blues, R&B, and funk have all been compromised, weakened, watered down, and prevented from “finding their text”—significant, culture-changing developments that have all been widely influential and generally underappreciated, but have all witnessed commercially more successful “white” versions, cleaned up and repackaged for white consumption (swing, beer-commercial blues, rock-n-roll, disco). (If this is news to you, see Public Enemy’s “Who Stole the Soul?” for a history lesson.) 

It’s too long a story to fully unravel here, but hip-hop has proven remarkably resistant to the traditional forms of Atonist suppression: there have been a wide range of Black-owned and Black-run labels; artists have been able to maintain an unprecedented degree of creative control over their work; the artform has been aesthetically self-policing from the start, sorting out the “real” from the wack or phony. Its integrity has not apparently been compromised by white participation (Grammy awards for Macklemore over Kendrick Lamar notwithstanding). It hasn’t been co-opted or bought or stolen. 

When the Beastie Boys’ Licensed to Ill (1986) skyrocketed to become the highest-selling rap album of all time (to be displaced eventually by Vanilla Ice’s To the Extreme [1990]), it looked to some like the same old story—Black cultural forms appropriated and imitated by whites who then become superstars, while the originators wallow in comparative obscurity. The Beastie Boys were embraced by MTV and white radio in a way that L.L. Cool J was not. But this isn’t how it shook out, for a number of reasons. White people have participated in hip-hop from the beginning, and the culture has always had an awesomely forward-thinking and generally embracing view of its diverse audience—the more people with their hands in the air, the better the show. The most important label in the early years of hip-hop, Def Jam, was started by a Jewish kid from Long Island in his dorm room at NYU. But the roster of significant artists remains almost exclusively African American, which, fifty years into its history, represents a total departure from the Paul Whiteman/Elvis/Clapton/Bee-Gees model of appropriation. The Beastie Boys and Eminem and El-P and Mac Miller (and others) must earn respect on the basis of their skills; they succeed in hip-hop despite being white, not because they are white. 

I won’t go so far as to assert definitively that Jes Grew has “found its Text” in the form of hip-hop (especially as contemporary hip-hop generally seems uninterested in lyricism), and it would be naïve to deny that in many ways the culture has been compromised in its transition to multibillion-dollar international industry. (This has indeed long been a source of discussion and self-analysis within the genre itself.) But the familiar methods of repression have not worked in the familiar ways. The culture that “just grew” out of abandoned, dilapidated playgrounds in the South Bronx has flourished to a truly astonishing degree, and—moreso than jazz, blues, and R&B—the text is an absolutely vital aspect of its appeal. Rap revels in its willingness and ability to say whatever the hell it wants in a proud and defiant manner, without innuendo or other forms of veiling, and yet it remains vitally poetic and figurative and persistently innovative in its uses of language. It has turned “slang” into an aesthetic playing field, with possibilities for multilayered signification, storytelling, personal expression, social commentary, and yes, the passing on of history—its own, and that of the nation. More than any other form I know of, rap is often self-referential, “about” hip-hop itself—where it’s going, where it’s been, what is and is not “real.” It pays homage to its luminaries (Biggie, Tupac, Left-Eye, Jam Master Jay) and educates its listeners on its own history through allusion and cross-reference. It delights in offending the sensibilities and moral standards of the cultural gatekeepers, and it is unapologetic in its typical defiance of criticism.

In short, I propose, even though he’s not literally writing about hip-hop, Reed’s novel suggests that hip-hop is of world historical importance, and not only—or not even—because it is lucrative. (Although, given its origins in poverty and its potential to elevate its artists and executives to rarefied heights of wealth and cultural influence, there is also world-changing potential in its profitability, too.) It is of world-historical importance because it has taken hold. It was repressed in all the usual ways early on—denounced, ignored, mocked, derided as “noise” or “not music” or “not original” or “incoherent mumbo jumbo.” But its spread—fueled by the beat, which Reed traces all the way back to ancient Africa—could not be contained, despite the best efforts of the Atonists over at Fox News.