Black Studies, Rap, and the Academy (Black Literature and Culture) [Paperback]

Houston A. Baker Jr. (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: November 15, 1995 | ISBN-10: 0226035212 | ISBN-13: 978-0226035215

In this explosive book, Houston Baker takes stock of the current state of Black Studies in the university and outlines its responsibilities to the newest form of black urban expression—rap. A frank, polemical essay, Black Studies, Rap, and the Academy is an uninhibited defense of Black Studies and an extended commentary on the importance of rap. Written in the midst of the political correctness wars and in the aftermath of the Los Angeles riots, Baker's meditation on the academy and black urban expression has generated much controversy and comment from both ends of the political spectrum.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

This brief, sometimes digressive essay exhorts those who teach Black Studies to take rap music seriously. Baker, director of the Center for the Study of Black Literature and Culture at the University of Pennsylvania, writes in a mix of postmodern lit-crit lingo and street slang. He sketches the growth of Black Studies from the ferment of the 1960s to its "forceful, scholarly citizenship in the American university," then looks closely at rap controversies. He "reads" the infamous 1989 Central Park jogger case, observing that commentators ignored how the lyrics to the rap song "Wild Thing" were misheard into the fear-word "wilding." He reproaches critics of bawdy rappers 2 Live Crew for thin analysis, and for arguing--contra free-speech advocates--that the group's album As Nasty As They Wanna Be "was understandably banned." Reporting how his students have tagged rap and MTV the "poetry for the next society," Baker argues sensibly for further analysis of rap, but his claim that "rap is now classical black sound" is a bit overstated. Photos not seen by PW.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From Kirkus Reviews

From former M.L.A. president Baker (English and Black Studies/University of Pennsylvania): four essays in defense of Black Studies and rap that tend to grow muddled and slip from your grasp. ``Black Studies: A New Story'' offers a superficial glance at what brought Black Studies into being (``What was required...was a revocabularization of academic discourse'') and at how the new discipline was greeted by the establishment (``What generally occurred...was moral panic as a function of territorial contestation''). In ``The Black Urban Beat: Rap and the Law,'' Baker sees rap as a way ``to provide sometimes stunning territorial confrontations between black urban expressivity and white law-and- order.'' This last being arguably a false dichotomy doesn't keep Baker from concluding--after a faintly unified meditation on urban space, rappers 2 Live Crew, and the Central Park jogger case--that ``Positive sites of rap represent...a profitable, agential resource for an alternative American legality.'' Meaning becomes increasingly obscured as the essays move on and Baker hides behind yet more words. The uncertain merits of 2 Live Crew are little clarified by his assertion that the group ``is less a causal site of agency than a single point of imbrication in an intricate social (and preeminently materialist) narrative.'' Rap, Baker concludes (``Hybridity, Rap, and Pedagogy for the 1990s''), ``is now classical black sound,'' but the claim isn't strengthened by the sound of the essayist's own reasoning--as in the following parenthetical definition en route to his conclusion: ``By postmodern I intend the nonauthoritative collaging or archiving of sound and styles that bespeaks a deconstructive hybridity. Linearity and progress yield to a dizzying synchronicity.'' Ideas worth hearing--and knowing--more about. But, on balance, Baker offers here a float across jargon-choked shallows. -- Copyright ©1993, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

Product Details

• Paperback: 117 pages
• Publisher: University Of Chicago Press (November 15, 1995)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0226035212
• ISBN-13: 978-0226035215
• Product Dimensions: 8 x 5.3 x 0.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 6.9 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,075,814 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars CLARITY OF THOUGHT: WHERE HOUSTON BAKER ERRED IN HIS DISCUSSION OF BLACK STUDIES, RAP, AND THE ACADEMY, February 10, 2006

By 

AfroerotiK "Scottie" (Maryland, United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Black Studies, Rap, and the Academy (Black Literature and Culture Series) (Hardcover)

The discussion of Black Studies and the academy is one that is essentially centered on diametrical contradiction-the academy itself, an institution based on Western ideologies that gives little or no credence to African contribution, and Black studies, arguably, the African centered exploration of an institutionally marginalized people. Add to that discussion the complexities of rap music with its blatant misogyny and reflective, although cracked, mirror held up to the realities of Africana urban existence-and you have a heated and passionate debate. Houston A Baker's book, Black Studies, Rap and the Academy, was not that debate.

I am convinced that there has never been a more contrived, convoluted, waste of discourse on topics that demand much critical attention. To produce a body of work as a Black scholar that does not work to correct the diseased misperception of the majority or to elevate the minds of the oppressed is an exercise in futility and does nothing more than perpetuate the phenomenon of white superiority. Baker, it seems, needed to impress the academy and produce some scholarship that qualified his Blackness and that proved that he had his finger on the pulse of Black culture. I assume the obvious choice was to choose rap music because, supposedly, all Black people have rhythm and can dance and it is certainly an easily vilifiable subject. Baker is an academic minstrel, pimping the culture of hip-hop to the prestigious academy to prove, it appears, that he is not only more intellectual than most Black people, but also to academically spank the collective hand of Black youth that would dare to produce music that reflects a bleak reality.

If I understood his contentions correctly, and I'm not sure that I did, Baker did nothing more than assert that rap music was sometimes violent and sexist and that it was an avenue for cultural expression for black youth. If that was his thesis, "he ain't said nothing but a thang," to use the vernacular of a people that he apparently finds distasteful. If that wasn't his point, then I lost it in trying to decipher the meaning of the quixotic pastiche of the Arnoldian cultural commodity contingent upon the urbanity . . . or whatever obscure, meandering rhetoric he felt such a penchant for using. Whatever theories he presented to tie the concepts of Black Studies and rap together went completely over my head because his writing style couldn't hold my attention for more than a few minutes without confusing me.

At no point in the book did I feel that Baker had ever listened to or respected rap music. In fact, his reference to the beginnings of rap reflected the media's interpretation of rap and were not reflective of my memories of the early 80s when I would ride the train to the Bronx or Queens, where some dj was burning up the wheels of steel. I grew up on rap. I've seen it evolve from an art form that I once loved to something that offends my very sensibilities as a Black woman. Whether I love it or hate it, it deserves more analytical critique than Dr. Baker afforded it. Some of the individuals he lists as pioneers, we, New York City's Black youth, considered clowns. Freestylin' was what we went to hear, extemporaneous lyrical battles where one sucka' MC would get taken out by another who could prove his intellectual genius over a beat. It was our form of nonviolent revolution, not to be televised, that lamented over how much we hated whitey and our social conditions.

Break dancing was not as popular as Baker asserts. Breaking was relegated to very small sects of gangs that were popularized by the movies Breakin and Crush Groove. For the most part, when a rap song came on in the club, no one danced. At best, all you could do was throw your hands in the air, and wave them like you just don't care, literally. Dancing and rap didn't go together. Rap was the music of Black men proving that they were a force to be reckoned with, not for dancers. It was disrespectful to dance to PE or BDP, not to mention the fact, with its repetitive tracks, it wasn't meant to be dance music. MTV showed artists like Whodini, rapping about freaks coming out at night and the Fat Boys, shoving food in their face, and while we enjoyed seeing anybody on TV that looked like us, that was not the reality of true hip-hop culture. Baker failed to contribute similar insights into the culture of hip-hop that were garnered from anything other than Hollywood's interpretation of the emergence of rap music.

Giving credit where credit is due, hidden within the pages of this book is a poetic, albeit missed, attempt to speak in the tongue of an African. On the page, written in black and white, Baker's words are heavy laden with vocabulary intended for only the most elite. But spoken, read out loud, they are, at times, the words of the griot, winding tales of rhythmic, social expression. Whether conscious of his tactics or not, Baker effectively reinforces the notion that Black people have a cultural language that we can not effectively write. In one of his more obvious attempts to wax poetic, Baker writes this:

What time is it? Time to get busy from the midseventies into the wildstyle popularization of the eighties. From Parks to Priority Records, from random sampling to Run DMC. Fiercely competitive and hugely braggadocious in their energies, the quest of the emergent rap technologists was for the baddest toasts, boasts and signifying possible. The form was male dominant-though KRS-One and the earliest male posses will tell you the "ladies" were always there. Answering back, dissing the ways of menfolk and kinfolk alike who tried to ease them into the postmodern dozens.

While this style is not present in the entire work, nor would I consider it sufficient to sustain a reader for one hundred pages, and it most certainly wouldn't win a prize at an open mic contest, it is the medium that modern day poets use to tell lyrical tales of cultural and social angst. Better delivered in a dark nightclub with dread locked brothas and clove-smoking sistas, Baker's later words sometimes ring true to an African cultural aesthetic of storytelling and rhyme, an academic rap if you will.

If the standard for producing Black scholarship means that one must alienate people of color whose consciousness needs to be raised, by conforming to the very narrow constraints of Western academy, to be considered valuable in the eyes of one's peers, then my future as an academic is doomed. If the objective of Black Studies is to prove that one has overcome their inherent Blackness and is now able to speak in the tongue of a traditional Western academic standard, then I shall remain a street prophet, unlettered and wholly African. That is a lesson Houston Baker might need to learn.

2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Jive on Rap, November 10, 2007

By 

Kurt J. Acker "bookmuncher" (New York City) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Black Studies, Rap, and the Academy (Black Literature and Culture) (Paperback)

Houston Baker is a jive-artist and his book about rap is almost comical in its brazen incoherence and in its total rejection of logic and scholarship. The book is filled with outrageous assertions delivered in Baker's own unique style, full of street-corner swagger and flippancy. After reading a few pages of this stuff, the reader will ask, "Is this guy serious?" The correct answer, I believe, is "No". The whole performance is a put-on.

2 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Black Strdies, Rap and the Academy, May 1, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: Black Studies, Rap, and the Academy (Black Literature and Culture) (Paperback)

This book is exactly what i needed for a paper on the history of rap. It will bring you to a new world of understanding rap. I highly recomend this book!