I’m either on to something or way out of my depth at this point. Gentle corrections in either direction are always welcome and appreciated.
Another question that stimulates considerable discussion in my rap classes is “Does graffiti belong in museums?” We will spend some time talking about how graffiti is time and place specific: reading The New York Time’s piece on TAKI 183, for instance, or talking about some of Murray Forman’s work, or maybe watching Style Wars or Bomb It! (I also like to muddy the waters a bit and show them evidence that graffiti originated in Philadelphia, not New York City.) Then the question: “If graffiti is so time- and place-specific, does it belong in museums?” Students historically have suggested many nuanced takes on the question, including preserving the original space in which the graffiti was posted (like the 5 Pointz building in Queens, which has since been demolished), or hiring specially trained curators to remove it and resettle it in an appropriate gallery setting, or to hire artists to create new graffiti that is specific to a particular gallery space. It seems to me that most of my students over the years have agreed that graffiti should be preserved—they disagree on how it should be preserved.
I was reminded of this discussion as I read through a passage from a book by Patricia Williams called The Alchemy of Race and Rights. In chapter 8, titled “The Pain of Word Bondage,” she argues that in the realm of critical legal studies, discourse about the rights of the black community has been more successful in advancing legal protections than discourse about their needs. She writes: “For blacks, describing needs has been a dismal failure as political activity. It has succeeded only as a literary achievement. The history of our need is certainly moving enough to have been called poetry, oratory, epic entertainment—but it has never been treated by white institutions as the statement of a political priority” (151). Later, she writes: “For blacks, then, the battle is not deconstructing rights, in a world of no rights; nor of constructing statements of need, in a world of abundantly apparent need. Rather the goal is to find a political mechanism that can confront the denial of need” (152). I would contend that initially rap music was this political mechanism: for me listening to rap thoughtfully was the beginning of my journey toward anti-racism, and I suspect this is true for many others. Over its fifty-year history, though, rap has been co-opted by whiteness and been re-figured in ways that uphold whiteness by prioritizing rights discourse over needs discourse.
In terms of my graffiti question, I think we all agree that graffiti artists have the right to have their work displayed in museums, but how does being in a museum address the needs of those artists? Of those artworks? How is the work that museums do fundamentally at odds with the work that graffiti artists do? How does a museum exhibit change the nature of graffiti?
When we listen to rap music—especially as white listeners trained as academic musicians—what do we hear? Do we hear needs? Do we hear our needs as academics or do we hear the needs of rappers, producers, or people of color generally? If so, how are we working to address those needs? I would argue that a wide variety of rap music serves to articulate needs, and the music does this on several levels. If we do hear needs and we are inclined to work to address those needs, then how do we proceed? Williams notes that “It may be different when someone white is describing need. Shorn of the hypnotic rhythmicity that blacks are said to bring to their woe [Nina Sun Eidsheim’s work on the race of sound is useful here], white statements of black needs suddenly acquire the stark statistical authority that lawmakers can listen to and politicians here. But from blacks, stark statistical statements of need are heard as strident, discordant, and unharmonious.” [Robin James’ work on the “sonic episteme” could be useful here] (152).
If not, what are we hearing and why? Eidsheim suggests that what we hear says more about us than it does about the actual sound itself, which is neutral at its source until we start wrapping it in culturally and socially determined meanings. She encourages us to ask: Who am I who hears this?